Almost 50 stories and counting . . .

We took a family trip to the Grand Canyon in the summer of 2016. My youngest daughter was a new driver so we let her take over the minivan helm for long stretches between the San Francisco Bay Area and northern Arizona. It was nice not to drive all those miles myself.

It was my first time at the Grand Canyon since my early 20s and I was very excited about the trip. We were having a good time, until I almost got blown off a mountain by a gust of wind with one thousand foot drops on both sides of the trail.

We went on a trail that stretched out into the canyon. My Giants baseball cap almost blew off in the wind. When I grabbed for it I almost went over the cliff.

I ended up on the ground on all fours not knowing what to do. I couldn’t see Mia who went on ahead of me while I stopped to take a picture. The others were ahead of her and I was alone and panicking.

Instinctively I believed that I couldn’t stand up or I would be blown off the side.

So I turned myself around and crawled back to where I came from. It was only about 20 feet to a section of the trail where there was mountain on one side.

Once I got there I sat for a few minutes against the mountain. Then I stood up and walked back to the main trail.

Since that time I’ve had a much bigger fear of heights.

In my life I’ve climbed 11,000 foot mountains, jumped off train trestles, and driven on a highway at 13,000 feet in Colorado. Now it can be a challenge for me to fly in a plane, drive along Highway 1 in California’s Mendocino coast, walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, or drive up Highway 50 over Echo Summit to Lake Tahoe.

I meet the challenge when I can. Last week I drove up to Tahoe over Highway 50 and I did fly to Atlanta and Mexico in the past two years.

This week I am nearing the milestone of my 50th article posted on SubStack.

Writing on SubStack can be challenging. There are all kinds of opportunities and all kinds of pitfalls.

I am feeling a little bit like it’s a going to be a celebration when I do write my 50th article. I know it’s not really that big of an accomplishment but it does feel good to be this far along and still enjoying what I’m doing.

Sure, I’m doing this I because I enjoy writing and communicating with other people. But I am also writing with purpose and facing my personal demons who want to stop me.

I had a college teaching assistant tell me once to never take up writing for a living. The irony of that story is that if they knew what they were talking about they would have realized that every job involves writing in some way or another.

You have to be able to read and write to do pretty much anything. It’s not surprising to me that college professors and teaching assistants feel this way about writing because they never taught me how to write.

I know that because I taught reading and writing for 10 years.

But I finally left all that steady work for good in 2025, figuring I might like being a full time artist, writer, and online educator.

Now, here I am with almost fifty ways to talk about it.

I was kind of excited during those first months in September, October, and November when I would scroll down the Notes feed and see people writing notes encouraging others with less than 200 SubStack subscribers to connect with them because they want to meet you.

Eventually I started seeing photographers, painters, farmers, and political writers which was all much more in my interest areas. Being a portrait photographer and social science teacher with backgrounds in history and political science, all of this was very interesting to me.

It was also very interesting to see all these people writing away, creating podcasts, and live interviews and events. How do they have time to do all that?

I thought I was just going to be writing and working on my craft so I could complete a book or three. I began to feel like writing on SubStack was more like hiking across a bluff with 1000 foot drops on both sides. I was feeling like I was teetering on going off the cliff and it was going to be a hard landing.

Then I saw a piece by someone complaining to SubStack about the Notes section because of the impact on people’s attention span and algorithms that miss the mark and send us what we don’t want to see.

I appreciated the fact that the person was lamenting the loss of long form essay writing which was what they wanted to do. I think we all thought that would surely be encouraged on SubStack.

Some people have believed for a long time that SubStack is already past that stage and heading into tech/corporate/algorithm oblivion.

Under that on-going milieu, last week’s article took me three weeks to write because it was too complicated and too long. I was starting to think that nobody was ever going to read it. The call I read for SubStack to support long form writing actually got me over the hump and I finished one of the longest pieces I’ve written so far.

I enjoy doing all of it. I know I just have to bear down at times and follow through on my ideas because that’s why I’m doing it, to communicate those ideas to others.

I am also writing for all the students I taught over the years and all the teachers I had. Yes, even the ones that told me I couldn’t write.

I’m writing for anyone who believes ideas are worth communicating and good ideas are worth discussing.

I’m writing for my parents, who would have loved to read my writing, and my own kids so they know what I’m doing these days while they go off and do all the things they are doing. (Not that I think they are reading this . . . but they might)

I’m also writing because these are important, serious, interesting, and sometimes fun things to communicate about.

That’s what I plan to keep doing and I’ll be offering special deals for subscribers when my 50th article arrives, including fully paid lifetime subscriptions!

Because this article is really about me I thought I would finish up with a couple of additional stories that show my resilience—then and now.

Going back to that 2016 trip to the north rim of the Grand Canyon, you should know that, on the way back to California, we stopped for a couple of days in Zion National Park.

Trekking up river in the canyons is a big activity for many visitors to Zion. But there is potential danger in the canyon because flash flooding from upstream could occur without notice.

For whatever reason, I was not worried about the water, nor was Mia. The rest of my family and pretty much everyone else turned back more than a mile before we did. There was only one other person up there with us who could take the picture.

There were many more mountains to climb, rivers to cross, and roads to ascend since that day.

I look forward to the challenges ahead.

These days my climbing is a usually a bit lower in elevation but some things are still a challenge for me.

Take for example this sunflower:

It actually doesn’t look that far up there does it?

The third row up there is about eight feet high. Then, the flower itself is over six feet high.

It’s high up there.

I managed to get up to the small ledge and take a close up of the flower then finished up with a selfie—because that’s what I do.

Did I tell you I invented the selfie?

Well, that’s a story for another day.

Meanwhile, I am literally climbing walls here on the Lakritz Farm to create articles for SubStack.

No artificial intelligence used for this piece. Only human ingenuity, my heirloom sunflower seeds, a digital camera, and a little chutzpah.

I survived to tell the story which I hope you enjoyed. Come back and see us again.

Also, please comment on and like my stories. SubStack doesn’t care about views. SubStack cares about likes and comments.

This story is my most read article so far with 117 views:

My most “popular” story according to SubStack is this one because it has four likes and two comments. However, this article has half as many views.

Your interactions with my writing impact the most popular stories at the top of my home page and the algorithm that leads people to it.

Here’s to the next 50 articles! Thanks for reading and listening today!

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