This must be the place: ‘I pulled off into a forest, crickets clicking in the ferns’
Somewhere in Eastern Idaho.
Garret K. Woodward photo
Late Monday morning. While taking a sip of my coffee at the Main Street Diner in Waynesville, I scanned the room at the tables filled with faces enjoying warm meals and hearty conversation. It was at that very moment when I started thinking about this anonymous postcard I received several years ago.
It was mailed from Charleston, South Carolina. No name on it or return address, but it read: “Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.” It’s a quote from the seminal novel, “Blue Highways,” by William Least Heat-Moon.
By the time you read this column, it’ll be Dec. 31. The end of the line for 2025. The final sunrise/sunset at the culmination of another calendar on the wall of my memory. As a sentimental old soul kind of person, I take pause at the end of the year to reflect on the road to the here and now, to take inventory of what the last 365 days have shown me in this vast universe that is existence.
For one thing, I vividly remember how I spent last New Year’s Eve. Alone and sitting at the end of a packed bar. The Scotsman in Waynesville. I was only a week removed from having my entire life blown up by my ex-partner. She disappeared on Christmas Eve and wasn’t heard from for almost three weeks. Radio silence, all while our apartment was still filled with her stuff.
Watching the brightly-lit ball in Times Square ring in the New Year on the big, glowing TV above the bar, I felt completely empty, incredibly lost, and sick to my stomach. The last two years of our life together just imploded with little notice or fanfare, the moments together soon to gather dust in the coming days, weeks, and months as we parted ways and figured out our next move.
And yet, I remember, even in that moment as drunk folks yelled and screamed all around me in celebration of the New Year, that things could only go up from here. I was at my absolute rock bottom, but I felt deep within that I would, in time and in patience, find my balance again. I didn’t know where or where or with whom I would find that balance, I just knew that everything was going to be different from that point forward. Head held high, always.
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Early January 2025. By this point, I was doing weekly online therapy, something that became quite a blessing, in terms of really digging into my past and figuring out the how and why of things happening (or not happening) in my daily life. The weather was cold and unforgiving, as was the deafening silence of my apartment in Waynesville, now half-empty once she moved out.
By March 2025, I was slowly, steadily getting back to my real self. Although I still was licking my wounds and wandering the Southeast with my tail between my legs, the warmth of the emerging spring and the sunshine of coastal Florida (while visiting my folks) sure accelerated my growth, both emotionally and spiritually. Even though I knew I still had a long way to go, I was beginning to find truth and purpose once again, and it felt so damn good.
To that, it really wasn’t until I took off on assignment to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado in mid-June when I really, honestly felt like my old self. And there was an exact moment, too. It was the last day of the festival, and I found myself on an extended trail run atop a ridge overlooking the Mountain Village and surrounding San Juan range. With sweat dripping down my face, I gazed at the mountains in pure awe of time and place, a big smile ear-to-ear.
By mid-July, I had taken off from Haywood County and bolted west towards Whitefish, Montana, for the Under the Big Sky festival. It was my third year-in-a-row attending the wild-n-out event. Familiar faces onsite that I only see that time of year and new, kind souls entering my orbit by chance or happenstance. Trail running in the depths of the Rocky Mountains. Swimming in sapphire-colored lakes just outside of the small, picturesque town.
Cue mid-August and another trip to the Park City Song Summit in Utah. Flying solo, I was granted a surreal townhouse with a hot tub and panoramic views of the Wasatch Mountains that cradle the resort. Midday trail runs along dirt trails crisscrossing ski slopes eager for the impending winter. Late-night musical shenanigans in and around the high-brow downtown corridor.
And all of those interviews throughout the last 12 months. Phone conversations with the likes of Alison Krauss and Mike Campbell. Zoom meetings with rock renegades Larkin Poe. Interviewing The Black Keys in their Nashville studio, all while a film crew from American Songwriter captured the entire interaction. Backstage interactions with Wynonna Judd, Stone Temple Pilots, Warren Haynes, Greensky Bluegrass, Charlie Starr, Goose, Dawes and so on.
But, mostly, the biggest takeaway from 2025, at least in my wanderings and ponderings, was the immense gratitude to be able to get lost, either purposely in thought or purposely on the open road of America. It’s those backcountry roads out west or here in Southern Appalachia. A cloud of dust behind the rusty, musty, trusty truck of mine, cruising along, the windows rolled down, some John Prine, Blitzen Trapper or Cotton Jones echoing from the speakers.
Those wanderings and ponderings. Like that late afternoon thunderstorm that rattled the truck as I made my way north on Interstate 29 from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Or that incredibly inspiring afternoon of sunshine and undulating waves while motoring down State Road A1A from Jacksonville Beach, Florida, to St. Augustine, only to pull over at some desolate beach, kicking off my sandals and letting the water wash over my feet.
Life is beautiful, grasp for it, y’all.
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A Friend sent me "Blue Highways" in 1986. I was 39. It caused me to purchase a Chevy van, load up my wife and 2 year old son, quit my job of 20 years and head off on a 12 week odyssey that took us from Orlando up through the middle of the country staying with college friends and family. We traveled through Georgia, Western Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan into Canada at Sault Ste. Marie, around the north shore of Lake Superior, to Yellowstone, Glacier National Park through Idaho to Seattle down the coast to Eugene Oregon, to Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs to Kansas City and St. Louis to New Orleans back home to Orlando. The purpose of the trip was to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. We ran out of friends in Michigan, and stayed in Bed and breakfasts after that and never traveled more than 300 miles a day all on back roads.
I’m now 78 and still don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. So far it has been a great adventure.Tuesday, 01/06/2026
