From 'Tabs' to 'Trail': Rusty Foster's 2,200-mile writing experiment
The Today in Tabs creator tells us what goes into his new effort, Today on Trail, and why he’s enjoying being (sort of) disconnected.
Rusty Foster, perhaps best known for Today in Tabs newsletter, his bitingly funny newsletter about the media industry and internet culture, had wanted to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail — that is, do the whole thing in one go — since he was a teenager. “I’ve done sections of it as an adult, and it was clear to me that I would be very lonely and unhappy if I did it by myself,” Foster, who is in his late forties and lives on Peaks Island, Maine, tells Depth Perception. “So I’d written it off as something that wouldn’t really happen.”
As luck would have it, Foster’s 19-year-old son, Mica, graduated college early and was down for a six-month hike. So in early July, father and son scaled Mount Katahdin in Maine, their first steps in a nearly 2,200-mile journey. Foster, who has put Tabs on hiatus, is documenting his hike in a separate newsletter called Today on Trail, which has some 5,800 subscribers. (Tabs, which he launched in 2013, has 42,000 subscribers, many of them in the media class.) Today on Trail is also being adapted for an occasional Washington Post opinion column.
“It's been really nice to write different stuff,” Foster says. “Tabs is written in a format that my brain functions in. I would break the format when I wanted to, but I’m kind of lazy. With Today on Trail, it’s been nice to have a more open kind of palette to work with. It’s such a smaller audience, and they’re basically just here to read whatever I want to write. So I’ve given myself permission to do goofy stuff sometimes.”
Foster spoke to us on the phone during a recent day off in Bennington, Vermont, some 580 miles into his hike. The following has been edited for length and clarity. —Mark Yarm
I’ve hiked parts of the Appalachian Trail before, and the last thing I want to do after a long day of hiking is write anything whatsoever. How do you discipline yourself?
I thought, Well, what if at the end of each day I write for an hour? It’s not that hard to write for an hour, right? And I can think about stuff to write as I’m hiking all day. Because even when I write Tabs, a big part of my process was always getting up and going for a walk. I have to be moving around to think clearly sometimes. So the idea was that I’d write for an hour a day, and then twice a week I would have created enough to edit it into a reasonable newsletter post.
That’s actually not how it's gone at all. It turns out that what I’m better at is thinking over the course of a couple of days about what I might write about next, and then at some point, when I have the energy, sitting down and spending two-and-a-half or three hours just solidly writing the thing and posting it. Most of the posts I’ve ended up writing in motels, when we get to town.
I did recently realize that I could sit down around 10 o’clock, when I take a snack break, and write for an hour then, which is still relatively early in the morning, when I’m still pretty fresh and I’ve spent the morning already thinking. I don’t know why it took me two months to think of this idea, but that’s been working really well lately.
What are the mechanics of writing the newsletter? What kind of tech are you packing?
I have an iPhone 13 and a little six-ounce folding keyboard that I got from Amazon. I can do editing with my thumbs, but to actually sit down and put thoughts down into a Google Doc, I really need some kind of a keyboard. It’s a Bluetooth keyboard. It cost 20 bucks or something, and I was like, Well, it's gonna last a week. But it’s been great. I think I’ve had to charge it once so far.
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Today in Tabs is so focused on the media industry and internet culture, I imagine that on the trail you're not so tapped into that. Do you have severe FOMO?
I have JOMO: the joy of missing out. It’s been wonderful. I still weirdly know things that I shouldn’t know. I should be more disconnected. But somewhere in Maine, I took my phone off airplane mode on the summit of a mountain because I wanted to check my email or whatever, and the first thing that rolled in was a whole bunch of fundraising requests from the Democratic campaigns. And it was like, “Tim Walz is the VP nominee. We need your assistance. Blah, blah, blah.” I texted my wife, “Oh, I guess it’s Tim Walz.” And she was like, “What?”
So I actually knew before she did, which is really funny. I think I turned my phone on five minutes after they announced the VP pick. But stuff like that keeps happening where I am finding things out despite desperately not wanting to know about any of it.
Do you feel like when you come back to Tabs that you’re going to have a hole in your knowledge of what’s been going on in the media and on the internet for the past six months?
Probably. I don't know. Tabs is day-to-day; it doesn't require that kind of historical knowledge. The appearance that I have that kind of deep background in history is mostly an illusion. Because I did Tabs from 2013 to 2016, and then took five years off. And a lot of stuff happened in those five years that I was absolutely not aware of because I wasn’t professionally paying attention to it. Then I picked Tabs up again in 2021, and it didn’t matter that I’d taken five years off.
A lot of people, like Bill Bryson, have written about hiking the Appalachian Trail. What do you think that you add to the corpus of writing about the trail?
That’s actually the question that I most wrestled with when I thought about doing this: What do I have to say uniquely about any of this? And my answer to that was this newsletter is not meant to be about the trail, per se, because that would take a lot more research and knowledge than I have. It’s a newsletter about what happens in my brain, specifically, when I spend eight to 10 hours a day hiking for six months.
“I have JOMO: the joy of missing out. It’s been wonderful.” — Rusty Foster
You’ve been doing this now for a couple months. What do you anticipate for the rest of the run of Today on Trail?
I mean, I’m gonna keep writing it. That’s a very, like, media strategy question. I feel like whenever media people interview me, they ask me media strategy questions. And I do not have a media strategy. I don’t have an audience target. I don’t know who my readers are, and I kind of don’t care. There’s always a lot of media questions that I don’t have good answers to. It’s the same way with Tabs, where it’s just like, “No, I really just write whatever I feel like writing that day, and as long as it’s working, I don’t ask questions.” I just think, You know what? This is working, it’s fine.
After you’re done with your hike, when do you foresee starting up Tabs again?
I put all the subscriptions to Today in Tabs on hold, so nobody’s paying for Tabs through, I think, the end of February 2025. So I gave myself a couple months after I came back to not necessarily have to restart it right away. And honestly, right now it’s like a blank void. The hike will end sometime in December, and then: question mark? That’s the best I can say.
I feel like everybody on the A.T. is between two things or dealing with some terrible problem or something. Like, we all have issues. I didn't realize until I got on the trail that nobody hiking the A.T. doesn’t have issues. We’re all there dealing with problems.
So what is your biggest problem?
I don’t know. That’s the thing. I have accepted that I must have some because I’m there. And I guess part of my challenge from here to December is figuring out what my problems are and trying to deal with them. I do think that maybe my career and what comes next for me as a writer is one of those problems. So was this project also, in some lowkey way, a chance to give myself an entire election season off where I don't have to write about Donald Trump again? Maybe. Maybe. And what comes after that? Like, I really don’t know. I don’t know.
Further reading from Rusty Foster
“Why Am I Doing This?” (Today on Trail, June 23, 2024)
“A Faint Brightness” (Today on Trail, July 21, 2024)
“The teenage woods” (The Washington Post, Sept. 9, 2024)
“Goodbye, For Now” (Today in Tabs, May 30, 2024)
“I May Not Harm Jeff Bezos” (The Awl, Aug. 14, 2013)