The road is narrow and winding, and the landscape is covered in darkness, but I can feel the shift. My old truck grumbles up the steep incline. Headlights carve quick-passing forest scenes from out of the gloom. A drive that started in desert terrain—full of yucca, cactus, and waving ocotillo—has turned decidedly coniferous. Juniper and pine now rise on both sides of the roadway, their branches black in the morning dark. A Carmen whitetail stops just short of the pavement and watches me with glowing eyes.

More than a mile above sea level, I reach Panther Pass—a drainage divide between Green Gulch and the Chisos Basin. I park in the small lot where a group of hikers drinks coffee from steaming thermoses. My truck is glad for the rest. It’s November 2024, and the odometer is just shy of 300,000 miles. I’ll surpass that number on my way home to Canyon Lake, between Austin and San Antonio.

I check the battery on my phone, the level of my CamelBak. My coffee has gone cold, but I sip at it anyway. People are getting out of their cars and looking up at the sky, where blankets of stars hold steady against the coming dawn. Here there is something spiritually tangible about the cosmos; something that seems to vanish amid the lights of civilization. Some of the hikers point upward as if to say, “See? The whole of creation is just there, at the end of our fingertips—do you see?”

Others stretch and hustle to the trailhead, likely trying to make the overlook by sunrise. I strike a leisurely pace. Even in November, autumn is yet a rumor for much of Texas. But high in the mountains of Big Bend National Park, the air is cold and electric. My breath dances in front of me like magic. And like magic, it disappears.

The Lost Mine Trail is a 5-mile out-and-back hike with a modest climb during the “out” portion. It’s a popular trail, though it doesn’t hold the same prestige as South Rim, where 13 miles of trekking nets glorious, sweeping views of the Chihuahuan Desert. But I’m not after prestige. I’m here to measure change.

Change often happens naturally and inevitably, but it can also be sought out. In 2017, my wife, Jordan, and I did the seeking. We were living in a condo on Austin’s tourist-friendly South Congress Avenue. I worked in politics and Jordan was a real estate agent. Between the two of us, we had about 15 minutes off each week. We worked long hours at unfulfilling jobs because we were certain happiness was always just around the corner. In the meantime, we kept grinding, kept saying “yes” to business meetings and networking events, kept living in a world colored by orange traffic cones and clamoring jackhammers.

One night that summer, we were standing in the lobby of the Alamo Drafthouse at 8 p.m. when Jordan received an urgent email from a client. I can’t remember the exact nature of the emergency. Contract amendments, maybe. Last-minute requests before closing. Either way, this wasn’t the first time one of us had to skip out on a movie or cancel plans because of work. I assumed I would just go see Baby Driver on my own. Instead, Jordan shook her head and took my hand.

“Life is now,” she told me, words now inscribed on a bracelet she wears. “I don’t want to keep doing this.”

Over the next two months we left our jobs, donated all our possessions save what fit in a small storage closet, and bought a 144-square-foot travel trailer and an old truck to tow it. Our plan was to drive across the country, living off the grid as much as possible, with the goal of finding ourselves. How we would accomplish this—or even what it meant—neither of us was entirely sure.

We headed west, like they do in the songs, and the landscape began to look like a visual representation of the change we were after—a lesson in geological evolution. After dropping off the Edwards Plateau, the soft, green hills started to die out, replaced by sharp mesas and even a few shapely buttes. The vegetation changed too, the desert overtaking the Hill Country with its own scrub brush biome.

I noticed the shift—tried to embrace it. The next transformation was even more dramatic. As we veered south through Brewster County and into Big Bend, the magnificent Chisos Mountains appeared before us. An entire world of igneous rock uplifts, formed by lava flows, ash deposits, and breccia, spewed from 40-million-year-old volcanoes, domes with multiple peaks, and narrow talus slopes that filtered sand and gravel beneath steep cliffs. I’d lived most of my life in East Texas, so this took some getting used to.

The same could be said for relying on propane for heating and cooking, constantly measuring water tank levels, and using precious fuel to run a small generator just long enough to charge a laptop. These things presented technical challenges. The mental challenge was greater still. What if we spent all our money and came home with nothing? No enlightenment. No plan. Not even a good story. Worse yet, what if I wasn’t the person I hoped I could be? What if I was just myself?

As we passed signs warning us there was no gas for 80 miles, I mentioned to Jordan that maybe we should have made a few more short trips to make sure we were ready.

“Eat the frog,” she said, taking my hand.

“Eat the frog,” I repeated, acknowledging her reference to Mark Twain’s unconventional quote about doing the most difficult task first.

Still, I was worried. We had no source of income and a modest, at best, savings account. To embark on a journey with no clear ending seemed ill-advised for anyone, and even more so for someone with my history of mental health struggles.

I had my first panic attack on May 28, 2008. My second and third were May 29, with more the day after. I was convinced I was dying. I had brain scans, MRIs, and every other manner of testing. The result was panic disorder. I was 19. For the next three years, I never left East Texas. The anxiety-induced agoraphobia created an imaginary border I couldn’t cross without struggling to breathe.

Then I met Jordan. She was visiting a friend in East Texas. We connected, and she convinced me to come see her in Austin a few weeks later. I felt like I was going to hyperventilate, and I had to pull over several times, but I made the four-hour drive. Then I made it again, and again. Eventually I was able to live and work in Austin, though it felt like every day was an epic battle. I struggled with going to restaurants, driving in traffic, and riding elevators. Each small step felt like a major accomplishment, until I looked at the ease in which seemingly everyone else operated in the world. Even on good days, I felt like a failure. I hated planes. Hated travel in general. Because of my anxiety, we honeymooned in Arkansas instead of Aruba, wary that too far a distance might lead to my unraveling.

Traveling to Big Bend in 2017 was about the farthest I’d ventured in 20 years. And there was no way to turn around and go home, since our home was now the 19-foot camper we were dragging along behind us. This did not bring me the peace I was hoping to find. But change is never peaceful.

Volcanic eruptions, colliding plates, extensive faulting. These are just some of the cataclysmic events that shaped Big Bend. There is drama in both the creation and what was created. An overexaggeration of nature’s potential for beauty, as well as its propensity for danger. Flash floods, terminal heat, and creatures that are well equipped to inflict pain if threatened.

By threatening my own stability, I was intent on creating something beautiful. But early on, all I could feel was the danger. On that first morning in Big Bend, when we hiked the Lost Mine Trail, it was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other while weathering an onslaught of intrusive thoughts. How are you going to make money? What if the truck overheats? Why aren’t you happy yet? You did the thing—you’re out here on the trail. What if you have a panic attack? Don’t think about that. Thinking about panic attacks will make you have one. Are you still thinking about it? Will your mental health forever be a detriment to your pathetically reasonable goal of just being OK?

I had yet to learn patience with the anxious, chemically imbalanced part of myself. True transformation takes time. It’s somehow both cyclical and mutable, and it reminds me at every turn of its dynamism. From dry creeks to roaring rivers. A tree dropping its leaves or a whitetail buck in velvet. Breaking waves, cicada shells, or the night making way for the day. Everything is growing, and everything is dying, and it’s all change, all the time. Every second of life because life is forever unfixed. Even the cells in my body are being replaced by the billions—metabolism, homeostasis, my nose itches. Small changes but changes nonetheless.

What was once a shallow ocean in the Big Bend region is now a sprawling desert. But it didn’t happen overnight. The formation of the Chisos took millions of years during the Eocene Epoch. Like these slow erosions and erections of land, I would, over time, become less obsessed with our financial outlook and more mindful of the wind carrying falling leaves. I would become more comfortable with the maintenance and repairs on the truck and trailer, finding pride in my newfound mechanical skills. I would discover that happiness, like all else in the natural world, is a series of ebbs and flows. And I would learn, most importantly, that learning is not linear. Not all questions offer obvious answers, and not all of life must be lived within the bounds of certainty.

Prescriptions, therapy, stargazing—it all helps. But I’ve found the best way to be OK is to embrace not being OK, to understand things are going to change in ways I can anticipate and ways I can’t, and that sometimes, for better or worse, those things will impact me. To deny that, or to hide away from it, is to rob myself of the human experience.

When we reached the overlook at the trail’s end, I took a photo of Juniper Canyon and then wrote down in my notebook what I felt in that moment.

When I see something beautiful, I sometimes think, “There is something beautiful, I wish I could appreciate it without being so afraid.” I think I believe that the world is a beautiful place, but it is so incredibly difficult to remove the filters from my eyes. What are the filters? Fear, anxiety, depression, cynicism, hopelessness, a victim mentality. Do you feel better different today? I feel brave. This whole trip, and the decision to do it, has made me see myself as brave.

The deeper we went into our adventure, the more at ease I felt. We spent two years on the road, boondocking in more than 30 states. We cooked over open fires, showered under waterfalls, and meditated daily. We played trivia until 2 a.m. with locals in a South Carolina shrimping village, danced with an Arizona family celebrating a cancer remission, and traded a spot by our fire for fresh-picked grapefruit from a Minnesota man who’d come south for the winter to work in his uncle’s orchard. We weathered snowstorms in New Mexico, an earthquake in California, and major flooding in Tennessee. And somewhere along the way I wrote a novel, found a literary agent, and secured a book deal.

We returned to Texas in late 2019 with a fresh perspective and new career paths. We parked the trailer at a KOA campground near the Travis County Exposition Center, and for a while our lives consisted primarily of attending book events and eating sorely missed Texas barbecue. But eventually we began to long for the road—something I would have never thought possible two short years earlier. When our dear friend told us he was struggling with his divorce, we convinced him there was no better place to embrace change than in Big Bend.

Big Bend is the natural embodiment of change. To the naked eye, the transformation is stark and sudden. The desert seems never-ending in its enormity until, without warning, the mountains explode upward from the dry, cracked earth. Here, extreme change is the rule rather than the exception. The weather, elevation, geological history—all prophets for the gospel of change.

That’s how seeing my wife’s positive pregnancy test felt. Like a sudden and monumental change.

We were running late. My friend and I had packed the truck and double-checked the provisions, but Jordan hadn’t come outside yet. When I went inside to get her, she was sitting on the edge of the bathtub holding the test with trembling hands.

She took another test. Then another. Results did not vary. During the seven-hour drive from Austin to our Airbnb in Terlingua, Jordan talked excitedly about baby names and what happiness the future held. Meanwhile, my newfound confidence vanished. Once again, I worried I wasn’t the person I wanted, or needed, to be.

Twenty-four hours later, the three of us were hiking Lost Mine Trail, and just as they had two years earlier, invasive thoughts ran rampant. You aren’t ready for this. You drink too much to be a good father. Your old man ruined you, and now you’ll ruin this kid. Who are you to force a life to exist, unconsented, in this cruel and terrifying world?

Then we reached the overlook, and there was Juniper Canyon in all its splendor. Despite my renewed sense of dread, the sun had indeed risen and shone now on the northeast rim of the Chisos, where from the cragged summit of Casa Grande, green troughs of bunchgrass sloped headlong into the valley. A great and steady calm overtook me, as I remembered with stunning clarity how scared I had been in this exact spot in 2017. I had seen then how pushing forward to greet my fears impacted me for the better. Even the failures during that time showed me that failing is not the end. There is only one end. Until we get there, the story continues. This was just a new chapter.

When we got back to the truck, I found a notebook, and in it I asked myself a familiar question. Do you feel different today? Yes. Why? Because sometimes change is magic.

There were many years I would not have made this claim. I am not a religious man. I believe the energy and stardust shared among us all is made alive by the alchemy of change. Motion and disruption and transformation. Eight months later, when I first held my daughter, I was a new person. A pandemic had covered the earth and a storm was raging outside the hospital window, but I held her against my chest and whispered, “Hello, Juniper. I can’t wait to show you everything.”

More books written. More chapters lived. It’s fall, and Jordan is home with our two children. I’m staying in Alpine, about an hour south of Big Bend, for a book event, but I can’t pass up returning to Lost Mine Trail. A mile in and already there is a cool blue line of light to the east. I think I can pick out the short, shrill call of a Mexican jay, a bird often blocking pathways in hopes hikers will ignore the “Do not feed the birds” signs. But I’m no master naturalist. By the time it’s light enough for birding, I’ll be farther up the trail.

I think about how many times I’ve desperately needed to know something. Know the answer, the outcome, the right decision to make. Then time passes and maybe there is an answer and maybe there isn’t, but the urgency is gone, and I realize it was my creation to begin with.

I take out my notebook and scribble in the dark. I wonder, sometimes, if my mind is a cage for my soul. My mind doesn’t believe in souls. I wonder if that’s something a cage would say?

When I reach the overlook, the sun is up in earnest. The canyon stretches out beneath me, still mantled in verdant green despite the season. Familiar slopes and ridges play shadows onto the valley like gentle malachite tracings. Somewhere to the south the river runs, and beyond it are the mountains of Mexico. Here in this place, the marvel of the physical world is still as overwhelming as the first time I laid eyes on it.

I pull out my phone and look at the photo of the canyon I took during those early days of our RV trip. If there are changes in the view, they are small. Maybe a bit more vegetation here, or less there. Everything looks much the same, and yet Heraclitus’ theory holds true—no man steps in the same river twice. The man I am today has never been here. I am sober, grateful, sometimes brave and sometimes scared. Though I try diligently to show grace to others and to myself, I sometimes fail on both counts. I still have much to work on. Most days I’m OK with that. Most days I’m OK.

I open my notebook one more time. Do you feel different today? Yes. I feel different every day. I am like the world, like the universe, like life, ever-changing.