Rivers of Thought
On Love, Legacy & the Discoveries Along the Way
Lower Latourell Falls, a single ribbon of water carving basalt for centuries.
I drove east from Skamania Lodge this morning, the Columbia River off my shoulder and the day so clear it almost rang. September-blue sky. Sun bright enough to make the river flash like a blade. My grandson, Jordan, told me Friday with precision: autumn arrives Monday at 2:19 p.m. Eastern. Out here, that’s 11:19 a.m.—still ahead of me as I wound into the Gorge toward Latourell Falls.
Autumn carries a certain somberness for me, a quieting. Not sadness exactly—more like the sound turns down so you can hear what’s underneath. Maybe that’s why I felt pulled to the trail. I wanted to walk into the season rather than let it arrive without me.
At the trailhead, a tour group had just gathered for the lower falls. Laughter, a few wool caps, an airhorn of enthusiasm. I smiled, stepped aside, and chose the upper falls first—the steeper, quieter way. I wasn’t looking to be alone, exactly; I was looking for the kind of company a forest keeps.
Within a few minutes, the Gorge did what it always does—it closed the door on the highway and pulled me into its own weather. Ferns stitched the ground, their fronds beaded with last night’s damp. Moss softened every trunk and limb as if the trees had been given green coats for the season ahead. The air smelled like earth made new, like stone rinsed clean. Even as I climbed, it felt like a descent into a sanctuary—cooler with every turn, light growing spare and slanted. Morning clouds had pooled in the ravine and hung there, a gauzy haze caught in the evergreens. Some places down here probably never see direct sun. They don’t need it. They glow on their own.
I thought of the Corps of Discovery—how often I do. Did Lewis or Clark, or any of their men, step into a bowl of forest like this and go quiet because there was nothing else to do? The Gorge isn’t the Missouri, but wonder travels well. The particulars change—rock, water, tree—but the feeling is the same: smallness that enlarges you.
This place surely carried another name, spoken in a language older than maps.
I also thought of the Indigenous peoples who walked this land long before Lewis and Clark, long before any of us. What drew them to these falls? Did the sound carry meaning, the mist hold stories, the basalt cliffs serve as markers? Surely this place, with its power and beauty, carried a name of its own—a name rooted in language older than English, older than the maps I’ve studied. I wondered what ceremonies, what moments of gathering or prayer, may have happened on these same stones where I now stood, a guest in their homeland.
And then, as always, I thought of Carmen. I miss her in places like this with an ache that’s both tender and grateful. I wish she could see what I’m seeing, breathe this somewhere-between-summer-and-fall air, hear the steady hush of water working the canyon. She has a way of noticing beauty that makes my noticing better. It’s one reason I’m writing Uncharted Moments—to gather these places and hours, to honor the way they’ve shaped us, to invite readers into the country we fell in love with (despite its flaws), the land itself and the people whose homelands these are, and the love story that carried us along.
That’s the challenge I carry up trails like this: how to translate a feeling into words without dulling its edge. How to write a scene so true you can smell the moss and taste the spray. How to talk about the wonder that arrives unannounced and refuses to be photographed. I want Uncharted Moments to do that—to rise, chapter by chapter, into a kind of crescendo that isn’t noise but resonance. Not louder, truer.
The path leveled, and the sound of water shifted from rumor to presence. At a break in the trees, the upper falls appeared—veil and plunge, a white ribbon slicing the basalt. I stood and let time do what it does in front of moving water: lengthen and loosen. You don’t measure a waterfall; it measures you.
On the way down, I rejoined the lower trail, and the crowd’s energy returned in bits and pieces—footsteps, voices, the happy clatter of trekking poles. I rounded a bend just as a woman—seventies, camera in hand, careful on the narrow path—rounded from the other side. She looked up, caught her first sight of the lower falls, and her face opened. It was all there at once: surprise, delight, reverence. A smile that belonged equally to her and to the water. Pure joy. Pure “oh my God.”
I wish I had taken a picture. I didn’t. The moment kept moving, as it should. But it stayed with me, because that expression—hers—was the mirror I needed. That’s what I’m trying to write toward. Not a catalog of places, not a ledger of miles, but that spark of recognition when beauty strikes and we say, without words: yes.
If you’ve followed my work for a while, you know how often I return to rivers and trails, to the Lewis & Clark story that first sent Carmen and me west, to the way travel can teach you to listen. You also know my bias: the land is a mentor if we let it be. It slows you down, insists on your senses. In a ravine like Latourell’s, you start to notice things you’d otherwise miss—the way the spray cools the air twenty paces before you see the falls, how moss drinks light, how a single cedar can hold the smell of a decade. The world doesn’t have to shout here. It just is, and that’s enough.
I think that’s why autumn carries that somberness for me. Not because something ends, but because the world invites you closer. Leaves turn, not to be dramatic, but to mark the shift. The river lowers. The light sharpens. The calendar clicks forward—11:19 a.m. Pacific, the equinox arrives—and whether you’re ready or not, the season proceeds on.
Driving back west toward Skamania, the sun a little higher, I thought about that smile again and what it asked of me as a writer, a husband, a grandfather. Pay attention. Say what you mean. Carry the moment carefully and then set it down so others can pick it up. Uncharted Moments isn’t a museum of our travels; it’s a living room. I want readers to walk in, sit with the stories, and feel the same quiet joy I felt on that trail—or the grief we’ve carried, or the stubborn hope that keeps us going. I want them to meet Carmen on these pages the way I’ve met her on a hundred trails and riverbanks: steady, brave, eyes bright at the edge of a view.
The Gorge didn’t try to make a speech today. It offered a handful of simple things: cold air, wet stone, trees in their green coats, a waterfall doing its work, a stranger’s face turned to wonder. That’s plenty. That’s abundance. And it’s enough of a map for me to keep writing, to keep trusting that the right words will arrive, as seasons do, right on time.
Autumn is here—my grandson’s clock confirms it. The light is already different. I’m grateful for a morning that let me walk into it on purpose, east from Skamania, up into the hush, and back again with one small, perfect reminder: joy is often just around the bend, waiting to be reflected.
Beauty reflected back in the faces of those who find it.
Shep – Ever Vigilant
Fort Benton wears the river like a well-earned badge. The Missouri slides past the levee with that steady, old-timer confidence—no hurry, no apology—shouldering stories you can feel even if you can’t name them. We parked, stretched road miles out of our backs, and did what we always do when we arrive anywhere along the trail: we listened. Not just with our ears, but with that other sense you learn on the water—the one that asks, What happened here, and who’s still holding the memory?
You don’t have to look far in Fort Benton. The brick storefronts, the iron bridge, the museum signs—they all point to lives stacked over lives. And there, near the river, is the town’s quiet heartbeat cast in bronze: Shep. Head lifted, ears set to a frequency I swear you can almost hear if you stand there long enough. The statue is beautiful, yes, but more than that, it’s attentive. It watches the place like a promise.
We learned the story—most visitors do—a dog and a depot. Loyalty stretched across too many days. Waiting that outlived an answer. Even if you only catch it in passing, the story tugs something in you that’s older than words. But that afternoon, the pull landed somewhere personal I hadn’t noticed before.
We read the plaque, circled the statue, and let the river do its slow work. The trick with places like this is to resist the urge to rush. You let your mind walk past the easy facts and settle into the grain. And in that space, Shep became less a legend and more a lens. Who’s keeping watch while we cross? Who’s marking the thresholds we don’t even recognize as thresholds until we’re on the other side?
A Second Shep
Back home, weeks later, I wrote the Fort Benton pages. I tried to capture the light on the water and the way that bronze posture lifted the afternoon into something like prayer. I tucked the scene among the rest of Leg 8—the miles, the small talk, the way a town on a river is never just a town. Then I slid the draft to Carmen.
Hickey Family circa 1909 – Shep Front Right
Carmen proofreads like a cartographer—pencil steady, eyes tuned to terrain. She loves me enough to circle what’s true and underline what needs another pass. She also listens for echoes I miss. She was a few pages in when she looked up, soft smile, head cocked just a hair.
“You know your Granny’s dog was named Shep, too… right?”
The room did that slow-focus thing. I could hear the pencil roll to a stop. “What?”
“Your Granny’s farm dog,” she said, like we were both standing there in the yard already, like we’d just heard the back porch screen door slap. “Shep—it’s in her journals.”
There it was. Two Sheps, one in bronze beside the Missouri and one running fencerows in stories I grew up hearing without really hearing. A simple name becomes a through-line you can trace with your finger across a map of years. You think you’ve written a scene about a statue, and it turns out you’ve been writing about keeping watch your whole life.
I can see him now in the mind’s film—my Granny’s Shep—tan, with a white face blur at the edge of chores, tail sweeping the dust of a long afternoon. Whistle and he comes. Whisper and he hears. That’s what a shepherd does, even on a farm nowhere near a flock: he tends the threshold. He tells you when a stranger is coming up the lane. He walks with you to the barn at dusk and back to the house in the blue wash of evening. He is presence in motion.
Presence
And that’s what Fort Benton’s Shep felt like to me: presence. Not just the story tourists trade on the levee, but the way a place remembers for you when you’ve forgotten. The statue doesn’t just honor a singular dog; it blesses the job all guardians have—human or canine, living or gone—to stand at the crossings and keep an eye on us as we pass.
Carmen has always been the one to catch these threads. She did it in Paris when a bell peal turned “just friends” into something is happening. She did it in Louisville, at Mulberry Hill, when a small chain-link fence around forgotten graves felt louder than the big history down the road. She does it daily in our living room with a pencil poised over my prose. She doesn’t preach; she notices. Then she hands me the noticing like a found coin: This matters. Don’t walk past it.
Her Shep comment sent me back to the manuscript. I didn’t rewrite the scene so much as I recalibrated the listening. The river was still there, the afternoon still shouldered the same light, but the center of gravity had shifted. The statue wasn’t simply a point of interest on a Lewis & Clark-ish road day. It was an icon for a vocation that keeps finding us: stewarding what’s sacred as we move.
Sacred, for me, is not a word trapped in stained glass. It’s the living room where my grandmother’s stories breathe. It’s a town that builds bronze to say, We remember. It’s the Missouri’s hush beside a levee that has seen more arrivals and departures than any ledger can hold. It’s Carmen connecting dots I didn’t connect and, in doing so, knitting past to present so the cloth won’t tear.
If you’ve traveled with us in Uncharted Moments, you know we chase big landscapes and find small mercies. We go looking for history and discover our own hearts leaving breadcrumbs. Fort Benton gave us Shep twice—once in metal and once in memory—and both times as a gentle nudge: Pay attention at the edges. That’s where crossings announce themselves. That’s where love does its quietest, bravest work.
Thresholds
I’ve been thinking about thresholds a lot lately. The obvious ones—weddings, funerals, new jobs, last days—carry rituals we recognize. But the smaller ones shape us just as surely: a pause before you say the hard thing, a glance across a room that says we’re okay, a pencil mark in a margin that turns a “nice detail” into a seam you can pull. Maybe that’s why Shep lands so deep. He stands there without fanfare and makes the ordinary act of going from one place to another feel witnessed.
I don’t know what threshold you’re approaching. A decision you’ve been delaying. A phone call. A goodbye you didn’t choose. If I could hand you anything from Fort Benton, it would be the sense that you don’t have to cross alone. Somewhere nearby, there’s a keeper of the bend—someone or something that will sit within sight and wait until you’re on your way. Sometimes it looks like a bronze dog by a river. Sometimes it looks like a memory you thought you’d misplaced until your person says, Hey, remember? And sometimes it looks like the river itself, patient as breath.
When we left the levee, I turned once more to the statue and gave a small nod, the kind you give to an usher who helped you find your seat. Back in the car, Carmen squeezed my hand and returned to the pages. I drove with the Missouri in the corner of my eye, thinking about Granny, about dogs named Shep, about all the watchers who’ve kept vigil while we figured out our way.
We call them Uncharted Moments, these little collisions of place and past, because you can’t plan them and you can’t force them. You can only be there when they arrive. And when they do, you mark the spot—on a map, in a book, in your bones—and you carry on, shepherded by love toward whatever’s next.
— Jeff
P.S. Over the next few months, I will be sharing more from my upcoming book, Uncharted Moments Along the Lewis and Clark Trail – A Love Story. If you want to be in the know as it proceeds through the publishing process, sign up for my newsletter in the side panel of this page!
It happened at the cocktail reception before dinner. The sun was starting to drop behind the trees at Skamania Lodge, the white tablecloths on the garden patio lifting in the breeze, and the smell of dinner drifting across the lawn. One of the participants, beer in hand, approached.
“So, I have a question for you. This morning, you asked about our “why” — why we came to this program. What is your why? Why do you travel halfway across the country three or four times a year to guide this program?”
In five years, a dozen cohorts, and over two hundred participants, no one had ever asked me that.
I gave the first answer that came to mind: “I love the story, I love storytelling, I love seeing the lightbulb moments in people’s eyes when something connects.”
True enough. But the question stayed with me—over dinner, around the campfire that night, on the flight home. Why do I really do this? Especially now, when leaving Carmen is harder and harder with each trip.
Why – Deep Learning
I am honored to have been selected by my client, FCCS, to help build this program. What began as Carmen’s and my journey to follow the Lewis and Clark Trail blossomed into an entirely new career when Jean Canty Segal of FCCS read some of my writing about leadership and Lewis and Clark. She invited me to meet with a team of people in Seattle to discuss building the program. I was thrilled to be selected as a part of the team.
It stretched me. I learned so much in those 18 months of developing the program. Not so much about Lewis and Clark, but about leadership development programs, experiential learning, and the discipline to bring their vision to life. I walked away from every meeting we had with new insights and new perspectives.
From Sean Murray, I learned how to pace an experience so it flows.
From Matt Walker, I learned how the outdoors can carve a lesson deep into memory.
From Jared Nichols, I learned to stand in the future and imagine beyond the present.
My why? The learning never stops — and I love what we built.
Why – Continuous Learning
We launched the program in 2021, and since then, I’ve had the privilege of leading a dozen cohorts through the key concepts of Vision, Team Building, Overcoming Obstacles, Developing Resilience, and Proceeding On.
It never gets old. It never becomes routine. It never gets mailed in.
Each group arrives ready — hungry to learn, hungry to grow as leaders. They bond quickly and deeply. They are open to new and sometimes uncomfortable experiences. They push themselves. They challenge each other.
It’s a joy to watch it happen. Twenty strangers on the first night become friends, teammates, colleagues by the end of day one. They come from different industries, different parts of the country, different perspectives — yet they share a willingness to listen, to learn, and to support each other.
And I learn from every single one of them. Sometimes it’s an insight shared quietly after the hike or the aerial course. Sometimes it’s a reflection offered around the campfire, or a look across the table that says, Yeah, that makes sense now. Other times it’s a suggestion scribbled on a survey form (yes, we read every one), or a perspective I’d never considered, or a question no one had ever asked me before.
That constant exchange — giving and receiving, teaching and learning — is one of the things that keeps me coming back.
Why – Legacy
One of the leadership lessons we teach in the closing module is about legacy, not necessarily the legacy you leave behind when you leave this earth, but the legacy you leave behind in your team, in your teammates, when you transition to a new role or a new job. What do you hope they carry with them?
I have grown so much through the program, sometimes taking to heart the very lessons I am teaching, perhaps in a different way. Like celebrating victories. As the facilitator, I too, need to celebrate victories, like the successful conclusion of another cohort.
I have been thinking a lot about legacy as I approach the end of my career, as I move into the final chapter of life. What do I want to leave in the hearts and minds of others?
Family, of course. My wife Carmen — my partner in all things. Good times — tough times, through it all, I want her to carry my love in her heart. My sons, Jeremy and Brad. I see pieces of me in them — different pieces, similar pieces. Yet, they are their own men, teaching me each and every day. My grandkids — Braxton, Jordan, Jasper, and Hayden, step grandkids Ari, Avery, and Henry, and step grandkids from a son’s prior marriage, Donny and Charity. Legacy.
The Indiana CIO Network. A group of IT professionals across Central Indiana and beyond. What started as five colleagues having lunch has grown into a group with over 400 members. Each member brings their insights and expertise — and their willingness to share and support each other. A new group of leaders have taken the reins and the group is thriving! Legacy.
The Lewis and Clark Experience: A New Way Forward. There will come a time when I no longer serve as a guide for the program. Having the program on a solid foundation is one of the reasons I have poured my heart and soul into it. It is why we fine-tune it almost every time. That’s why I rehearse until I can forget the script and speak straight from the heart. Legacy.
The Journey
When Carmen and I first set out to follow the Lewis and Clark Trail, we had no idea what we’d discover. It became the theme of our life, the shape of my career, and the heart of my next book — Uncharted Moments Along the Lewis and Clark Trail – A Love Story.
I suppose that’s my real why: to keep the story alive — for the people in the room, for the people I love, and for the people I’ll never meet.
— Jeff
P.S. Over the next few months, I will be sharing more from my upcoming book, Uncharted Moments Along the Lewis and Clark Trail – A Love Story. If you want to be in the know as it proceeds through the publishing process, sign up for my newsletter in the side panel of this page!
