Jessica Michael

If one day you drive across a bridge rinked with black ice the day after dreaming of your death as my mother did and it happens that the wheels slide from underneath and turning into the parabola fails to arrest the guardrail—

“I have known salmon to be particularly talkative during the full moon. The same cannot be said for tuna, who are notoriously closed-mouthed, so to speak. Unless, of course, one knows the right questions to ask about their ancestral history. They simply adore genealogy, and will go on for hours reciting bloodlines and the like. In fact, I once engaged a school of tuna in a discussion about a common ancestor and ended up missing the South Equatorial current to Brazil. I had to swim all the way to

In Las Cruces, 500 miles south of my father’s last threat where everything blooming is crimson— we take dinner at the hacienda.

On a Friday in Philadelphia 1,400 songbirds stormed the windows and dropped— skyscraper casualties, folded and clipped, a passing broom for requiem

Support Into the Void by reading this piece in a beautiful print edition of Issue 14 that’ll look great on your bookshelf. Lazarus is tired of rising from the dead. Jesus has started yammering again about the good old days. The good old days, Lazarus says. You always end up murdered. But he doesn’t hear him, never does. He is prone to nostalgia—Lazarus can see memories of the adoring crowds of Galilee in the shine of his forehead. Lazarus is tending his orchids, the shade of sky in August ligh

First Annual Roverlander of the Year Winners We here at Overland Journal and Expedition Portal love our canines. In fact, we’ve thought of making pup ownership a requirement for employment. Many of us have hiked, camped, and overlanded with our four-legged adventurers, so we were excited to read all of the stories and photos we received for our inaugural Roverlander of the Year contest. Winners of the Ruffwear goodies were decided based on the number of Facebook post likes because we knew there

By Ruby the Adventure Dog Hi, I am Ruby, and I love adventure. That scar by my left eye was from a tussle with a rattlesnake! Read to the end to find out more about our first annual Roverlander of the Year contest and win some cool swag for your pup! If you’re going to be an adventure dog, you’d better sport the best gear. I decided to try out some of Ruffwear’s offerings on a recent trip to Comb Ridge, UT. The first part of any overland adventure is getting there, and sometimes for us pups,

In August of 1888, Bertha Benz loaded her two teenage sons into a Model III and headed 106 kilometers to visit her mother. This was no ordinary road trip—it was the first long-distance automobile adventure ever, and it changed the world. Benz was the wife and business partner of Karl Benz, the German engineer who invented the Benz-Patent Motorwagon. She was also his first and primary investor. As an unmarried woman, she originally invested in Karl’s failing iron construction company. When they