PART ONE: HOME IS JUST THE PLACE WHERE YOU HAVEN'T BEEN ARRESTED YET He had made friends in town. It had only been six months or so, but it felt right. A place to call home. That was until today. Potter stood barefoot and shirtless, handcuffs hanging from his wrists, one hand clutching a body camera. At least he had that. The moon lit the night sky. It was a beautiful evening, the kind that mocks you when everything has gone wrong. How did he get here? Let me start at the beginning. It was a short flight from Spokane, Washington to Cancun, Mexico, the next stop on my early retirement at thirty-eight. On the road for a few years, hopping from country to country, exploring the sights. No schedule. No boss. No one telling me where to be or when. I had just finished a nine-month tour of Mexico on my Kawasaki Vulcan 1500. I crossed from Texas to Monterrey, then down to Tampico and over to Mexico City. Thousands of miles of desert, mountain, and coast. The kind of ride that strips you down to your essentials: you, the bike, and the road. I was hit by a truck in Guadalajara and spent a month there recovering, then two months in Puerto Vallarta. By an act of God, or maybe just decent Mexican insurance, the driver was insured, and the bike was repaired back to new. I rode up to Sinaloa, over to Ensenada, and down the Baja Peninsula to one of the most beautiful places on earth. I spent a month there doing absolutely jack shit. Smoking weed. Fishing. Watching the sun set over the Sea of Cortez. Beautiful beaches, cold cheap beer, cheap weed. The kind of life that makes you forget why you ever wanted anything more. Having spent most of my time camping and on the road, my thoughts turned toward beach bumming down the coast of Central America. I had a craving for spicy Mexican food and warm Latin company. Cancun was a short, cheap flight from my worries and family problems back in the States. A reset button. A new beginning. The ocean is part of my life. An avid free diver and spearfisherman, I need its limitless adventure, its cold embrace, its honest indifference to my existence. Having owned a few different boats over the years, I still held the dream of living on a sailboat and touring the world for the rest of my life. I planned on starting that dream in Cancun. COVID-19 had been active for a year and a half at this point. Mexico was still the most open country for travel, with lax restrictions, which made it the best place to start my search for a seaworthy vessel. Always the bargain shopper, I keep an eye out for exceptional deals. Husbands and wives scorned, going through divorces: fire sale that shit. They provide excellent deals for thrifty buyers like myself. Someone else's heartbreak becomes my opportunity. I don't feel bad about it. Heartbreak happens. Boats need owners. Assuming I could access ports along my way, I could find out what boats were for sale. The likelihood of expired boat slips or abandoned boats from expats in Europe and the States, unable to return because of the pandemic, was in my favor. I had just made forty thousand dollars on trades during the collapse of the market. While the world panicked, I bought. While others sold in fear, I held. When the dust settled, I had cash, and cash in a pandemic is power. I was looking to invest in a restaurant, a bar, or a hostel: a base I could call home between adventures, close to epic, beautiful water where I could dock a boat while off on a trip in another part of the world. Businesses were available at pennies on the dollar. The pandemic had created opportunities for those bold enough to take them. One such opportunity was a bar in Santa Marta, Colombia. An American acquaintance from Idaho had owned it for ten-plus years and now wanted out, because of his age and the lack of tourism caused by COVID. It was a turnkey restaurant with a bar and a small apartment behind, directly across from a beautiful, creepy historical cemetery in the center of the old town. It was perfect. Or it would have been. But Colombia was still restricting travelers at the time, and getting in was not simple. I was in no hurry. So I stayed. I made friends and built something that felt like home. Six months: long enough to know the names of the shopkeepers, to have a regular table at the taco stand, to stop being a tourist and start being a person. And then it all came apart. Barefoot. Shirtless. Handcuffs. The night was warm. The ocean was somewhere nearby, doing what the ocean always does, rising and falling, indifferent to the small dramas of men. I clutched the body camera like a talisman, like proof, like the only thing standing between me and oblivion. The handcuffs bit into my wrists. The concrete bit into my feet. The silence bit into my soul. Standing under the moon with nothing but his skin, his shame, and a body camera full of evidence, Potter wondered whether any of the friends he had made would remember him tomorrow. He wondered whether any of them would care. The story continues. It always continues. But for now, this is where it paused: a man, handcuffs, a beautiful evening, and the quiet realization that home is never as permanent as you want it to be. Home is just the place where you haven't been arrested yet. Tonight, that place was somewhere else. PART TWO: NOTHING EVER HAPPENED The locals assumed they had just enjoyed an R-rated show. They hadn't. But assumptions are powerful things. Before they had a chance to pillage our belongings, spread carelessly on the shore like a buffet for opportunistic thieves, I was already closing the distance. Naked. Fully naked. Not a heroic charge, not a warrior's sprint, but a naked man running toward a group of people who had not signed up for that visual. I assume I terrified them, because they dropped everything, my clothes and my wallet included, and ran. We quickly pulled our bathing suits back on, resumed our daily attire, and walked back to the bar as if nothing had happened. In travel, that is the rule. Nothing happened. Nothing ever happened. You laugh. You drink. You move on. The next morning, she left with her girlfriends and continued on their journey. I never saw her again. That was Monday. Mui Ne is an exquisite destination for any traveler on a budget. Beautiful sandy beaches stretch along the South China Sea. Fishermen push themselves across the water in teacup-shaped boats, round, improbable vessels that look as if they were designed by someone who had never seen a boat but heard a description once. The sand dunes, orange and white hills that roll along the coast like a desert dropped into the jungle, are a popular tourist site. Restaurants and fresh fruit stands appear at every turn along the main road. Coconut sellers. Pineapple vendors. Women in conical hats with baskets balanced on poles across their shoulders. The air smells of fish sauce and sea salt and something sweet you cannot name. After a few weeks of lodging, I had settled into a comfortable routine of ease. Too comfortable. That should have been my warning. One day I hopped on my motorbike to get a quick bite to eat. Andrew, still at the hostel, would join me. The restaurant was just around the corner: five minutes, maybe ten. I usually never ride without a helmet. Usually. But the lackadaisical side of my nature failed me that day. The helmet was in my room, ten seconds away, and ten seconds felt like too much effort. I wanted food. I wanted wind in my hair. I wanted to feel like I was on vacation, not in a safety briefing. So I headed off, and Andrew did the same. Police in Mui Ne, and in much of Vietnam, are widely reported to set up roadside checkpoints and solicit bribes from tourists riding motorbikes without proper documentation. We passed the restaurant we had intended to stop at and kept going, aiming for something new and not paying attention to how far we had traveled. The road in and out of town is long, straight, and deceptively empty. We inevitably crossed paths with a pop-up inspection station. They flagged us down and waved us to the side. No helmets. Easy targets. Vietnam has few requirements for tourists operating a motorbike. A helmet is one. The others are a blue registration card, which does not carry your name, only that of whoever originally purchased the bike, and an international driving permit, available in the States for about twenty dollars through AAA. We had none of these things. We pulled off the road and stopped in front of four officers. They stood with arms crossed, faces hard, already calculating the bribe. "No helmet," one said. Not a question. An accusation. I had very little experience with corrupt cops outside of Mexico. In Mexico, you know the game. You pay, you leave, and everyone moves on with their day. Vietnam was different. Or maybe I was different. Maybe the naked run had left me with less patience for authority. I had nothing of value in my pockets. Two dollars. The equivalent of a bowl of pho and a beer. The officers demanded that we get off our bikes unless we could pay the bribe: one hundred dollars each. Andrew looked at me. I looked at Andrew. Neither of us had two hundred dollars. I objected by refusing to get off my bike. This escalated things. Andrew sat there watching as four officers tried to pry me off the bike. One put me in a headlock. Two others pulled on my arms in opposite directions. The fourth tried to pull the bike out from underneath me. It was absurd, a comedy sketch performed in real life, with only the laugh track missing. But no one was laughing. Long story short: I lost a motorbike. And the police were furious, because now they had to do paperwork. Forms to fill out, reports to file, a process that would take hours instead of the thirty seconds it would have taken me to hand over a bribe. I had denied them their easy money and made them work. Andrew and I watched our bikes get hauled away on a police box truck, like garbage, like evidence, as if we had committed murder instead of helmetlessness. We pondered our predicament during the couple-mile walk back to the hostel. The sun was setting. The road was long. The fruit stands were closed. Because we had the blue cards for the bikes, tucked safely in our pockets, we only had to wait a week, pay the one-hundred-dollar impound fee, and ride away. Simple. Simple is boring. With hindsight, breaking the two bikes out of police impound was an unnecessary life experience, unnecessary in the way that all great stories are unnecessary. You could avoid them. You could stay home. You could wear a helmet. But then you would have nothing to write about. The breakout went like this. We returned to the impound lot at midnight. The fence was low enough to climb. The guard was asleep, or pretending to be. We found our bikes in the back corner, covered in a thin layer of dust and disappointment. The keys were not in them. Of course they were not. The keys were in the police station, in a drawer, behind a desk, behind a sleeping guard who probably had a machete. Andrew looked at me. I looked at Andrew. "Hotwire?" he whispered. I shrugged. I had never hotwired anything in my life. But how hard could it be? Very hard. We spent an hour in the dark, pulling wires, sparking connections, and cursing softly in multiple languages. At some point a dog started barking, then stopped, then started again. The guard shifted in his sleep. We froze. He snored. We resumed. Eventually, through luck or divine intervention, one of the bikes started, then the other. We pushed them to the gate, rolled them through, and did not start the engines until we were two blocks away. We rode into the night with the wind in our hair and, of course, no helmets. We had not learned anything. We had only accumulated another story. The next morning, we left Mui Ne. Andrew went south. I went north. We never rode together again. But somewhere in Vietnam there is a police station with four officers who still tell the story of the American who would not get off his bike, who forced them to do paperwork, and who came back in the night and stole his motorcycle back like a character in a bad movie. I hope they laugh when they tell it. I hope they have forgotten my face. I have not forgotten theirs. Travel is not about the destinations. It is about the moments between destinations: the naked runs, the corrupt cops, the midnight impound-lot escapes, and the choices you make when you are tired, hungry, and too proud to pay a bribe. Some lessons cost money. Some cost bruises. Some cost a week of your life waiting for paperwork. Mine cost a motorbike I never really owned and a story I will tell until I cannot speak. Worth it. Every stupid, terrifying, naked second of it. PART THREE: THE LOCK Potter stood silently in the hallway, his pack beside him, preparing to leave. He observed his surroundings. The adjoining rooms lay silent. He had passed through the capital only the day before. The sun had not yet risen. A mist lingered in the air, and a coastal breeze touched his skin. The world was still asleep, and Potter was about to wake it. He approached the wall of locked boxes: a rainbow of multicolored locks against individual steel-blue security doors. A petty fortress of other people's valuables, each lock a promise of safety. Each lock a lie. The opportunity was too much to pass up. He positioned himself at his starting point for one last moment of calm, emotion and empathy absent. Not because he was a monster, but because in this moment he could not afford them. Emotion makes you slow. Empathy makes you hesitate. Hesitation gets you caught. He held the lock in his hand, partially obscuring it from anyone who might interrupt. A trick he had learned years ago: hide the act in plain sight. Most people see what they expect to see. A man checking his own lock. A traveler securing his belongings. No one looks twice at a key turning in a lock. No one looks at all. The tensioner sat at the base of the lock port, his thumb applying careful pressure. His tools were a simple set he had fashioned out of stainless steel tweezers in Kuala Lumpur: broken in half, one half shaped into an "L," the other given a slight bend at the end and filed down into an astonishingly effective key. A lock pick born from garbage. A skeleton key from a medical kit. His right hand inserted the tool. He felt the notches and grooves at his fingertips. The travel lock was a truly false sense of security. The majority needed only one or two pins pressed before giving way. Cheap metal, poor manufacturing, the illusion of safety sold to millions who never tested it. Potter tested it. The thin key passed over the pins, back and forth, a gentle dance of tension and pressure. The furthest pin pressed into place and held. The correct tension is the solution to every lock: too much and the pins bind, too little and they slip, and just right, the world opens. His hand felt a subtle movement, additional pressure giving way, the key port shifting slightly, the telltale sign that he was heading in the right direction. One more pin. Two at most. Then the lock would surrender. Potter was a bit of a pirate in truth. The need to be close to the sea ran through his veins like salt water. He possessed a collection of talents unusual to most: lock picking, free diving, spearfishing, and the ability to disappear into a crowd and emerge somewhere else entirely. These were not hobbies. They were survival mechanisms. The island of Sri Lanka, just south of India, was not originally on his list of must-see destinations. His travel companion in Bali suggested they go together after Indonesia. Her name was Sam, a driven Filipina-American from Las Vegas with an ever-consuming ambition to build a social-media influencer empire. They had met a few weeks earlier at a tropical resort-style hostel: ice-cold beers poolside, travelers from every walk of life coming and going, everyone zooming off on rented mopeds that cost five dollars a day to explore Bali's crystal-clear beaches, glorious coastal sunsets, and vast jungles hiding gems of every sort. Sam had been backpacking for a year. A successful businesswoman in her late twenties, she owned a handful of homes that she managed as rentals to fund her endeavor. She refused to accept the status quo of life, the 9-to-5, the mortgage, the quiet desperation of suburban existence. Instead she chose to adventure the world, documenting her travels in a vast wardrobe of bikinis, tube tops, and short shorts, all packed into a single travel pack. Potter was a happy camper along for the ride, the eye behind the lens. It was something he was actually good at. He had a selective eye for the best settings and environments, and he captured dynamic shots that drew envy from other photographers. He made her look amazing. She made him feel useful. They made a good team during their short time together: a few short weeks, but a lifetime of adventure. Before Sam, before Bali, before the locks, Potter had been working his way through Malaysia, crossing by ferry into the northern tip of Indonesia. Stepping off the short jaunt across the sea, he was uncertain of his next steps. The humidity hit him like a wall. The smells of spices, exhaust, salt, and sweat overwhelmed him. The language shifted around him, unfamiliar sounds bouncing off unfamiliar buildings. He hailed the first motorbike taxi and hopped on the back. "Take me to the bus station, please," he said to the driver. The driver nodded, and they zoomed off into traffic that defied all logic, a chaotic ballet of honking horns, swerving scooters, and pedestrians who valued destination over life. The lock surrendered. A soft click, almost inaudible, the kind of sound that travels only inches before disappearing into the ambient noise of the world. No one heard it. No one turned. No one saw Potter slide the door open and reach inside. He would be gone before the sun fully rose. He was always gone before the sun rose. This story continues in "Chicken Bus Indonesia," the ride from hell, the Day of Silence, and the cold Bintang beer that made it all worthwhile. What happened next involved two drivers, a pregnant woman, an old woman who may have died, forty-eight hours of Arabic music, and a bus full of actual chickens. For now, know this: Potter got on that bus and survived the ride. Somewhere in the chaos between the lock, the bus, the island, and the woman who would change his trajectory, he discovered something about himself. He was not a good man. He was not a bad man. He was a man who could pick a lock in the dark, catch a bus at dawn, and outrun his own conscience for days at a time. Whether that made him free or just alone was a question he did not ask himself. Not yet. Not there. Not under that mist, in that hallway, with that lock still warm in his hand. PART FOUR: IT WAS UNLOCKED "It was unlocked when I got there." A lie. He knew it. The foreman standing over him knew it. The men gathered in a loose semicircle around him probably knew it too. But the lie was out now, hanging in the Turkish air like smoke. Behind it lingered the unsaid truth: Potter had picked the lock, or found the key where it shouldn't have been, or simply been lucky. How he accessed the locker belonged to him alone. The path of escape was blocked by their presence. Three men, maybe four. Hard faces, harder hands. The kind of men who worked with their bodies and solved problems with their fists. Potter had taken cash. Not all of it, just enough. He left the wallet and flipped through the belongings with practiced speed. Passport: useless to him. Credit cards: traceable. He left them all. Only the cash. Clean, untraceable, the kind of theft that takes seconds and haunts for days. But they had tracked him down faster than he thought possible. And really, whose stupid idea was it to leave all that camera gear out in the open in the first place? A fortune in lenses and bodies, unwatched, unlocked, tempting fate. That was the thought that got him caught. Not the theft itself but the arrogance afterward, the assumption that he was smarter than everyone else. His error had been ignoring his intuition, the little voice that told him to liberate the valuables and vanish, to flee to another city immediately. Instead he had become complacent, comfortable, slow. He had become his victim. Only a few hours earlier, that thought would have been impossible. Potter had arrived in Turkey a few weeks before, hitchhiking from Romania across the massive country with ridiculous ease. The generosity of locals astounded him: concern for his well-being, offers of tea and bread and a place to sleep, a refreshing change after the reception he had met in Eastern Europe. He had crossed the bridge into Istanbul on foot, thousands of years of history beneath his boots. Romans. Byzantines. Ottomans. And now him, just another wanderer passing through. That felt like a lifetime ago. Now Potter climbed a steep embankment on all fours. The Mediterranean coastline glittered to his right, indifferent to his terror. The small Turkish coastal town sprawled below, full of people who might or might not be looking for him. His backpack, once his closest companion, was now his only hindrance. It caught on branches, threw off his balance, and threatened to send him tumbling back down into the arms of the men who wanted blood. His heart raced. Adrenaline pumped. His breath came in ragged gasps that sounded like thunder in his own ears. He crawled through the forest. Tall pines stood like silent witnesses. His hands clawed through fallen needles and loose soil. His feet gave way with each step, the dirt shifting, sliding, betraying him. Every movement was a negotiation with gravity. Every moment threatened to become his last free moment. Below, voices called out to each other, searching, coordinating. They were close. Too close. Vengeance was their goal, not justice and not recovery of the cash: the kind of vengeance that leaves marks and makes examples. His only hope was to push forward and up, over the crest of the mountain. If he could put solid rock and dense forest between himself and the men below, he might survive. Massive boulders protruded from the shadows, ancient, weather-worn, unmoving. They obstructed the view from below and gave him seconds, maybe minutes, before the men could locate him again. Potter took a breath, then another. His lungs burned. His legs screamed. His fingers were raw from clawing at dirt and rock. Do not stop, his mind demanded. Keep moving. Forward is the only direction that matters now. He continued his climb. What Potter learned in those hours, scrambling up a Turkish mountainside with vengeful men below and nothing but adrenaline between him and disaster, was not about theft or escape or survival. It was about the lie he told at the beginning. "It was unlocked." That lie bought him seconds. Seconds became minutes, minutes became distance, and distance became survival. Sometimes a lie is not a sin. Sometimes it is a tool, the only thing standing between you and a beating you will not walk away from. Potter made it over the crest. He found a road and flagged down a truck. The driver asked no questions. In Turkey, that was the other thing Potter learned: people help, even when they shouldn't, even when the man asking is covered in pine needles and sweat and the unmistakable scent of fear. The truck took him to the next town, the next bus, the next country. He never returned to that coastal village. He never saw the men again. He never found out what would have happened if they had caught him. Some questions are better left unanswered. Some lies are better left believed. And some mountains are worth climbing, even on all fours, even with a backpack, even with your heart in your throat and your freedom hanging by a thread. On the other side of that mountain is a road, and on that road is a truck, and in that truck is a driver who does not ask your name or your business or why you are running. He just says, "Where are you going?" And you say, "Away from here." And that is enough. Potter kept traveling. He kept making mistakes. He kept ignoring his intuition, paying for it, learning from it, and forgetting the lesson two weeks later when a new opportunity presented itself. That is the curse of the wanderer. You do not change. You just accumulate stories. This is one of them. The truth of what happened on that mountain is known only to him, the pines, and the indifferent Mediterranean. The rest is just words. But words are what we have. Words are what survive. And this story survived. PART FIVE: THE ALMOND A mind I do not understand. One that does not rely on my acceptance and exists whether I believe in it or not. Its creation of myself is unimportant to its grand scale. God chooses our roles and our paths, good, bad, or ugly. An author writes the story as it chooses, and we are just the characters. We do not get to argue with the plot. My mind is aware of the future, aware of what the small brown object in my hand holds as I choose to listen. I toss the whole thing into my mouth and chew it wholly. For the first time in my life, I taste the almond: slightly sweet, buttery, pleasant. A gift, really, from a world that does not owe me anything. Almonds contain cyanide. Bitter almonds, specifically, hold a compound called amygdalin, which the body converts into hydrogen cyanide. A few dozen raw bitter almonds can kill an adult. Sweet almonds, the ones sold in bags at the grocery store, are safe, domesticated and stripped of their danger over centuries of selective breeding. But wild bitter almonds still carry the poison. Nature's little joke: a nut that tastes like marzipan and kills like a spy novel. I did not know, in that moment, whether the almond in my hand was sweet or bitter. I did not test it. I did not hesitate. I simply put it in my mouth and chewed. Death is always possible. That is not a threat. That is a fact. Every breath could be your last, every step could be the one that breaks your neck, every almond could be the one that stops your heart. But life is worth the adventure. There is something freeing about accepting that you do not control the story. The author writes and the author chooses. You just show up. You put the almond in your mouth and trust that the plot is not ready for you to die yet. I have made peace with this, not through religion or philosophy but through experience: standing in hallways picking locks, riding buses that should not run, eating nuts that might kill me. The almond tasted like butter and sugar and something else I could not name. Maybe it was the cyanide. Maybe it was freedom. Maybe they are the same thing. I swallowed. The world did not end. The story continued, not because I deserve it or am special, but because the author is not done with me yet, and I am curious to see how it ends. For the record: it was a sweet almond. I lived. I am writing this in Nicaragua, years later, still chewing, still swallowing, still trusting that the next thing I put in my mouth will not be the thing that kills me. But if it is, at least it tasted good. A NOTE ON TREE NUT ALLERGIES AND THE REALITY OF DEATH My almond did not kill me. But for millions of people, a single almond, or any tree nut, can be a death sentence. Tree nut allergies are among the most common and most dangerous food allergies in the world. The nuts involved include walnuts, cashews, pistachios, hazelnuts, Brazil nuts, pecans, and almonds. Cyanide poisoning from bitter almonds requires a large quantity of nuts. Anaphylactic shock can kill in minutes, sometimes seconds. The immune system mistakes a harmless protein in the nut for a deadly invader and floods the body with histamine and other chemicals. Blood vessels dilate. Blood pressure plummets. The throat, tongue, and airways swell shut. The person cannot breathe, the heart cannot pump, and organs fail. Death by anaphylaxis is suffocation while fully conscious, the body turning against itself in an attempt to protect it. According to the World Allergy Organization, food allergies affect an estimated 220 to 550 million people worldwide. Tree nut allergies alone affect approximately 1 to 2 percent of the global population, up to 160 million people. In the United States, tree nut allergies affect about 1.1 percent of the population, roughly 3.6 million people, and nearly half of those have a history of severe reactions. About 1 in 13 children has a food allergy of some kind. Tree nuts are among the nine major allergens (sesame was added to the U.S. list in 2023) that together account for about 90 percent of serious reactions. In the United States, food allergies cause approximately 30,000 anaphylactic reactions requiring emergency medical treatment each year, and between 150 and 200 people die annually from food-induced anaphylaxis. Tree nuts are a leading cause. My gamble with a potentially bitter almond was a choice I made freely and consciously. People with tree nut allergies do not have that choice. A single cross-contaminated surface, a hidden ingredient, a mislabeled package, or a kiss from someone who ate a granola bar hours earlier can trigger a reaction that ends in a hospital bed or a body bag. For them, an almond is not a philosophical adventure. It is a terror. The EpiPen, the brand-name epinephrine auto-injector, has become a symbol of this reality. The drug itself costs about $1 to manufacture, yet in 2016 Mylan Pharmaceuticals was charging over $600 for a two-pack. Parents rationed injectors, and schools struggled to afford them. Public outrage eventually forced a price drop. Lower-cost generic auto-injectors are now available, and since 2024 a needle-free nasal epinephrine spray, neffy, has been on the market as well. Even with epinephrine, survival is not guaranteed. The injection buys time, sometimes only minutes. The patient still needs emergency care and oxygen. Someone with a tree nut allergy does not get to be philosophical about the almond. It is not a metaphor for them. It is a loaded gun.