Finding more than 419 National Parks

April 28, 2019 10:06 PM

The death of a loved one carries with it a profound effect: For Mikah Meyer, his father's passing in 2005 inspired a three-year, 75,000-mile journey...
posted by dfm500 (2 comments total)

I appreciate that they addressed the cost of this kind of thing, but then they seem to kind of just handwaved it away. Were the churches paying him? Did he get sponsors finally? Was it all dependent on his Instagram follower count?
posted by Literaryhero at 6:51 AM on April 29, 2019

He seems like a decent guy and this was an interesting adventure, but something about the way this article is written gives me bad feels. It's presented in a way that makes this man, his journey, his grieving and so on seem very shallow, hedonistic, and caricature-millennial. I encounter paragraphs such as:

"It was at Dinosaur [Nat'l Monument] that Meyer had something of a religious experience. On a rafting trip, his group attracted the attention of a wild Canada goose. “We nicknamed him George,” Meyer said. “He just followed us everywhere — swam along our boat, joined us on hikes. He even slept next to our tents.” When Meyer shared the story of George the Goose on social media, one follower insisted that the bird was actually the spirit of Meyer’s late father, who wanted to be a part of his son’s journey."

It's almost as though the writer of the article is trying to convey that Meyer is an empty-headed self-obsessed nonbeliever whose journey is all about himself. By the time I got to the goose paragraph, I expected the article to end with a scene of him lighting a candle at Burning Man. Perhaps I'm just over-interpreting some not-very-insightful magazine writing in a fluff piece.
posted by Seaweed Shark at 7:41 AM on April 29, 2019