The Empty Stage

Johnny Cash, loss, and redemption.

I am on stage at the Ryman Auditorium, the most famous concert hall in Nashville. A photographer tells me to smile. I hate getting my picture taken, but that day smiling came easy.

After years apart due to the pandemic, my family was reunited: my mother and father, my husband and children, and my sister and her husband and kids. We were in Nashville to celebrate my parents’ 50^th wedding anniversary. My parents drove from Connecticut, my sister flew from Dallas, and we drove from St. Louis. It was the first time the ten of us had taken a vacation together.

We didn’t know it would be the last.

Sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows of country music’s holy ground. Legends surrounded me: Willie, Dolly, Hank, and my favorite, Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash, who sang with the weariness of reconciling mortality with morality; Johnny Cash, apocalyptic and American to the end.

There is no better music to ride out a pandemic than Johnny Cash. That’s a truth I never wanted to learn. Twenty-first-century truths are like that.

I had taken the kids to the Johnny Cash Museum the day before. I showed them his guitar, his crucifix ring, his handwritten lyrics to “Folsom Prison Blues.”

They shrugged. They knew Johnny Cash — his baritone blared through their childhoods — but preferred the Glen Campbell Museum, where we belted out “Rhinestone Cowboy” karaoke to the horrified amusement of other patrons. Nashville was in full “Nash Vegas” mode and the kids lapped up the flash. Being in the Johnny Cash Museum was too much like being at home.

“What’s wrong, Mama?” my son said when he found me on a bench, tears streaming down my face.

“Nothing,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m watching the last music video Johnny Cash made before he died. He was dying in this video. He was 71, the same age my parents are now. I was so scared they would die when covid came. I still am. I keep thinking about it and how lucky we are to see each other again.”

“And celebrate the anniversary,” he said. He was ten.

“That’s right. Watch with me. You can see a whole life in this video. You can see life go by so fast. Decades and decades, memory and regret, time too fast to bear.”

* * *

I look at family photos from our 2021 tour of the Ryman when I can handle it: my children with my father in the year before the cancer came. When a stage was what brought us together instead of what tore us apart. My father was diagnosed at stage four: terminal. Since then, we’ve lived on stolen time.

Our family reunions have turned into group texts about metastases and symptoms and signs. The endless search for signs: a cruel component of cancer, that evil guessing game. Trying to predict the future when the only certainty is that there won’t be one.

That’s when I put on Johnny Cash and cry for redemption. I’m not sure whose.

My dad is still here. A clinical trial extended his life beyond the initial prognosis. He got to see his musical hero, Neil Young, endorse my newsletter in December 2024. I never heard my dad so excited about something I had done. Forget my books — Neil Young liked my writing, Neil Young knew the name KENDZIOR! Neil Young has no idea how happy he made my family. It felt like a miracle that my dad beat the odds to see this surreal collision of his worlds.

That’s what happens when you are a Johnny Cash fan with a dying father: you look for signs. Then you look elsewhere, away from soulless technology, away from the corporeal void, toward what lasts when life won’t.

* * *

In September, I was talking with another writer about the collapse of the US media. We were bemoaning the glut of writers on Substack and longing for a business model that valued collaboration over competition.

“Do you remember The Highwaymen?” I asked.

“I loved The Highwaymen.”

The Highwaymen were a 1980s outlaw country supergroup of middle-aged men: Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Johnny Cash. Poets and prophets set to Casio keyboard production that somehow made the songs scarier instead of sillier. I had been playing the first Highwaymen album on a loop, in particular, the ominous sing-song “The Twentieth Century Is Almost Over”:

Ol’ Father Time is a-rumblin’ and a-rappin’
Standing at the window, thumpin’ and a-tappin’
Everybody’s waiting for something to happen
I hope it don’t happen to you!
You know that Judgement Day is getting nearer
There it is in the rearview mirror
If you duck down, I could see a little clearer — all over this world!

“We should form The Highwaymen, but for writers,” I said. “Like four really good writers and we’ll help each other out.”

“I call Willie,” my friend said instantly. I agreed; he is Willie.

“I’m not sure who I am,” I said. I’d been on a Kristofferson kick since he died, and like Waylon, I am lonesome and ornery, though not mean.

Then I laughed. Who was I kidding? “I call Johnny!”

On October 10, I defended Johnny Cash against a widely derided Wall Street Journal article by an author who once thought him uncool. As a joke, I quote-tweeted the piece on the social media site BlueSky, writing, “I want to shoot the author of this article just to watch him die”, a reference to Cash’s infamous “Folsom Prison Blues” lyric, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” People laughed at my line and moved on to real problems.

Except for the BlueSky administrators, who suspended me a month later. On November 10, they deleted my account. Days later, they announced on BlueSky that I had threatened to murder a writer, removing my one-liner from the Cash context. Because they banned me, I couldn’t see them lie: a reporter sent me a screenshot.

My friend saw the reason for the ban and wrote: “Are you fucking kidding me?!?!?”

“At least now I know which Highwayman I am,” I said.

BlueSky reinstated my account after outcry but never apologized for portraying me as an aspiring killer. I encouraged folks to focus on other banned users, like Palestinians documenting genocide. Then I set about my real business: reclaiming my past.

The main reason I wanted my Bluesky account back was to grab photos I had taken of birds. I didn’t bother to explain this to the terminally online of BlueSky. They don’t care about the real sky. Their world is loveless and literal. They don’t understand nature or poetry or music, and they don’t understand me.

The ban was inane, but I did not like getting dragged into a spectacle at a vulnerable time. My dad’s clinical trial drugs had stopped working and I was breaking down. When BlueSky deleted my account, I was already gone. I was doing what I do when the pain gets too much: hitting the road and driving until I could vanish into the woods.

* * *

There is a part of the Ozarks I go to when life is so unbearable, I worry I will end it if I find no salvation. It has never let me down. I rarely write about it.

The land knows me. This sounds arrogant and superstitious. I hope I’m not falling prey to hubris by confessing it, but I do so with gratitude. I can feel recognition in the air. Every time I am there, something magical happens. The botanist George Washington Carver wrote that nature will share its secrets if you love it enough. That has been my experience, and I believe it cuts both ways.

I do not drink, do drugs, go to therapy, or take antidepressants. I don’t judge people who do. But when I am on the river or in the woods, it is for the same reason: to heal or at least find enough reprieve to keep going.

And to look for signs, or when I am lucky, have signs look for me.

2025 brought nightmare weather: a record tornado in St Louis, record cold, record heat. There was no autumn: green leaves fell to the ground like a mockery of hope. The flailing fall felt like an outward manifestation of my inward sorrow. Fall is the season of death, but it is also the most beautiful, and it had stopped unnaturally, like an infected body that would not die or heal. Nature was locked in unchanging agony.

Until early November, when I went to Don Robinson State Park and had a supernatural experience. That was the first sign.

I can never tell this story, I thought as I drove home. I want to, but people will think I’m insane. However, since Bluesky already has people thinking I’m a killer, I can risk it.

I have written about Don Robinson State Park before. It is not my secret place, but it is the most special place that I can easily visit. The park was created by Don Robinson, a millionaire recluse who lived like a pauper and bought the exact amount of land as Central Park but let it remain wild and free. Robinson donated his property to the Missouri state park system when he died.

In Don Robinson State Park, the drab world of delayed fall was gone. There was an explosion of color, as if the entire season had arrived in one day. I walked the trail in solitary wonder. That is another great thing about Missouri state parks: if you get there early, you are almost always alone. Gold, orange, red, bright yellow, even neon green: I was a fragment of Don Robinson’s kaleidoscope, rolling around inside.

I wandered in awe and then felt something in my hand: I was holding a leaf. I had not plucked it nor did I catch it. I was simply holding a leaf and did not know how it got there. I put it in my pocket and kept on.

At the end of the trail is Don Robinson’s grave. I’m going to return the leaf to him, I thought. I’ll put it on his grave. Folks in Missouri often leave coins or stones on the grave of Don Robinson. This idea isn’t as strange as you might think.

What was strange was the wet shape on the gravestone the same size as the leaf I held. I could not discern what caused the marking. The morning was cloudy, but it had not rained in days. I placed my leaf on top of the shape — and instantly, the sun erupted, lighting up the Ozark foothills in a dazzling display.

I grabbed my phone to take photos and document the depth of the change. My leaf was like a key that opened a portal of sunlight.

I aimed my camera upward, only to find an eagle soaring in what had become a clear blue sky. The clouds had vanished. As I tried to snap a photo of the eagle, two more joined it. The three birds flew in a circle over my head like they were performing a dance. I put my phone away and watched. Within minutes, the birds departed, the sun retreated back behind the clouds, and all returned to how it was.

I walked to my car, trying not to think that the ghost of Don Robinson had emerged to show me the beauty of the world in exchange for my leaf, but it seemed like something he would do.

The second sign came days later. Trying to calm my racing thoughts, I walked the perimeter of Creve Coeur Lake, a place I kayak so often I know its waterbirds and like to believe they know me. Like Don Robinson, Creve Coeur had exploded in color. It was breathtaking enough to gaze at golden trees reflected in a mirror lake at golden hour — when on top of that, a rainbow appeared. A rainbow leading to the pot of gold that is the forest of Creve Coeur, French for “broken heart”.

I usually prefer remote regions. But I like Creve Coeur because it’s popular with immigrants. It is a joy to hear people marvel at the same rainbow in different languages.

I decided that on Monday I would drive south to my sanctuary in the Ozarks. Nature was healing, and it was healing me. I felt almost human again. Something was telling me it was time.

* * *

Johnny Cash was a cover artist. He was a dynamic original songwriter — as “Folsom Prison Blues” made clear —but he is probably the best cover artist the music world has known. Not only country, but any music at all.

When Johnny Cash covers a song, it becomes a Johnny Cash song. This was obvious to everyone when he covered Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”, the song whose video I was watching at the museum, but it is true of every song he recorded.

I listened to Johnny Cash covers when I was writing my book Hiding in Plain Sight, because writing non-fiction feels like being a cover artist. I am reinterpreting a world that others have built, breathing new meaning into old memories, trying to convey in emotion what was forgotten in facts.

One of my favorite Cash covers is of Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind,” for the way his voice nearly breaks at the lines: “You won’t read that book again/Because the ending’s just too hard to take.”

That’s how I felt about Hiding in Plain Sight. It’s how I felt about the 21^st century, since the 20^th century was all over, all over this world. A technofascist hell had taken its place: a world where Johnny Cash is replaced with AI; a world where walks in nature are replaced with virtual reality facsimiles.

Cash came from Arkansas. When the kids were young, we saw his childhood home in Dyess. I wrote about that trip in the first draft of my book The Last American Road Trip, but like the sections on Bobbie Gentry or any southern singer, I was told to take it out, that it was irrelevant. I repurposed the Gentry section for this newsletter, and it was one of the most popular essays I published.

The corporate world hates soul. As a result, it hates the south. The south is the cradle of American music: folk, blues, bluegrass, country, gospel, rock. The songs of the south are inextricably bound to nature. They often bemoan natural disasters, which leads to musings on God, which leads to warnings of God’s ruthless ways, and the need to cleanse one’s soul, and guard it, and save it.

The south has no monopoly on American music. Motown is Detroit. Rap and punk thrived on the coasts. But it is the cradle. And cradles are where you go to be reborn.

Not too far from my special place is a section of river where people get baptized, and on many an occasion I’ve wanted to do it, not to join an organized religion, but because I love the water that much.

Johnny Cash was a man of faith and a man of sin. He suffered and overcame, and left a record of those trials.

It is the same beauty that I see in this part of the Ozarks, with its ancient towering boulders, and crystal waters that can rise in a flash flood and kill you, and towering trees of thorns, and deep rumbling waterfalls beneath the ground.

The parts of America I love best lie over karst formations, where water seeps through the soil and forms intricate caverns invisible from above. This includes my Missouri and Cash’s Arkansas and Tennessee.

The man in black above and the earth in black below.

* * *

I have been to my sanctuary about a half dozen times, and these are some of the things that happened:

I saw the aurora borealis — twice. Neither time was forecast. I had driven to a clearing in the forest to see the Milky Way and instead was greeted by the northern lights on the two occasions they were visible in southern Missouri.

I walked to a creek wondering if anything good would ever happen and within seconds found a rare fossil.

I reached into a river and pulled out a rock with my son’s name etched on it not by human hand.

This is only a sampling: some secrets are between the land and me.

On Tuesday, I went for a walk at dawn and was greeted by another rarity: frost flowers. A frost flower is a curling piece of ice that emerges from a plant when moisture is pushed through the stem and hits the frozen air. They grow in delicate spirals and last hours before they melt, leaving no trace.

I have seen frost flowers a few times. But I never saw them like this: bountiful fields of silvery white, so many I at first mistook them for litter and was annoyed. I wandered in the cold for hours, examining each one. No two frost flowers are alike.

Had I been able to sleep well, had I not been up early with anxiety, I would have missed the frost flowers. By the time I drove out to the trail I planned to hike, they had melted. My sorrow had become my solace.

This is why I think the land is watching out for me.

My hike began at The Devil’s Well. A long staircase leads to an iron gate blocking you from plunging a hundred feet into an underground lake. The lake is assumed to reach the river to which I was headed, but no one knows for sure. All you know, as you climb above it into the Ozark mountains, is that you are towering above a secret world.

Like Don Robinson, like Creve Coeur, the five-mile hike was lit with vibrant foliage. By now I was used to it, though never unappreciative, since I had feared fall would never come. My goal was to hike to a river cave I had paddled in 2023. Rumor was you could climb to the outside of the cave and see a spot the painter Thomas Hart Benton had immortalized eighty years ago.

I veered off the main trail onto the cave trail and climbed down to the river’s edge. The view was identical to Benton’s painting: even a frail tree leaned at the same angle. I climbed into the cave, where the water is as turquoise as the Caribbean. Last time I was here, it was with my husband in a canoe, trying to navigate without hitting the walls. This time, I could appreciate its grandeur: a ceiling of stalactites and intricate limestone formations.

I was not alone. There was an elderly fisherman who told me he had been fishing in the cave for fifty years, because it was the most reliable spot in winter. This was his special place, not mine, and I let him be.

That night the sky performed a symphony: the Milky Way, a shooting star, and then the aurora borealis, pink and green and white. I walked to a pond and caught its reflection. I couldn’t believe I was given so many gifts at once.

This is proof of God, in my eyes. Proof that redemption is possible. I don’t see the wonders of nature as a reward so much as an invitation to keep trying. That for one night my suffering is recognized and relieved in magnitude equal to the weight I carry.

* * *

In remote parts of the Ozarks, my cell phone does not work. I cannot receive texts. I can get internet in places with WiFi, so I knew I was part of an internet controversy, even though I was not participating in it. I knew that at some point, as I drove north to St. Louis, my phone would erupt. I have never turned on social media notifications because I don’t hate myself. But texts alone would do it this time.

They poured in when I reached the highway. Many were from friends concerned I was censored. Others were from family, but I needed to drive several hours, and I would lose it if something new and bad had happened to my father in the one day I was away. I needed to hold on to the magic of that land for as long as I could.

I put on my iPod — I am never giving up my iPod — and sang outlaw country for outlaw terrain. Waylon, Johnny, Townes Van Zandt, Bobbie Gentry, Sammi Smith. I wondered for the hundredth time whether Gary P. Nunn lifted the melody of “London Homesick Blues” from Kris Kristofferson’s “Just the Other Side of Nowhere”. I wished social media was still the sort of place where you could ask a question like that and not get reported as offensive by an angry bad faith mob.

“I taught the weepin’ willow how to cry, cry, cry,” I sang to The Highwaymen’s “Big River”. “And I showed the clouds how to cover up a clear BlueSky…”

BlueSky is a bad place for people who like blue skies. Who like wild lands and poetic allusions and don’t live their lives to train AI modules, but to escape them.

It is not a place for Johnny Cash fans. Johnny Cash constantly sang about death. Killing in rage, killing in regret, getting executed for just and unjust reasons, natural disasters, the wrath of God, the loss of loved ones, the loss of yourself.

On social media, you are not supposed to talk about death. It is seen as uncouth and is cloaked in non-words like “unalived”: non-words that don’t even rise to the level of euphemism. They are the neologisms of humans self-censoring to dodge the rebuke of robots. What has become of us?

* * *

For months, I’ve had chest pain. It eases when I’m in the wild: away from the computer, away from social media, away even from the expectations that come with a newsletter like this.

It did not occur to me until now that my chest hurts because I need to get so many things off it. The main one being that my father is dying and I am struggling to process the dread and the pain. I have lived in anticipatory grief for over two years, with the slow collapse of the world forming a Greek chorus to my private tragedy.

It is a terrible time to be a person and a worse time to lose a person. I fear the years ahead, picturing the empty stage. Is an empty stage a space you enter or a void you feel? Stages of cancer, stages of grief. I shot straight to acceptance when I heard the news. My father always told me I did things too fast. Acceptance does not help the pain.

I look at our photo on the Ryman stage and hold the memory tight. That was a frost flower day, an aurora borealis day. A day that a decade ago would be mundane but turned rare and then gone. That day was real, that day was ours, and that is how I will remember my dad.

I look at the photos of birds that I retrieved. In kayaking season, I sent my mom a photo of a bird every day to cheer her up. I wanted to make sure I had all of them. Those birds are for her, like the secret spot in the Ozarks is for me. Like music is for all of us, from my father’s Neil Young to my Johnny Cash: transcendent comfort in the eternal friends of song.

* * *

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Handwritten lyrics to “Folsom Prison Blues”. All photos by me.

Inside the river cave.

Frost flower.

The northern lights.

The rainbow.

Sunset over a broken heart.