This is the first post in my Feral Adventures series about experiences that changed my life, made me reconsider how I thought about the world. I’ve wanted to share these stories for a long time because I hope others will be inspired by them to go out and explore, to have their own strange, uncomfortable, profound adventures.

If you visited suburban Long Island in the 90′s, driving out past the crowded boroughs to the leafy, quiet suburbs a solid, monotonous hour away from the city, you’d have found my family’s home. There, for reasons that were in no small part due to an anxious mother, I led a sheltered, safe, and isolated early life. Supervised. Secure. Wasn’t that a good thing? To be shielded from the risky, dirty, dangerous world? That sort of safety was, and is, pretty much a national obsession. And I think about it a lot.

In order to understand this story, I have to explain a few things. Specifically about growing up on an island, and this island in particular. In my early life there was no wilderness. No free-spirited weirdos. No farmer’s markets. No public art, street performance, junk shops or radical politics. We lived in New York City’s massive bagel-shaped cultural desert. Everything interesting within 50 miles was either sucked in or repelled (possibly to California). On top of that, my family was not particularly religious, or social, or adventurous, or traditional. Everything – holidays, weddings, weekends – was allowed to slump into the general American upper-middle-class stew of “meh”.
Continue Reading →