Hands on the Wheel

I once had the opportunity to float for a while in the confluence of two great rivers. It was hot, the middle of summer in the Utah desert. I waded out into the cold water and floated along for a while, half my body in the Yampa River, half in the Green River.

The Green River was true to its name. The Yampa was muddy brown. The brown and green waters met at a surprisingly sharp line you could see and feel.

I floated along for maybe five minutes. Ten at the most. It was a pit stop on a long day’s paddle, but I think about that confluence all the time. I think about how sharp the division was there, and how utterly it vanished two hundred meters further down the channel. Two very large, incomprehensibly powerful things join together and become one in a matter of feet.

What’s perhaps more startling, having started out on only one river, is to suddenly see that second one join in. A world you didn’t even know existed suddenly arrives and blends into what you thought was the world. Everything changes in an instant and then carries on toward the sea as if nothing happened. Rivers of thought, rivers of possibilities, rivers of history, rivers of choice all coming together, opening and closing worlds in ways that are sometimes difficult to predict. Everything always heading toward the sea.

We spent some time at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown in an old farmhouse that had been converted into a schoolhouse. It seemed in keeping with our general strategy that, when the world zigs, you should zag. In a world where no one was going to school anymore, our kids, who have never been to school in their lives, suddenly lived in one. Zig, zag.

While everyone else struggled to entertain their kids at home, ours suddenly had access to swing sets, climbing structures, stages for plays and magic shows, and every STEM-related learning toy and tool you can imagine. There was even a zip line. From my kids point of view, for a few weeks, the pandemic was the best thing that had ever happened to them.

We tried to make the best of things and not let the pandemic intrude on the kids’ life too much. We were isolated of course, no campground playmates to run and bike around with, no campground even, but otherwise we tried to stick with our normal routines — school and work in the mornings, playing outside, climbing trees, zip lines, swings in the afternoon. Then after the kids were in bed I finished up work. Naturally there was plenty of time for waffling.

When it became apparent that the lockdown would last more than a few weeks, we started looking around for a place to hole up a while. The school house lacked beds, and its future was uncertain. It also had a ghost that liked to walk around smoking a cigarette.

As so often has happened to us in our travels, someone we barely knew offered us a place to stay. We took them up on it for a few weeks while we tossed around ideas for the future beyond that.

It turned out to be a perfect place for us, plenty of room for the bus, and a huge yard for the kids to play in. There was even fancy stuff like an oven, which we used to make brownies, because brownies don’t work in a waffle iron, we’ve tried.

We toyed with a variety of plans, but we’re more strategy people. Broad sweeping life aims are pretty well defined around here. We know what we want, but there are a lot of ways to get what you want.

Consider for instance this trip. We had a few goals, but one of the biggest things that’s emerged over time is that we like to spend time in the wilderness, undisturbed by the trappings of modern culture. A plan to achieve this would be to look at BLM land and maps. A strategy to achieve this would be to modify your life in such a way that you can get to the BLM land, or get it to you.

One day Corrinne ran across a Zillow listing for an 19th century farmhouse for rent in the middle of a 300-acre forest. I dismissed it out of hand because real estate descriptions are usually nothing but lies. Still, it did get me thinking. Thinking strategically. Instead of wondering when we’d get back on the road again, I began to wonder if getting back on the road again was the best strategy.

What if you could rent the wilderness for a while? Bring the wilderness to you so to speak.

Those two rivers swirled around me for a while. On one hand there was the comfort of the familiar, life in the bus. But you can’t go home again, things are always changing. With international travel largely shutdown we knew people would turn to camping. RV sales went up 600% in April 2020. This year is shaping up to be an Eternal September for RVing in the U.S. and I was not at all sure I wanted to be part of that.

There was also a parallel current that’s been pulling at me for some time, one that seems to want me away from the road for a while. We flirted with this in Mexico, but that didn’t work out quite the way we wanted. We were not able to get the things done that we intended to get done. At the end of the day, we were still on the road in Mexico.

One of the strange things about writing about travel is that it’s very tough to do when you’re actually traveling. To write you need long uninterrupted periods of nothingness, which travel generally fails to provide. Most writers I know travel in bursts, then retreat to write about it. And to be clear, I mean writing longer projects. Creating a site like this on the road is a lot of work, but it happens in short bursts so it’s not too tough to do.

Eventually, these two streams for ideas began to mingle. Both Corrinne and I have projects we want to get off the ground that we just can’t swing from the road. And that property? It turns out the description wasn’t all lies. It really was an old farmhouse in the middle of 300 acres of pine forest.