TOM THE NOMADa field journal from the road

FIELD NOTES

Notes from the road, in chronological reverse.

57 entries · 26 regions · 68 days on the road

◆DEC 21, 2024
On the road

The reed fence was the first thing I noticed, then the blue.

I sat with the cottage for a long time before going inside. The patio was paved in flat stones, the kind that hold the morning cool a little longer than they should. A bamboo pergola threw a soft lattice of shade across everything. The cottage itself was light blue, stucco, with French doors thrown open onto an interior staircase that climbed up into shadow. A white rope hammock hung close to where I stood, beside a small wooden table. A wicker chair with a green cushion waited near the door, and an ottoman sat off to the right, looking like it had been carried out and forgotten. On the side wall, a mural half-faded by sun. Potted plants and a few cacti softened the edges, and a reed-fence screen kept the rest of the world a polite distance away. I did not move for a while. It was the kind of place that asks you to sit before it asks you anything else, and I let it.

◆DEC 22, 2024
San Marcos La Laguna, Solola

San Marcos La Laguna, Solola — December 22, 2024

I came down through San Marcos in the late morning, past a property where thatched roofs sat above tiered stone garden beds and a single tall palm leaned over a lawn cut by stepping stones. The whole hillside seemed to be building itself slowly — another cluster of palm-leaf roofs above retaining walls, two small white houses behind a chain-link fence, one with a curved wall I kept turning back to look at. I stopped at a small dome-shaped stone hut on a flagstone patio, red tubular flowers running along the low wall in front of it. By afternoon I was down at the lake. Pebbles, small waves, a single boat out on the water, thin wooden posts standing in a line near the reeds. The big mountain across the water was half-hidden in haze, and the sun was coming through the clouds above it in straight pale bars. I sat there a while. This is the kind of place that doesn't ask much of me.

◆DEC 24, 2024
San Marcos La Laguna, Solola

The candles were lit before I noticed it had gotten dark.

On the morning of the twenty-fourth I walked down to the lake. The water was quiet, the two volcanoes across the way half-wrapped in cloud, and reeds leaned in from both sides of the shore. A weathered wooden post stood at the edge of the stone. I lingered there longer than I needed to. Later I followed the grassy bank around to where the hillside steepens, a few pale houses tucked into the trees just above the waterline, ridges stacked behind them in the haze. By evening I was at a long wooden table under beams and stone walls. Candles between the plates, flatbreads, small dishes, dark ceramic, a cut of roasted meat on a metal grate at the center. People I had only just begun to know stood and sat and leaned in to talk. I did not say much. I held a glass and watched the candles do their slow work on the room. It was Christmas Eve, and I was a long way from anywhere I had ever spent one before, and that felt, quietly, like enough.

◆DEC 30, 2024
San Andres Semetabaj, Solola

San Andres Semetabaj, Solola — December 30, 2024

I walked out onto the terrace in San Andres Semetabaj a little before the light went. The sky over the hills had already started its slow shift, pink bleeding into lavender, the kind of color that makes you stop mid-sentence. A bare branch leaned into the frame on the right, almost black against the soft wash behind it, and below the metal railing the town spilled down the slope in scattered roofs and small lit windows. In the distance the volcano sat under a heavy ceiling of cloud, more suggestion than shape. Later I walked a stretch of road above the valley. Another bare tree, this one alone against the sky, a power line cutting clean across the pink. The guardrail was cold under my hand. I stood there longer than I meant to. There was nothing happening, really. Just the day letting go of itself over the hills, and the small sound of my own breathing while it did. I thought, walking back, that some places do not ask you to do anything. They only ask you to be there while the light goes.

◆DEC 30, 2024
Panajachel, Solola

Panajachel, Solola — December 30, 2024

I walked into Panajachel on the second-to-last day of the year. The brick street near the entrance was strung with red ornaments swinging between the poles, and a turquoise kiosk caught the gray morning light. A man in a white tank top stood holding a camera, and further down the block a small cart had drawn a loose cluster of people. I drifted with them, past stalls set up along the tiled road, until the lane began to slope toward the water. The path down to the dock passed a thatched roof and a row of pink bougainvillea, and the two volcanoes across the lake rose into a sky that could not decide on weather. The promenade ran along a low stone wall planted with pink and yellow blooms. People walked unhurriedly. I leaned on a blue and red railing and watched the boats. Later I took one of them out. From the water, Panajachel pulled back into a thin strip of low buildings under cloud-shrouded mountains, and the lake went a darker blue than it had looked from shore. I remember thinking the year felt like that — already receding, already quieter.

◆DEC 30, 2024
San Marcos La Laguna, Solola

San Marcos La Laguna, Solola — December 30, 2024

I left San Marcos from the small dock on the north shore, the lake flat against the grass and a blue-and-white lancha tied to a post by the reeds. A leaning tree framed the volcano across the water, its cone soft under a partly cloudy sky. The boat pulled away and the wake churned a pale line behind us, the far shore reduced to faint smudges of village at the foot of the ridge. Inside the covered lancha, the dark blue frame cropped the world into a moving postcard. Another boat passed close, a single figure standing at its bow, two peaks behind him under heavy cloud. At the next dock I stepped onto weathered planks, pilings dark with old waterlines. A swimmer was out past the moored boat, just a head and a slow arm. Later I walked back to a longer pier where a white lancha with a red stripe was easing in, kayaks pulled up on the shore beside it. I stood for a while and watched the boats arrive and leave. The lake did most of the talking that day.

◆JAN 11, 2025
San Rafael, Alajuela

San Rafael, Alajuela — January 11, 2025

I sat on the porch in San Rafael late that afternoon, the wood under my hand cracked and sun-bleached, grey from too many dry seasons. A small brown lizard had claimed the edge of the same plank. He held perfectly still, tail laid along the grain like he was reading it, and I tried not to shift my weight. Behind him the foliage went soft and green, the kind of green that only registers when you stop moving long enough to notice it. Later I walked to where the ridge opens west. The sun was already low, a hard orange disc above the dark layered mountains, and a thin band of cloud caught around it in orange and red. Higher up the grey clouds drifted slow across a paler yellow sky. Out toward the horizon the ridges stacked themselves into hazy blue, and on one of them I could just make out a small antenna, a thin mark against the burn. I stood there until the colour started to thin. Nothing happened, really. That was the whole point of the day.

◆JAN 11, 2025
On the road

Two pizzas arrived on wooden boards before anyone had finished pouring the wine.

The room was dim in that way small places get when the night has settled in and no one is hurrying anyone out. Two pizzas had arrived on wooden boards, one scattered with basil that had gone slightly limp from the heat. A small black dish sat between us, and the wine glasses kept catching what little light there was. I remember the table more than the food — the way three of us leaned in around it, how the boards took up most of the surface, how a single water glass somehow felt important. Two faces across from me, smiling at whoever was holding the camera. I think it was me. I don't remember what we'd talked about before the pizzas came, and I don't remember what we said after. Only the middle part, the long pause where everyone reaches at once and no one apologizes for it. That was the whole evening, really. Basil, wood, wine, the quiet relief of being indoors with people who weren't in a rush to be anywhere else.

◆JAN 10, 2025
San Ramon, Alajuela

San Ramon, Alajuela — January 10, 2025

I came up to San Ramon for the day and ended up mostly standing still. A concrete bench had been set at the lip of a hillside, framed by tall grasses and a low wire fence, with a palm tree leaning into the valley beyond. I sat there a while, watching the forested ridges roll out under a sky that could not decide on weather. Around the terrace, magenta ti plants and a spiky yucca pressed up against the dark mesh fence, a small wooden pergola off to one side. Fanny with a garden hose, the water beading down through the fronds provided the waterfall. Nearby, a staghorn fern hung from a metal hook, its antlered shape splayed wide against the green shade net. Inside, on a white plastered mantel, two twine-wrapped candles stood beside a small Baby Groot planter holding a single sprout. That was the part that stayed with me. A whole valley outside, and the thing I kept looking at was a sprout the size of my thumb.

◆JAN 10, 2025
San Rafael, Alajuela

San Rafael, Alajuela — January 10, 2025

I spent the last of the light on a hilltop above San Rafael, sitting near the canvas peak of a tipi-style tent. The sun was already low, pressed into a narrow band of orange-red beneath a long ceiling of gray cloud. Forested ridges stepped away from me into the haze, each one a little paler than the last, until the farthest line was barely a suggestion. Power lines cut across the middle distance, three thin strokes that I kept trying to edit out with my eyes and then gave up on. Closer in, the vegetation was still green and loud, leaves catching what little color was left. I did not move for a while. There was no sound I can remember now, only that slow narrowing of light, the cloud closing the day like a lid. I have come to love this view, a sky deciding to be done. When the orange finally thinned to gray, I walked back to the houes, hands in my pockets, already a little colder than I expected.

◆OCT 17, 2024
Wheat Ridge, Colorado

Wheat Ridge, Colorado — October 17, 2024

October seventeenth, Wheat Ridge, Colorado. The kitchen smells like apples before I see them — slices going pale at the edges, a green-handled peeler still warm from my hand. Out at the pond earlier, a buck stood in the dry gold grass and didn't move, just watched, ears wide as satellite dishes. A second deer grazed behind him through the yellow flowers. Ducks drifted by the reeds. The water held the sky. Back inside, the second bowl is nothing but peels and cores — pale green, yellow, red — and that's the part I keep thinking about. The scraps are a map of the day. Every slice on the counter is a trade: the deer get the orchard windfalls, the soil gets the cores, we get the pie. Autumn is just a long, quiet exchange, and if you're paying attention, you're already part of it.

◆OCT 27, 2024
Colorado Springs, Colorado

Colorado Springs, Colorado — October 27, 2024

We pulled into Colorado Springs late in the morning, and by the time we found the overlook the light was already that high, flat October light that flattens the reds into something close to rust. I stood at the wooden deck first. The railing was warm under my hands, and the coin-operated viewfinder had that chipped paint look every canyon viewfinder seems to have, like it had been turned a thousand times by people who didn't really need it. The canyon opened below in slabs of reddish rock, evergreens scattered along the ledges, the opposite ridge catching sun in long sunlit planes. We walked on and came to the second overlook, the stone-walled one. She leaned on the metal railing in her blue tank top and watched the waterfall step down the gray cliff in tiers. I remember thinking the water made almost no sound from where we stood, or maybe it did and the wind took it. A glimpse of wooden walkway showed at the lower edge of our view, going somewhere we did not go. We stayed a while. Then we drove on.

◆OCT 19, 2024
Colorado Springs, Colorado

Colorado Springs, Colorado — October 19, 2024

A week or so out from that Saturday in Colorado Springs and what I keep coming back to is a pavement lot off the road, blue sky overhead, a yellow construction crane in the middle distance, and an Optimus Prime welded out of scrap vehicle parts standing there in red, blue, and silver like he had always been there. We wandered the lot one figure at a time. A yellow-and-black bot about my height, teal metal siding behind it, chain-link fence, a Private Property sign I noticed but did not mind. Around the corner, the Optimus again in harder light, sharp shadows across the asphalt. Then a dark green mech, gears and tubes welded together, small red cross emblems on the chest and shoulders, leaning weight you could rest against. The sun was bright enough to flatten the colors a little. I remember being quieter than I expected, just walking from one to the next, reading the seams where parts had been joined. Cars passed on the road. We did not stay long. The sky stayed that clean October blue the whole time.

◆AUG 6, 2024
Nettuno, Latium

Nettuno, Latium — August 6, 2024

August 6, 2024. Nettuno, in Latium. 20 years ago I landed in the south of France 2 hours behind schedule. The group of students and other chaperones that I was supposed to meet at the airport were already gone. I was on this trip because I'd spent 2 months cramming French (about what it takes to speak better than someone who's taken four years of French in the American school system). I knew that I was traveling with people who knew the language, and the country, so I didn't pay much attention to the name of the town we were traveling to, or the hotel we were spending the first night in... to my dismay, that now turned out to be valuable information. After circling the airport for an hour, I hopped on a bus that I thought might be going in the right direction. 20 minutes on the bus and my palms were sweaty. I pulled the chain and got off. I walked towards the shoreline. Left or right? Right would have been doubling back, so I turned right and wandered down the waterline with my backpack, and a strong suspicion that I might now live in France... I had a very similar feeling walking up the coast of Anzio, but this time I was lost in a foreign land on purpose. I am, it turns out, not lost, but on a kind of pilgrimage.

◆SEP 27, 2024
Edgewater, Colorado

Edgewater, Colorado — September 27, 2024

September 27, 2024. Edgewater, Colorado. I walked the riprap at Sloan's Lake until the water went still enough to hold the sky. Rocky shoreline at my boots, a long ridge of mountains stacked on the horizon, and the sun pulling everything gold. Across the water, low trees, and on either side, the city's high-rises standing like quiet sentries. Funny thing about a lake at this hour. The wind drops, the surface settles, and what was just water becomes a mirror wide enough to fit a whole range of mountains inside a city park. I took a couple, mostly to remember the light, then put the phone down and let the evening do its work. Lesson of the day: stand still long enough, and even a pond inside a town will show you the sky.

◆OCT 12, 2024
Wheat Ridge, Colorado

Wheat Ridge, Colorado — October 12, 2024

October 12, Wheat Ridge, Colorado. Two totes on the grass, leaves already turning yellow underfoot. The blue bag is heavy with small red apples; the purple one mounded with big yellow-greens, blushed pink where the sun hit them all summer. Inside, I peel and slice a pile, knife resting between passes. Out the window, a brown rabbit crouches low in the wet grass, ears flat, watching. Here is the one thing I keep turning over today: the same cool, damp October air that drops these apples and greens this lawn is the air that wakes the fungi underground. Roots and fungal threads have been trading sugar for minerals all season, quiet as breath. The apple in my hand is, in a small way, a gift from a fungus I will never see. Next walk, I am going to kneel where the leaves are thickest and just look.

◆SEP 18, 2024
Esparza, Puntarenas

Esparza, Puntarenas — September 18, 2024

September 18, 2024. Esparza, Puntarenas. I walk out before the heat sets in and the Pacific is doing that trick where the sun finds one seam in the clouds and pours silver onto the water. Small waves cross the middle distance in a neat, repeating line. Later, past the palms, a raccoon stops on a cracked concrete slab, and just looks at me. Not afraid, not begging. Reading me. That is the thing about raccoons here: their hands are almost as sensitive as their eyes, packed with touch receptors, so when one freezes and stares, it is also feeling the ground for what you are. By the time I reach the river — wide, muddy green, driftwood piled like bones on the bar — the sky has closed again. One sunburnt selfie. One upside-down rainbow I will never reshoot. A day well spent on the coast.

◆SEP 17, 2024
Pital, Alajuela

Pital, Alajuela — September 17, 2024

September 17, 2024. Pital, Alajuela. The path in finds you before the place does — palms leaning close, leaf litter soft underfoot, a little yellow-trimmed shelter waiting in the clearing. I walk past beds of red cordyline and mossy stones, past small interpretive signs I half-read, until the jungle opens onto painted concrete the color of clay. Steam lifts off the thermal pools. The water is greenish and still in one pool, bubbling in another, held by stacked river stones. I leave my flip-flops in the dirt by a stairway that drops into the foliage, magenta leaves at shoulder height. Later, up a metal-framed platform with twisted-branch railings, banana leaves at eye level, I think: the volcano isn't in the photos, but it's in everything — in the heat under the rocks, in how lush everything grows.

◆SEP 14, 2024
La Fortuna, Alajuela

La Fortuna, Alajuela — September 14, 2024

September 14, 2024. La Fortuna, Alajuela. I walked into the plaza at dusk, under a sky the color of wet slate. A dome-shaped tree sat at the center, trimmed so tight it looked sculpted,. String lights in red, white, and blue ran overhead in long triangular rows. A tiered fountain with a pale blue basin held the middle of the square. On the walk in, I'd passed a cluster of tropical ginger, cones stacked like scales, yellow-green at the base, deepening to red at the tips. One quiet idea stayed with me: a town square is a kind of canopy too. Same shape as the big feathery tree on the edge of town — wide cover, soft light, everyone underneath. If you pass through La Fortuna near sundown, sit by the fountain for ten minutes before you go anywhere else.

◆AUG 20, 2024
Rome, Latium

Rome, Latium — August 20, 2024

August 20th, Rome. I started at the brick flank of Santa Maria degli Angeli — Michelangelo's church built inside the warm rooms of Diocletian's old baths. Out front, broken capitals and a single tall vessel sat on patchy grass like the city had emptied its pockets. Inside, red granite columns climbed into a vault under scaffolding and CAPUT MUNDI banners. I drifted to Santa Maria Maggiore: a gold half-dome over the apse. Then the Pantheon — coffered ceiling, oculus pouring one clean column of light onto the marble. A side chapel held a triptych under a small dome; another, behind iron gates with brass rivets, kept its statues in soft shade. One idea I carried home: Rome doesn't replace, it nests — a basilica inside a bathhouse, a chapel inside a basilica, a saint inside a temple. The city is layered, each generation building on the last.

◆AUG 7, 2024
Ponza, Latium

Ponza, Latium — August 7, 2024

August seventh, Ponza. I follow a hand-painted sign down a sun-bleached wall past a red gate and an orange building with its shutters pulled against the heat. By midmorning I'm on the water. The island shows me its other face: pale limestone cliffs streaked with rust-colored lichen, a narrow channel between two headlands, a small white chapel perched at the far tip of a promontory. From the bow I watch turquoise deepen into navy where the rock drops away. One thing I keep noticing — those orange streaks on the stone aren't paint or stain. They're lichen, a slow partnership between a fungus and an algae, living where almost nothing else can. The fungus is the house; the algae is the cook. Together they color the cliffs of Ponza. Next time you pass a sea cliff, look for the rust — that's life, holding on.

◆AUG 7, 2024
On the road

Some towns are built around a square. This one was built around a view.

August 7, 2024. I climbed a stone stair above a harbor I didn't know the name of yet, and stopped where the path opened onto the whole bay at once. Pastel houses stacked toward the water like sugar cubes left out in the sun. Small boats freckled the blue, and rocky islets sat just offshore, patient as old dogs. Someone's garden spilled over the wall in front of me — grapevines on wire, red flowers I couldn't name, a few shrubs catching the wind off the water. One core thing I want to remember: the town was built looking outward. Every roof, every terrace, every vine angled toward the bay. You don't get a view like this by accident. You get it because generations of people decided the sea was worth turning the whole house toward. Tomorrow, we dance. Today I just sit on the wall and let the harbor do the talking.

◆AUG 16, 2024
Santa Fiora, Tuscany

Santa Fiora, Tuscany — August 16, 2024

Santa Fiora, August 16th. I came down off the hill in the late afternoon and the festival ground was still empty — a white circle of stage on damp grass, dark banners reading Santa Fiora in Musica, the trees crowding in like an audience that arrived early. I drank a small espresso at a cobbled table, folded paper wrapper on the saucer, and walked into the Peschiera. That's the thing here, the thing worth carrying home: the town built itself around a spring. Cold water from the Monte Amiata volcano rises here and fills these long stone basins, and the trout drift through them like slow gray thoughts. So I stand there with my hands in my pockets. A red mirrored sphere floats on the water, doubling the sky. By evening the second basin had gone glassy, an island of reeds at its center, the bell tower and a thin moon held upside down on the surface. A town that decided, a long time ago, that its center would be water you could see through. I keep thinking about that.

◆AUG 16, 2024
Castel del Piano, Tuscany

Castel del Piano, Tuscany — August 16, 2024

August 16, 2024. Castel del Piano, Tuscany. I keep coming back to a single shape today: the hilltop town on the ridge, two slender bell towers rising out of a band of stone buildings, dark woods tumbling down the slopes beneath it. From the overlook, the valley between us is just canopy — green on green on green. Then the weather does the thing Tuscany does in August. A heavy grey lid of cloud cracks open, and luminous rays fan down over the forested ridges, pooling warm gold along the horizon. Closer to home, our little above-ground pool sits in the foreground, a green cactus float grinning at the whole show. One quiet idea I want to remember: the town stays the same all day; the light is what writes the story. Tomorrow I want to walk into those woods below the ridge and see what the canopy looks like from underneath.

◆AUG 14, 2024
Seggiano, Tuscany

Seggiano, Tuscany — August 14, 2024

August 14th, Seggiano. We drove a back road in Tuscany with the window cracked, and the same tree kept lining every fence: tall, slender, dark green spires standing in rows along the dry grass. Cypress. I used to think they were just scenery. Then a friend out here told me the old Tuscans planted them as living property markers — slow-growing, narrow, almost impossible to mistake for a wild tree, and they live for centuries. So when you see a straight line of cypress along a field, you're often reading a boundary somebody drew a hundred or two hundred years ago, still holding. We pulled off at a hilltop place above Seggiano — hills folding into haze, an old stone villa with a tower out across the olive groves — and I sat there a while thinking about that. Some fences are wood. Some are wire. And some are a row of trees, quietly outlasting the people who planted them. Next drive through Tuscany, watch the cypress lines. They're usually telling you something.

◆AUG 14, 2024
Castel del Piano, Tuscany

Castel del Piano, Tuscany — August 14, 2024

August 14, 2024. Castel del Piano, Tuscany. I followed a rumor of water down through the woods and found a gorge the color of bottle glass — pale rock weathered into shelves, a froth of white where the stream slid over the lip into a dark pool below. People were already there ahead of me. Two floated near the reeds. A child in a striped shirt waded in the shallows while sunlight came down through the leaves in pieces. Later, back in the village, a friend opened a cellar door I would have walked past a hundred times. One bulb. Wine bottles on wooden shelves. Iron keys hung on the stone like punctuation. One core thing I want to remember from this day: in this part of Tuscany the cold things live underground — the river in its gorge, the wine in its cellar. The heat sends everything down to the stone to keep.

◆AUG 18, 2024
Rome, Latium

Some cities you photograph in daylight. Rome, I think, was drawn for the lamps.

Rome, August 18, 2024. I walked the city after the rain, when the cobblestones held the lamplight like shallow pools. A curved neoclassical facade glowed over a damp piazza, statues along its roofline keeping watch over a few late cars. Down the way, an old brick basilica was lit warm from below, its arches set saints leaning into the dark. Rome does good fountains. An older couple stood embracing at the basin's edge while a tall jet rose behind them. The square was nearly empty, just the water climbing and falling in tiers. One small thing I keep noticing in Rome at night: the city is built to be seen by lamplight. The travertine, the niches, the curved colonnades, the wet stone underfoot, they were all designed to catch a warm, low light and throw it back softer. Daylight shows you Rome's bones. Night shows you what the architects were actually drawing for.

◆AUG 18, 2024
On the road

The storm was already leaving when I noticed the town had grown a rainbow.

August 18, 2024. The rain quit somewhere over the headland, and a rainbow set itself down across the pastel town — the kind of stack of ochre and pink and washed blue that steps down a hillside toward the sea. I stood under a pine with a trunk thicker than my arms can reach, bougainvillea spilling at my feet, and watched the storm clouds back away over the water. Here is the one thing I keep with me from days like this: a rainbow is not a thing out there. It is an agreement between you, the sun behind your shoulder, and a sky still full of rain. Move three steps left, and it is somebody else's rainbow. Think of it like a mushroom flushing after a wet night — the fruit you see is only the visible end of a much bigger conversation between water, light, and place. Next storm that passes you, turn your back to the sun before it clears. See what shows up.

◆AUG 1, 2024
On the road

the road — August 1, 2024

August first, twenty twenty-four. Field note from the kitchen floor. This started, an innocuous looking, dark block. A web of filaments spread, slowly, over two weeks. When the block transformed to a white lattice work, I cut back the plastic bag to let the mycelium flex. Here's the one thing I keep turning over: that pale crust on the block isn't a coating, it's the organism. The mushrooms are the fruit. The block is the tree. When the mycelium decides conditions are right — a drop in temperature, a bump in humidity, fresh air — it pins, and within days you get caps at the edges where the block meets the world. The fruiting bodies are the apples; the white web inside is the orchard. Next time you see a mushroom, picture the quiet network underneath that spent months or years building it.