My friend Isaac Fitzgerald released a gorgeous book this week that is one of my top picks for a Father’s Day gift. And because of that I’m giving away a copy to one lucky US Winner. Put RAMBLER in the comments for a chance to win.
American Rambler is a gorgeous blend of memoir, history, and travelogue and an ode to the American heartland, a meditation on escaping the breakneck pace of modern life, and a clear-eyed look at the myths—often violent, sometimes hopeful, frequently romanticized—at the very core of American identity and history.
The book begins as a story about tracing the path of Johnny Appleseed across America and unfolds into a meditation on loneliness, midlife, friendship, faith, home, and the realization that adventure doesn’t actually end once you stop backpacking through Europe or sleeping on strangers’ couches.
Since reading the book and chatting with Isaac on Under the Influence I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how little time we spend moving through the world at what Isaac calls “a human pace.”
We rush everywhere now. We scroll through other people’s lives instead of fully inhabiting our own (or others). We optimize every second of the day and research every restaurant before we leave the house and flatten entire experiences into a couple lines of text on a screen. Somewhere along the way we stopped wandering, and I think a lot of us are deeply lonelier because of it.
Our whole conversation made me want to put my phone down for a while, go for a long walk without a destination, and maybe spend a little more time talking to strangers in bars and bookstores instead of reading everyone’s opinions filtered through algorithms all day.
Here are the five things I kept thinking about long after I finished reading American Rambler.
1. Midlife might actually be your greatest adventure
Isaac described American Rambler to me as a “coming of middle age” story.
I loved that framing because I think we’ve spent decades being told that adventure belongs almost exclusively to young people. Adventure is quitting your job at twenty-three to travel Southeast Asia. Adventure is climbing mountains and sleeping in hostels and taking spontaneous flights to countries where you don’t speak the language. And listen, I’ve done a shit ton of that and so has Isaac. But I honestly think midlife is proving to be far stranger, harder, richer, and more emotionally complex than any of those earlier adventures ever were.
There is real adventure in building a life instead of constantly escaping into a new one. About staying somewhere long enough to know your neighbors, building friendships that last decades, raising children, caring for aging parents, figuring out who you are after you’ve shed all the identities you performed in your twenties. None of that gets categorized as adventure in the traditional sense, but it should.
I love this video of Isaac celebrating the launch of The Fly Fishing Book (my other top Father’s Day Gift) with my sister husband Steven Weinberg
2. We are desperately and wildly hungry for real-world connection
People were so incredibly kind and generous to Isaac on the road once he got back out into the world and started moving through it slowly enough to actually meet them. People invited him into their homes to talk about apple trees. Strangers at bars became companions for an evening. Random people wanted to tell him about the places they loved and why those places mattered to them.
I think we’ve spent so much time online lately that we’ve forgotten most people are actually pretty decent face to face. The internet rewards outrage and performance and turning people into caricatures, but real life tends to be much messier and kinder than that. Every time I go on book tour I’m reminded of it. People invite me to join them for fries before an event or tell me stories about their town or ask where else I’m traveling next because they genuinely want to connect.
There’s a real hunger for low-stakes human interaction right now, and I think we underestimate how much we all need it.
3. We’ve optimized the serendipity out of our lives
Before we go anywhere now we look up the best coffee shop, the best sandwich, the best hidden gem that stopped being hidden six months ago because TikTok discovered it. We go through the world trying to maximize every experience instead of allowing ourselves to stumble into things accidentally.
Isaac writes about how much joy there is in wandering somewhere without a plan and just seeing what happens.
Some of the best moments in my own travels have come from exactly that kind of rambling, including meeting my husband.
4. Building a home is its own kind of bravery
Isaac writes beautifully about growing up without stability and spending much of his adult life bouncing from place to place, always feeling slightly transient, always feeling like he had one eye on the exit.
What moved me most when we chatted was hearing him talk about realizing, maybe for the first time, that he actually wanted a home and that he deserved one.
Staying requires believing that you deserve to belong somewhere instead of always preparing yourself to leave.
5. We all need a little more rambling
We need more rambling walks and rambling conversations and afternoons without schedules. We need more wandering around towns we don’t know very well and more conversations with strangers and more moments where we aren’t trying to turn every experience into content or productivity or self-improvement.
The older I get, the more I think life is in the detours and the rambling and the serendipity.
Rambler!
Rambler