Denver had been hotter than hell for weeks, and my AC had all but given up. So I did what I do when the world becomes too much: I hung the velvet blackout curtains and stayed inside. The dogs agreed with the plan. Their poor toe beans couldn't bear the unforgiving city pavement, not even for a short walk. We'd become a household that only slipped outside in the narrow windows when the temperature dropped below eighty-five.
I grew up with the ocean, so I know a thing or two about waves. I know the lessons can come at you the way an angry riptide does, over and over, with a fury, grasping at anything it can hold onto. And I know the thing nobody wants to hear when they're the one in the water: sometimes the smartest thing you can do is stop fighting and let go.
It had been that kind of season. Change on top of change. Hard lessons, the same ones on a loop, each one arriving like it still had something left to prove. A dark space that takes grit to sit inside, and one last white lie to yourself, that this will be the final time you have to dig your heels into the sand and try again. One day it will slow down, I kept promising myself. I figure I'll keep making that promise until the day I die.
The plan was small and safe
So the weekend's plan was small and safe. Amy was coming over to help me organize the trinkets and tchotchkes I've hauled home from estate sales and the Goodwill outlet bins, my little competitive sport. It's been a season of cleansing. Of setting down what no longer serves me. Fitting, in hindsight, that I couldn't see it yet.
An hour before she arrived, Amy floated another idea. What if we skipped the sorting and went to a festival instead? Rhythms on the Rio. I'd been the year before, but only for a single night. A brutal turnaround where I shot Andy Frasco at the Rio, drove back to cover him again the next day at Levitt Pavilion, then turned around for Mishawaka to shoot Dogs in a Pile.
I declined before she finished the sentence. When I'm in the hole, isolation feels like the safest bet.
Then I looked down at my phone and saw the message I'd missed. It was from Shelby. She had an extra pass. Her fiancé, Dan, plays the fiddle, and his music has a way of pulling Shelby and me into adventures we never planned for. The signs were lining up the way they do when you're finally paying attention. Why the fuck not. Maybe I'm not depressed. Maybe I just need to go outside more.
And then I remembered the festival was dog-friendly, and that settled it. I hadn't taken my beloved Yams on a real adventure all summer, not since our trusty Astro van blew its transmission five months back and left us leaning on our God-given legs. I checked the forecast: highs of eighty-five, lows of fifty. No rain, which I've learned is a lie you tell yourself in Colorado, though those sprinkled showers are a gift from the heavens when they come. Perfect. I said yes before I could talk myself out of it.
Here's what I decided on the drive in: I was going to be there. Not to work. Not to network. Not to spend the weekend panicking over which cord I forgot to charge, where my mic clip went, whether I'd have to re-interview someone because the audio didn't sync to my phone. I was just going to show up. For once, empty-handed.
The universe was going to help me keep that promise whether I liked it or not. Every time I tried to charge my phone, something went sideways. The Jackery wasn't switched on. The cord got yanked loose by sleeping bags and dog rearrangements. The second the battery caught any juice, it overheated and died. So I walked in with almost nothing, just my small bag and whatever I was carrying inside me.
Then Clay Street Unit took the stage, and there was Dan, ripping all over it. He tore me open with a rendition of MGMT's “Kids,” a song that's lived rent-free in my head for years, an instant flashback to some of the best days of my life, my UC Davis Ski and Snowboard Club days, when times were simple and the windy roads to Tahoe glistened with fresh snow and I was making the kind of friendships that would certainly last a lifetime. I stood there in a field with wet eyes, watching my friend's whole heart come out through a fiddle. Somewhere in that song, I stopped reaching for my phone. I just left it in the hot tent. Unplugged.
The road to the river
Saturday morning we met a gallivanting gentleman on a motorbike, his rowdy chocolate lab chasing him back and forth down the gravel road. As he braaaped past us, I noticed the dog was slick and shaking off water.
“Where's the water?” I asked.
“Oh man! You gotta go this way!” He pointed down the gravel toward a circle of RVs, the furthest point from the main entrance. We'd rolled in after dark, and I'd written that stretch off as family camping. By daylight I understood what it really was: the road to the river.
It was already in the eighties. I'm a water-sign Scorpio, and every cell in me wanted to go under. I left the phone behind. I had to; it was never going to charge. We carried our chairs down to the bend, and the moment my feet found the current, I was a new person.
We clung to the soft moss on the rocks, pretending to be barnacles, laughing like we had nowhere else on earth to be. The dogs chased sticks up and down the warm shore, the shallows tiled with earth-toned stones: mustard yellow, brick red, deep ocean blue. Something caught the light. A transparent shine. I fished out what I was sure was smoky quartz and pocketed it like treasure.
Later, at a rock booth back on the grounds, a man told me it was calcite. He said the stone in my hand had formed inside a cave thousands of years ago, and now, somehow, here it was, resting in my palm. A Carl Sagan, pale-blue-dot moment, right there between the vendor tents. I'm an existentialist at heart; I can't help but zoom all the way out and marvel at time, and at the strange grace of ending up exactly where I was. We spent the whole day in the water. Someone downstream lulled us into bliss with a jazz saxophone, the notes drifting up the current like they'd been sent. I walked for what felt like days, hunting shiny things to carry back to my friends.
Back to myself
The truth is, some seasons still run dark, and I move through hard things, sometimes almost without a break. But just like the Rio, my life tends to curve more sharply than most people are used to, and the water still runs bright. The glitter and the gold and the beauty are always there in it. One day it will slow down, I keep saying. And the tides can turn, even when you've decided, for the final time, that they never will.
Eventually the house cooled down. The AC coughed back to life. But I didn't mind lingering out on the porch with my dogs, nursing one last cold libation of the weekend, letting the light go soft. I'll still be sad every once in a while. What felt vindicating, what I could finally feel in my chest, was setting down the burden I'd been carrying for everyone but myself. That weight gets so heavy you forget you're the one who picked it up. As Jenny Lewis wrote:
“And sometimes when you're on, you're really fucking on, and your friends, they sing along and they love you. But the lows are so extreme, that the good seems fucking cheap, and it teases you for weeks in its absence.”
It's taken time to get here. To feel like I have permission to believe in who I am. That's where things quietly begin to align. Setting down the heavy gear, the baggage, the tangle of cords, it felt impossible at first. I'm the one who's always seeing scenes, always asking, silently, what's that person's story? This weekend I put the camera down and let myself be the one in the frame. Part of the story instead of the one collecting it. Witnessed, for once, instead of witnessing.
Just my dog. The water. Friends who helped me show up for myself and asked for nothing back. Some good old-fashioned bluegrass shenanigans, a pocket full of shiny rocks, and the Rio, carrying me gently back to myself.
If you're moving through your own hard season, you're not alone in it. In the U.S. you can call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) any time to reach a real person, or connect with a doctor or someone you trust. The tide can turn.
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