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@@ -1,3 +1,11 @@ +"There's a race of men that don't fit in, +A race that can't sit still; +So they break the hearts of kith and kin, +And they roam the world at will." +-Robert Service + +"On either end of the social spectrum there lies a leisure class." – Eric Beck + ## Prologue I've been waiting for this night all my life, this is the last night. @@ -6,7 +14,7 @@ Tomorrow my wife, our three children and I will climb in a 26-foot-long, 7-foot- I've thought this night, about what it would feel like a thousand times, but I never got it right. -I imagined a deep feeling of freedom, an ever-expanding sense of the world and self where anything seemed possible. I imagined it would feel like coming home. I imagined I would want to spend it alone, which why I am sitting in this diner, well past midnight, watching rivulets of water trace patterns down the frosty window pane. I can hear the hiss of a broom on the sidewalk outside, the barman next door, cleaning up before locking the doors for the night. +I imagined a deep feeling of freedom, an ever-expanding sense of the world and self where anything seemed possible. I imagined it would feel like coming home. I imagined I would want to spend it alone, which is why I am sitting in this diner, well past midnight, watching rivulets of water trace patterns down the frosty window pane. I can hear the hiss of a broom on the sidewalk outside, the barman next door, cleaning up before locking the doors for the night. I have a few more hours before my sleeping family will miss me. I pull out my notebook and try to think of something profound to write, but nothing comes. @@ -70,13 +78,41 @@ It was a monumental trip, months on the road, but eventually the money ran out. One day that was no longer enough. I got rid of the house. I got a plane ticket. I was gone for over a year. The money ran out. I came back. I did all the things they said I should do. Most of them turned out to be empty and false. I got a family, but we had too much baggage. I began to plot an escape something that would get my family on the road as well. I began to study nomads, to wonder not why they crossed the ice sheets, but how. The practical details. Moving through the world with a family is different than doing it alone. How did nomads do it, where did they go, how did they got there and how could those strategies might be applied to modern America? I settled on the idea of a mobile home, an RV or van. I could never afford an RV, it would take years to save the money to buy one. I turned to used used RVs, but RVs turn out to be poorly made and fall apart quickly. Reasoning that things used to be made much better than they are now, I added the word vintage to my research. That is when I came across the thing that would change everything. I stumbled upon the Dodge Travco. + +## Sea + +aThe sand is cool underfoot, the sea oats sway in the pre dawn breeze this tiny patchedwedged between two houses feels unaccountably wild in the early morning, before the people have come to make it feel smaller someohow, I watch it from the top of the small dune, wanter the sun to the east, at the edge of where sand and sea meet begines to make its way up by turns. starting with a faint violet glow that casts that pale blue that's nearly impossble the photograph, I've tried over and over and have only one image, not mine that properly captures that pale blue pre light that begine o fade out the stars and turn the sea from the surging black mass of night glittering with moon light, startlight, ship light a vast black nothingness puntucated withe this specks of the light, into the more recognixable blue that and great thatit will become by turns throughout the day. The sun is preceeded byu light, dawn comes slowly in gradations, not all at once nature never hurries, the world had ni deadlines, has no concerns has no worries, it simply is and we are part of it buit for some reason unstatsified by it, we invented all these things to give ourselves a esens of urgency that doesn't exist outside our heads and the imaginings they foist onto the world. + +Charlestown. Edisto. The saneing campround, the storm we've just outrun accross the flood plains of the lower Carolinas and Georgie out all the way out the here where finally we read an edge, the easternmost point we can get to. Befor ehte storm and kids and I head down to the beach determed to have our time before the rain plots out the sky. It;s fold, the sand whips at us in the wind like tiny tk We tough it out for quite a while. I watch them run and play. I am wishing they where braver, would take more risks, were more featless but they aren't they are who they are and I consider that gap between who they are and who I want them to be and I consider it, why it exists, why I want them to be something they are not yet. I worry about them, I worry they are too sheltered. I try to relax this is one of those things that my mind has invented and I am busy foisting on the world that could nto care less what I think it should be doing or what I think others in it ought to be doing. It is. Iam we are. Here, not. On this shore, windblown and looking to storm. + +We head back to the sampfouind fully exfoliated by the wind and sand. We set up camp like the amatuers without a clie that we are. The sky darkens grows darker and darker. I start the fire, shapen the burgers. Corrie put on the beans an washes the Kale. The rkey open up and lets lose with rain less than five minutes after the burers hit the grill. It is a big splattering rain ouf huge drops that batter the palm and oak leaves around us, drum on the rof of the bus and threaten to platter our burders into water mush meat. I hold out for as long as I can, tbtue burgers are beginneg to break up and sink into the fire. I dash inside for a skillet and hurriedly scope them off the gril and into the pan. The biut it is too late, they are to smashed, to water logged to ever be burers. I go inside the bus and rain begine to come down in tsheets. We watch as the windows egine to leak, the sliding channels overwheled by water running off the roof in sheets, a problem that will plauge us for the next three years and beyond there is no solution to to it, it is a design flaw of sorts, a consewuence of the wonderful swept back shape fo these windows. A price to pay for the loow of the bus. One we have paid over and over again, but of course thatnight in Edisto we do not yet know it -- I have my suspicious from the time I spent restorying it, but that was on uneven ground so I never knew for sure of the probms wa sthedesign or the posution of the bus in the driveway. Taht nifirst night in Edisto I learned, it was not the drieveway. After resting for a monent on the couch, the dam pof the shirt givng me a chill that doesn't match the actual temperature, Corrinne suggest I put the pan on the stived and tryto salvage the burgers, but there is no salvaging to be done, this is gound meat now, water logged fround beef at that. Corrinne suggests we just dump it all into the ban, beacns meat and kale and mixed together. So we do and theus is born a dish we eat countless more times in the coming years, alway sclaling it edisto skillet. + +Thewater disappears quickely, the sandy sil taking it down nearly as fast as it come. Byut mornin the world is steamy and wet but the water largely gone the campsite looks more or less like it did the night before, a little rain splattered, but otherwise. Corrine is up all night with every clap andcrash of theunder. I wake up from time to time when the lightning and thuder are close enought htat it wakes me, but I sleep well enough. Despite the leaking windows. I get up periodically to change the towelsthat soak up the drippin, but otherwise I sleep qyite well through the nights. + +The next morning we walk aroudn the campground loop looking for thPaul, whi is hear in antoher travo. This will be one of two times we will meet someone else in Travco on the road. Paul is on the far edge of the loop. WE meet, we talk about the storm, we take a tour of each others travcos and then we pack up and hit the road. + +That cain't beright, we wer ein edisto for a couple of nights I think. What else happened? I don't remember. Strange. + + +## Mountain +## Desert +## Shore + + ## Soul Power "What you call home, your country, the place where you come from, you're probably not going to describe a house. You may describe a tree, the weather, the lighting, the food, maybe the music, not a house." - Takis Yalelis, Greek Architect -A screaming roar comes down the hill. It has probably happened before. But not for me. Nothing like this has ever happened for me before. Nothing I've ever done compares to now. -To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it's a 27 foot long fiberglass container full of magic and joy. I have no idea what it is about it, I've owned it for four years now, lived in it for over two, and I still can't put my finger on it, some objects transcend themselves. The Travco has that thing not one can put their finger on, but everyone feels it. + + + + +After looking it over for about twenty minutes, I pulled out a wad of cash, handed it to the previous owner and it was mine. + + + +We go screaming down the hill at bre. It has probably happened before. But not for me. Nothing like this has ever happened for me before. Nothing I've ever done compares to now. The engine makes a guttural roar every time I press down on the gas pedal. It's an addictive sound. Not really a good one, but I didn't know that at the time, and it's satisfying anyway. It's the kind of roar that makes you say, screw it, let's go. And that was definitely what we wanted to do -- screw it, let's go. |