Trail connections

by Anton Zuiker on July 17, 2026

Erin tracking seals off Indian Point, Nature Conservancy's Blagden Preserve, Maine

Last week, Erin and I were back in Maine to celebrate our 30th anniversary.

We had honeymooned on Mount Desert Island and in Boston in 1996, and when a special trip to Portugal seemed too hard to shoehorn into this summer’s busy schedule of Oliver at summer camp, a big landscaping project, and Anna preparing to move to her first nursing job, we landed on a return to Acadia National Park. Our spring break glamping in Zion earlier this year was so much fun that we decided to book another tent at Under Canvas Acadia and then two nights at the posh Longfellow Hotel in Portland.

Seeing things

I have an insatiable need to make connections and find shared interests with others, so, naturally, I was looking not just at the rocky path and stunning views but also at the other people on our first hike up the strenuous St. Sauveur and Acadia Mountain Loop.

A pair of hikers were coming down the trail while Erin and I were climbing and I noticed a familiar design on the woman’s shirt. I instinctively said, “RUN DRM, I have that T-shirt.” They stopped to explain that the man grew up in Chapel Hill and the two live, and run, in Durham.

Erin and I kept hiking.

Where did 30 years go? we wondered. We talked about our travels around the globe, raising a family, developing our careers, “growing up and growing old together” (from our wedding vows). Here we were in Maine again, with time and health and resources to revel in our relationship. As I felt on our honeymoon and every day since, I was grateful, and in love.

Later, we reached the panoramic Acadia Mountain summit marker. Other hikers were paused there, one woman wearing a hat with the word Carolina both upside down and backward. What’s the meaning of that? I asked her. It was a promotional hat for the Carolina Blaze, a professional women’s softball team that plays in the Smith Family Stadium on Duke’s campus. I live in Chapel Hill and work for Duke. Small world, this trail.

I was feeling proud of my ability to notice what I’m noticing and to engage others.

By now, though, I also was feeling hot, thirsty, and a bit light-headed. I worried that I was still out of shape from my six-week recovery from the broken toe, but I’d played soccer the previous week and I seemed to be hiking just fine. The next day, though, I knew I wasn’t well, with a stomach bug that’s still with me a week later (my doctor will run a test for cyclosporiasis). I did my best to push through the rest of our hikes and meals, but I did backtrack, smartly, at the start of the steep Beehive climb because I sensed I was faltering and Erin saw me stumbling.

Anyway, I’m standing off to the side while Erin is asking the group for local dining recommendations, and a tall hiker looks at me and asks if I am into typography and web design.

I was momentarily confused (still hot) but then I realized he was referencing the hat I was wearing, KERN. I explained that I follow the typography work of Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits and I have my own website using Textpattern and one of Dan’s fonts. The tall hiker listened to me ramble, then mentioned he was the creator of an open source CMS called Drupal.

Erin was listening now. “Do you know Drupal?” she asked me.

“Of course! Many of the websites at Duke University run on Drupal.”

I looked back at the hiker. “So you’re ….” I started to ask.

“Dries Buytaert,” he finished.

I was tongue tied (still dizzy!) and as I searched my memory for the first time I encountered Dries on the web, Erin ribbed me about being a fanboy, which was true, because I’ve admired all the developers of the blogging software I’ve used over the last 25 years: Noah, Evan and Meg, Ben and Mena, Matt, Rick, Dean, Dave, Dries, Manton, and others.

Standing there on the side of the mountain, we chatted about blogs, RSS, design, and the World Cup. Belgium would be playing the U.S.A. later that day. Dries is a great blogger with an excellent domain—dri.es; see his photo post, on this page, about how his friends congratulated him on Belgium’s decisive victory. Erin and I watched that game on her iPad in our tent, and I was still smiling about my interactions on the trail.

We watched other matches along the way, including the second half of the thrilling Egypt-Argentina game in the Tap & Barrel Tavern (delicious beet salad and the Amber grilled cheese sandwich) and the France win over Morocco in the Rí Rá Irish Pub in Portland.

So, even through my dizzying nausea, lots of highlights to the week. The pinnacle, of course, was that I was alongside Erin, my hiking and life partner of 30 years.

Extras

• We also hiked sections of the steep Gorge Path and Cadillac South Ridge Trail, Great Head Trail, and the Indian Point-Blagden Preserve. We ate popovers on the grass at Jordan Pond House, too.
• At Under Canvas, happy kids ran around as we roasted marshmallows and a momma porcupine ignored the commotion to munch on grass. One night, her baby appeared briefly. A baby porcupine is a ball of cuteness.
• The Portland restaurants Chaval (‘Spanish and French-inspired cuisine meets the flavors of the Maine coast.’) and Duckfat (‘Belgian-style frites, hand-punched, twice-fried in duck fat.’) were excellent; we even returned to Duckfat a second day for more of the delicious tomato soup.
• I would have eaten more, and tried more beers, if I hadn’t been feeling so off.
• In Portland, we took the Casco Bay Ferry over to Peaks Island; Erin saw me struggling so quickly rented a golf cart so we could tour the quaint island. We also went for a sail on the schooner Timberwind.
• “In Typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the space between two specific characters, or letterforms, in a font. It is not to be confused with tracking, by which spacing is adjusted uniformly over a range of characters.” (From Wikipedia)
• The description of the KERN hat claims ‘This low-profile, embroidered hat demonstrates some absolutely terrible kerning, and is sure to be a conversation starter.’ Spot on, Dan!
• See my Wan Smol Blog for more posts and photos from the trip through Acadia and Portland, and then Rhode Island, where I spent a few days visiting my father and catching a show by The Heavy Heavy.
• See my Duke River of News to read what’s flowing through those Duke websites.

Appreciation

by Anton Zuiker on June 28, 2026

Last year on LinkedIn I posted an update about how I was benefitting from leadership coaching, therapy, orthodontia, time to read, and opportunity to play pick-up soccer.

Here’s what I wrote:

So far in 2025, I’ve gotten a promotion at work, redesigned my long-running blog, been in good health (scored two goals in pick-up soccer on Sunday!), finished reading a few novels and memoirs, and started most mornings with meditation and mindfulness.

All of this is in my personal ‘vivid vision’ that I wrote last year. That two-page document, which describes what I want to be doing and feeling on my birthday in 2030, was inspired by a business strategy book by Cameron Herold, but really the clarity and specificity in my vision document reflects the weekly coaching sessions I’ve had with Troy Livingston. Troy’s been a curious, kind, and steady coach. I turned to him when I needed help applying mindfulness to my work life. His questions and insights have helped me grow as a manager and leader.

During this same time, my therapist has helped me look deep, my orthodontist has aligned my teeth, and my stylist has made my longer hair look good.

There’s more that I want to do. Less, too. I’m grateful for Troy’s coaching to help me see the difference. If you are at a point in your career that you’re ready to craft a vision for where 2025 will let you grow, consider Troy (or another coach) to go there with you.

Completion

Recently, I decided to stop my coaching sessions with Troy. After more than two years, I had come to a feeling of completion. “You have graduated,” Troy said to me in agreement, and so we reviewed the span of our conversations and the trajectory of my professional growth and inner peace.

I shared a small example. Here at the house we have a backyard courtyard and landscaping project underway, and there’s construction dust coating everything. Our cars, too, are full of dust from the gravel driveway and dry conditions here in North Carolina. I bought a pack of soft microfiber towels and handed them out to the family. Knowing the benefit of keeping my eyeglasses clean (I always have a hank from GondekEDC in my back pocket), I recommended to the family that they use the towels to “clear the dust daily.” I mentioned this to Troy and he agreed it was both a good practice as well as a fine example of awareness and habit and striving for clarity.

This mindfulness is precisely why I asked Troy for his support in 2023. He helped me get here, and I am grateful for Troy’s support.

Troy is available to be your coach, too. Check out Troy Livingston Coaching & Consulting.

Legacy

As good coaches do, Troy asked me repeatedly, “How do you want to show up?”

He also asked me, “What do you want to be known for?”

I never felt my answers to Troy were adequate or thorough, but I’m glad for those questions. I will keep working at being better, being kinder, being calmer, listening deeper, loving longer.

Last week, Om Malik, an influential journalist and blogger and venture investor, died at the age of 59. Om was admired, respected, and beloved, and there are many tributes to him and his kindness to others, whether strangers or new friends or longtime collaborators. (John Gruber’s remembrance is one of most beautiful of the bunch.) What a life. What a legacy. What an answer.

Josh Ritter again

by Anton Zuiker on May 24, 2026

Josh Ritter is one of our favorite singer-songwriters, and I’ve seen him perform at least six times, often with Erin but also with Oliver and Malia. Earlier this year, Ritter was scheduled for two nights at the Haw River Ballroom, where I’d last seen him. But Erin and I had plane tickets to St. Croix and we were going to miss his shows, and then a big winter storm came through North Carolina so we pushed our travel out, we hunkered in our warm house, and Ritter’s second show was canceled.

So, I bought two tickets to the final night of Ritter’s tour at the famed Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee. I invited my college buddy, Mark Schreiner, to join me in early May. Mark lives in Raleigh and he worked at Duke University until last summer. Now he’s a part-time announcer at The Classical Station and I get to listen to him talk about classical music when I’m driving to the Wednesday evening pick-up soccer game. Mark and I connect every few months for lunch, and we’ve hoped for years to take a trip together. But life got busy and I didn’t even think about the Nashville details. With airfares and AirBnB prices a bit much, we decided instead to drive to Boone, visit a couple of the breweries, and hike Grandfather Mountain.

Still, I was holding two tickets to the Ryman show. I asked around and found a Vanderbilt colleague whose parents live in Nashville and was happy to be introduced to Josh Ritter. I transferred the tickets to them from the cabin in Boone. The night of the concert, Mark and I sat at the cabin’s kitchen table to record a long conversation about our memories of John Carroll University and how our we reconnected in North Carolina and on the Duke campus. (I posted one segment over on Wan Smol Blog.)

Here’s a video from Ritter about that Ryman show:

Ritter’s tour was over but he’d committed to a make-up date for that canceled Haw River Ballroom show. Erin surprised me with tickets from a local friend, so there we were with Oliver (and Mary and Ginny) last Tuesday for his stand-up standout solo performance. It was awesome: nearly two hours of Ritter singing his stories—Truth is a Dimension is both funny and deep—filling the old textile factory with his exuberance.

Good friends. Good music. Good travel.

Island hopping

by Anton Zuiker on May 7, 2026

Last night, I finished reading The Wayfinder, a novel by Adam Johnson. I had started this book on Christmas Day (I give books to each of my family, and when I saw this on the table at Flyleaf Books, I took it home and put it under the tree with my name on the tag), and I took my time reading the 713 pages. Savored them, really.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story of Tonga and the royal intrigue that sends princes and storytellers and poets and fefine girls and a talking parrot on journeys throughout the South Pacific. It’s Polynesian magic realism (written by a Stanford University professor who is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe). I read this here in North Carolina, but what made it especially personal for me was my own connection to the Pacific: my time in Hawaii, where I briefly studied the Hawaiian language, and my Peace Corps service in Vanuatu, where I drank kava (“bitter like puddled water” writes Johnson, just as I remember it). Through the years, I’ve also read with interest about the knowledge of traditional navigators, such as this 2016 NYTimes feature and this 2025 science story, both about the Marshall Islands.

What might a nomadic life look like? Consider Vaha-loa. Cradled by wave troughs and weaned on limu, this maritime vagabond had, before his first whisker, felled a man with a Tahitian sling, shared breath with a volcano in Vanuatu, and seen the seas luminesce against submerged reefs. His father taught him the arts of barter and ransom. His mother, stealth and evasion. And he had a third parent: the vastness of the sea, whose tutelage remediated all other lessons but one: a human’s lowly place in the oceanic scheme.

I liked that line about sharing the breath of life with a volcano—I had breathed in the vapors of Benbow, Yasur, and Lopevi, all volcanoes in Vanuatu (and Kilauea in Hawaii).

Earlier in the novel, Moon Appearing, one of the heroines—there are many strong and wise girls and women in this story, in which the king and other men wreak havoc across the seas—“finished her chores, her hair had fallen and she smelled like pond water. It was evening, and the light from the west lit the thorny ribs of palm fronds and set the pale green ferns aglow.”

As I read that, I remembered swinging in my hammock in Liro Village in the late afternoon as I looked across the village through “a green and liquid light that I swear I could just about swim through.”

Reading this book was like once again swaying in that hammock, swimming in the glow of the islands, floating in the poetry of village life and sounds of tropical birds.

Kōrero is another heroine, a girl storyteller who connects all the threads of this story. Her name is the Māori word for talking and conversation, much like the Bislama yumi stap storian and also talk story that I learned in Hawaii. Both of those phrase have been important through my 25 years of blogging and community building and influenced my decade of narrative. I’ve been thinking about ways to keep up that focus, and The Wayfinder pointed the way.

“Kuo pau ke ke ‘alu,” she said to him. (You must go.)
“Pea ko koe e nofo,” he responded. (And you remain.)

That’s a refrain throughout the story. So good.

This was quite the reading experience. Thank you, Adam Johnson.

Gift bags

by Anton Zuiker on April 28, 2026

Another text message from my local bookseller, Flyleaf Books, came in today saying my order of Unreasonable Hospitality: The Field Guide was in. So, at the end of the day — after annual performance reviews for three of my colleagues, and a group meeting for a project I’m on — I drove over to retrieve two copies of the handbook. I also picked up a copy of the original book by Will Guidara, since I’d given away my last copy just yesterday. It must be over 10 copies that I’ve gifted, because this bestselling book is meaningful to me and I want others to be inspired by it, with the story of Eleven Madison Park and how Guidara and his team found ways, both simple and over the top, to acknowledge their restaurant’s guests.

I’d given that copy of Unreasonable Hospitality to a colleague yesterday at the end of our day-long team retreat. We’d spent the day looking back on a year’s goals and challenges and results and accomplishments. We’d also heard from a couple of the leaders with their historical perspectives and guidance on what’s important to focus on in the months ahead. I had prepared handwritten notes and gifts for each of my colleagues, and the two leaders. This is part of my goal for 2026 to become a better gift giver, inspired in part by Guidara but also Erin and Edwin and others in my circle.

“I like that you’ve reused gift bags, which we do at our house,” said one. I was about to hand her the bag with Unreasonable Hospitality. Perfect, I thought to myself, and out loud I said, “Yes, thanks for noticing! I dug into the box of bags at home and this is what was left.” I’d felt bad about the bags not matching or being pristine, but this comment and the team’s chuckles told me this was even better. I’ll probably write a version of this blog post into the notes pages of the handbook.

Oh, and I gave copies of The agile comms handbook to other members of the team.

The easy postcard

by Anton Zuiker on April 10, 2026

Uncle Larry's postcards to Jenny, collected

My uncle, Larry Zuiker, founded a hikers club in Arizona and wrote a book about his treks throughout the western United States and our national parks, and he once lead me on hike near Phoenix when I was there for a conference.

Over the last 20 years, Larry has been sending me postcards about his adventures, including in Zion National Park. When we saw him in Boulder for Uncle Denny’s funeral, Larry had given me and Erin tips for our own trip to Zion, including to get up to Walter’s Wiggles and Angel’s Landing; he followed up by sending his own photos of the canyon’s hikes, simply writing on the back of each photo, adding our address, and affixing a stamp. As I blogged last week, I only made it as far as Scout Point, but on my way down the trail, I paused at the top of the Wiggles to record a short video message to Larry that I texted him later that night. I also sent him a Zion postcard once I returned home to North Carolina.

In Boulder, I also had learned that Larry’s been sending postcards to some of my other cousins. Jenny had her collection on a ring so we could turn through them all. I was impressed that Jenny had presented them this way, and I had even more admiration for my uncles.

Coincidentally, the same day that I was hiking the wiggles, my friend Karyn Murphy, who lives in Homer, Alaska, was telling her own story of a postcard collection. Alloted just five minutes to show and tell (it’s a format called PechaKucha), she explained how her mother had sent simple-seeming postcards to her when she was living on the island of Molokai and how, in the final year of her mother’s life, she returned the favor. It’s a heartwarming story and, given Karyn’s artistic and curious nature, an inspiring one: listen and watch. (Karyn told a version of this story in one of the Talk Story sessions I hosted in 2012. Watch here and read the News & Observer report.)

And yesterday, at a perfect vineyard wedding in Lovingston, Virginia, I was invited to do just that. Instead of a traditional guestbook, Agustin and Maya invited us to pick a postcard from the rack—cities, states, countries, and national parks—write a message, and drop it into a metal lunchbox. Zion was there, and many other places I’ve visited or hope this lovely and talented couple may one day visit, but instead I selected Big Bend National Park, which reminded me of my sister-in-law’s art about the Rio Grande and the rafting trip in Big Bend that Katherine had taken us on in 2015. ‘May you have wonderful adventures!’ I finished my note to the newlyweds.

Here on my desk is a stack of unused postcards, which I’ve ben collecting since my childhood and that I dug out of a storage box. In another box, I’ve saved the cards I’ve received through the years; it was fun and emotional to reread these. Last year, I wrote about the collection of postcards that Malia had written to me and Erin during her studies in Madrid and tour through Europe. Her messages made me proud and happy.

Giles Turnbull recently wrote a blog post about How to write more postcards — “Make it easy, like texting is,” he wrote, along with advice that “you don’t have to have a lot to say. It’s fine to just send a single question, or a sentence or two.”

Thank you, Larry and Karyn and Agustin and Maya and Giles, Malia, and so many others.

It's good to be outside

by Anton Zuiker on April 5, 2026

From the Watchman Trail, Zion National Park

As I noted in Shows I attended in 2025, my personal five-year plan, under the question “What is my state of mind [in 2030]?” says I will find awe, beauty, and wonder from nature and spend 5 full days outside each year.

I’m glad to have just done that with the family. Our trip to Zion National Park was spectacular.

Sure, I had moments of impatience and frustration and worry—a work stress was particularly hard to shake—but being able to slow down, breathe deeply, and look up and around and into the eyes of my loved ones confirmed that this outdoors goal is right to be at the top of my ‘vivid vision’ document.

Read | posts, or go to the ARCHIVES.