In October of 2025, I had a widow-maker heart attack. The kind where the EMTs don't make small talk on the way to the hospital, and the kind where the staff at Aurora Grafton moves with a particular urgency that tells you, without words, that things are considerably closer than you'd like them to be. I made it — obviously, because you're reading this — but for a stretch of time that I genuinely couldn't measure, that outcome was not obvious at all.

Here's what I remember most clearly from the days that followed. I wanted to go outside. Not to run a marathon or prove anything to anyone or perform some kind of triumphant return to the land of the living. Just outside. Into the air, onto a trail, near water, somewhere with dirt under my feet and sky overhead and the particular kind of quiet that only exists when you're moving through the world under your own power. That pull — that deep, almost embarrassing need to be in motion and in nature — told me everything I needed to know about what I'm supposed to be doing with whatever time I have left. So that's what this is.

My name is Glenn Rieker. I'm 70 years old, I live in southeast Wisconsin, and I have spent 45 years in the dirt — professionally, passionately, and occasionally by accident. I've designed project from blank lots into estate gardens, built things with my hands that will outlast me by decades, ridden more Wisconsin trails than I can honestly count, and paddled more quiet rivers than I've managed to photograph — though I've photographed a considerable number of them, including from above as an FAA-certified drone pilot, which is a job title I still find quietly thrilling.

I grew up the kind of kid who mowed half the neighborhood so he could afford better gear for exploring the woods behind it. Boy Scouts, YMCA camp at Phantom Lake, a canoe base near Land O' Lakes, golf with my parents at ten years old, skiing at Majestic Hills and Devil's Head and Rib Mountain — and through all of it, a lifelong unshakeable conviction that being outside makes everything better, that the outdoors is not something you do but something you are, and that any problem that can't be improved by a long walk or a morning on the water probably can't be improved at all. That conviction has been tested in ways I didn't see coming.

Twenty years ago, my sister died at 56. When you lose someone that young — someone your age, your blood, someone who was supposed to be there for decades more — it does something permanent to your sense of time. It makes "someday" feel like a dangerous word, a kind of wishful thinking you can no longer afford. My wife Cheryl and I sat with that loss and made a decision together: we were not going to wait for someday. We were going to build our life around the things that actually mattered — each other, our family, time spent outside, and enough good Wisconsin cheese to make the whole project feel celebratory rather than just urgent.

For thirty four years, that's exactly what we did. We gardened together in the way that serious gardeners do, where the conversation happens between tasks and the silence between conversations is comfortable and full. We biked together. We paddled together. We explored Wisconsin in all four seasons, including February, which requires a particular kind of optimism that I believe is unique to people who grew up here. We got dirty together in every sense of the phrase — in the soil, in the work, in the beautiful and complicated and often genuinely muddy business of building a life that felt worth living every single day of it.

Then I lost my brother. Then my father, four weeks later. Then Cheryl passed away in 2023, after two years of fighting stage four lung cancer with the kind of grace and grit that I am still, three years on, trying to fully understand and absorb.

I won't try to describe what that's like, because I don't think description does it justice and because if you've lost a partner of 34 years you already know, and if you haven't I genuinely hope you never find out. What I can tell you is what got me through it, and what continues to get me through it on the days when through it feels like the wrong preposition entirely. Being outside. Not because nature fixes grief — it doesn't, and anyone who tells you it does has probably not experienced grief at the depth where that claim gets tested. Grief doesn't get fixed. It gets carried, and slowly, if you're patient with yourself and lucky enough to have good people around you, it gets integrated into who you are rather than being the only thing you are. But being in motion, in fresh air, with dirt under your fingernails or tires on a quiet trail or a paddle pulling through calm water — that is the closest thing I have ever found to a reset button for the body and the soul. It doesn't solve anything. It just makes it possible to keep going, which is sometimes all you need it to do.

Then October of 2025 happened, and I found myself in the back of an ambulance with a 100% blockage of the left anterior descending artery and a team of EMTs who were, to their enormous credit, extremely good at their jobs. The staff at Aurora Grafton were even better. Between all of them, they gave me back something I hadn't fully understood I was about to lose, and I have thought about that every single morning since in the way that you think about things when you understand viscerally that the morning itself is not guaranteed.

I came out of it changed — not broken-changed, not frightened-changed, but grateful-changed and clarified-changed in a way that is difficult to articulate but easy to feel. I had already learned, after losing my sister and my brother and my father and Cheryl, that life is short and more or less indifferent to your plans for it. The heart attack didn't teach me anything new so much as it underlined everything I already knew, circled it in red, and added several exclamation points for emphasis. So here is what I decided, lying in a hospital bed looking out a window at an October sky in Wisconsin: I am going to get as dirty as possible with whatever time I have. I am going to ride more trails. Paddle more rivers. Spend more mornings with my hands in the soil and my face in the wind. I am going to share every bit of it — the beauty, the hard days, the gear that works, the routes worth riding, the gardens worth building, the mornings that make you glad you're alive — and I am going to do it honestly, the way a 70-year-old man who has buried people he loved and stared down his own mortality does things, which is to say without pretending it's all highlight reels and perfect sunrises.

Getting Dirty with Glenn is built around four things — the same four things that have anchored my life for as long as I can honestly remember, and that I keep coming back to no matter what else changes.

The first is the garden. Forty-five years of growing things has taught me that a garden is never just a garden — it is patience made visible, loss made beautiful, and a bet on the future that you plant today without any guarantee of seeing it fully grown. I have built gardens from nothing into landscapes that will outlive everyone who walks through them, and I have learned more about life from working in soil than from most other things I have done. I share what I know here — what works in Wisconsin, what doesn't survive a real winter, and what the garden quietly teaches you if you're paying attention.

The second is the trail and the water. Biking Wisconsin's rails-to-trails and paddling her rivers is not a hobby for me — it is medicine, it is therapy, it is the place where I process the hard things and celebrate the good ones and stay in a body I actually want to live in. I have done both through grief and through recovery and through a body that has had, at this point, every reason to slow down, and I have written honest guides to the routes worth riding and the waterways worth paddling, from someone who does it at 70 with a heart rate monitor and absolutely no interest in pretending it's always easy.

The third is NoNáme — my 2025 Ram ProMaster 3500, named NoNáme, which is how I get from Grafton to the destination trails and quiet kayak launches and out-of-the-way Harvest Host and Hipcamp locations that most people drive right past without knowing they exist. There is an entire corner of the van world devoted to $200,000 custom Sprinter builds with rooftop solar and handmade cabinetry, and that is genuinely beautiful, but it is not this. NoNáme is a real budget, a real van, and a real person figuring out how to sleep well and arrive at the trailhead by sunrise without requiring a second mortgage. I document all of it — what I bought, what it cost, what I'd do differently, and every location worth pointing a van toward.

The fourth is the journey itself — the part about grief and recovery and staying in motion at 70 and the stubborn refusal to stop moving when life gives you every reason to. This is the most personal corner of what I do here, and probably the most useful if you are navigating something hard right now, whether that's loss or a health scare or simply the quiet realization that the years are moving faster than they used to and you want to spend them differently than you have been.

I have signed my emails with the same quote for over twenty years, and it hits differently now than it did when I first found it, more truthfully than I could have understood when I was young enough to think it was just a good line:

"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body — but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow. What a ride."

That is what Getting Dirty with Glenn is about. Living fully and laughing often and getting outside every chance you get and embracing every messy, meaningful, muddy moment this life decides to throw your way. I'm glad you're here. Come along.

— Glenn Rieker Grafton, Wisconsin