In Praise of the Non-Linear
- Dec 5, 2025
- 12 min read
by Tyler Dempsey
If I cared about linear progress, I would’ve never gotten picked up by a plane hitchhiking.
Had I taken my friend’s offer to drive me from Anchorage to Denali in early-May of 2017, after arriving in the 49th State from a winter in Missoula, MT, I wouldn’t remember a single damn thing of that trip today.
Lucky for me, I’d spent seven months living a pretty pedestrian lifestyle. I missed the carefreeness, the anything-might-happen-ness of Alaska. Plus, I knew I couldn’t smell the ambrosial cottonwoods by staring blankly at them from my friend’s windshield.
So, north of the city, I drug my backpack and the acoustic guitar I’d just carefully stored back out of her trunk, gave her a quick hug, a thank you, and stuck out my thumb.
Several times I’d hitchhiked this exact route. I knew getting to Pittman Road beyond the glitter of Wasilla wouldn’t take long. And it wasn’t five minutes before someone offered just that.
The Chugach Mountains whizzed past till we pulled into what locals call “The Valley,” where centuries ago, the Knik and Matanuska Glaciers confluenced together, their gigantic weights pulverizing the landscape into some of the flattest and most fertile farmland in all the State.
I thanked the driver, stepped out, and took in the view. Reliving past adventures up Matanuska and Pioneer Peaks, which dominated the skyline. The Talkeetna Range off north glowed as ever-present sun rebounded from snow clinging to their divots and north-facing angles.
Again, my thumb took a position which can have no other meaning than: “Are you someone who has to know everything? Do you prefer life to be totally, utterly predictable? Or is the Unknown more your thing?”
If you’ve hitchhiked more than a handful of times, you earn a sixth sense about whether a car will pick you up. And it’s rarely wrong.
For instance, an RV, sporting room for you and twenty more hitchhikers, will not stop. I’m sorry. My eyes never instinctively dart over my shoulder if a Honda Civic, three-years-old, passes me by. But, give me a beat-up Chevy, a VW Bus — or, in this instance, a thirty-year-old Ranger — and start it backfiring my way, and my Spidey senses go nuts.
At least, usually.
This one had something unusual in the bed, though. Something that would throw even the most veteran thumber’s psychic prowess off-kilter.
An airplane wing.
In spite of that, its blinker came on. Slowly it drifted outside the neat, white lines. And the ancient man behind the wheel leaned over to hand crank the window down.
“Hop in!” he yelled.
·
Toward his final years, my grandfather resembled, sitting or standing, a symbol. Because, for decades, he’d lived a life that, if charted in a way to be taken in visually, in a single gulp, would appear to have been drafted by a madman.
Had you caught him side-profile during those years, this is what you would’ve seen: ?
His spine, leaving the base of his skull, took an arcing journey, till it firmly latched to his pelvis, bearing likeness to a Warner-Bros-style bow and arrow drawn cartoonishly backward until its two points almost touched. Walking, he’d steady himself by bracing his palm on the ground.
And it wasn’t shrapnel he’d taken in his back from a grenade while working as a tank mechanic in the Korean War that bore the blame. Though, that didn’t help. And it probably wasn’t the dump body, the entire open-box container mounted to a dump truck, that fell on his head while working as a maintenance guy at the college I graduated from, the pressure severing his left ear, snapping his sternocleidomastoid, the rope-like muscle on the side of the neck, and shooting his upper-canine teeth out both cheeks.
But that didn’t do any good, either.
It turns out, if you leave formal education in the Fifth Grade and follow whatever seems interesting at the time, or might make a little money, basically winging it, there are plenty of years to drift the winds of labor until something bends you into a question mark.
But it wasn’t his time with the Union Pacific Railroad. Or even the odd-jobs fixing Toyotas as a side-hustle, despite what you’d think.
Piano Technician was the job that did him in.
·
There are some good things to be said about long-distance trail running.
Not many, but some.
For instance, Pheidippides ran 26.2 miles from Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory over the Persians in 490 BCE. Now, hundreds of times a year, people pay homage to running’s once-unmatchable-ability to communicate information over long distances by signing up to eat a lot while running through the woods at their local marathon.
(Pheidippides died right afterward, but nobody cares. Forget about it.)
No matter how you look at it, running’s an unparalleled way to measure human potential. Each weekend, during every month of the year, people line up to try running 100 miles. And, more and more, 200- or even 300-mile races keep popping up.
It makes me wonder, if you have ever heard of Katie Schide, Courtney Dauwalter, Killian Jornet, or David Roche?
And if not, why?
Why — instead of LeBron James, Travis Kelce, and Serena Williams, who you undoubtedly know — not them?
Because what these athletes pull off in a day is far more interesting, infinitely more badass, than literally anything anybody on a baseball diamond ever accomplished.
So, why does almost no one care?
·
There was a gilded time — 1968, to be precise — when the powers that be didn’t give a shit. The training wheels seen nowadays in organized sports, like the Olympics, didn’t exist.
And it was in this glorified era the British Sunday Times created the “Golden Globe Race.”
Men and women would compete in a non-stop, single-handed, round-the-word yacht race. Ignore the sissies claiming the race’s lack of requirements to enter, a bad, or even dangerous, idea. Because the same wimps bemoaned, after-the-fact, that most of the entrants couldn’t finish, got lost, sank, died, or committed suicide, allegedly.
Anyway.
Robin Knox-Johnston, from Putney, London, was the only person out of nine to finish. Ten months after starting, his thirty-two-foot boat returned to where it began, on April 22, 1969, where he was promptly congratulated and handed his award money (£5,000), which he immediately donated to the family of the guy who, miserably failing, decided to fake a circumnavigation before committing suicide (allegedly.)
But that doesn’t interest me.
As I said, getting predictably from Point A to Point B is fine for most people. You could finish school, find a job, a home, and start a family, like being shot from a cannon, all by the age of twenty-three. But you won’t have any stories. None worth listening to, anyway.
It’s the reason I sat up straight when I first learned of another of the Golden Globe’s competitors, Bernard Moitessier, who, in a strong position to beat Knox-Johnston, decided to hell with commercialized competition, instead sailing off-course to Tahiti before eventually “completing” the race by returning to Falmouth, England, after he’d circled the globe one and a half times.
His tan, for those fortunate enough to see it, was perfect.
·
How hard was being a Piano Technician in the 1950’s, anyway?
First of all, you didn’t need any newfangled understanding of today’s electronic devices. You only needed a tuning fork and your ears. And luckily, when my grandfather was tuning pianos, he still had both of them.
The only additional requirement was what old-timers called “skill.” So, most pianos arrived to Technicians having been perfectly neglected for decades. Restoring them, where they were filling a family with happiness and a room with rich sound, was as much a mechanical process as it was an artform. Unlike today, Technicians had to make manual adjustments for inharmonicity — how higher notes sound flat and lower notes sound sharp — and had to build temperament octave by counting imaginary beats by ear. Meaning they were going off vibes rather than mathematics.
If it all sounds confusing, all you need to know is, it was incredibly easy.
Pianos have around twelve thousand parts, so knowledge and tools for dealing with a wide range of mechanical issues was paramount. Therefore, my grandfather traveled with his tools and expertise to peoples’ homes.
Any amount of money was way, way more than he had, and his six kids were constantly getting hungry, so he grew a quick clientele by working for less than his competitors. Also earning a reputation of pushing hours beyond what would have mentally and physically exhausted other technicians, for finishing the job in a day, regardless the effort.
Still, there were a few corpse-like instruments that wouldn’t metamorphosize into angelic, breathing creatures — not in a day, at least — requiring my grandfather to bring them home, earning him enough time to putz around and figure out what was wrong with them.
And this is where it gets interesting.
·
The most watched sports in the United States are football, college football, basketball, baseball, and soccer, in that order. Running holds space near the very bottom, just below Extreme Ironing and competitive eating.
One might argue the reason is, not a lot of people in the U.S. understand the rules of competitive running. And I would say, have those same people explain icing in hockey or why only goalkeepers in soccer are allowed to wear long tracksuit bottoms in cold weather.
Well, what about the fact that not that many people actually are runners?
That’s true, but when was the last time you looked around and saw adults actively participating in any sport?
But don’t races take a long time? Like days? That sounds boring and like a commitment.
What about fucking golf?
If spectators aren’t involved in the sport themselves, and therefore wouldn’t be searching inspiration from the pros, while at the same time, little is actually understood about the sport they’re watching, aside from knowing the team or player with more points is probably winning, why would something like 17.5 million people tune in for a football game while a world record at a marathon might not receive coverage at all?
One word: lineality.
·
At a low estimate, pianos weigh around two hundred pounds. This varies based on size and type. But if you drove around your city taking averages, the number you’d probably land on would look closer to five hundred.
Imagine needing to move one of these behemoths out of somebody’s house and over to your own.
How would you do it?
You’d probably start, like my grandfather, by having the owners help, snorting and scraping it outside through any means necessary. Once out, you’d wipe your brow and comment what a damn pain in the ass moving pianos is. The owners would look you in the eye and tell you they’re glad they don’t do this for a living.
But then what?
Well, here’s the method he settled on:
Grab a thick plastic bucket and towel from the passenger seat of your Chevy. Say a few prayers as you place them alongside the piano, the bucket in front of your less-dominant leg, the towel beneath the mouth of the bucket for increased friction. You’ll see why in a second. Assume the closest thing resembling a deadlift given the piano’s awkward dimension. Try not to tear anything as you lift, simultaneously sliding the bucket as far as it’ll go, gently transferring the weight onto it, hoping the towel keeps it from sliding.
Use what few moments it takes backing the flatbed of the truck underneath the side of the piano to catch your breath. Then strap the wheeled, wooden square you’ve fashioned specifically for this purpose onto the bottom of the raised leg.
Now comes the hard part.
There’s no “track” the wheel is on, so in addition to needing — at a buck-fifty — to lift five hundred pounds, prepare to do so in an explosion. Because, from the initial force, the bed has to get cleared by the back of the piano, simultaneously using completely different muscle groups to steer the thing, hopefully not through your back glass, all the while dodging the bucket and not damaging a precious heirloom.
My grandfather said if he missed one of the aforementioned details, in any way, he’d need to rest for six to eight hours before trying again.
But he almost never missed.
Still think being a Piano Technician was easy?
·
Only true narcissuses — superfans — watch early-season games.
The rest of the population have lives.
But, give it a month or so. Soon the numbers begin doing something to people. And the guy at work who you thought only played video games and masturbated might catch you in the breakroom and go, “You watching the Hawks, they’re twelve and oh?”
The “oh” is the important part.
Could it be? A trajectory? Something to pin your hopes to?
People need something to invest in before they get invested. Hope relies on consistency. Ever watch a season of “The Voice?” It’s a mega-sped-up version of what happens over the course of a sports season.
No one gives a shit about the first few episodes. Hell, they don’t even know who to root for. But then, teams start breaking out.
Team-Brittany.
Team-Kyle.
Whatever.
People attach their identities to something that, for most of them, will never be anything more than pixels on a screen. Rivalries form. And we love our rivalries. This creates social identities, a sense of drama, and communities. And, let’s be honest, people have none of that. Not usually.
But, tell me, do team-Brittany fans turn off the show refusing to watch another episode, when Brittany, rejected, walks off-stage crying?
For fuck’s sake, no!
They watch till the very, very end.
Remember I said 17.5 million people watch an average football game? Well, last year, 127.7 million watched the Super Bowl. And it wasn’t because they’d all been rooting for the Eagles or Chiefs all along.
They watched because we idolize a line continuing in an uninterrupted way. It rubs our egos. Supports the theory that there is a “best way” of doing something. We want less room for argument, because we love winning those, too. We equate greatness with consistency.
But running doesn’t work that way. The G.O.A.T. argument doesn’t hold up in a sport where last month’s winner might not even finish this month’s race. Inconsistency is just part of the equation. Cracks always exist for possibilities to seep through. The lines are often a circle.
·
Hop in, I did. The ancient man was Don Glaser. And, if he could be trusted, he was a goddamn bush pilot.
When asked, I told him I was heading to Denali.
“No shit,” he said, “I worked there a long time ago.”
“No shit,” I said, “where?”
“Denali Air.”
“No shit.”
I told him I was friends with the guy who owned Denali Air. And you’ll never guess his response.
He called our mutual friend right then and there. And I hoped this man who was well into his eighties could multitask like this and still drive. I heard RD’s voice crackle from his cellphone.
“Howdy, Don, what can I do for you?”
“Ron, I’m sitting here with our friend Tyler.”
“No shit.”
Learning how this came to be, Ron mentioned that Dan (I’m not making this up — Ron, Don, Dan. I knew two pilots named Roger who lived a quarter-mile from each other and people were always mixing them up) yet another pilot we all knew, was just leaving Merrill Field Airport in Anchorage. And, probably, if Don wanted to, he could drop me off at the side of the airport in Willow (about the halfway point of my trip) and Dan could scoop me up.
No shit.
Don and I shared stories. Since the ‘60’s he’d flown wolf biologists around Isle Royale so they can continue an ongoing study. I said I was a guide tourists hired when they wanted to hike or backpack but were too scared of bears to do it alone.
But then we were parting ways, and it was on to the next story.
Dan and I lifted from the Willow airstrip. Quickly affording me a bird’s eye view of the place I love so much. The place I’m usually so nose-deep in, trying to push the line of my life forward, that I hardly notice.
·
I only ever wanted be an old man with stories. Someone like my grandpa.
But even having him right in front of me as a guide, it wasn’t like I could look at where he was, and trace how he got there.
When he dropped out of school at ten-years-old he hadn’t set out to be anything. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. And, if he had, he would have never made it to where he did.
I always had this nagging feeling I was a failure because of the life I led in my twenties and thirties. While friends and peers were buying up homes, having their second kid, and flaunting bank accounts with more than three-figures, I was dorking off on whatever nonsense it seemed like I was up to at the time. Never really getting anywhere.
Years ticked by and the nagging grew. It became more frequent. More pronounced. I believed I was worthless. Because, while my friend’s lines rocketed forward, mine was spinning out. The track I created was approaching some irreversible singularity. Where “life,” or “success,” or any other buzzword we’re told to strive for was flying out of reach.
I think about that now. Almost forty. Married. A house of my own. Happy.
I think of the open air around Dan and I as we floated above it all that day in 2017. Bound only to a moment in time. Below us were the choices I’d made to get there. Down around the hills I’d watched two bears fuck on, before they lost their balance and tumbled alongside one another to its bottom, afterward walking in different directions like nothing happened. A million miles from there, was a tiny island in an immense ocean where I’d once sat with my guitar and watched a green flash at sunset. There were waterfalls and glaciers and moments of laughing till I cried scattered between the two in all directions.
And if you took a map and stuck a pin in each of these places, and drew a continuous line connecting all of them, then took a step back, squinting, not too concerned with what waited for you off in the distance, you might see my face looking back.
Tyler Dempsey is the author of 4 books and host of Another Fucking Writing Podcast. He lives in Arizona with his wife and dogs.
