“No, Will, I don’t think taking the plane to Thermopolis today is a good idea.” I was on the phone with William, proud owner of a marvellous little Super Cub. Standing in the hangar—so cold it could make a polar bear rethink its life choices—I explained:
“Here’s the plan. My wife and I will book a room at a friend’s motel here in town, plug in the oil heater to your engine, and by tomorrow, she’ll be nice and warm, ready to fly out to Nate for service. A brand-new engine like yours? I’d rather not crank it up in subzero temperatures with oil that’s basically frozen maple syrup. At that point, sandpaper would provide better lubrication. It’d be like sleeping outside for 15 hours at -20 degrees, then immediately trying to run a marathon on a frozen lake in bathroom slippers.”
“Great thinking, Marcel,” he replied. “Thank you. I’ll reimburse you when I get back from Carolina next month.”
That was settled, then. Honestly, I was more than happy to stay in Cody, which at least had the bare minimum required to sustain human life—bars, a movie theatre, and the vague illusion of civilisation. Thermopolis, on the other hand, was the kind of place where excitement peaked at watching paint dry. Unless, of course, you counted the thrill of shovelling down burgers at the One Eyed Buffalo—the closest thing to nightlife, assuming your idea of an exhilarating evening involved flirting with cardiac arrest. After 8 p.m., the town had less pulse than a Pharaoh’s tomb—where, at least, the ancient Egyptians had the decency to provide mummies for company.
“Yeeehhhaaarrrhh!!!”
It doesn’t take much to cheer me up. A Piper Super Cub in my preferred configuration—big wheels, extended landing gear, a bare-minimum cockpit, and a climb prop—is all I require. Just like that, the chaos and mayhem of the past few weeks vanished faster than a first date in Los Angeles when the check arrives—suddenly developing an urgent bathroom emergency or backing into the bushes like a guilty Simpsons character.
We were tearing down the runway on one wheel—left wing low, right wing high—Nicole safely strapped in the back cheering. After what felt like an eternity (though, in reality, only a few hundred hours of flight time) of operating Super Cubs on floats, it was downright exhilarating to rip down a full mile of tarmac on massive tundra wheels. If God were looking for a plane to have fun in, there’s no doubt—He’d choose a Cub. This flying marvel—built with Roman-era technology and an engineering philosophy that treated safety as an optional suggestion—had never failed to lift my spirits. It felt better than happy hour at a Ghana gun market.
What a tragic fate awaited most little airships like this—destined to join the vast graveyard of private planes that technically still "existed" but spent more time in pieces or parked in a dark hangar than in the sky. If a Cub was lucky, it might scrape together 20 to 40 hours of flight time a year, wedged between lengthy vacations at the mechanic’s shop after yet another brush with incompetence. Some weekend warrior, high on delusions of grandeur and YouTube bush flying videos, would inevitably misjudge a landing, clip a wing, nose it over, or—because history loves to repeat itself—plow it straight into a building. And so, the cycle would continue: a machine built for adventure, reduced to an expensive, stationary monument to human error.
I sincerely hoped this particular Cub was bound for a better, brighter destiny with William at the helm.
This Super Cub—like the one I had proudly owned many years before—was essentially a glorified lawn chair with wings, held together by fabric, sheer stubbornness, and the ghosts of long-dead barnstormers. But no matter what chaos waited outside the cockpit, the moment I was airborne, life’s problems dissolved into insignificance—like a DMV worker at 4:59 p.m. on a Friday.
Still, after barely 20 hours of soaring through the blue Wyoming skies, it became clear—the walls were closing in, and the chips were down. Like a roll of toilet paper that vanishes faster the closer you get to the end, This happy tale of living in the Forever West was wrapping up faster than a Vegas marriage when the tequila wears off—no romance, no second chances, just a crushing headache and a pile of regrets.
Not even the confines of my little flying wonder could provide lasting solace as it dawned on me—this might well be the last time I’d fly a Super Cub. Sure, the skill would probably stay with me forever, like riding a bike, but the magic of flying had slipped away. Somehow, it was just… gone.
Cessnas, of course, were the exception—they had always felt like the darkest, most disturbing kind of witchcraft to me.
However, catastrophe is never the work of a single villain. The Titanic didn’t sink because of an iceberg alone—it was a symphony of failures. A happily drunk captain, an inattentive first officer, a deceptively small shard of ice concealing the leviathan below. The reckless push for speed, the flawed compartmentalisation that turned a minor breach into a death sentence, the criminal lack of lifeboats, and the merciless cold that finished off those who made it to the surface. Had they crashed in the balmy waters of the Caribbean, at least the dying would’ve had the courtesy of warmth. But fate isn’t kind—it simply waits, stacking missteps like dry kindling until the spark finally comes.
So, my point is, it is never just one thing that brings down a ship, a building, or even a dream. It’s the quiet accumulation of overlooked warnings, bad timing, and cruel mathematics, all conspiring until collapse is no longer a possibility but a certainty.
Apart from Sylvia—who single-handedly transformed my visa status from “dear guest” to “America’s Most Wanted” (may she spend eternity battling ingrown toenails so severe they curl like cursed tree roots, while marooned on an island the size of a beach towel, surrounded by relentless seagulls that scream through the night, with only Director Dick for company and no hope of rescue)—even greater game-changers had forced their way into my life’s equation.
None of it was catastrophic on its own—just a series of quiet omens, like shadows lengthening before sunset or the first uneasy creaks of a failing dam. Small clouds, gathering unnoticed, until they would swell into a monstrous cumulonimbus the size of Kentucky, ready to blot out everything. My lovable little Western world had started to shift, the characters I had grown so fond of slipping away—retiring, moving on, or simply vanishing like they’d been written out of the script without so much as a final scene.
Everyone—yes, even you, dear reader, unless your observational skills rival a goldfish head-butting the glass—has felt it. That creeping sensation when a chapter is closing, when the calendar flips and something intangible shifts, when people quietly exit your life and strangers take their place. When whatever’s on your plate, once comforting, suddenly tastes stale and out of place—like biting into something that was never meant for you in the first place.
It started with my favourite chiropractor in the world—a man with magic hands, surgical precision, and a wardrobe so immaculate he could’ve adjusted spines in a three-piece suit. No-nonsense in his approach to snapping misaligned bones back where they belonged, he was someone I considered a friend, holding a special place in my heart ever since the day I hobbled into his office after being unceremoniously ejected from a horse. At the time, I was convinced I had at least five broken vertebrae, a dislocated shoulder, a shattered hip joint, and a skull fracture.
Lucky for me, my self-diagnosis was about as accurate as a palm readers weather forecast.
Doctor Bill, the bone-wielding wizard of Thermopolis, set me straight—literally and figuratively. But on a cold December morning in 2022, I walked into his office only to hear the words no spine-abusing fool ever wants to hear: He had sold the practice. Effective immediately, he was semi-retired, working only part-time.
The next domino to fall was the retirement of none other than Mr. Awesome himself—Kevin, the legendary owner of Wayne’s Boot Shop in Cody, Wyoming. He had inherited the business from his father back when the mighty Diplodocus still roamed the plains, and somehow, against all odds, managed to keep it running in the modern age.
Kevin had a rare talent: the ability to crack jokes so painfully unfunny that they circled back around to being endearing—mostly because of the sheer, heartwarming determination behind them. We had stumbled into his shop years ago during a motorcycle trip from Manhattan to Malibu, accidentally ending up in Cody, a town so thrilling that wandering into a boot store out of sheer boredom seemed like a reasonable life choice. And yet, there he was—making terrible puns, fitting us with boots, and unknowingly becoming a permanent fixture in my personal history.
But like Bill the Bone Wizard before him, Kevin too succumbed to the relentless march of time. By the end of the year, he passed down his nostalgic little leather-scented kingdom to his son-in-law and stepped into retirement, leaving yet another gaping hole in my once-familiar world.
Our dear friends, the Santas—Mr. Santa (aka Rod) and Mrs. Claus (aka Karen)—were the kind of people who could restore your faith in humanity, or at the very least, your faith in not freezing to death. Almost a year earlier, they had, against all logic, handed us the keys to their second home when we arrived in the middle of a blizzard—our wheezing, barely functional Range Rover serving as both transportation and, in our incredibly stupid plan, a temporary coffin.
Karen, who would go on to become a true friend, took one look at us—two half-frozen idiots fresh off the boat from a dark and unyielding continent (Europe, that is)—and decided against letting natural selection take its course. Whether it was kindness, curiosity, or sheer morbid fascination that made her trust us, I’ll never know. But in February 2022, she chose to defy both common sense and self-preservation instincts, handing over the keys to her second house like some benevolent game-show host saving contestants from elimination. For some time, Karen and Rod had been toying with the idea of selling their “backup” home—though, in reality, it had mostly functioned as a sanctuary of peace and a high-security vault for their Santa costumes, dressing room, and the vast containers of Christmas presents. Because, let’s be honest, being Santa Claus comes with a rather cushy work schedule. You put in a few high-intensity shifts in December, bask in the glory of holiday magic, and then promptly return to a life of sedentary bliss for the remaining eleven months.
But now, the time had come to put the house on the market. Renovations were underway, and with every stroke of fresh paint and every replaced floorboard, the once-comfortable retreat was slipping away. The writing was on the wall—the days of cozy exile were numbered, and just like that, another safe haven was vanishing, swallowed up by the relentless churn of time and real estate listings.
Helping Nate at Thermopolis Airport had lost whatever appeal it once had, the last scraps of purpose fading like a bad aftertaste. My place had already been filled by someone else—a poor soul whom life had dealt a particularly bad hand. Hopelessly unqualified in mechanical affairs, socially awkward in a way that wasn’t endearing, and about as confident as a chihuahua in a pride of lions, he had been thrown into the deep end of an industry that chews up the unsure and spits them out with a condescending smirk.
And yet, there he was, standing among the aviators—an unforgiving species that regarded anyone outside their sacred halls of aviation as a personal insult, an unworthy intruder fit only for patronising lectures and passive-aggressive corrections.
Unless one is a pilot themselves or possesses an utterly unshakable confidence (or, at the very least, the ability to fake it so convincingly that even the most condescending airmen hesitate before launching into a TED Talk on lift coefficients), working with or for the endless parade of coming and going aviators is no laughing matter. It’s a battlefield where the weak are devoured, the insecure are crushed, and only the truly oblivious can survive unscathed.
To top things off at the airport, returning would have meant subjecting myself to the sight of the predator control pilots—the very crew I had dreamed of joining—shooting the shit about guns and planes, swapping stories about reckless flight manoeuvres, and revelling in the kind of camaraderie I’d spent years clawing my way toward. I had envisioned myself among them, clad in the same fancy flight suit, an American flag proudly embroidered on my sleeve, a gun at my side, a highly sophisticated helmet strapped on, my own Super Cub waiting for me on the tarmac. That was supposed to be me. That should have been me.
But instead of flying, I was grounded—not by skill, not by failure, not even by some tragic accident, but by the USDA, that bloated, mismanaged circus of bureaucratic incompetence, where careers go to die and paperwork goes to be forgotten.
Some lifeless, coffee-breath government drone—tucked safely behind a taxpayer-funded desk, basking in the flickering glow of a malfunctioning overhead light—had smothered my future under an Everest-sized pile of unprocessed paperwork. Not by malice, mind you. That would have required effort. No, my dream died the most pathetic death imaginable: suffocated under a mountain of sheer, unfiltered, industrial-strength laziness.
It wasn’t even a rejection. A rejection, at least, would have had dignity. It would have meant someone had actually read my file, weighed my worth, made a decision. But that would have required competence. And the USDA doesn’t do competence. The USDA does delays. The USDA does lost emails. The USDA does “Oops, it must have slipped through the cracks” while shovelling another tax-funded donut into their face.
In my world of reasoning, going back to Nate’s airport and having to face those USDA pilots would feel like slowly suffocating myself with a sport sock that hadn’t been washed in decades—moist, festering, and steeped in the kind of rancid stench that could peel the paint off a battleship and send grown men weeping into the sea. It would be a slow, torturous suffocation, each breath a punishment, each inhale dragging the foul decay of lost dreams and bureaucratic rot deeper into my lungs. Standing there, watching them joke and swap war stories, would be like being locked in a coffin that wasn’t buried deep enough—close enough to hear the world moving on without me, but too far gone to claw my way back. It wouldn’t be death, not quite. Just something worse—a slow, perishing purgatory where every second stretched unbearably long, each moment a reminder of what could have been if not for the mindless, pen-pushing parasites who let my future rot in some forgotten pile of paperwork.
There were more problems.
The Range Rover. A name that once conjured images of rugged exploration and aristocratic over-landing—but in our case, it was less a vehicle and more a sadistic British death trap on wheels, a rolling experiment in human patience. It never abandoned us in the middle of some desolate, post-apocalyptic wasteland, a zombie-infested hellscape, leaving us to fend off ravenous hordes of the undead with nothing but our wits and a tire iron. No, but it came close.
This museum exhibit on wheels—beautiful in our eyes but about as structurally sound as a Nairobi ghetto shelter made of wet cardboards—tested our resolve daily. Each morning, we found ourselves whispering pleas, threats, and outright blasphemy in hopes that it would do the bare minimum: just. bloody. start.
The starter engine, a recent abomination courtesy of CarQuest Auto Parts of Thermopolis, had somehow managed to be worse than the failing one it replaced, proving that incompetence is indeed an art form. Thanks to their nonexistent customer service and absolute commitment to ensuring maximum human despair we were now shackled to a vehicle that had to be parked on an incline at all times—just in case it needed a gravity-assisted resurrection.
And that? That was the good part.
The disintegrating drive chain, an instrument of vehicular terrorism had begun to shake itself apart with such malicious enthusiasm that after every road trip, we’d have to send a recovery vehicle to collect the debris field we left behind. Doors, windows, screws, nuts, bumpers—hell, for all we knew, somewhere along the way we’d lost a few decades off our life expectancy.
At some point, it stopped being about fixing the Range Rover. It became a grim endurance test. How much could it take before it finally collapsed in on itself like a dying star? How much could we take before we finally gave up, dug a hole in the Wyoming dirt, and buried the bastard where it belonged?
Wyoming had given us adventure. The Range Rover made sure it came with a body count.
However, it became painfully clear that we had to end this masochistic entanglement with our ancient, wheezing carriage. What it needed was a new owner—someone with bottomless financial resources, like a tax-funded bureaucracy, the eternal patience of a mummy, and a fleet of reliable vehicles to actually get him where he needed to go when this relic inevitably decided to die in the middle of nowhere.
There was still more.
The final, skull-crushing blow came in the form of my wife—my steadfast partner, my co-conspirator in this absurd misadventure. She had arrived in Utah with suitcases full of hope, ready to turn some bleak corner of Fillmore into a home, to stake our claim in a country that clearly had other ideas. But in the end, she was just another casualty of this slow-motion disaster, collateral damage in a war we never even got to fight.
Unless she had a burning desire to see her face plastered on America’s Most Wanted, she had no choice but to leave. Back to Germany she went, uncertain when—or if—we’d see each other again, our so-called American dream now nothing more than a punchline in a joke we weren’t in on. TSA, in all its gormless, overreaching glory, had already flagged her as a potential security threat. Her crime? Daring to enter the United States twice in six months. Because obviously, only terrorists, drug lords, and unassuming German wives attempting to build a life with their legally employed husbands would pull such a stunt.
It was a perfect, government-issued gut-punch, a final act of bureaucratic farce that sent our last hopes skidding across the floor like an empty beer bottle at closing time.
Most of life’s solutions tend to present themselves through sheer doing rather than sitting around contemplating the meaning of it all. Not that I’ve ever been accused of overthinking—if elaborate planning truly solved problems, I’d probably be running a multinational conglomerate instead of repeatedly hurling myself headfirst into fate’s wood chipper.
This time, the first sliver of hope came when John—launching his grand solar project at Cody’s airport—offered me a two-week gig assembling solar panels at an exhibition site. Now, I’ll admit, solar technology is as much of a mystery to me as time travel is to a Neanderthal or big wave surfing is to the Pope. But I’ve always been eager to pick up new skills, especially when the work involves people I actually enjoy—ideally those capable of forming sentences longer than a grunt.
John had a solid guy working with him—Ryan, a gifted pianist. A talent I’ve always dreamed of acquiring myself, though my progress in that department has been about as impressive as a tortoise attempting parkour. Regrettably, Ryan hadn’t thought to bring a keyboard to enlighten me between panel installations.
The best part of the job? It came with a roof over my head. John arranged for me to stay in a little cabin at the Ponderosa Campground, a far cry from my previous night’s lodging—crammed into our groaning, oil-seeping, borderline-sentient Range Rover. Every single one of my worldly possessions had been stuffed into that barely functional heap, and to make matters worse, I’d attached a trailer to haul my motorcycle. Considering that simply existing was already an unreasonable demand on that car, towing an entire gypsy caravan over 80 miles from Thermopolis to Cody was pushing the limits of mechanical abuse. The engine haemorrhaged so much oil along the way that if we’d followed the trail back, we probably could have single-handedly fuelled the global shipping industry for a month.
The Ponderosa Campground
Speaking of the Ponderosa Campground, it wasn’t my first encounter with this little outpost of civilisation. We had first stumbled upon it during a motorcycle trip in 2016, when we arrived at the gates of Yellowstone National Park with all the foresight of a potted fern, utterly unprepared for the minor detail that the park was still closed. Left with no choice but to slink back to Cody in search of shelter, we landed at Ponderosa, a family-run campground that would, unbeknownst to us, become a significant waypoint in the long, tragic saga of our crumbling existence.
The place was run by Robin and Larry, an unlikely duo who presided over their little empire of transient campers and clueless tourists like benevolent dictators. The reception area was a crossroads of human oddities—European over-landers with suspiciously clean hiking gear, RV enthusiasts who treated their mobile homes like palaces, and the occasional East Coast dad suffering an existential crisis in cargo shorts. Even the hillbillies from Nebraska and Missouri showed up, dragging their denim-heavy wardrobes and deeply held suspicions about government tracking devices.
Then there was Larry. A man whose age, if I had to estimate, could be traced back to at least the late Cretaceous period, likely having once traded bar stories with a Velociraptor. He had a self-deprecating, razor-sharp humour that could rival my own. I liked him immediately, and I suspect the feeling might have been mutual—unless, of course, his ability to fake enthusiasm surpassed my own. Robin, meanwhile, was the true commander of the operation. She carried the calm, seasoned air of someone who had spent decades dealing with whining tourists and entitled boomers demanding refunds because their campsite didn’t come with a butler.
Then there was Greg, her husband—a man of few words but infinite patience, with a mechanical skill set that made him the unofficial saviour of all things broken and barely held together. What I didn’t expect when I rolled back into the Ponderosa in April 2023 was that this very spot would become the new playground for our fickle, gasping Range Rover. The vehicle—a mechanical abomination that defied both logic and mercy—would soon become Greg’s ongoing charity project, requiring all of his skills, funds, and quite possibly divine intervention to keep it running. I sincerely hoped that, along with his patience, he had a bank account deep enough to single-handedly bankroll an intergalactic war. He was going to need it because from this moment forward, he was at war with my car.
The next few weeks, I did my best to settle into the little cabin, a process that mostly involved lowering my already low standards and pretending I didn’t notice the drafts sneaking in through gaps that probably hadn’t been addressed since the Carter administration. Enter Karen—ever benevolent, ever determined to ensure I didn’t slip into full-blown feral existence. One day, she arrived bearing the single most critical piece of survival equipment known to mankind: a coffee machine.
Now, let’s be clear—there is no life without coffee. I don’t care what the poets, philosophers, or misguided decaf drinkers of the world claim. No caffeine, no existence. If I ever get the privilege of reincarnation, I’d like to return as a coffee plant, firmly rooted in the equatorial soil, basking in the tropical sun, fulfilling my true purpose: fuelling the barely functional and the utterly exhausted. What could possibly be better? Apart from this current life of mine, stumbling through Wyoming with a haunted British car and a rapidly unraveling sense of purpose. But at least now, I had coffee.
And before some soulless tea-drinker chimes in about the “soothing ritual” of steeping leaves in hot water—save it. The only thing more baffling than the continued existence of Tofu and Taylor Swift is the grim reality that entire nations willingly sustain themselves on a beverage that tastes like the ghosts of dead plants whispering final apologies before dissolving into lukewarm mediocrity. If coffee is the elixir of life, then tea is the sorrowful murmur of a former empire that has accepted defeat—one tepid, miserable sip at a time.
I digress…
The four weeks that followed were spent working alongside John and Ryan on his Envigor Solar Installation project. John had secured a prime spot right in front of the airport as an exhibition site for his company, and while the work itself wasn’t exactly groundbreaking for me, the company more than made up for it. The atmosphere was refreshingly free of condescension—no passive-aggressive remarks, no inflated egos, just good conversation and steady progress.
Both John and Ryan were skilled musicians, which, I suspect, played a role in the overall harmony of our little crew. Between assembling solar panels and discussing everything from chord progressions to concert performances, I found myself genuinely enjoying the experience. If only Ryan had thought to bring a piano—coffee breaks could have doubled as impromptu music lessons, and maybe, just maybe, I’d have walked away with more than just solar panel knowledge.
Still, when I left the work site and returned to my little cabin at the campground, the dark clouds of looming despair crept back in—held at bay during the day only by the company of decent men, but always lurking, waiting for nightfall to sink its teeth in. The inevitable decision loomed over me like a slow-swinging executioner’s axe, every fibre of my being praying—pleading—that somehow, someway, Aladdin would show up with his magic lamp and yank me out of this downward spiral. But no genie came. No miracles. Just me, alone at the crossroads, staring down two equally bleak paths.
One road led to a skull-crushing existence in a country that had nothing for me—no solace, no friends, no companionship, and worst of all, no work worth doing. Germany. A medieval purgatory where joy is rationed, laughter is a suspicious act, and the only form of fulfilment is grinding away at some pointless job until the sweet release of retirement. A nation of bureaucratic vampires and soul-drained clock punchers, where the only thing colder than the weather is the enthusiasm for life itself. Germany was the antithesis of adventure—a bureaucratic abyss where spontaneity went to be strangled in triplicate. It was the USDA, TSA, and DMV rolled into one bloated, Kafkaesque nightmare, pumped full of steroids and armed with a stack of soul-crushing paperwork. A place where laughter was rationed, joy was taxed, and the mere suggestion of fun was met with the kind of scorn usually reserved for war criminals. Even Nebraska—a land so mind-numbingly dull it could be used as a sedative—looked like a raging, neon-lit, tequila-fuelled carnival by comparison.
And what would I even do there? None of my skills—none of my experience, my hard-earned knowledge—had a place in that lifeless machinery.
I was a man with no country, no foothold, and no goddamn clue what to do next.
The other path of misery led straight into the abyss—a life of perpetual shadow-dwelling in a country that treats unwanted foreigners like expired milk: tolerated for a moment, but ultimately destined for the trash. It doesn’t matter how many job openings sit unfilled or how useful my skills might be—if I wasn’t pre-approved, pre-packaged, and stamped with bureaucratic approval, I was nothing. I’d be a ghost, drifting between the cracks, always waiting for the moment when some badge-flashing government dweeb from an obscure three-letter agency—probably created just to ruin my life—would materialise from the void to erase me. My money, my possessions—hell, they could take the Rover. In fact, I’d insist. Let them suffer too. But the worst part? The not knowing. The constant, gut-churning uncertainty of when I’d see the one person who had stood by me through every stupid, reckless misadventure. My wife. The only true companion I had in this relentless, godforsaken mess.
How long until we were together again? Weeks? Months? Years? How long before the dream—our dream—collapsed under the weight of bureaucracy and borders?
Faith, in moments like these, isn’t some celestial spotlight breaking through the clouds. No choir of angels, no Morgan Freeman narration, no divine hand tossing you a life raft. No, faith is sitting at life’s high-stakes poker table, holding a pair of threes while the dealer—who looks like he moonlights as a debt collector—flashes a royal flush and winks at you like he knows where your buried hopes and dreams are. It’s knowing you have nothing but bad luck and coffee breath, and still shoving all your chips in with the confidence of a man who just binge-watched The Wolf of Wall Street and decided bankruptcy is just a state of mind.
Faith is what keeps you from lying down in the middle of the road and waiting for fate to run you over in a Prius.
Faith is that tiny, delusional voice whispering,
“Yeah, you’re completely screwed… but what if you’re not?”
And sometimes, that whisper is all you have.
So, I did the only thing that made sense—I stood up, dusted off whatever dignity I hadn’t already traded for gas money, and forced myself to move. Not forward, necessarily, and certainly not with any particular grace, but movement is movement, and as long as you're moving, you’re not sinking.
There was still a Range Rover that needed ditching, a future that needed to be duct-taped back together, and a wife waiting an ocean away, while I played bureaucratic hopscotch with a government that couldn’t decide if it wanted me gone or just miserable. But somehow, some way, I knew this wasn’t the end of the story. Just the end of this particular, Wyoming-flavoured, government-agency-infested, cowboy-hat-wearing chapter.
And maybe—just maybe—whatever came next wouldn’t feel like choosing between a dinner date with an amorous Angela Merkel and a cuddle session with a passionate porcupine. Because here’s the thing about hitting rock bottom: sometimes, if you listen really closely… you realize it’s actually a trampoline.
The first step to feeling better when scraping yourself off life’s pavement is to start counting your blessings. Not that coma-inducing cliché about ‘someone, somewhere always having it worse’—that’s about as comforting as a debate between a cabbage and a carrot. No, real gratitude is looking around at the wreckage of your life and realising that, miraculously, you still have all your limbs, at least one working credit card, and no active warrants (yet). It’s understanding that even though you’re knee-deep in the bureaucratic equivalent of quicksand, at least you’re not stuck in an online seminar or married to a ‘Disney adult’ wearing a Mickey Mouse costume.
This was the kind of blessing-counting I could get behind—the real, tangible kind, not the hallmark nonsense about finding joy in suffering like some monk on a hunger strike. I had good people around me. Karen and Rod had bestowed upon me the holy grail of sanity: a brand-new coffee machine, ensuring I wouldn’t have to contemplate unspeakable crimes before sunrise. John, my two-week employer and fellow aviator, had proven to be a decent, civilised human being, a rare species in the wild.
Then there was Robin, the Ponderosa’s lovable overseer, a woman who had seen the world back when it required paper maps and actual social interaction. She had granted me refuge in a cabin at such a generous discount that I half-expected her to hand me a sceptre and declare me Duke of the Ponderosa. And Greg—oh, Greg. The man who, against all logic and self-preservation, had fallen in love with my Range Rover. Fully aware of the mechanical horror he was about to unleash upon himself, he still wanted to buy it.
Greg had everything necessary to tame the beast: the patience of a Buddhist monk trapped in LA traffic, the mechanical genius of Scotty from Star Trek, a garage so vast it could store the entire cast of Mad Max, and an arsenal of spare vehicles that could singlehandedly solve New York’s taxi shortage. Most importantly, he wasn’t just offering to take the cursed artefact off my hands—he was paying in cash. A miracle. A divine intervention. The equivalent of finding out your terminal illness was actually just heartburn.
For the first time in weeks, I felt like I might actually crawl out of this mess without needing an exorcism.
There was even more. I still had my beloved motorcycle—the indestructible steed that had circled the equator the equivalent of three times without so much as a hiccup, a true testament to American ingenuity and whatever dark sorcery the engineers at Harley-Davidson had dabbled in. Unlike my Rover, which demanded ritual sacrifices of money and sanity, this machine had never betrayed me. It would come with me to Europe, my noble metal companion, ensuring that even in the land of roundabouts and existential despair, I would remain mobile. Every glance at it would remind me of the endless highways of the American West, where freedom still roamed, and gas stations didn’t charge a kidney for a gallon of fuel.
Yes, I would pack whatever worldly possessions could be duct-taped to my two-wheeled escape pod and make my way to that adjacent third-world country—Canada—land of maple syrup-fuelled bureaucracy and temperatures that suggest God might have abandoned the place. The plan was simple: ride up to Calgary, board a plane, and—because dignity is a luxury—I’d be seated among screaming infants and rogue elbows while my loyal bike would be unceremoniously tossed into the cargo hold like a smuggled exotic pet. Destination? Yet another crumbling monument to Western civilisation: London. Where the streets are as grey as the food, and the general public has the collective enthusiasm of a boiled potato.
Eventually, the time came for trapping a handful of tissues and mumbling some teary-eyed goodbyes, though I was mostly crying over the thought of dealing with Canadian customs. I loaded my motorcycle with more gear than an Arabian camel caravan, defying several laws of physics and at least one of common sense. With my trusty metal steed now resembling a doomsday prepper’s fever dream, I set off—first stop, Yellowstone, because if I was going to be exiled from the land of the free, I might as well take in some last-minute geyser eruptions that weren’t caused by my own frustration.
My route wound through backcountry Montana, a state so beautiful it felt like nature was trying to make up for all the terrible life choices I had made up until this point. Since I couldn’t possibly fit a tent on my bike—because I had prioritised essentials like coffee-making supplies and a very unnecessary-but-symbolic cowboy hat—I opted for some high-class luxury and booked motel rooms along the way. By "high-class," I mean I selected places where the sheets were only mildly questionable and the odds of stepping on a heroin needle were below 50%.
My grand farewell tour reached its thrilling conclusion in a town called Cut Bank, Montana, a place about 20 miles south of the Canadian border and roughly 200 years south of anything resembling excitement. Now, this town had a special place in my heart—not because I had ever been there, but because years earlier, in a moment of cinematic desperation, I had watched a movie titled Cut Bank. At the time, I had assumed the director had gone full Hollywood, drowning the film in ridiculous levels of bleakness and despair. No town could actually be that lifeless, right? Even a forgotten colony on Dune, the desert planet, would have offered more vibrating life.
I was mistaken. Entirely.
Cut Bank, Montana, was not just boring—it was aggressively, soul-siphoningly, existential-crisis-inducingly dead. Walking through town, I could feel the absence of hope, like an abandoned Western where even the tumbleweeds had given up and rolled themselves into an early grave. You could tell, just by looking at people’s faces, that everyone in this town had been whispering the same prayer every night: “Dear God, please, something—meteor, alien invasion, spontaneous sinkhole—just take us out.”
It was a perfect place for my final night in the United States. Nothing says "time to leave" quite like staying in a town where even the flies have packed up and moved somewhere livelier—like a funeral home.
Come to think of it, Cut Bank—this windswept tombstone of broken dreams—was the perfect boot camp for the next soul-crushing chapter of my existence: Europe. If misery loves company, then this town had prepared me for the cold, bureaucratic embrace of the Old World like a drill sergeant prepping fresh meat for the trenches.
However, crossing the border and slamming the lid shut on this chapter of misadventure did sting—like disinfectant on a fresh wound. Not just because I was leaving behind my beautifully dysfunctional American dream, but because I knew it would take at least two years before TSA and Border Control stopped treating me like a Benghazi bomb maker with a suspicious fondness for road trips. At this point, my chances of waltzing back into the U.S. without a full cavity search were about as likely as finding an airline meal that didn’t taste like a wet cardboard ransom note.
As my beloved USA shrank in the rearview mirror, I couldn’t help but feel a flicker of anticipation for whatever lay ahead. A road trip—heck, even an 800-mile ride from Wyoming to Canada—has a way of opening your mind, realigning priorities, and reminding you of what truly matters. I would regroup with the one person who’s always been by my side. Together, as we always do, we’d find a way forward—heads held high, backs straight as pillars—ready to embrace a future we hadn't quite figured out yet.
Because here’s the thing: most of the time, pressure grinds stone into dust. But every so often, pressure creates diamonds.
And here’s another thing: a new idea for a project was beginning to take shape in my mind… maybe Africa again...We would see.
Marcel Romdane, signing off.
Pictures below from left to right:
1. Teary Eyed Goodbye from Robin, Greg, Beemer (neighbor) and me with the physics defying packed bike
2. Life doesn't get much better than this, my favourite way of tearing down the runway. Only this was my own plane, a long time ago
3. Goodbye Santas Home in Thermopolis, Wyoming
4. What the hell am I doing here?
5. John, exaggerating a bit. It wasn't even below zero yet
6. Temporary home at Ponderosa Campground, courtesy of Robin
7. Same
8. Ryan and me discussing Piano lessons
9. Bike at the drop-off at Calgary airport
10. Tearing down the runway in Will's marvel of a Cub
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