Waypoint 1.1: Vulcan’s Evangelist

From Chapter 1, “Standing in The Ancient Shadow“

This is Waypoint One of No Shortcuts to Now — a book I’m releasing In real time, one section at a time.

In each Waypoint, I weave together myth, philosophy, personal narrative, and political reflection to explore how we make sense of resistance and resilience in turbulent times.

“How old were you when you figured this out?”

“About seven. I could tell that some of my older people were a little bonkers. I’ve always been able to recognize that other people were a little bonkers.”

— Charlie Munger

Nearly out of diapers, my son began dragging our family along, like so many ragged, dusty, and torn teddy bears, up to the top of his trail. From the time he learned to speak, the word volcano was one of his most frequent. He erupted the word, out of some unfathomable depths. And by the time he could speak full sentences and hike with us, the tectonic logic of his character had led us into the Cascades, to the trail head of Mt. Lassen, an active volcano, where we found ourselves surrounded by the pine forests of Northern California.

But the night his obsession began, he was just into his second year. We still lived in South Korea, where I taught Literature and Philosophy in a high school for gifted kids. It was good to have such a gig, especially given the number back home who had lost so much — their jobs, their homes, their hope, their faith in meritocracy — in the rumblings of The Great Recession. Like many young Americans, I had come to Korea to work off student debt, and found myself working in a world of white-collared bean pickers. Most of us were there legally.

In our tenure abroad, we teachers watched many a fiery mother with big dreams, and bigger anxieties, drag her little teddy bears up the stairs of every best after-school academy her overworked husband could afford. Some of us even met with this mother, secretly, in a dark corner of some Starbucks cafe, where we sipped dark coffee; and, under the table, for the promise of proper nouns and progressive verbs, we accepted her white envelopes stuffed with cold hard Korean cash. We dark teachers dealt in that most slippery of black-market currencies: the subjunctive mood.

In this time, we American expats still lived with an audacious hope under Obama skies, and my little be-diapered boy expressed as much. When he’d spot an American flag on TV or on a tee-shirt, he’d point up and call out, “Obama Flag!” I’d smile, a proud progressive father. But another part of me wanted to shush him, knowing how many from my rural California town would take to having Old Glory called by the name of a socialist-Marxist-African, known to be a secret Muslim terrorist: Barack ‘Hussein’ Obama?

Scary.

Moreover, the proof of his citizenship had already been called into question, and the Birther Conspiracy had been embraced by a certain orange-faced buffoon — let’s call him the Coup Clux Clown — who was beginning his rhetorical assault on the legitimacy of a president. A seismic shift had begun in our political landscape, which would transform it into a well-armed poorly fact-checked circus of three rings.

Well, on the night my son’s obsession with volcanoes began, I sat with him at our kitchen table in our little twenty-first floor apartment, playing with play dough, and sipping on a bottle of home-brewed American Ale. Together, we sculpted little brown mountains. At first, it was a joy. We’d plunge our index fingers into their peaks, form craters, and stuff them full with red-dough lava, which spilled over to burn Big Bird’s village below. The people of Pompeii knew no disaster like that which buried Sesame Street that night. How many pyroclastic flows slipped down that mountainside, I can’t recall. Count von Count counted a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, and a twentieth fire-show. With each new ashen security-blanketing of Bert and Ernie, I began to better resemble Oscar the Grouch.

Soon, my third empty beer bottle began to tremble and shake, and I belched. Yet my son’s little seismograph detected not the slightest tremor, as the twenty-first burst began from above.

Vah-ca-no! Boom! Pwikhhh! Big Bird bye-bye!¹

Eventually, the clock turned eight, the sun set, and my wife and I turned his attention to Goodnight Moon, which never quite lulled his little super-volcano heart to sleep. That universal heart never really sleeps. It pulses each night through. The earliest dreamers heard it, and pounded its varied rhythms through stretched-skin drums, as they danced in circles around their fires. We still dance to it, deep into the night, even as we dream. Or we toss, and we turn, we modern insomniacs; and then we pull back the sheets to step out of bed and look out through an open window, to wonder on the midnight mystery.

Some of us, made nervous about the day’s news, take pause to wonder what heated nightmare it was that moved the mad god-emperor Caligula to invite the moon into his own amorous bed.

That ancient insomniac we find to be strangely familiar: He thought himself to be a god; yet he ran in a mad mortal terror from Mt. Etna’s raging fires.

What was your childhood “volcano”? Comment below! I’d love to hear from you.

• 📝 Field Note 1.1: “Goodnight Moon, Hello Caligula” — Add your thoughts about what happens to a culture when power bends reality to server its needs.
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1. Footnote: When I first wrote this, “Big Bird Bye Bye!” was partly a child’s game—but also a quiet nod to the threat public broadcasting was under. That threat has now materialized. On July 18, 2025, Congress approved a $1.1 billion rescission of federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, following Executive Order 14290, in which President Trump directed the CPB to “cease all funding for NPR and PBS.” Public media leaders warn the cuts could devastate local stations, especially in rural and tribal communities, and jeopardize essential children’s programming like Sesame Street—long funded in part through PBS. [^1]
   
   [^1]: “Congress votes to strip more than $1 billion in funding for NPR, PBS,” Axios, July 18, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/07/18/npr-pbs-funding-senate ↩︎

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