Historian and author David Nicandri joins Clay in the LTA Airstream in Olympia, Washington, for a conversation about lingering mysteries of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The first question was why Meriwether Lewis’ journal remained silent when he finally reached the Pacific Coast, which was the primary purpose of his transcontinental expedition. It was a dereliction of duty for the leader of the expedition to fail to write about reaching the Pacific after 18 months of gruelling travel. Clay and David attempt to make sense of Lewis’ silence. The second mystery they tackled concerns the enduring appeal of the Lewis and Clark story after 230 years. There are several dozen interpretive centers for Lewis and Clark, none for Zebulon Pike, who was exploring the Mississippi River drainage at the same time, and none for John C. Fremont, a generation later. Why? This episode was recorded September 9, 2025.

Clay interviews Montana adventurer Norm Miller, who has undertaken truly heroic canoe and kayak journeys on great rivers of the West. When he was 35, he retraced Scottish trader Alexander Mackenzie’s 1789 2,000-mile journey from Lake Athabasca to the Arctic Ocean. When he was 41, during the Bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Norm floated from St. Louis all the way to Astoria, Oregon, leaving his modified canoe only when there was no longer anything to float, and then making his way overland with a 45-pound backpack. Both stories are amazing — a lone man threading some of the most powerful rivers on the North American continent, keeping a daily journal, taking thousands of old school photographs, affirming the geographic descriptions in the journals of Lewis and Clark and Alex Mackenzie, and meeting very interesting roadside groups and individuals. This episode was recorded on September 13, 2025.

In the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah, Clay asked his good friend Beau Breslin of Skidmore College to join him in a conversation about political violence in America. Political violence is nothing new in America. We were born in an armed revolution, we’ve had waves of political violence throughout our history, and we seem as a nation to be in love with violence, at least in our popular culture, and beyond. The program includes discussion of slave revolts, violent brawls on the floor of Congress, the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and JFK, the rash of violence in the 1960s, and the growing polarization of America. Professor Breslin believes firmly that we can bring down the political temperature in the U.S. but only if we sit down together and grant each other legitimacy, even when we very seriously disagree. Prompted by popular demand, in the third segment of the program, Clay offered an op ed statement about our need to have a serious, respectful, and civil national conversation about the Second Amendment and gun violence in America.

Clay talks about his 2025 trek across America in his 23-foot Airstream following the Lewis and Clark trail. Clay discusses RV life and provides a sense of what a day in the life of an RV drifter is like. Clay also speaks about his intensive study of the journals of Lewis and Clark and the book he is developing, tentatively titled Getting Noticed on the Lewis and Clark Trail. And, at the end, he tells us about his future Airstream travel plans and his fall 2025 trips to England and Rome.

Clay and his friend Russ Eagle interview Robert DeMott, one of the greatest living Steinbeck scholars, at his fishing cabin on the Madison River, south of Bozeman, Montana. DeMott is the author of three important studies of Steinbeck’s novels, the editor of the journal he kept while writing his classic, The Grapes of Wrath, and also the editor of the four-volume Library of America edition of Steinbeck’s work. Russ Eagle has been enamored of Steinbeck for decades, particularly his 1945 novella Cannery Row. Dr. DeMott was incredibly generous with his time and his insights into Steinbeck. An avid fly fisherman, DeMott spends five or six weeks each summer in Montana’s Madison River valley, where we met up with him. DeMott regards the Grapes of Wrath as a top-five American novel, and Cannery Row, though underappreciated, is nearly as great. Over sodas and sandwiches, we had the honor of listening to one of America’s most significant literary critics. This episode was recorded on August 1, 2025.