If you think a brutal sea and a barren landscape are the only hazards at Cape Disappointment, you’ve never had to make a midnight run to the Long Beach emergency room with a child burning up from a terrifyingly high fever. That chaotic night, complete with an eight-hour wait, a whopping $3,000 out-of-network bill, and an aging ER doctor who literally rolled into the room using a walker, is just one of the reasons this rugged park became the backdrop for several family survival stories in The Unbreakable Anchor. In fact, the landscape left such a permanent mark on our history that an original photograph of the driftwood and shifting tides at Cape D eventually became the actual cover of the book. Tucked into the extreme southwest corner of Washington State, right where the mouth of the Columbia River collides with the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean, lies a place that completely contradicts its own name. For years, my definition of Cape Disappointment was painted in a very specific shade of Pacific Northwest green. It was the color of my dad's old Toyota truck, that bright green rig topped with a red-and-white canopy that served as the carriage for our family's childhood adventures. Back when the park was still called Fort Canby, we only pulled that truck in there once, a short stop in the middle of a longer vacation down the Oregon Coast. It was a brief detour, but it became permanently burned into my memory for one reason: the wind. It was the kind of wind that whipped you right in the face, relentless and raw, sand peppering your skin until you ducked for cover. My mom hated it there. The wind never stopped. After that trip, my parents never returned, at least not until years later, when we convinced them to experience it again through the eyes of their grandchildren. My dad's bright green Toyota and pop-up camper at Cape Disappointment in the early 1980s. Long before RVs and reservation apps, this was how our family's adventures began. That first visit wasn't much to write home about. The driftwood graveyard. The piles of sand going on forever. The absence of trees in every direction. What I remember most is a landscape stripped bare, open and indifferent to the people standing in it. My dad had brought us to explore the old fort, which stood tall over the ocean and didn't disappoint, but the rest of the place had a raw, almost hostile quality that we weren't prepared for. It's ironic that what was little more than a windy pit stop in my youth would eventually become one of the most meaningful places in our family's story and a recurring backdrop in The Unbreakable Anchor. Cape Disappointment in the early 1980s. Taken from a bluff-top trail overlooking the Long Beach Peninsula, this view shows how much the landscape has changed before the forest canopy filled in. The name itself has a story worth telling. In 1788, English captain John Meares was searching for what he'd heard called the Great River of the West. When he reached this stretch of coastline, the treacherous sandbars concealed the river mouth so completely that he mistook it for nothing more than a shallow bay. Convinced there was no river to be found, he sailed on. He named the headland accordingly. Four years later, Captain Robert Gray found what Meares had missed. He navigated through those shifting sandbars and into the mouth of the river, naming it the Columbia after his ship. Gray's Harbor County here in Washington was named in his honor. What Meares saw as an ending was really just a hidden beginning, a river so vast and powerful it concealed itself behind its own geography. Lewis and Clark made their way here too, completing their extraordinary journey from Missouri all the way to the edge of the continent. You can stand in the interpretive center today and read their words, carved into a tree at the top of the bluff after they climbed up to take in the view: "By Land from the U. States in 1804 & 1805." Nearby, Fort Canby still stands, originally built during the Civil War and later expanded into an important coastal defense battery during World War II. For my boys, those visits were more than a history lesson. They were a reminder that the people who came before us faced impossible odds and kept going anyway. Originally built during the Civil War and expanded through World War II, Fort Canby helped defend the entrance to the Columbia River for generations. If you stand at the edge of the cliffs today, it becomes immediately clear why this stretch of coastline earned its grim reputation as the Graveyard of the Pacific. The headland is so rugged and deceptive, the sandbars so treacherous where the mighty Columbia River meets the open Pacific, that a single lighthouse wasn't enough to protect the ships trying to navigate it. It required two. Perched high on the cliffs is the Cape Disappointment Lighthouse, first lit on October 15, 1856, making it the oldest functioning lighthouse in the Pacific Northwest. But the massive rock formations blocked its light from ships approaching from the north, so the government built a second beacon. The North Head Lighthouse was completed on May 16, 1898, positioned two miles up the road to watch over the open ocean. When those lighthouses were built, the landscape around them was completely stripped of trees. Nothing but wind and cliff and churning water. Just two towers standing against the dark, doing their job, refusing to move. Decades after that first visit, after a massive multi-million-dollar state park renovation transformed the area, I returned to Cape Disappointment with my family and discovered something I hadn't expected: my favorite place on earth. It is completely full of trees now. A dense evergreen canopy has grown up over the years, shielding the campground from the worst of the wind, softening what was once a raw and relentless landscape into something quiet and sheltered. Wildlife moves through the sites at dawn. The smell of salt air mixes with Douglas fir and campfire smoke in that particular Pacific Northwest combination that gets into your clothes and your memory in equal measure. The same campground decades later. The open, windswept landscape of my childhood has given way to the dense evergreen canopy that now defines Cape Disappointment. We brought our boys there when they were young, and what happened over those years happened slowly, the way the best things do. The campground became a constant. A place we return to, over and over, like the tide. It became the backdrop for dinners that went until midnight, for conversations we couldn't have anywhere else, for the kind of quiet that only happens when you're far enough from the noise of real life that you finally remember what stillness feels like. Kathy and Carl have joined us there more than once, the same Kathy who has been my sister in every way that matters since we were teenagers, who showed up with her whole heart during some of the hardest chapters in this book. Cape Disappointment has held all of it. The celebrations and the worries we carried in our pockets. The laughter around the fire and the moments where Alex and I sat in the camp chairs long after the boys went to sleep, not saying much, just watching the trees and whatever else moved in the wilderness. One of our many campground visitors. At Cape Disappointment, it's not unusual to look up from your campsite and find a deer watching from the trees. There is a reason this place keeps showing up in our family's story. The Unbreakable Anchor is, at its core, about what it looks like to keep going when life doesn't cooperate. The health scares and the financial crises, the deployments and the long silences, the moments where the ground shifts and you have no choice but to hold on. It is about a family that learned, slowly and sometimes painfully, that love is more logistics than romance, more showing up than grand gestures. Cape Disappointment is the physical version of that story. The headland has been pounded by weather and tide for thousands of years and it does not move. The same rocks that fooled Captain Meares are still there, still holding the lighthouse, still taking the full force of everything the Pacific throws at them. What looks like desolation from the water is actually foundation. What looks like emptiness is actually endurance. My grandfather would have had something to say about that, probably at full volume in his thick Norwegian accent, probably to everyone within earshot. He would have pointed at those cliff faces and found a way to turn it into a story about stubbornness and survival and why Norwegians make good sailors. And he wouldn't have been wrong. Standing on those wind-swept bluffs, I've come to understand what I wrote in the prologue: that survival rarely announces itself, and true strength looks less like heroics and more like persistence. The lighthouses weren't dramatic. They were steady. They showed up every night and did their job. Not the grand gesture, just the steady light. The Cape Disappointment Lighthouse has stood watch over the Graveyard of the Pacific since 1856, guiding ships through fog, storms, and shifting sandbars. We return to the Cape not to escape real life, but to stand on something that refuses to be moved. After a year like the one this book describes, standing on that headland does something for me that nothing else quite manages. It reminds me that the anchor is still holding. It always has been. Stay Connected The fog may hide the coastline, but Cape Disappointment never goes anywhere. Subscribe to the newsletter for updates on The Unbreakable Anchor, future books, and the places, people, and adventures that continue to shape our family's story. Planning a Visit To Cape Disappointment Cape Disappointment State Park is located in Ilwaco, Washington and offers camping, hiking, two historic lighthouses, the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, and direct access to the coast where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean. We recommend booking campsites well in advance. It fills up fast, and for good reason.

My grandmother rarely talked about her childhood. What I learned about where my family started in America came from stories overheard at the kitchen table: my dad and uncle trading memories while my grandmother’s musical laughter filled the room and my grandfather’s annoying chewing habits provided the soundtrack. The stories were always the same at their core: The endless drive from Marysville, Washington to Minot, North Dakota. Towering mountains and evergreen forests slowly gave way to the open prairie beneath an even bigger sky. The plains had their own quiet beauty, one I would only come to appreciate much later, but to two boys trapped in the backseat for endless hours, the Magic City was anything but magical. It wasn’t until I was much older that I started to understand why the place stayed with them. Years later, driving across the endless corn fields of Iowa myself, I finally understood part of what my father had tried to describe all those years. The prairie has a way of distorting time. The horizon barely changes. The road keeps unfolding endlessly ahead of you, mile after mile of open land that feels both beautiful and isolating at the same time. Somewhere in those long stretches of highway, I began to understand the Dakota plains a little better. The Dakotas could not have been more different than the fjords of Norway where so many immigrant families had come from. There were no similarities at all: not the climate, not the scenery, not the land itself. It was a harsh and unfamiliar world. Wheat fields stretched toward horizons so wide they barely looked real. The wind never stopped moving. In the Souris River Valley, the carved-out valley floor and rising plateaus made the landscape feel almost lunar, ancient and impossibly open. And yet people came. They stayed. They built something. That tension became one of the foundations of The Sunstone Path. Albert's Farm near Minot, ND The series follows several lives shaped by the Dakota plains, including Albert and Edvard, two Norwegian brothers trying to build a future outside Minot during the railroad expansion that transformed the region almost overnight. While Albert experiences the rough edges of frontier Minot firsthand, other characters in The Sunstone Path experience the prairie very differently, through family, faith, survival, silence, and the impossible choices that shaped immigrant life. Minot earned the nickname “The Magic City” in the late 1800s when the Great Northern Railway pushed westward and the town seemed to materialize from the prairie by sheer force of ambition. Like many frontier towns, Minot developed a rough reputation early on. Railroad workers, land speculation, vice, violence, and rapid expansion created a city that could feel lawless at times. From 1905 to 1920, Minot’s population exploded alongside railroad construction and waves of settlement, while court records documented widespread criminal activity throughout the region. Then came Prohibition, and things became even wilder. Minot turned into a supply hub connected to liquor smuggling routes running south from Canada. Bootlegging, prostitution, speakeasies, and opium dens flourished in the city’s underground economy. Smugglers reportedly used tunnels beneath parts of downtown to move illicit cargo through the city, earning Minot a second nickname: “Little Chicago.” Photograph of men with buffalo bones in Minot in 1886 from Minot State University's Digital Minot: An On-Line Museum of Local History This photograph, taken in early Minot, shows wagons that are not loaded with goods or supplies. They're piled high with buffalo bones. By the time settlers and railroad workers arrived on the Dakota plains, the great buffalo herds had been nearly wiped out. What remained were bones, millions of them, scattered across the prairie as far as the eye could see. Settlers and homesteaders collected them by the wagonload and sold them to eastern factories to be ground into fertilizer and made into carbon black for refining sugar. A single ton fetched just a few dollars. Men made entire livings from it. It is one of the stranger and more haunting details of frontier life. The same land being broken open for farms and railroads and cities was also being picked clean of what had sustained the Plains peoples for thousands of years. Minot was being built on ambition, yes, but also on bones. What fascinates me most is not just the criminal side of that history, but the contradiction sitting beside it. While bootleggers operated beneath the surface, churches were being built above ground. Families established farms that lasted generations. Scandinavian immigrants carved communities out of the plains and built lives sturdy enough to survive brutal winters, isolation, crop failures, and time itself. The Magic City was building its future on both ambition and vice. There is something deeply human about that. Albert experiences that version of Minot firsthand in The Sunstone Path. His first Fourth of July in the city captures the raw energy of a frontier town still trying to decide what kind of place it wanted to become: In the Magic City, the festivities didn’t wait for the sun; gunshots cracked against the dawn, the reports ricocheting off raw timber and false-front buildings that looked as though they had been exhaled from the prairie dust overnight. It was a town built on the frantic architecture of hope and gunpowder, where the American dream didn’t just arrive, it exploded into being. Albert and Edvard end up spending part of that Fourth of July in the Minot jail, the story of how they got there is one for the book, but sitting in that cell, Albert reflects on everything he had already sacrificed to build a life there: Albert sitting in a jail cell. The iron bars of the Minot jail cast striped shadows across the floor, smelling of stale tobacco and the copper tang of blood still drying on Edvard’s knuckles. Albert sat on the edge of the cot, the silence of the cell heavier than the humid July night. “I should’ve stayed in Norway,” he said, the sarcasm thin over a raw layer of exhaustion. But even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. That line may sum up the immigrant experience better than any history book ever could. Minot continued reinventing itself long after those early frontier years. The Air Force base transformed the city into an important military community during the Cold War. The Bakken oil boom reshaped western North Dakota once again in the twenty-first century. Scandinavian heritage festivals still celebrate the immigrant roots that helped build the region in the first place. The city that sprang from railroad tracks and prairie dust never really stopped changing. But beneath all those reinventions, the prairie remains the same. Maybe that is why Minot continues to pull at my imagination despite being a place I know mostly through stories, research, and inherited memory. Some places become part of a family long before you ever stand there yourself. The Magic City, in the end, was never really about perfection. It was about survival. The story of Albert, Regina, and the families shaped by the Dakota plains continues in The Sunstone Path, scheduled for release 2027.

Not long ago, my family and I were out in the yard re-doing the landscaping when my shovel hit something completely unyielding deep in the dirt. When I finally cleared away the earth, I discovered I had uncovered a massive piece of a petrified log, ancient wood turned completely to stone, glowing with compressed rings of amber, rust, and gold. Holding that heavy piece of deep time in my hands made me look toward my plant shelf by the window, where two other specific stones sit side-by-side. One is a glittering, deep orange feldspar sunstone, a treasure my parents bought me from an Oregon gift shop while we were on an RV camping trip when I was a kid. The other is a piece of Iceland spar, a completely clear, colorless crystal I acquired years later to replace a family heirloom that was lost, which I write about in my upcoming multi-generational true family story, The Unbreakable Anchor. On the surface, they look like a simple Pacific Northwest rockhound's collection. But for me, they are a tangible connection to an ancient seafaring mystery that spans across the ocean and directly into my own heritage: the legendary science of Viking sunstone navigation. An Oregon sunstone in its natural matrix. While the stone itself didn't inspire the story, its name eventually inspired the title of my upcoming novel, The Sunstone Path. For decades, historians treated the idea of Viking sunstone navigation as pure myth. The old Norse sagas, such as the Saga of St. Olaf and the Hrafns þáttr Guðrúnarsonar (The Tale of Hrafn, Gudrun's Son), made passing references to a mysterious sólarsteinn, or sunstone, used by raiders to locate the sun on completely overcast days. Because no physical compasses existed in Northern Europe during the Viking Age, academia largely dismissed these accounts as magical folklore. The concept eventually broke into modern pop culture through the historical drama series Vikings, where the character Ragnar Lothbrok uses a small, clear gemstone to navigate his longship across the open, fog-choked North Sea to reach England. As a researcher tracing my own roots, I wanted to understand the actual science behind the screen. In the 2010s, historical and physical science finally caught up with the legends, proving that Viking sunstone navigation was an incredibly sophisticated method of maritime tracking. However, the tool they used wasn't the glittering, colorful orange gemstone most people picture today. It was that clear, colorless Iceland spar sitting on my shelf. The mechanics behind how this clear crystal tracks the sun through a dense sea storm are entirely grounded in optical physics. The North Atlantic is notoriously treacherous, plagued by heavy mist, thick cloud cover, and the deceptive haze of summer's midnight sun, which makes standard celestial tracking impossible. Iceland spar looks as clear as glass, but its structure naturally splits light to show a double image. When unpolarized light enters the stone, the crystal splits the light into two distinct beams traveling at different speeds and angles. Sunlight naturally scatters into rings around the sun, creating a hidden pattern in the sky. Even on the cloudiest days, this special crystal worked like a filter. A navigator would hold it up and slowly turn it. By looking through the stone, they watched the split images until both glowed with the exact same brightness. At that precise moment, the crystal pointed directly at the hidden sun with incredible accuracy. This legendary trick was proven true when divers explored a 16th-century English warship wrecked near the island of Alderney. Right next to the ship's navigation tools, archaeologists discovered a real piece of Iceland spar. This proved that sailors kept using the ancient stones for centuries, especially because steel cannons and iron tools could easily throw off a standard magnetic compass. You can read all about the discovery in depth through BBC News or explore the artifact details via Live Science. This history isn't just an abstract research project for me; it is woven directly into my DNA. My own family line stretches back to Norway, deeply rooted in the historic Gudbrandsdalen valley through ancestors like Paul Harildstad. Paul was an Eidsvollsmann, one of the historic delegates who gathered at Eidsvoll in the spring of 1814 to frame and sign the Norwegian Declaration of Independence. When you trace your heritage back to the steep valleys, historic farmsteads, and ancient routes of the Norsemen, the stories of the sea cease to be just text in a book. The very bloodline that walked the Gudbrandsdalen valley eventually looked toward the western horizon and made the immense, terrifying choice to cross the open ocean to the New World in the early 1900s. Together, the stones on my shelf and the petrified wood buried beneath my yard capture that dual identity. Oregon designated the feldspar sunstone as its official State Gemstone in 1987, its copper-flecked interior giving the stone a warm, ember-like fire, the exact sparkle that caught my eye in a small gift shop during a childhood camping trip. Beside it sits the clear Iceland spar once used by Norse navigators to track the hidden sun through storm clouds and sea fog. The objects that brought this story together: an Oregon sunstone, a piece of Iceland spar, and a fragment of petrified wood discovered beneath my own yard. Finding that petrified log buried in my own Washington yard recently brought the entire journey full circle. Petrified wood became Washington’s official State Gem in 1975, honoring the ancient forests buried beneath volcanic ash millions of years ago. One lineage of stone connects me to the deep geological past of the Pacific Northwest land I live on today, while the other connects to an ancient seafaring legacy across the water. At its core, the history of Viking sunstone navigation is about finding a way forward when the horizon disappears and the clouds roll in. It's about the tools we carry to keep ourselves oriented when we are navigating uncharted territory. That specific human weight, the idea of finding your bearings during life's greatest transitions, crossings, and unexpected storms, is the ultimate heartbeat of my writing. The title of my upcoming novel, The Sunstone Path, was inspired by that very idea. In the story, a sunstone passed down through generations eventually comes into the hands of my own great-great-great grandfather. To him, the stone becomes more than a simple heirloom. It becomes a reminder that even when the horizon disappears, the light itself is never truly gone. Regina listens as the legend of the sunstone is passed down to a new generation in this artistic interpretation inspired by The Sunstone Path. As he says while holding it up against the darkness: “It doesn't create light. It only reveals what is already there, hidden by the clouds.” That same search for orientation through uncertainty runs deeply through both The Unbreakable Anchor and The Sunstone Path, and the books still to come, stories shaped by crossings, inheritance, survival, and the invisible things that guide us when the horizon is lost. Book One: The Sunstone Path, coming soon. Don't lose the horizon. Subscribe to my newsletter for exclusive updates on The Sunstone Path.

Regina Lien, as she might have been in the early years on the prairie. When I first started writing The Unbreakable Anchor, it was meant simply as a gift for my children, something they could hold onto long after I am gone. What I didn’t expect was where it would lead me: deeper into my own history, into the lives of those who came before me, and into a question I hadn’t thought to ask, where does strength really come from? “She learned early that strength was not something you spoke of, it was something you carried.” Regina Lien is one of those answers. She is my great-grandmother, a woman I knew only from, fragments of my dad's memory. My grandmother, Regina’s daughter, rarely spoke about her childhood. What was passed down instead was something quieter, strength, steady and unquestioned. Regina was born in Jämtland, Sweden, in 1883, near the Norwegian border. In 1902, she made the journey to America with her family, eventually settling on the South Dakota prairie. The South Dakota prairie is not a gentle place. The winters are punishing, the work was relentless, and the community of Norwegian immigrants around her was held together by faith, stubbornness, and the unspoken agreement that you show up for your neighbors the way you hope they will show up for you. Regina is woven into all of that. She belongs to this place, even as the place keeps costing her. Regina is not a woman who talks about her feelings easily. She is the person her family turns to. Not because she volunteered exactly, but because she is simply the one who shows up, and people learn, over time, that she will always show up. A life shaped by the prairie; quiet, relentless, and enduring. That quiet reliability is both her greatest strength and, in many ways, her heaviest burden. But she is not without joy. There is warmth in her, and humor, dry and understated, the way Norwegian humor tends to be. She notices beauty: the particular light on the fields in late afternoon, the way a newborn smells, the sound of her native language spoken by someone who learned it the same way she did, at a mother's knee far from here. For a long time, Regina existed for me only as a name in a family tree and a few faded photographs. I knew the broad outline of her life. But the woman inside that outline, what she carried, what she feared, how she made sense of the things that happened to her, was lost. The Sunstone Path is a work of historical fiction rooted in real lives, real places, and real events. It is my way of preserving and honoring a story that might otherwise have been lost. Regina’s path in this book is not an easy one. I will not say more than that. But I will say that by the time I finished writing the chapters I have written so far, I understood something about her, and about the women in my family, that I had not understood before. I hope, when you read her story, you come to love her too. — TJ Nilsdatter Join my newsletter to be there when Regina's story unfolds in the Sunstone Path, coming 2027.

Some places stay with you long after you leave them. Lake Wenatchee, in Washington State, is one of those places for me. Nestled in the Cascade Mountains, it’s where towering pines meet clear blue water and the world seems to quiet down for a while. Over the years, trips to Lake Wenatchee became more than just camping weekends; they became chapters in our family story. The crystal blue waters of Lake Wenatchee. Lake Wenatchee sits on the east side of the Cascade Mountains, an hour and a half drive from my hometown of Snohomish, WA. Carved out of glaciers, the crystal blue, ice-cold lake stands in bright contrast to the tall pines of the Wenatchee National Forest. Campers and tourists alike flock to the state park to take advantage of the white sandy beach and cool waters to escape the heat of Eastern Washington. In the winter, the layer of snow insulates the noise and creates a pristine winter wonderland for recreation. For my family, Lake Wenatchee was a second home. Every summer we would pack up and head up here for weekends of camping, adventure, and just time spent together as a family. Weekends were spent hiking, horseback riding, and swimming, or taking a trip into Leavenworth, 30 minutes away. The vast majority of it was simply spent being a family: roasting marshmallows, playing cards, or sitting by the creek or the lake. Sitting by the lake was its own adventure. Perfect days spent by the water's edge. Swimming in the lake was not something for the faint of heart. The water is crystal clear, unlike some lakes on the west side of the mountains. There are no lily pads, no ducks, and no mosquitoes, well, I take that back. Mosquitoes could be a problem depending on the month. That meant the wind was welcome to keep them at bay, along with creating recreation of its own. When the wind picked up, Lake Wenatchee turned into a surfing haven. Well, what we called surfing. The waves were massive. If you could survive the cold water. There was nothing better than the thrill of the windy water. My cousins and I dove right in, of course, until our whole bodies turned blue. Right in the thick of it was always my grandma, surfin' the waves like she was sixteen. The lake was the start of the Wenatchee River, yes, the same river they give white-water rafting tours on further down. It was along this river that one of the moments from my childhood unfolded. That memory eventually became the first chapter in my book, The Unbreakable Anchor. "I was seven or eight years old the first time the river tried to take us. Old enough to remember the details, but too young to understand how close we’d come to something worse." -Chapter One The Unbreakable Anchor The bridge over the Wenatchee River. This is the bridge we anchored to that day, fighting the current of the Wenatchee. You can read the full story of what happened next in Chapter One of The Unbreakable Anchor. The Unbreakable Anchor is set for release Fall 2026. For those who have never visited Lake Wenatchee, I highly recommend spending a few days at Lake Wenatchee State Park. Between the crystal-clear water, towering evergreens, and mountain scenery, it's easy to understand why so many families return year after year. It's one of those rare places that still feels much the same as it did when I first fell in love with it. -TJ Nilsdatter Join the Journey. Subscribe for book updates, new blog posts, family history, and a behind-the-scenes look at the inspiration behind the books.

Last night, as I was editing my Memorial Day graphic, I remembered a phone call I got from my father a few years ago. He was upset with me as I made a Memorial Day post on Facebook for my friends and family. He was upset that I left my grandfather off that post. I also left my son off it, my husband and my many uncles. I had to explain to my father the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day. My grandfather in uniform during World War II. My grandfather's service deserves to be recognized, to be honored. But there is a difference between honoring veterans and honoring the fallen, and somewhere along the way, that line has gotten blurry for a lot of us. Memorial Day has quietly drifted into a general appreciation weekend for all who served, and while that comes from a place of love and gratitude, I think it unintentionally dilutes something sacred. Memorial Day belongs to the ones who never came home, the ones who gave the ultimate sacrifice, the ones who gave it all so we can be free. I didn't fully understand the weight of that until four years ago. Four years ago, on Memorial Day weekend, I sat in a packed auditorium at my son's boot camp graduation. I was among hundreds of proud, emotional family members watching our kids take one of the biggest steps of their lives. What happened at that ceremony, amidst all the pomp and circumstance, profoundly affected me. It was one of the most emotional days of my life, not just because my son had made it through, but because of what happened next. The command invited a group of Gold Star Families to attend. As each family was introduced, mothers, fathers, wives, and children who had lost someone in the line of duty, the entire auditorium rose to its feet. The applause didn't stop for fifteen minutes. Fifteen full minutes. There wasn't a dry eye in the building, not among the new recruits, not among the drill sergeants, not among the toughest people in that room. Nobody told us to stand. Nobody told us to keep clapping. We just did. Because some things don't need an order. As I stood there, now a Blue Star Mom, it hit me that these Gold Star Moms had once sat exactly where I was sitting, living in the moment, bursting with pride and excitement, watching their child begin a new journey. That journey just looked very different now. It took an extraordinary amount of strength for them to walk into that room. I'm honestly not sure, if I were in their shoes, that I could have done it. That moment stayed with me. And this year, it led me to a story much closer to home. My son’s Navy graduation ceremony at Great Lakes My grandfather served in World War II. He was an engineer for the Army Air Corps, assigned to laying airfields in the European theater, in France and in North Africa, in the thick of it. He was a quiet man and rarely spoke of his time in the service. He was also one of the lucky ones. He came home. He lived a long life. He got to grow old. I got to know him. Not everyone in my family's story was so fortunate. Before my grandmother met my grandfather, she was engaged to another man. She never spoke of him, not once, until my grandfather passed away. When she finally did, she told us simply that he was a pilot, and that he had been shot down over Italy. When she died, we found an envelope tucked carefully away in her hope chest. Inside was his photograph, a Bible, and letters, correspondence that had never been sent. A piece of a life that never got to continue. A hopeful WWII pin-up photograph my grandmother intended to send overseas to her fiancé to lift his spirits. Inscribed with love, it was never mailed. Ever since then, I have been searching for him. The man who did not return. The man who left her brokenhearted. The man who gave everything so that we could be free. I think I finally found him. He never came home What I discovered as I dug deeper was a story of loss that is almost too heavy to hold. He was a pilot shot down during the Sicily campaign. He never came home. And then, six months later, his brother, also a pilot, was lost too, shot down over Germany and never found. Two brothers, two sons, one family shattered completely by the war. Most people don't know that the military eventually created what is commonly called the "Sole Survivor Policy," a rule designed to prevent exactly this kind of devastation, to keep whole families from being wiped out by a single war. Years later, the idea behind that policy would become widely known through the movie Saving Private Ryan. That policy exists because of stories like theirs. Because of a mother who lost both of her boys. Because of a father, himself a World War I veteran, who knew better than most the price that freedom sometimes demands, and who paid it twice over anyway. That policy personally affected my grandfather, whose younger brother was able to stay home to work the farm. This Memorial Day, I am choosing to honor the distinction. My grandfather will always have my love and my gratitude. Veterans Day is his day, and I will celebrate him then with everything I have. But today belongs to the ones who didn't make it back. Today belongs to the Gold Star families who walked into that gymnasium with their heads held high while the rest of us wept. Today belongs to a young pilot shot down over Sicily, and his brother lost somewhere over Germany, and the mother who had to bury the idea of them both. Today belongs to every name on every wall. Every folded flag. Every empty chair at a table that was never meant to be empty. U.S. Army photo by Elizabeth Fraser / Arlington National Cemetery We owe them more than a long weekend. We owe them the truth of what this day is really for. Their sacrifices will not be forgotten.

Every family has one. The person who walks into a room and becomes the room. The one whose name alone, when dropped into a sentence, makes everyone lean in a little closer, because whatever comes next is going to be a story. Let me paint you a picture of my dad. He is a proud union man, a devoted Norwegian-American, and a man with encyclopedic knowledge of every tree, landmark, and historical footnote in the Pacific Northwest. He will share all of this with you, unprompted, at length. He has opinions, strong ones, about politics, about church service times, about the correct way to do almost anything, and he will defend those opinions with the passion of a man delivering closing arguments to the Supreme Court. He is also, without question, the most dramatic person I have ever known in my entire life. We call him Ranger Rick, and you will discover exactly why when you read The Unbreakable Anchor. Throughout my journey, my father has been both a primary inspiration and a source of complete unpredictability. Early on in my life, my brother and I had to learn to “read the room” to see what dad we were going to get. The man. The myth. The legend. Rick does not do small problems. In Rick's world, there are no small problems. There are problems, and there are catastrophes, and the distance between them is approximately three seconds. A minor inconvenience in his presence has a way of escalating, rapidly, loudly, and with full commitment, into something that feels like it requires emergency services. He is not doing this on purpose. That's the thing. He genuinely feels it all at full volume, and he is constitutionally incapable of dialing it back. Everyone and everything is out to get him at all times. The chaos doesn't just follow him. It finds him. In the most mundane situations, in the most unexpected moments, something will go sideways, and Rick will be at the center of it, fully invested, loudly involved, and somehow making it both worse and more entertaining simultaneously. My husband got to experience this firsthand helping with a project at my parents’ house. He had come upstairs to get a drink of water and in the two seconds he was gone, we heard a crash and a bang, and there came my dad up the stairs, blood pouring down his face with that same furled brow we’ve come to expect, and the extra dramatic sighs and moans. “I only left him for a minute,” my husband said. This was a typical day for me growing up. There was always some drama, always some huge catastrophe, and always an exaggerated response. My mother is a saint. This fact cannot be overstated. That being said, on the flip side, my dad could light up the room with his laughter, his jokes, and his tendency to do mischief. There was this time when we went on a picnic to Deception Pass State Park for Mother’s Day. I was a teenager then and it was a few months after my grandfather had died. There was a nice, paved nature trail there. My grandmother was with us, slowing in her years, but excited to be out of the house with the family. During this walk, my dad decides he’s going to pick up rocks and put them in her sweater pocket. My uncle, who was with us, teamed up with my dad and before we knew it, Grandma was walking slower and slower because by then she had two sweater pockets full of rocks. When she discovered it, the look on her face broke out into infectious laughter until the whole family was laughing so hard we had to take a break from the trail. Watching time slow down for the people we love is one of the strange gifts of growing older ourselves. There are a hundred stories like that one, some made it into the book, some did not. But the story that became family legend was the day my dad rolled his car, his precious 1972 chestnut brown Plymouth Duster. He decided to work on the brakes. His house, the one both my grandfathers warned him about buying, was on a steep incline. The steep driveway that became part of family legend. Stubborn as he was, my dad decided to work on it on the steep driveway, which made no sense to my mother. My grandfather had a six-car garage, complete with an oil-changing bay. He could’ve taken the car there, but the stubborn Norwegian in him decided he wanted it done right then and there. My mom was on the phone with his mother telling her that he was being stubborn and they weren’t coming over. At that moment I hear: “Gotta go Mom, Rick’s rolling down the driveway.” Sure enough, there he was, hanging onto the driver’s door for dear life as the car rolled down the hill into the neighbor's yard. It is a funny image now, a family legend told at Christmas and around the campfire on our camping trips. He could’ve been seriously injured or killed, but in typical Rick fashion, he came out of it with just some scraped knees that in his eyes should require hospitalization and certainly required my mom to wait on him hand and foot for weeks. My dad’s 1972 Plymouth Duster after an ill-fated brake repair attempt. But Rick’s antics weren't just confined to our steep driveway. His larger-than-life personality demanded a much bigger stage, and he found it in the great outdoors. There is no more enthusiastic tour guide in the Pacific Northwest than Ranger Rick, as long as you aren't in a hurry and have made peace with the fact that every road trip will double as a lecture series. He approaches the mountains, the rivers, the trees, and the history of this state with the energy of a man who has been personally entrusted with its reputation. He will tell you the name of every tree. He will tell the strangers near you the name of every tree. He has never once sensed that an audience was disengaged, and he never will. Growing up, my brother and I became experts in the history and plant life of “Warshington". I never quite understood the R, but it was there nonetheless, my dad’s own unique pronunciation of his beloved state. Watching him bestow this experience on a new generation is one of the quiet joys of my adult life. It’s why the waters of Lake Wenatchee, the hikes up Beacon Rock on the Columbia River Gorge, and the endless history lessons of the Oregon and Washington coasts are still with me. I have passed them on to my own children. I might have grandchildren named Lewis and Clark someday because of it. That is some legacy right here. But his true legacy isn't just a mental map of the Pacific Northwest or a shared vocabulary of trees; it’s the fierce, unshakeable way he cares for the people within it. Here's the paradox of Rick: the same intensity that can turn a camping trip into a theatrical production is the exact same intensity he brings to loving his family. There is no in-between with him. There is no quiet, background version of my dad. He is all the way in, all the time, in the arguments, in the laughter, in the showing up. And he does show up. Maybe not calmly. Definitely not quietly. But when the people he loves need him, he is there, opinionated, loud, occasionally making things slightly more complicated than they need to be, and completely, utterly present. My dad was my rock when I needed him, every time. He showed up to rescue me when the car didn’t start, when my friend locked her keys in the car two hours away, when I needed him to calm my anxiety when my husband was in the hospital, and he even showed up for my best friend when she lost her own father in a car accident. Some of my favorite memories began outdoors with Ranger Rick leading the way. He is chaos incarnate. He is also, underneath all of it, one of the most fiercely devoted people I have ever known. Ranger Rick is not a supporting character. He never could be. He is woven into nearly every chapter of this story, which means you have a lot to look forward to. Chapter One starts with him. Learn more about Ranger Rick in The Unbreakable Anchor, coming this fall. Sign up for the newsletter to stay updated on the journey ahead. *Some photographs in this post have been artistically altered to preserve family privacy while honoring the memories behind them.

The Silent Service: What No One Tells You About Loving a Submariner Military Appreciation Month · May 2026 Family Gram This is a family gram. If you've never seen one, it looks like a telegram, because that's essentially what it is. A strip of typewritten text, all capitals, every word chosen carefully because you only got so many of them, and sometimes, there was a story there that didn’t fit in a family gram No punctuation to spare. No room for anything that wasn't essential. This was how submarine families communicated thirty years ago. One way only. You wrote your words, submitted them, and hoped they made it through. No reply was coming. The boat was silent, and silence was the whole point. Welcome to the Silent Service. What Makes Submarines Different Most people have a general picture of military deployment. Phone calls with bad connections. Care packages. Video chats that freeze at the worst moment. They know it's hard. What most people don't know is that there is a corner of the military where none of that exists. When a submarine goes under, it goes dark. Not slower. Dark. This is the reality for submariners. It's what they train for. For weeks, sometimes months at a time, the families left behind simply wait without knowing where their person is, whether they are safe, or when they will surface again. And unlike the rest of the military, submarines are volunteer only. Every person on that boat chose to be there. Chose the silence. Chose the mission, and chose what that would mean for the people waiting at home. To even serve on a submarine you have to earn it. Every submariner wears a pin called the dolphins, two dolphins facing a submarine, and earning it is one of the most demanding qualifications in the entire military. It requires mastering every system on the boat, being able to respond to any emergency, anywhere. You don't get handed the dolphins. You prove you deserve them. The people waiting at home know what that pin cost. Submarine Warfare Pin. Known as "dolphins" or "fish". My husband served as a sonar technician out of Kings Bay, Georgia. In that time I learned what it means to live inside a silence you didn't choose but have to carry anyway. The family gram was our lifeline, and it only ran in one direction. Ironically, I think I easily adapted to modern texting due to the shorthand I learned sending family grams. When the submarine was deployed you got used to it. You learned to rely on your community, the family members who knew exactly what you were going through. There was nobody to help you make decisions, you were on your own. Nobody to bounce ideas off of. Nobody to help with the chores. Nobody to comfort you when you were feeling alone, because you were alone. It was like living in an old movie with subtitles, everything moving around you, but the sound turned all the way down. Days go by when you hope and pray they are doing okay. That they weren't working too hard. That they brought enough books to read. That they had enough snacks. The waiting is brutal. It messes with your head. It is one of many sacrifices military families make quietly, without fanfare, and without being asked to. It's Better Now. Mostly. Today's submarine families have email. But the transition from family grams to actual phone calls was its own adjustment. My husband had a phone my parents gave him, a Star Trek phone, complete with a red alert ringtone. After months of silence, being jolted awake by a red alert at 2am was its own special kind of chaos. Progress, I suppose. The frequency still varies. There are still stretches of total silence, still deployments where communication goes dark for weeks, but the absolute blackout my generation lived with is less constant now. And yet the fundamental truth of submarine life hasn't changed. You learn to live in the not-knowing. You learn to hold things together on your own, not because you signed up for it exactly, but because the person you love is doing something that matters, and this is your part of it. I know this not only because I lived it then, but because I am living a version of it now. Author's son heading to the barracks The day I dropped him off after boot camp, as he waited to ship out to submarine school. He is now stationed here in Washington, practically my own backyard, and the military still finds ways to remind you that close and reachable are not the same thing. The silence follows you. It just looks a little different than it used to. What Submarine Families Carry There is a specific kind of strength that develops in people who love someone in the Silent Service. It doesn't look dramatic from the outside. It's just the ability to keep going when you don't know where they are. To hold the family together when the other half of it is underwater and unreachable. To find the humor in a family gram that ends with "BUT I DIDN'T TELL YOU THIS." The homecomings are something else entirely. But those stories belong to the book. The Unbreakable Anchor is a multi-generational story about family, resilience, and the kind of love that keeps showing up, through deployments, through silence, through everything the Silent Service asks of the people left waiting on shore. To every submarine family, past and present: the Silent Service runs on your strength too. Thank you. — TJ Nilsdatter Want to go deeper? The Unbreakable Anchor shares more of the personal stories behind the silence, the hardships, the waiting, and the homecomings. Join my newsletter to be the first to know when it's available.

What RV Life Is Actually Like There is a version of RV life that exists on the internet, and then there is the version that actually happens to you. In the internet version, a golden-haired couple parks beside a glassy alpine lake, opens two folding chairs, and watches the sunset with matching mugs of coffee. Nobody is arguing about the slide-out. Nobody has discovered that the gray water tank has been full since Tuesday. Nobody’s husband drove two miles past the campground entrance because he was “certain” he didn’t need the GPS. We are not those people. We never were. But after years of doing this, first in a conversion van that my husband loved more than reasonable, then in an actual RV, I’ve come to believe that the real version is better anyway. Messier, yes. Better. The Rig Nobody adequately prepares you for how much a vehicle can have opinions. Our RV is not a passive participant in our travels. It has moods. It has preferences about which campgrounds it is willing to pull into and strong objections to anything involving a left-hand turn on a hill. There is a drawer in the kitchen that will not stay closed if you are driving over 55 miles per hour, and we discovered this the hard way when half our utensils launched themselves across the trailer somewhere outside Gold Bar. The first time my husband backed it into a site, I stood behind it waving my arms with the authority of someone who had absolutely no idea what the hand signals meant. He could not see me. My hand motions were something you would see had you watched a rookie air marshal directing a 747 on the tarmac after three espressos and a bad breakup. Wild, enthusiastic, and completely open to interpretation. Left arm flailing like I was trying to hail a cab in a hurricane. Right arm doing some interpretive dance that might have meant “straight back,” “hard left,” or possibly “the drawer with the sharp knives is about to revolt again.” At one point I crossed my arms overhead in what I thought was the universal “STOP” signal. He interpreted it as “floor it in reverse and trust the process.” The Rig, of course, had its own strong opinion. It crab-walked sideways, the rear bumper politely declining the tree’s invitation to get acquainted while the leveling jacks made disapproving clunks. By the time we were (mostly) in the spot, I was sweating, gesturing like Leslie Nielsen doing an impromptu tango with an invisible Priscilla Presley, and yelling helpful phrases like “Your other left!” and “Cut it, cut it—NO, NOT THAT WAY!” We survived. The utensils stayed in their drawer this time. And now we have a system: Do not do anything unless he’s about to hit something, which sometimes works. Because nothing says “romantic getaway” like turning a simple parking job into airport ground control… with slightly lower stakes and way more passive-aggressive sighing from a 30-foot vehicle that definitely has opinions. Truck towing RV backing into campsite at Pioneer Trails RV Park surrounded by trees” The Space Living in a small space with the people you love most in the world will reveal things about your marriage and your children that a house keeps politely hidden. At home, someone can retreat to another room. In the RV, there are no other rooms. There is one room. It folds into itself at night. You are all, always, right there together—and you better like each other. There is also the acoustic reality that the brochure fails to mention. In an RV, there is no such thing as a "private" sneeze or a "quiet" snack. If you drop a spoon in the kitchen at 6:00 AM, the person sleeping in the back bunk doesn't just hear it; they feel it in their soul. You learn a very specific "RV volume" for late-night conversations, a hushed, conspiratorial whisper that makes every discussion about whose turn it is to do the dishes feel like a high-stakes spy mission. But here is the thing about small spaces: the closeness is also the whole point. When it rains for three days straight at the ocean, when your campsite turns into a lake and you are all stuck inside playing cards and eating every snack you brought, something happens. You stop being family sharing a schedule and start being family who actually know each other again. My boys, who at home could go a full weekend without a real conversation, got bored enough in that rig to start talking. Really talking. I will take three days of rain and a full gray tank for that every time. Flooded campsite with picnic table and fire pit at Grayland State Park in Washington The Sites Campsite selection is a skill that takes years to develop, and the cost of tuition is paid in bad nights. We have learned that “picturesque” in the listing photos means the photographer stood in one specific corner and did not turn around to show you the neighbor's slide-out just two inches away from yours. We have learned that “some road noise” is code for “you will hear every semi-truck that passes on the highway all night long.” Our family has a campground we return to every year at Lake Wenatchee, site 14, right next to my grandparents’ old spot at site 13. That particular stretch of forest beside Nason Creek has been part of my life since I was a child. I can still close my eyes and hear my grandfather’s booming voice startling birds off the branches while the sharp, clean scent of his stovetop percolator coffee cut through the morning mist. My grandmother would be in her faded webbing camp chair every morning before anyone else was awake, just watching the light change. Some places hold memory in their soil. You can feel it when you pull in. Find your place. The one you go back to. The one where the kids know which trail goes to the swimming hole and you know exactly how the light falls through the trees in the late afternoon. A new site every trip sounds like freedom, and sometimes it is. But the site you know by heart is the closest thing I have found to that feeling of exhaling. The Disasters I want to be clear that disasters will happen to you. Not might happen. Will happen. This is not a reflection of your intelligence; it is simply the nature of living inside a vehicle that has plumbing and moves at highway speeds. We have had a water leak under the sink that we did not notice until we opened the basement and found it had flooded all our gear. We have opened the slides on the RV to a sound that immediately told us something had gone very wrong, resulting in a pantry door that no longer had a door knob. We have run the battery down. We have driven away from a site with the exterior storage compartment still open, which we discovered when we heard a sound like applause from behind us and realized it was the door swinging freely on the highway. My grandfather used to turn disasters into stories before the adrenaline had even finished draining out of the room. He understood something essential: a bad day in the woods is still a day in the woods, and most things that go wrong become funny faster than you think. The compartment door became a story we told at dinner that same night. The lack of a door knob on the pantry kept us out of the snacks. The sink leak is not funny yet, but we’re working on it. The Part They Don’t Photograph Nobody photographs the drive home. Nobody posts the moment when everyone is sunburned and quiet and a little sad that it’s over, watching the scenery shrink behind you in the side mirror. Nobody documents the unpacking, which involves discovering snacks you completely forgot about and a wet towel you do not remember leaving wet. Then there is what I would call the "RV Hangover", that strange first hour back in the house where the rooms feel unnervingly large and you find yourself looking for a foot pump to flush the porcelain toilet. But that drive home is part of it too. The quiet in the rig after a good trip is a specific kind of full. Everyone has had enough sun and enough fire smoke that the silence feels comfortable instead of heavy. The boys fall asleep. My husband puts on something from the same playlist we’ve had since before the kids were born. I watch the transition from foothills to suburbs and feel grateful for all of it. View through windshield driving on Highway 2 through Washington mountains RV life is not a lifestyle, exactly. It’s more like a practice. You keep showing up for it, and it keeps teaching you how to be flexible when the plan falls apart, and how to be genuinely present because the creek is right there and it would be a shame not to sit beside it. If you are thinking about it, do it. Go in knowing the slide-out will argue with you and at some point something will leak. Go in knowing that the person sitting across from you in that tiny dinette, sharing chips and watching the campfire burn low, is the whole point. The coffee really does taste better outside. I don’t know why. I just know to bring enough of it. -TJ Nilsdatter Follow along for more of this chaos, and the stories behind it, by joining my newsletter. The Unbreakable Anchor is coming Fall 2026.

Spring Planting on the Dakota Prairie, Early 1900s Before the homesteads became legends. Before the old photographs faded. Before the names carved into fence posts were swallowed by grass and time, there was a Monday in May that looked something like this. Not a romantic Monday. Not a Monday from a painting. A Monday with mud caked to the knee, with a back that ached before the sun was fully up, with horses that needed tending before a man had swallowed his first cup of coffee. A Monday that held no guarantee the frost was truly done, because this was the Dakotas, and the Dakotas made no promises. Source: Arthur Rothstein, Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress. This is that Monday. 4:30 A.M. — The Dark Before the Work He was awake before he was conscious of being awake. It happened this way every morning in planting season, a slow surfacing from sleep. It was pulled up not by an alarm but by the weight of everything waiting to be done. The soddie, or the modest frame house if the farm was a few years old, had grown cold overnight. The coals in the iron stove were a dull, dying red. The first order of business, before boots, before breakfast, before any thought about the fields, was to get the fire going. Outside, the prairie in early May was a different animal than the prairie of winter. The cold was no longer trying to kill you outright. It was merely indifferent, a biting, 35-degree indifference that fogged the breath and stiffened the fingers and made the short walk to the barn feel longer than it was. The sky was still the deep, blue-black of a night reluctant to let go, and the stars were fading one at a time at the western edge. The dogs always knew. Before his boots hit the porch, they were up and at the door, tails moving with a quiet, steady rhythm. They wanted to work. Everything on a Dakota homestead in the early 1900s wanted to work. That was the bargain. 5:00 A.M. — The Barn Comes First The barn was the center of everything, and he entered it the way a man enters a church, purposefully, with the understanding that what happened here mattered. The horses heard him on the frozen ground before he reached the door. The big Percheron-crosses shifted in their stalls, the heavy sound of their hooves on the plank floor a language he had learned to read over years. Contentment. Hunger. Impatience. He hung the lantern on the iron hook and moved down the aisle, talking to them the way his father had talked to the horses back in Norway, a low, steady narration that meant nothing in particular and everything in general. He pitched hay into the mangers first, because a horse that ate was a horse that worked, and today was going to demand everything they had. The harness was stiff from the night's cold, and he worked neatsfoot oil into the leather by feel, checking every buckle and every strap with a methodical patience that could not be rushed. A snapped trace at noon on the far end of a half-plowed field was a disaster that cost him two hours of daylight. He had learned that lesson once. He did not intend to learn it twice. Then came the cows, the chickens, the water hauled from the well. Each task had its own particular sound and smell, the deep, bovine patience of the milk cows, the sharp, dusty complaint of the hens, the clean, mineral scent of the well water as it hit the wooden buckets. By the time the first pale grey light appeared at the eastern edge of the prairie, he had already been working for an hour. He went inside for breakfast smelling of horse sweat and hay, and he was not apologetic about it. That smell was the smell of a farm that was alive. 6:30 A.M. — Breakfast at the Table The kitchen was the warmest room in the house, and in planting season, it operated like a small factory from before dawn until after dark. His wife had the cast iron skillet going before he was back from the barn. Salt pork, fried until the fat ran golden. Potatoes from the root cellar, sliced thin and crisped in the drippings. Eggs from the hens. Dark rye bread sliced thick, with fresh butter, because they had a cow and a churn and the bread was something a person could hold on to. Coffee, black and boiled, in a tin cup that was too hot to hold and too necessary to put down. He drank it standing at the table, going over the day in his head. The south field first, it had dried the fastest after the spring melt. The north quarter was still heavy, still holding the melt in the low spots, the kind of gumbo mud that could swallow a wheel up to the axle and ruin a morning. He would leave it for Wednesday if the wind held. His children ate quietly, understanding the particular tension of the planting season without being told. Even the young ones knew that May was not a month for dawdling at breakfast. The older boy had his own list of chores that would begin the moment he swallowed his last bite, fence line to check, wood to split, water to haul. There was always more water to haul. The meal was done in fifteen minutes. He pulled on his coat, pushed his hat down over his ears against the morning wind, and went back outside. The sun was clearing the horizon now, burning away the blue-grey of the early morning and turning the prairie to gold. It was a beautiful thing to look at, and he allowed himself exactly one moment to look at it. Then he went to hitch the team. 7:30 A.M. — Into the Field The breaking plow went into the earth with a sound like a long, slow zipper being pulled through the skin of the world. He felt it through the handles, through his arms, into his shoulders, the resistance of ten thousand years of matted prairie grass and compacted soil fighting the steel blade. The horses leaned into their collars, their massive haunches working in a rhythm that was almost musical, and he walked behind them for hours, holding the line steady, watching the dark ribbon of turned earth appear to his left. Source: Fred Hultstrand History in Pictures Collection, NDSU Archives. This was plowing, and plowing was not romantic. It was a conversation between a man, two horses, and a piece of ground that did not particularly want to be farmed. The prairie grass roots were deep and stubborn, and they grabbed at the share with a persistence that required constant pressure to overcome. Every few furrows, he stopped to hone the plow share with his whetstone, the rhythmic scraping sound carrying across the open field, because a dull blade was the enemy of progress and he could not afford to lose ground. The sky above the Dakota prairie in May was enormous. It was a pale, enormous blue that seemed to press down on the flat horizon from every direction. A hawk circled to the south. In the distance, toward the coulee, a line of bare cottonwoods stood like weathered fence posts, their new leaves still too small to make any noise in the wind. He was aware of all of it in a peripheral way, the way a man is aware of his own heartbeat, constantly, without having to think about it. By mid-morning his back was talking to him in a dull, rhythmic language that he had learned to ignore until noon. He stopped once to water the horses at the trough he had dragged to the edge of the field, watching them drink with the greedy, efficient thirst of animals that had been working hard. He poured water on his own face from the clay jug tied to the side of the plow, and he ate a cold piece of salt pork and a wedge of rye bread that had gone a little stale from sitting in his coat pocket since breakfast. It was not a bad life. Hard, yes. Relentlessly, physically demanding in a way that modern language struggles to describe. But there was something in the long, quiet furrows, in the smell of the turned earth and the sound of the wind moving over the new-broken ground. It made a man feel he was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. The prairie did not offer comfort. It offered purpose, and for a Norwegian immigrant who had crossed an ocean to stand in this flat, windswept place and call it home, purpose was enough. Noon — The Brief Pause His wife, or perhaps the oldest child, would bring dinner to the field. Not lunch, the Scandinavian immigrants of the Dakotas called it dinner, and it was a meal that deserved the name. A bucket of potato soup, thick and steaming inside a cloth wrapping. More bread. Dried meat. On a good day, a jar of the sweet-sour pickled herring that reminded everyone at the table of Norway, even the children who had been born here and had never seen a Norwegian fjord. They ate sitting on the overturned plow or on the tongue of the wagon, the horses standing hipshot nearby, resting their weight with a patience that was almost bovine. He looked at the field behind him, how much had been turned, how much remained. He looked at the sky, reading it the way prairie farmers always read the sky: not with alarm, but with attention. The clouds to the northwest had the wrong color. Not wrong enough to stop work, but wrong enough to note. Thirty minutes. That was all he allowed himself. The horses needed the break more than he did, and he gave it to them without resentment, because a tired horse at two o'clock was a dangerous horse at four. Then he stood, brushed the crumbs from his trousers, and picked up the lines again. Afternoon — When the Real Work Began If the morning was about breaking ground, the afternoon on a planting day was about preparation and faith. Where the field had already been turned in earlier days, the disc harrow went in now, a brutal, rattling machine pulled by the same patient team that had pulled the plow, its sharp circular blades chopping and pulverizing the heavy clumps of sod into something approaching a seedbed. The work was deafening compared to the relative quiet of plowing, and it sent the smell of dark earth rising up in waves that a man could almost taste. On a day when the ground was ready, the grain drill came next. He had inspected the seed the night before, running his hands through the sacks of flax or wheat with the focused attention of a man who understands that what goes into the ground today is everything that comes out of it in August. Bad seed was a year lost. On the Dakota prairie in the early 1900s, a year lost was not a setback. It was a catastrophe. The flax, when conditions were right, was the cash crop, the great blue gamble of the northern plains. It grew fast in the raw, newly broken earth, its shallow roots threading through the virgin sod like a promise. Source: Russell Lee, Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress. By mid-afternoon, the muscles across his shoulders had gone from aching to a deep, burning numbness that he had learned to work through rather than stop for. The wind had picked up from the northwest, confirming what he had noted at noon, but it had not turned into the thing he feared. It was just wind. The Dakotas were always just wind, right up until they weren't. Evening — The Animals Come First, Again He quit the field when the light told him to, not a minute before. The horses knew before he did. Their heads came up, their pace changed, and he could feel through the lines the particular shift in energy that meant they understood the barn was close and the work was almost done. He guided them in, unhitched them with the same careful attention he had given them in the morning, and spent twenty minutes rubbing them down with rough burlap. They had earned it. The evening chores were the mirror image of the morning ones, with exhaustion added. The cows were milked. The chickens were shut in. The water was hauled. The fire in the house was built up against the coming night, which in May could still drop to near freezing by midnight and threaten the seedlings he had been coaxing in the kitchen window since March. He checked those seedlings every evening with a tenderness he rarely showed anything else. They were small, fragile green things in tin cans and cracked clay pots, waiting for the last frost date to pass so they could be set into the ground. He ate supper at the wooden table his own hands had built, in the house his own hands had built, on land that he had broken from raw prairie with nothing but his own physical determination and the willingness to stay. The meal was simple, whatever his wife had managed to put together from the root cellar and the smokehouse and the garden that was just beginning to show green. He ate everything on his plate. He was not capable of doing otherwise. After Dark — The Thinking Hours There was a window between supper and sleep that belonged to something other than labor. Not much of a window, an hour, maybe two, before the exhaustion of a planting day pulled a man under completely. But he used it. He sharpened the plow share for tomorrow, the whetstone moving in long, rhythmic strokes in the light of the kerosene lamp. He looked at the land book, the simple ledger where he tracked what had been planted and where, how many bushels of seed had gone in, what it had cost and what it might yield. His wife, if she was not already asleep in the chair, sat nearby with her knitting or her mending or her endless, sacred work on the quilts for the Ladies Aid at the church. They talked, or they did not talk. There was a language in the silence of a Dakota homestead at night. It was a language of shared exhaustion and shared purpose and the particular comfort of being in the same room as the person who understood exactly how hard the day had been. Sometimes, if the children were asleep and the lamp was burning low, he would step back outside for a moment. Not for any reason. Just to stand in the yard in the dark and look at the sky. The prairie sky at night in May was staggering, a vast, cold brilliance of stars from horizon to horizon, unobstructed by any ridge or tree line, laid out above the dark, sleeping land like a map of everywhere he had ever been and everywhere he would never go. He did not stay long. Tomorrow started at 4:30, and the horses were already resting, and the seed was in the ground, and the land was as ready as it was going to be. He went inside, pulled off his boots, and was asleep before his head had fully settled into the pillow. What Was Left Behind The early 1900s homesteader on the Dakota prairie did not leave memoirs. He left furrows. He left fence lines. He left the dark, turned earth of a field that a century later would still remember the shape of the land he broke. He left children who grew up knowing what it meant to work before the sun was up and to keep working after the sun went down, who carried that knowledge in their bodies the way the prairie carries water, quietly, deeply, in places you can't see until you dig. He left the bones of houses and barns that leaned into the prairie wind for eighty years before they surrendered. He left the faint indentation of a well that fed a family for three generations. He left the barely visible rise of a sod wall that was, for a while, the only thing standing between a family and the full ferocity of a January blizzard. He left seeds in the ground. That was always the act of faith at the center of all of it, the willingness to put something into the earth and trust that the earth would give it back. That is worth remembering. That is, in fact, why we remember. — — — Read more in The Sunstone Path, the story of Albert and Regina, and the land that made them. Coming 2026. Join my newsletter to follow along.

There's a particular kind of silence that falls over a room when doctors leave to consult each other. The quiet hits you harder, sitting on a crinkled paper sheet, watching a screen that shows your unborn child. If you’ve been there before, you know exactly what I mean. When my son was diagnosed with hydrocephalus at 20 weeks in utero, I didn't know what to do with the word. I barely knew how to say it. The pamphlets they gave me were quickly crammed into my pockets, staying there until I was brave enough to read them, to accept the version of his life the doctors were already sketching out for me before he had even taken his first breath. I know now that you are allowed to walk out of that room and refuse to accept a fixed ending. You are allowed to fight, to research, to ask hard questions, and to seek out the doctors who give you hope. That is what I did. This post is for the parent sitting in that room right now. Or the one who just got home from it, not knowing what to do with the pamphlets they gave you. My son at 4 months old. What Is Hydrocephalus? Hydrocephalus, often described as "water on the brain", occurs when cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) builds up in the ventricles of the brain. Normally, this fluid flows through the brain and spinal cord and gets reabsorbed. When that process is disrupted, pressure builds. It can be present at birth (congenital) or develop later in life. It can be mild or severe. It can be caught prenatally, as in our case, or diagnosed months after birth when subtle symptoms emerge. Common signs that may prompt further evaluation include: An unusually large or rapidly growing head circumference Bulging fontanelle (soft spot) in infants Eyes that appear to gaze downward ("sunsetting") Irritability, vomiting, or poor feeding Developmental delays In older children: headaches, vision changes, or difficulty with balance Prenatal diagnosis, like ours, often happens during a routine anatomy ultrasound when enlarged ventricles are detected. A follow-up scan and specialist consultation will typically follow. In our case they were monthly for the remainder of my pregnancy. What Comes Next: Understanding Your Options One of the most disorienting parts of a hydrocephalus diagnosis is the amount of information thrown at you in a very short time, often by specialists who are focused on the medical facts, not on how those facts land. Back in the early 2000s, we were given a much grimmer outlook than what many families hear today. Some children, like my son, have arrested hydrocephalus where his body adapts to the excess fluid. My son is 22 years old today, living a normal life. Here is what I wish someone had told me: The range of outcomes is wide. Some children with hydrocephalus diagnosed prenatally are born with minimal or no symptoms. Others require intervention. The ultrasound alone cannot always predict how a child will fare, and doctors who deal in probabilities are not dealing in certainties. Treatment has evolved significantly. The most common treatment is a shunt, a small device surgically implanted to drain excess fluid and relieve pressure. Shunts have improved dramatically and, for many children, allow full, active lives. Another option for some patients is endoscopic third ventriculostomy (ETV), a procedure that creates a new pathway for fluid to drain without a permanent implant. Your neurosurgeon will help determine which approach fits your child's specific anatomy and presentation. A second opinion is not a betrayal of your first doctor. It is simply good medicine. I sought a second neurosurgeon, and that conversation gave me both clarity and confidence. You are your child's best advocate, and advocating starts here. The Emotional Weight No One Prepares You For Getting a prenatal diagnosis means grieving and hoping at the same time, which is one of the more exhausting emotional experiences a person can have. My coping mechanism was just stunned silence. Then came the guilt. The guilt, in particular, can be insidious. Parents, especially mothers, can fall into the belief that they caused this somehow, or that they failed to protect their child before they even arrived. I know that feeling intimately. It is a lie. Hydrocephalus is not caused by anything you did or did not do, felt or did not feel, prayed or did not pray. It's also worth acknowledging: the stress of a medically complex pregnancy or a child with a serious diagnosis doesn't end at birth. It often continues through surgeries, follow-ups, unexpected complications, and the long stretch of waiting to see how things unfold. You are allowed to struggle with that. You are allowed to fall apart sometimes. What I learned is that "falling apart sometimes" and "showing up every time" are not mutually exclusive. How to Advocate Effectively When your child has a complex medical condition, advocacy isn't optional, it's essential. Here's what helped me most: Come prepared. Bring a notebook, and/or bring a friend. It often helps to have another person there to hear what the doctor says. Write down your questions before appointments. Don't leave until you understand the answers, or at least until you know what you don't yet understand. Build your team intentionally. Your pediatrician should be a partner, not just a checkpoint. Find doctors who take your observations seriously. A parent's gut is a diagnostic tool. You know your child. Ask about the full picture. Hydrocephalus can come with related conditions or complications that aren't always volunteered upfront. Ask about developmental monitoring, speech and occupational therapy, and what signs should prompt a call or a visit. Get connected. The Hydrocephalus Association (hydroassoc.org) is an excellent resource, offering support groups, research updates, and guidance for families navigating this diagnosis. You don't have to piece together information alone. Document everything. Keep records of scans, test results, surgical reports, and physician notes. Medical history matters, sometimes years later. The doctors who gave us our son's diagnosis were not wrong about the condition. They were wrong about the future. His story is one I'm still telling, because it didn't end in that appointment, or in the surgeries that followed, or in the years of monitoring that stretched after that. That was just the beginning of his story. -TJ Nilsdatter This post is part of a larger story, a memoir about family, resilience, and the kind of love that keeps showing up. Hydrocephalus was just the start. More to come in The Unbreakable Anchor. Join my newsletter to follow the journey.

AI has become one of the most debated topics in creative spaces, and for good reason. But somewhere between the extremes, there’s a quieter reality that doesn’t get talked about as often: how it’s actually being used by writers trying to tell meaningful stories. This isn’t a defense of AI, and it’s not a warning either. It’s simply an honest look at how I use it in my own work, the good, the bad, and the ugly. AI has existed for a long time now, longer than it’s been a household word. It started in the 50s and 60s with things like Eliza and even the infamous Clippy. When I think of AI, I think of cylons from Battlestar Galactica or Skynet from Terminator. But for most of us, AI didn't feel real until it showed up in our homes through Siri and Alexa. That was my first real experience with it. I didn’t actually start discovering how useful it could be until about a year ago, when I used it to help my husband navigate a long job search in this new AI-driven world. Since then, I’ve learned a lot. I use it now for all kinds of things, wedding planning, recipes, troubleshooting my computer, planning camping trips, and yes, as an assistant with my writing. It is changing the world as we know it, and for writers it opens up avenues that didn’t exist before. There are people with stories to tell who did not have the means to put pen to paper. Think of someone battling rheumatoid arthritis, dyslexia, or any number of conditions that might make writing difficult. AI gives them a way to get those stories out. For me personally, it was a confidence boost. I’ve been writing my whole life, but I lacked the confidence to do anything with it. It wasn’t until I pasted a chapter into AI and got instant feedback that it could actually turn into something, that I started to believe in it. As a writer of historical fiction, it’s also been an invaluable research partner. This is also where I have to be careful. I’ve seen AI confidently present information that simply isn’t true, and worse, present it in a way that looks completely legitimate. In one case, it even generated what appeared to be a real newspaper article that didn’t exist. That’s a problem. When you’re working with real history, accuracy matters. AI can help point you in the right direction, but it can’t be trusted as a source on its own. Everything still has to be verified. Most of all, it’s a sounding board, helping me catch plot holes, tighten structure, and even notice things like overused adverbs or commas. As someone deep in a long editing process (I’m currently on edit four of The Unbreakable Anchor, with a 5th to go), that kind of feedback is genuinely useful, and is much needed for times when I suffer through writers block or my eyes just get tired and everything blurs together. It's not a magic button however. I spend a lot of time going back and forth with it, clarifying, correcting, rewording, and yes, occasionally yelling at it because it’s not listening or completely missing the point. It can be frustrating. It gets things wrong a lot of the time. It goes off track and it doesn't remember anything. It is programmed to be a "yes man" and in trying to reach that goal it will hallucinate details. But that’s part of the process too. Sometimes it even adds more work for me by getting facts wrong and I base chapters on these facts only to find out later on they are incorrect. The other way I use AI is in graphic design. I’ve been doing that as a hobby for years, long before AI tools existed. I’ve made my own graphics, logos, cards, newsletters for a long time, and I still do. AI has just added another layer. A lot of people don’t even realize they’re already using AI, it’s built into Photoshop, Canva, and most modern design tools. My book covers were made in Canva. My memoir has no AI involved at all, the cover is from a photo I took at Cape Disappointment but for my historical series, I did use AI to convert my photos into paintings. I took those paintings into Canva and then added all the other elements to them. Now I could've done all that in photoshop but AI is better at it and faster then I would be. As someone with time constraints it is a relief to be able to spend more time on my writing then fiddling around in photoshop. Top photo is my original photo, bottom is AI assisted. This is the cover images for The Sunstone Path. I’ve also used AI to help me visualize a world I can’t actually see. I uploaded real photos of my great grandmother, my grandmother, and myself and asked it to create an image of what my great grandmother might have looked like in 1905. When that image came back, and I could see all three of us in one face, it was emotional. It helped me connect with Regina in a way I hadn’t before and you can get it to do that exactly ONE time cause any other request turns into some kind of deformed monster. You can get a beautiful image back, and then realize it gave her three arms. At that point, you just have to laugh and start over. It's one of the many limitations there are with AI image generation. You can't just say "paint like Picasso" and a masterpiece will appear. AI thinking humans have 3 arms This is where things get complicated. There are people who will shut down anyone who uses AI at all, and on the other end, people trying to make a quick buck by letting AI write entire books. I’ve seen both sides. AI is scary for a lot of people, and not without reason. It is taking jobs. My husband has been out of work for almost two years, a veteran, with 30 years of executive experience. My son, with a master’s in IT, can’t get a single interview. The entry-level jobs that used to build careers for him are disappearing to AI. So when people raise those concerns, they’re not wrong. But at the same time, AI also creates opportunities. There’s also a financial reality that doesn’t get talked about enough. Breaking into writing can cost thousands of dollars, editing, covers, formatting, marketing. That is a big ask to invest that kind of money for something that may never make any of that back. For a lot of people, that’s simply out of reach. AI doesn’t replace those things, but it lowers the barrier enough for someone to start. And sometimes, that’s the difference between a story staying in someone’s head, or finally making it onto the page. All the talk about AI taking over the world is premature though. It’s not there yet, not even close. We are nowhere near a Battlestar Galactica scenario, and here’s why: AI has no soul. It cannot create with intention, and honestly, it’s not great at storytelling. I ran an experiment and had AI write a chapter about my husband’s accident overseas with sources directly from The Unbreakable Anchor. It came back with something technically impressive… but completely over the top. I’m calling it: AI GONE WILD — courtesy of Google Gemini “The humidity—a damp, suffocating wool blanket soaked in the spicy tears of a thousand street vendors—clung to Alex like a desperate ex-girlfriend who refused to accept the breakup of the season. He gripped the handlebars of the scooter—his mechanical steed, a plastic-clad Pegasus of the Orient—as the engine let out a high-pitched whine that sounded like a vacuum cleaner trapped in a blender. Bangla Road was a kaleidoscope of chaos—a neon-drenched fever dream where the lights pulsed like the heartbeat of a frantic rabbit—and Alex was the carrot. "Stop!" a voice thundered—a sonic boom of authority that shattered the humid air like a brick through a stained-glass window—as the Thai police emerged from the shadows like jaguars in khaki. “ As you can see, AI can sound impressive, but it doesn’t know when to stop. It leans into patterns, overuses metaphors, and mistakes “more” for “better.” This is not useful unless you're planning on going on writing comedy tour. Over time, you start to recognize those patterns, and you realize just how far away it is from replacing real writers. That said, there are people who make it their mission to tear down anyone who even touches AI. But AI isn’t going anywhere. Just like computers didn’t, or cars, or cell phones. Progress happens whether we like it or not. I don’t use AI to write my stories. I use it to support the process of telling them. I write every word that makes it into my books. AI helps me refine it, shape it, fix mistakes, often over multiple drafts. AI is not the storyteller, I am. AI is just an tool. And like any tool, it can be used well or misused. The difference isn’t in the technology, it’s in the person using it. For me, it’s about preserving stories that might otherwise be lost, whether they’re family histories, lived experiences, or something entirely imagined. In my case, I write to leave a legacy for my family, the one thing that carries on after we are gone. As a storyteller, I use the tools available to me to help bring that vision to life, while staying transparent in the process. My hope is that comes through to my readers in The Unbreakable Anchor, in The Sunstone Path, and the stories still yet to come. -TJ Nilsdatter Join the Journey Subscribe for book updates, new blog posts, family history, and a behind-the-scenes look at the inspiration behind the books.