I’m a nervous optimist. Life here in meatspace is changing fast. Global insecurity is skyrocketing, fueled by the spread of misinformation and our eroding trust in public institutions. The narratives…
Category: <span>Essays</span>
Essays from Patrick Cumby
Here’s where I ramble on about stuff I care about.
WRITING JOURNAL: Within an hour on the first day that GRONE was released, it got three 1 & 2 star ratings. It was devastating. Beyond devastating. Imposter syndrome is a…
It was never a good idea to drive a defective British roadster into the desert, but the promise of adventure was irresistible. It was June, 1987. Ronald Reagan was president and the Berlin Wall had not yet fallen. I was 24 years old, heartbroken from a failed romance, ready to take a risk I would normally have never considered. Here’s an entirely-true love story of a young man, his absurd motorcar and a thousand-foot cliff.
Leo Tolstoy once set out to write novel about the Russian defeat of Napoleon’s armies. As he researched the history leading up to the events of 1825, he decided to…
I met Jens a week after walking across the Pyrenees from France. It was September, and we were in the heart of Basque country, following the ancient pilgrimage trail to the city of Santiago de Compostela which lay over four hundred miles to the west. I’d noticed Jens earlier in the day, an old man tottering along the path, sweating despite the relative cool, his tall figure supported by a pair of trekking poles upon which he leaned precariously. As I’d hurried past him I’d nodded and given him the traditional pilgrim’s greeting: “Buen Camino!”
He’d been too occupied by the strenuous act of walking to return the greeting, but he had returned my nod. His age made him an exception on the Camino. Most of the other hikers were middle-aged or younger. Though he bore himself with youthful pride, his gait gave him away. It was the shuffle-sway-shuffle of an octogenarian. Jens was far older than his fellow pilgrims, but despite his age, he was still a large man with broad shoulders and a strong back. He carried a small blue pack, but he wore no hat, and his face and scalp were dangerously red.
Make sure your kids read good stories, because the books they read as teens will shape them for the rest of their lives.
A friend recently sent me a Facebook challenge to name my top ten favorite novels, not expecting that her simple request would preoccupy my life for a week. At first I tried ignoring the request, but I am a list-maker, a ranker of things, so the challenge eventually proved irresistible. I started a list, but it quickly grew to twenty, then thirty titles, with more popping into my head as fast as I could jot them down.
Every family tree has secrets, but sometimes it’s the family name that conceals the biggest secret of all.
As a kid I always thought Cumby was odd-sounding, a little embarrassing, and nothing like the Scotch-Irish names of the other white families in my small Southern town. MacDonald. Spencer. Kennedy. Those were regular names. Cumby sounded like a cartoon character. Its history was a mystery; if anyone knew its true origin, they had decided to keep it to themselves.
A hike through a California forest reveals a plain truth about America’s past—and her future.
I don’t notice it at first. The trail is a carpet of clover-like sorrel, trillium, fairy bells, and redwood orchids. The burbling of the creek, the shadows of forest and ravine, cool and inviting, fill my senses. But every hundred feet or so I experience an unsettling sensation, a gentle pull from the forest, like the gravitational tug of a great mass. Giants lurk in the shadows, hiding behind the dense scrub of undergrowth. Every so often through the leafy shade I glimpse a cliff of gray—large, much too large for my Eastern sensibilities. Something is out of scale. That can’t be a tree. Even here in the American West, where everything is big, trees don’t grow as big as mountainsides.
One of the most memorable places I ever stayed was a little guesthouse in Mek’ele, Ethiopia. It was December, 2019, right about the time a novel coronavirus was claiming its first victim at a fish market in Wuhan, and about a year before Mek’ele was overrun by rebel Ethiopian forces who brutally rounded up the young men of military age and executed them while gleefully filming the murders with their cell phones.
A dozen different shades of lichen spot its surface, along with a clump of yellow moss it wears like a haughty sailor’s cap. Strands of old barbed-wire stick out threateningly from several of the ancient staples. This thing looks like a fierce, grizzled old warrior, ready to stab me and send me to the hospital with a fatal case of tetanus.