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@@ -1,70 +1,64 @@ ## Prologue -"Happy juice?" +I've been waiting for this night all my life, this is the last night. Tomorrow it's the road. -"Yes. Happy juice." +As of tomorrow my family, my wife, me and our three children live in a 26-foot-long 7-foot-wide psychedelic blue fiberglass jellybean of an RV built in 1969. -William is laughing. The red vinyl cushions of the diner booth give both of us an unhealthy pink aspect. +I've thought this night, about what it would feel like a thousand times, but I never got it right. -"Don't ever use that phrase again." +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. -"Okay, dopamine. The D4 dopamine receptor if you want to get technical." His smile disappears. It's replaced by that look old friends get when they believe they may have solved some riddle of your life. +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. -"Look. It's not you. Well," he hesitates, "it is you, but you can't help it. It's your genes." +I don't feel anything. I've already left long ago. This is just my body catching up. -"How is this supposed to make me feel better about having no home, no job and no real future in our culture?" +I had already been through the profound sense of panic and self doubt that always accompanies any big trip. Perhaps the most marvelous thing about travel is the feeling of detachment, you carve a space where you can think with a clarity you can seldom muster otherwise. You're in a world that's all your own and there's a feeling of absolute relaxation that comes from removal, from the distance between you and the world that renders commitment and obligation moot. It's the most wonderful feeling in the world, but right after it comes the panic. I imagine it's like floating in space, complete relaxation. Until you realize you're floating away into space. You never get something for nothing. -"They've done studies on fruit flies, some are adventurers, some are not. The ones that are have more D4 dopamine receptors. They do more with dopamine. That's you I guess, you need more dopamine." +I've done a few trips at this point in my life. None this big, but enough to expect the panic. There is no other way, you simply have to ride it out. If you ever do this you'll start feeling the panic rise as you get closer to departure. But don't panic about the panic. It's natural. You'll get through it. If it's your first time it helps to find someone to talk to about it. You can call me if you want. -I consider this for a moment in silence, feeling the acrid burn of late night coffee rumbling in my already knotted stomach. I'm starting to think perhaps I should have stayed where I was half an hour ago, in my hotel room, and white knuckled my way through an anxiety attack. Instead I find myself in a diner at 2AM with my oldest friend comparing me to fruit flies. +The broom outside falls silent. The world has been swept away. A squeak escapes the kitchen. I look around. I'm alone in this place. The white tile floors echo. I can hear the cook and waiter talking in the alley out back, hear the silence of inhaled cigarettes, the bored wiling away a long, slow night shift. -"It's your fault really, I read all this that book you gave me." +Once I spent the night before I left on a big trip trying to find a rational reason for doing what I was doing. I never could. You'll chase your tail for years rationalizing it all. There's no rational reason to travel. Rational traveling is called fleeing. -The book in question is Craig Child's Atlas of a Lost World, an attempt to trace human migration into North America. The question D4 might answer is why. Why would a human living a perfectly happy life in Paleolithic Alaska attempt to venture across thousands of miles of ice just to see whats on the other side? Characteristically, science backed up and asked a slightly smaller, more manageable question -- why are some fruit flies more adventurous than others? Not all fruit fly larvae behave the same. Most pop out of their eggs and go for the nearest food. That's easy to understand. Others though, they do not. Why would a tiny fruit fly larvae wiggle right past food on some quixotic quest for...? No one knows what they're looking for, no one know why they do it. +Don't try to rationalize it. Better to stay in your room, stare in the mirror and see if you can sense the personality behind the personality that's staring in the mirror. That personality might know why, might have a reason. It won't be a reason that helps stave off the panic, but if you can find that other personality it'll make the panic you have pale in comparison to the panic you feel once you pull that off. -What we do know is that Whether or not a fruit fly larvae stops for the first food it finds or keeps going, hitting the open road as it were, is reliably determined by genetics, what scientists call the rover allele. When there are more rover alleles, the larvae goes on a quest, one that, incidentally, almost always leaves them dead at the edge of that petri dish. "Their journey more important than living," as Childs puts it. +Perhaps it's because I was a nomad in the former life. You were too. We all were. Sedentary living is new. Even long after the advent of agriculture and cities, nomads were the rule. Staying in one place is evolutionarily unwise. Sedentary cultures have a smaller world and ruin it faster. Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, Chaco Canyon. Environmental collapse is easy when your environment never changes. Nomads move around, disperse their impact, avoiding strain on any one part of the system. -Move to more complex organisms and the same division occurs though the mapping to genetic markers gets more complex. Broadly speaking there are what biologists call sitters and rovers. David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist from Binghamton University, has done quite a few experiments with sitters and rovers. In one he put traps in a pond of pumpkinseed sunfish. The rovers were, naturally, the first to investigate the traps. It's not hard to imagine how that ended -- at the edge of their petri dish as it were. The sitters on the other hand did just fine because they never felt the need to investigate the traps. Score one for the sedentary. I am ruining my life. I want my house back. I want my security back. +From its earliest days America has been home to the greatest of nomads. The early mariners who likely arrived in skin boats, tracing their way along the Aleutian coastline, were probably the first, though little trace of them remains. The remants of fires in coastal caves, napped knives and other stone tools found alongside the bones of animals. We know they were here, can guess at how they might have come, what can't rationally explain is why. -But sitters don't always come out ahead. Security is an illusion. Wilson has done other experiments. In one study he moved the fish to a new pond and it was the rovers who thrived because their drive to explore meant they found food before the sitters. More importantly though what this shows is these are not individual evolutionary strategies, they species-level strategies. In other words the world needs both sitters and rovers, each will survive different scenarios. +Writer and fellow adventurer, Craig Childs has devoted a whole book to finding the answer. He calls it the *Atlas of a Lost World*. Childs wants to know why anyone who had a reasonably content life, as it seems safe to suppose an Ice Age era human probably had, with plenty of game around, the relative safety of the tribe, a family to provide for and so on, why would such a person leave that behind and set off into the unknown? -My family and I will be just fine, we will drive our vintage bus to where the food is and beat all those other people trying to find food. Except that sounds alarmingly like a zombie apocalypse type scenario. +Childs never comes up with an answer that's very satisfying. Science offers the D4 dopamine receptor, a part of your brain that craves dopamine, which is often released by novel experiences. The further into North America you go, the more D4 receptors you find. "Among Native American genomes and those of their ancestors," writes Childs, "the presence of D4 is correlated with an individual’s distance from the land bridge." In South America the presence of D4 is more than double what you find in North. -"Oh no question," William takes another sip of his beer, "you're definitely who I'd want to be with in a zombie apocalypse." +What we really can't know is if that extra D4 drove them further, or if perhaps they have that extra D4 because something else drove them further. Is D4 a cause or effect? Short of time travel, there's no way to know. -For humans the determining component, the key difference between sitters and rovers, appears to be the number of D4 dopamine receptors in your brain. More D4 produces what Childs calls "the kind of people who are reckless or adventurous, in need of something new." Childs' research turns up an interesting explanation of why anyone would ever have set out across that vast ice sheet even if they had a perfectly nice life in Alaska: they were driven by their genes. The D4 receptors correlate to how far prehistoric individuals wandered. Looking at remains ranging between one thousand to thirty thousand years old, scientists found that the D4 marker is more prevalent among those who migrated as compared to those who maintained a long genetic history in one place. +Perhaps it really is as simple as Sir Edmund Hillary's famous quip about why he wanted to climb mount Everest: "because it's there." -> Among Native American genomes and those of their ancestors, the presence of D4 is correlated with an individual’s distance from the land bridge. North America, with the closest access to the land bridge, shows 32 percent of samples with D4 elongation. Central America comes in ahead with 42 percent, and South America reaches an average 69 percent, as if people needed that much more umph to reach that far south. +Watching the water run down the window I try to come up with something more profound than Hillary, but I can't. Why sell our house, get rid of the vast majority of our possessions, and pack our three young children, along with what few possessions would fit, into the RV I'd restored in the past year and venture into the unknown? We aren't following mammoths, we aren't running from environmental pressures. Or are we? Has the pressure to be part of a complex culture that increasingly fails to meet the needs of the people within it a kind of environmental pressure? Is that why we're going/ Are we traveling or are we fleeing? Is the difference visible before the journey is over? -> Too high in D4, though, you’d never be seen again, a seed blown beyond all horizons. +To see the world as it is, perhaps that's why anyone goes. Simply to see. What's on the other side of the land bridge? What's on the other side of the ocean? What's on the other side of town? Scale doesn't seem to matter much. -It's that latter possibility that had me up in the hotel bathroom late at night, staring at my reflection in the mirror, nearing what might be called a nervous breakdown. +I became conscious of how quite a diner is at 2 AM. The sound of my pen scratching on the pages of my notebook seemed an unnecessary disturbance. I ordered another cup of coffee to give the waiter something to do. I watch the steam trace arcs into the air. I should go home, but I don't know where that is just now. The vintage RV we're picking up from the mechanic tomorrow? The hotel room where my wife and children are asleep? The house we sold two days ago? The city I was born in? -My wife and I had sold our house, given or sold off all our possessions, packed our three young children and what few possessions would fit into a 1969 RV I'd restored and were, the very next morning, going to head off into what remains of the wilds of America. +The truth is I have never really felt at home anywhere. Except when I was traveling. Moving. Becoming rather than become. -We weren't following mammoths, we weren't running from environmental pressures. What had me staring in the mirror and later meeting William at the all night diner down the street from our hotel was the possibility that my excess of D4 was making me and everyone around me likely, as Child's puts in, to "never be seen again," that we were a seed about to be blown beyond the horizons of the life we used to know. +As a child I desperately wanted to be moving, all the time. I was assured by many, living and dead, that this was not normal. That I would need to settle down. That I would stop becoming and become. What was I running from, they asked, seconds before answering for me, myself. I was running from myself they told me. They said that it was me, that it was curse, that I could never escape this feeling of out-of-placeness because it was something inside me. I listened and observed these little loops of logic from a distance. I ignored them out of a stubbornness born of the nagging feeling that I was right about me. I wasn't sure at all about anyone else, but I was pretty sure about me and I found it odd that everyone else seemed so sure about me as well. -Over a few cups of coffee I managed to calm down. Somehow the notion that it wasn't me, it was the D4 receptors helped, even if, deep down I wasn't sure I bought that hypothesis at all. It's a correlation after all, a possible contributor, not cause and effect. +I grew older. I began to move. I began to wander. I began to explore. First on foot. I walked three blocks to a friends house, then four to get mint chocolate chip ice cream from Sav-on, then five, all the way to the castaways, the wildest place I could get on foot. -Still, I have never felt at home anywhere but on the road, moving. - -When I was very young I desperately wanted to be moving, all the time. I was assured by many, living and dead, that this was not normal. That I would need to settle down. What was I running from? Myself, they told me. - -They said that it was me, that it was curse, that I could never escape this feeling of out-of-placeness because it was something inside me. - -I ignored them out of sheer stubbornness. As I grew older I began to move. I began to wander. I began to explore. First on foot. I walked three blocks, then four, then five all the way to the castaways, the wildest place I could get. The world never felt so large, me never more a part of it, finally in it, finally free to be part of it than when I slipped under that faded gray pine fence, the cracked and splintered last outpost of civilization in my seven-year-old mind, and stepped out into the field of sagebrush and buckwheat as tall as me. Here I disappeared into in a network of BMX bike trails and discarded tires, watched brown and tan gopher snakes and blue throated fence lizards dart under my feet as I made my way down to the edge of the bluff where a cluster of Eucalyptus trees and ice plant held out against the ravages of erosion, trying to keep themselves and us from slipping in to marshy islands of cordgrass below. It was here we came to ride bikes, smoke our first cigarettes and drink our first warm, foamy beers stolen from dad's stash in the back of the garage. It was here, traveling, on the road, however short it might have been, that we first found freedom. +The world never felt so large, me never more a part of it, finally in it, finally free to be part of it than when I slipped under that faded gray pine fence, the cracked and splintered last outpost of civilization in my seven-year-old mind, and stepped out into the field of sagebrush and buckwheat as tall as me. Here I disappeared into in a network of BMX bike trails and discarded tires, watched brown and tan gopher snakes and blue throated fence lizards dart under my feet as I made my way down to the edge of the bluff where a cluster of Eucalyptus trees and ice plant held out against the ravages of erosion, trying to keep themselves and us from slipping in to marshy islands of cordgrass below. It was here we came to ride bikes, smoke our first cigarettes and drink our first warm, foamy beers stolen from dad's stash in the back of the garage. It was here, traveling, on the road, however short it might have been, that we first found freedom. I caught a taste of that freedom and never wanted anything else. I looked for more places to go in the suburbs where I grew up and, to my own surprise, found them. Across the street was a drainage ditch. I scaled the fence and followed it for miles, lost in my own private explorations of a world that was new, full of algal growth, darting song sparrows and looping, bouncing flight of Monarchs and Swallowtails. It was here that I first met a local who did not like my presence in his world, a mockingbird attacked me, going so far as to beat my head with its wings before I took off running. But that mockingbird was right, it was not my world. It was surrounded by but cut off from the everyday world I inhabited, hidden by a mere two feet of hedge, but hidden nonetheless. -I discovered I wasn't trying to outrun myself, I wasn't running from myself, I was just running to feel wind rushing past me, to make sure the planet was still moving, to try to feel connected to it in some small way by reaching out to it, seeing as much of it and as many of the people sharing it with me as I possibly could. +I discovered I wasn't trying to outrun myself, I wasn't running from myself, I was just running to feel wind rushing past me, to make sure the planet was still moving, to try to feel connected to it in some small way by reaching out to it, seeing all that it was offering, as much of it and as many of the people sharing it with me as I possibly could. I found other places, Again and again I found freedom in moving, freedom in exploration. Everywhere I went there was something to discover, so long as I went. It wasn't long before I convinced my parents to let me go farther. First down off the bluffs and into the marshes around the bay. Then to the other side of the bay. Then all the way to where the bay emptied into the sea, and at that point, the bonds were effectively loosed. I roamed where I liked. -I went everywhere I could every time I could. Farther and farther afield, each trip longer than the last, until I noticed something -- they were right, I was not normal. But they were wrong as well, there was a place I felt at home, a place I felt I belonged, an observer within a system that otherwise seemed to have no use for me. I felt something when I was traveling that I have never felt anywhere else -- I felt at home. +I went everywhere I could every time I could. Farther and farther afield, each trip longer than the last, until I noticed something -- they were right, I was not normal. But they were wrong as well, there was a place I felt at home, a place I felt I belonged, an observer within a system that otherwise seemed to have no use for me. I felt something when I was traveling that I have never felt anywhere else -- I felt at home. Which is to say I felt relaxed, at ease, like I belonged. It was a good feeling, I wanted more. Probably it released some dopamine in my brain. Whatever it was there was just something about the light, something about the smell, the touch the texture of the world... I began to chase that feeling. -I started ditching school to explore the bay in fourth grade. By high school I was leaving at lunch and not returning until the next day. Once at the age of eleven, my friend Josh and I managed to convince each of our parents that we were going to the other's house. Instead we stealthily slipped out with our surfboards on our bikes and met up half way between our houses, hid our bikes in the unused drainage ditch, the same one the mockingbird had driven me out of, and caught a local bus for San Clemente. I'll never forget the way I felt, my head pressed up against the window, watching the world slip by, but also watching the reflections of it in the window as we slipped down the coast, the feeling of being a part of and watching the reflections of the world at the same time. This is still my favorite part of life on the road, the way glass shows the world and you, together, riding along, slipping into the future as it becomes the present, the ever present future of boundless possibility. We were still twelve when we stepped off the bus a good 40 miles from home, but for my part, I was much, much older already. We spent the morning surfing, and out in the water, waiting on a wave was the first time I ever recall thinking, *I wonder if I could do this forever?*. +I started ditching school to explore the bay in fourth grade. By high school I was leaving at lunch and not returning until the next day. Once at the age of eleven, my friend Josh and I managed to convince each of our parents that we were going to the other's house. Instead we stealthily slipped out with our surfboards on our bikes and met up half way between our houses, hid our bikes in the unused drainage ditch, the same one the mockingbird had driven me out of, and caught a local bus for San Clemente. I'll never forget the way I felt, my head pressed up against the window, watching the world slip by, but also watching the reflections of it in the window as we slipped down the coast, the feeling of being a part of and watching the reflections of the world at the same time. This is still my favorite part of life on the road, the way glass shows the world and you, together, riding along, slipping into the future as it becomes the present, the ever present future of boundless possibility. We were still twelve when we stepped off the bus a good 40 miles from home, but for my part, I was much, much older already. We spent the morning surfing, and out in the water, waiting on a wave was the first time I ever recall thinking, *I wonder if I could live like this forever?*. The older I got the farther I went. I became (and remain) a huge fan of bus systems. The bus down the coast to surf offered me a way to get where I wanted and asked no questions. You got on, paid your fare and you could get off when you wanted. I became a consummate bus rider in a world obsessed with personal cars. I took the bus up the coast to see punk rock shows in Long Beach. I took it inland to hobby shops to buy model airplanes. I took it everywhere I could until enough of my friends had cars that I began to see a new way to extend my horizons even further. @@ -72,50 +66,25 @@ By senior year of high school I had all but dropped out, and spent as much time As you might imagine this did not mix well with education. I did manage to graduate from high school and I even briefly went to college, partly for a girl, partly because I found a college at the edge of Los Angeles that was just far enough beyond the traffic that it made a good home base for weekend trips. Eventually though it turned out my girlfriend wanted to spend time with me, not with me on the road, and the advantage of missing traffic paled next to the horrors of the Inland Empire. I dropped out of college and -- what else? -- went traveling around the country with a friend of mine who was, if not perhaps quite as enthusiastic about travel, at least willing to tag along. -It was in a shabby hotel room in little Rock Arkansas, while watching two men in ski masks rob a van in the parking lot across the street, that I hit upon my first way to combine travel and making a living: music. I turned away from the window and said to Mike, "hey, let's start a band." Then we called the cops about the van, but they never showed up. - -Somewhere along the way I sat still long enough to learn a few chords on the guitar and I was young and dumb enough to believe that like Minor Threat and Husker Du and Fugazi and The Minutemen and R.E.M and all the rest of the bands I loved, I too could make a living driving around the United States playing punk rock shows. - -In the mean time I had to live in the house. But I discovered ways around the vague but persistent despair that would overtake me starring at plaster walls late a night. I took to sleeping on the couch and cracked the window enough to feel the night wrap around me to the sound of tires hissing on wet pavement, the sound of someone going somewhere, the sound of the road taking me home. I would search out these moments of peace. I took to sleeping on couches even at home. I lived for years with a bedroom I rarely entered. I slept on couches, turned out the lights early and let the warm nights carry me off in my imagination as I chased sleep out the window and into the night. - -For years this was how I got by, dreaming of future filled with travel and live music and perhaps if we worked hard and stuck to our guns, a modicum of fame and fortune -- what's not to love? - -As it turned out a lot. Not only was the fame and fortune not forthcoming, a significant portion of my band did not exactly relish a life on the road the way I did. The bass player believed in something he called "the future", which although he could not define it very well for me, seemed to include selling cars. My friend and fellow witness to van related crime eventually decided photography was the art he preferred. The drummer had a baby, which put a damper on his touring desire. At least the drummer was William, who, if not touring, was still around twenty years later, on the opposite side of the country, to meet me in diners for anxiety-fueled discussions about evolutionary biology at all hours of the night. That's a lot more than most people get out of their bands. Still, after three years, almost no band related travel, and no significant fame or fortune other than a long string of colorful stories about biker bars, skin heads and tk, we called it quits. - -The failure to combine travel with a way of making a living exploded in my life a bit like a bomb. A realization came in the wake of that explosion: it can't be done. Perpetual travel is for the rich, the famous and the already successful. The road to Paul Theroux crumbled long before I could walk it. - -I fell into what I now realize was a depression. At the time I just felt bored, restless and generally only happy when I pouring as much alcohol and other intoxicants into my body as I could lay my hands on. - -I stopped traveling for the most part. I moved across the country to a small rural town in Georgia and got a job working in a restaurant kitchen. I went back to college and got a degree, which I mailed to my parents. They seemed happy with it. I met a girl, then another, then another. - -I followed one north, to Massachusetts where I found my own restaurant to run. I was ordained in the church of the Red Sox, I learned how to cook beans in new ways. I bought a lot of books. I did not travel. I accepted what life handed me, I asked nothing more. - -The girl I had followed north was much smarter than me and she saw things I did not. She made plans to travel to Europe. Without me. I remember the day she told me. It was like a ton of books fell on me. Literally. I slumped against a bookshelf when she was talking and one of the shelves collapsed and quite a few books, probably not a ton, but quite a few, fell on my foot. - -We had couple good fights about her plans, but looking back I can see that what really bothered me wasn't the end of the relationship, it was always going to end, it was the reminder that I could have been traveling, that I could have been slumping against the glass of the bus window, not a bookshelf, that I could have been in that state of flow, that place I belong, and I wasn't. - -It would be a really good story if I told you that I realized right then I needed to travel again, that I dropped everything and got back out there and just did it like a truly D4-saturated, roving pumpkinseed sunfish. - -But that would be a lie. That's not what happened. Instead I packed up all my stuff and headed back down to Athens GA to resume the life I'd left there three years before. I went back to my old job. It was offered. I took it. I was looking for a place to live when an old friend came through town on a visit from Australia where he'd moved a few years before that. He showed me some pictures from an island I've long since forgotten the name of somewhere off the coast of Thailand and there was something about the image, it looked like it was take by someone leaning their had against the window of a bus, looking out at the sea, there was a line of dark thunderheads lining the horizon, turning the water blue gray in the distance, but crystal clear closer to shore, it was the kind of photograph that perfectly captured that feeling I used to get -- the freedom of movement. - -The next day I rented a storage unit instead of the house, stashed my stuff and drove across the country to visit my parents for a little while before I disappeared forever into the wilds of wherever. - - ---- - +It was a monumental trip, months on the road, but eventually the money ran out. It always does. I moved back into a house and searched for ways around the vague but persistent despair that would overtake me starring at the plaster walls late a night. I took to sleeping on the couch below the window, cracking it open enough to feel the night wrap around me to the sound of tires hissing on wet pavement, the sound of someone going somewhere, the sound of the road taking me home. I lived for years with a bedroom I rarely entered, it was too permanent, too settled. I moved from one end of the country to another to another. As long as I slept on couches I felt free. +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. ## Chapter 1 -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 it now. +"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 just transcend. The Travco has that thing not one can put their finger on, but everyone feels it. +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. 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. After looking it over for about twenty minutes, I pulled out a wad of cash, handed it to the now previous owner and it was mine. -I was now the proud, if clueless, owner of a 27-foot-long bright blue fiberglass tube with the swept back windows and curved lines that make it look like something straight out of a future that never happened. I had no idea what I was doing and no idea how I was going to do it. I knew restoring a vintage motorhome would be a big project, I did not anticipate that it would change my life forever in ways I could not have even conceived of on that first drive down the hill from where it had been sitting for two years before I showed up to rescue it from backyard irrelevance. +I was now the proud, if clueless, owner of a 27-foot-long bright blue fiberglass tube with the swept back windows and curved lines that make it look like something straight out of a future that never happened. I had no idea what I was doing and no idea how I was going to do it. I knew restoring a vintage motorhome would be a big project, but I did not anticipate that it would change my life forever. All I knew was I was ready to go. + +It had been sitting for two years before I showed up to rescue it from backyard irrelevance. I should have perhaps been a little more conservative in my faith in it, but I wasn't. The Travco would gradually cure my arrogance, but my confidence was total in the beginning. As it should be. Whatever hand wringing I'd do later in the diner, on the day it arrived in my life I had no doubts. I fired it up, pointed it downhill, and we were on our way. @@ -123,77 +92,97 @@ The first few corners are nerve-wracking, the kind of white knuckled terror-indu The prudent man would have done some sort of test drive I suppose. But screw it, let's go. -It's not until I get out of the previous owner's driveway (which sloped uphill relative to where the bus was parked) and turned onto the main street that it occurs to me I never tested the brakes. There's one big hairpin turn at the bottom of the hill that I noted on the way up and it's the main thing that has my palms sweating. If I miss it I'll fly off the road, plunge through some Kudzu and, I think, crash into the small university offices that make up most of the sum total of Mars Hill, north Carolina, a college town I'd only heard of three days ago. +It's not until I get out of the previous owner's driveway (which sloped uphill relative to where the bus was parked) and turned onto the main street, which headed sharply downhill, that it occurs to me I never tested the brakes. There's one big hairpin turn at the bottom of the hill that I noted on the way up and it's the main thing that has my palms sweating. If I miss it I'll fly off the road, plunge through some Kudzu and, I think, crash into the small university offices that make up most of the sum total economy of Mars Hill, North Carolina, a college town I'd first heard of just three days ago. -I don't want to disrupt the quiet world of of Mars Hill, so I give the brakes a little push and, nothing happens. Oh shit. Then I do what I think comes naturally to anyone who grew up in the days before disc brakes, I start frantically pumping the brake pedal. The second pump has a bit more tension in it and by the third she's responding to me, slowing slightly and I'm well on my way to reabsorbing the massive dose of adrenaline that flooded my brain in that first split second I pushed and felt nothing. +I don't want to disrupt the quiet world of of Mars Hill, so I give the brakes a little push and... nothing happens. Oh shit. Then I do what I think comes naturally to anyone who grew up in the days before disc brakes, I panic and start frantically pumping the brake pedal. The second pump has a bit more tension in it and by the third she's responding, slowing slightly, and I'm well on my way to reabsorbing the massive dose of adrenaline that flooded my brain in that first split second I pushed and felt nothing. -The turn turns out to be nothing. I pump the brakes a bit, take it nice and slow and slice around the corner like it's not even there. After that the road straightens out as it heads through downtown Mars Hill. +The big hairpin turn turns out to be nothing. I pump the brakes a bit, take it nice and slow and slice around the corner like it's not even there. After that the road straightens out as it heads through downtown Mars Hill. At the first stop light I pull up close enough to the car in front of me that the entire facade of the Travco is visible in the back window. I start laughing because it is quite simply the coolest thing I've ever seen. Over the course of the next 18,000 or so miles this will happen over and over again whenever I stop and catch a glimpse of this thing in some window or mirror. It's that thing about the Travco that captivates, delights. I am quit confident that the Spanish poet Lorca, would say the Travco *tener duende*. -The Spanish word Duende is mostly untranslatable, though English dictionaries try with phrases like "a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity". I think it's that last word that matters. To have Duende a thing, a work of art, must have come from somewhere, whoever had it must have reached deep within or far out into those vast uncharted, unchartable spaces that we cannot name, but recognize. You cannot fake a journey these places. Everyone recognized a fake. You cannot fake duende. +The Spanish word Duende is mostly untranslatable, though English dictionaries try with phrases like "a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity". I think it's that last word that matters. To have Duende a thing, a work of art like the Travco, must have come from somewhere, whoever made it must have reached deep into those vast uncharted, unchartable spaces that we cannot name, but recognize. You cannot fake a journey to these places. Everyone recognizes a fake. You cannot fake duende. -Duende what gives you chills when you hear Beethoven's ninth symphony, why makes you smile when tk or cry standing in front of a painting. I think the closest we have in English is the word soul. Not soul as in religion, but as in James Brown. Soul as something that is becoming, not something become. Soul is not out there or in you, it’s the place where you meet the out there. +Duende what gives you chills when you hear Beethoven's ninth symphony, what makes you smile when tk or cry standing in front of a painting. I think the closest we have in English is the word soul. Not soul as in religion, but as in James Brown. Soul as something that is becoming, not something become. Soul is not out there or in you, it’s the place where you meet the out there. -Some times duende is very individual. Sometimes it's broader. With the Travco it seems to happen to just about everyone. On the way from Mars Hill back to Athens Ga, where we were living at the time, I get 180 miles of smiles, waves, thumbs up and cheering fists raised. +Some times duende is very individual, a personal encounter with something at the right moment, where everything come together at once. Sometimes the duende is broader, affecting us all to whatever degree we're capable of feeling. With the Travco it seems to happen to just about everyone. On the way from Mars Hill back to Athens Ga, where we were living at the time we purchased the bus, I got 180 miles of smiles, waves, thumbs up, and cheering fists raised. -The first time I stop, at a rest area on I85, a man is up at the window asking if he can take a picture before I've even taken off my seatbelt. "What is this thing," he asks, "it's the coolest thing I've ever seen". This will happen hundreds of times more over the years and eventually I realized no one wants me to tell them what it is, the name doesn't matter, it simply exists and people want to acknowledge that it exists. +The first time I stop, at a rest area on I-85, a man is up at the window asking if he can take a picture before I've even taken off my seatbelt. "What is this thing," he asks excitedly, "it's the coolest thing I've ever seen". This will happen hundreds of times more over the years and eventually I realized no one really wants me to tell them what it is, the name doesn't matter, it simply exists and people want to acknowledge that it exists. -The Travco cuts across some normally pretty rigid race, age, class and social lines in America. I get smiles and waves from the kids lounging on skateboards, smoking cigarettes behind a gas station, a well dressed middle age couple coming out of an antique store in Fletcher, NC, an old man walking through Anderson, SC tips a baseball cap to me, and driving though the predominently black neighborhoods of tk everyone I see looking my way is smiling and waving. I may be cheating a little, it is the south after all, we really are friendly. +The Travco cuts across some normally pretty rigid race, age, class and social lines in America. I get smiles and waves from the kids lounging on skateboards, smoking cigarettes behind a gas station, a well dressed middle age couple coming out of an antique store in Fletcher, NC, an old man walking through Anderson, SC tips a baseball cap to me, and driving though the predominently black neighborhoods of tk everyone I see looking my way is smiling and waving. I may be cheating a little, this is the south after all, we really are friendly, but with a couple of notable exceptions, the Travco is remarked upon, loved and irresistibly draws people in across the country. Pulling into Athens I stop at a light downtown and everyone waves. A man making a left comes around the corner and I watch his eyes widen as he takes in the Dodge grill and then he breaks into a smile and starts laughing. I completely relate to him. -Usually wanting is better than having. We call this buyers remorse, but it's basic evolutionary biology -- wanting, that is, imagining having, releases more dopamine than having. Those of us with all those D4 receptors around have dopamine issues to begin with so perhaps we feel this more acutely than most. But even without extra D4 you have all this dopamine associated with the thing you want, but then when you actually get the thing, well, no more dopamine. And you experience what we call buyer's remorse. +Usually wanting is better than having. We call this buyers remorse, but it's basic evolutionary biology -- wanting, that is, imagining having, releases more dopamine than having. Those of us with all those D4 receptors around have dopamine issues to begin with so perhaps we feel this more acutely than most. But even without extra D4 you have all this dopamine associated with the thing you want, but then when you actually get the thing, no more dopamine. And you experience what we call buyer's remorse. Unless the thing is a Travco. I get a huge hit of dopamine every time I see it. To this day I still smile every time I come around the corner and it's there. Yesterday my wife and I sat on a picnic table where we were camped just staring at it and giggling like children. -### beginnings +### The Big Blue Bus -About six months before that first drive my wife and I had one of those epiphanies of boredom that are common in America these days. We looked around and thought, is this it? We had a house, suburbs, kids, cars, stuff. +It became the big blue bus the minute our kids saw it. None of us remember who gave it that name, but it stuck, for us at least. -This life, I don't think it's for us. We should go somewhere, do something. We'd been to Nicaragua, we like it, we decided to look into going back. A friend of ours was down there at the time, she seemed to love it. Our twin daughters were two, we had a boy due to arrive in a few weeks. We decided, we'll stay put until he's walking, then we'll go. It was a plan anyway. +About three months before that first drive my wife and I were in Florida, staying at a friend's beach house. Our twin daughters were two, we had a boy on the way. I was sitting on the porch of the house, watching a shrimping boat motor slowly from one side of the horizen to the other when my wife came walking back up from the beach in front of us. "Okay," she said. "I could live like this." -I had a nagging thought at the back of my head though, the thought was America. It's not perfect, in fact it has a lot of problems, but I've traveled enough to know that I am American. The least American American, as my Irish friend Keith once said, but American nonetheless. And something about that, somewhere in that, I felt the need to show my kids the country that shaped me, even if it did not end up shaping them. And there is nothing so American as the road trip, Jack London, Henry Miller, John Stienbeck, and yes, Jack Kerouac. In many ways the road trip is America. America is an endless road, a becoming, not a thing become. +Couldn't we all, I thought? Except for the part where we have to pay for it for more than a week. My wife has over the years adopted my habit of continuing conversations hours or even days later without any reference to the earlier conversation, just dropping the answer to a question from two days ago on her way inside to shower and get ready for dinner. It took me a minute to remember that earlier conversation in which I'd said we should try living on the road full time. -I decided we should get some kind of travel trailer and drive around the country for a few months, a year, some time anyway, and live on the road. +We had a house, suburbs, kids, cars, stuff, but we'd decided some time ago that this life, it's not for us. It could have been that we'd had one too many beers, but we convinced ourselves we should go somewhere, do something. What was unclear, but something. We'd been to Nicaragua, we liked it, we decided to look into going back. A friend of ours was down there at the time, she seemed to love it. Our twin daughters were two, we had a boy due to arrive in a few weeks. We decided, we'll stay put until he's walking, then we'll go. It was a plan anyway. We like plans, we just never follow them. -One symptom of my least American Americaness is that I don't like new things. At the time my car was a 1969 truck I'd inherited from my father. tk tk tk exampels of loving old things, things made of metal, made with care, made with pride. We traded all that for a bunch of junk imported from overseas. And ming you it's not junk because it was imported from overseas, it'd be junk if we made it, but I don't think we'd make it. I see people making things in America and it isn't plastic junk. It's computers from Denver or tk from tk form tk. and so on. When we put our hearts into it, America makes wonderful things. Things we need, not things we want. Fuck stuff. +I had a nagging thought at the back of my head from the beginning, the thought was America. -I turned to the internet. As you do. I searched for vintage travel trailer or something of that sort. I found out about Shastas, I learned about airstreams, I learned about a lot of things like that and then one day, I don't remamber the specific terms I plugged in, but I came across my first Travco. People often name their Travcos, this one was called Myrtle. Once I had the name I plugged it in and, to put it cheaply, I fell in love. +It's not a perfect, in fact it has a lot of problems, but I've traveled enough to know that I am American. The least American American, as my Irish friend Keith once said, but American nonetheless. And something about that, somewhere in that, I felt the need to show my kids the country that shaped me, even if it might not end up shaping them. -I also found the Bumfuzzles. +There is nothing so American as the road trip. From those Ice Age explorers setting out from Siberia in their seal skin kayaks to 20th century American literature -- Jack London, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, and yes, Jack Kerouac -- there is nothing so American as setting out into the unknown. In many ways the road trip is America. America is an endless road, a becoming, not a thing become. +I decided we should get some kind of travel trailer and drive around the country for a few months, a year, some time anyway, and live on the road. My wife was, in the beginning, less convinced of this plan. Our original conversation ended without a real plan, just my idea floating out there. Until she came up off the beach that day and said, okay, I can live like this. -## The Big Blue Bus +Two days later she was who found the Travco that was to become our home on the road. -It became the big blue bus the minute our kids saw it. None of us remember who gave it that name, but it stuck, for us at least. It also became the neighborhood attraction, which it would remain for the next eighteen months I spent gutting it, rewiring, replumbing, repaneling, and rebuilding it into something that was livable for a family of five. +One symptom of my least American Americaness that my Irish friend pointed out to me is that, generally speaking, I don't like new things. American's worship of the new and shiny, the religion of progress you might say, is utterly lost on me. As far as I can tell most goods made since I was born have steady declined in quality to the point where the notion that goods used to be of a certain quality, used to be worth fixing, worth understanding, worth keeping around smacks of ignorance and outright foolishness. -How exactly I was going to do that I didn't really know. All I had was vision in my head of what it would look like when it was done. This was, fortunately, enough to sustain me even when I ran out of time, money and self confidence. I never wanted to quit, in fact quitting or giving up on it never entered my mind. I knew when I started that on the other side of this massive undertaking lay a totally different life that was going to be much better than the one we had before it and I never considered not getting to it. There were times when it took immense will to keep going, and my blood sweat and tears are figuratively and very literally in the Big Blue Bus, but I never once thought of stopping. +Which is a long way of saying that if it was build recently, I probably don't own it. -I have, thus far in my life, found that there are very few things that you can't do given sufficient time and money with which to work on them, *provided you have the will to do them at all*. If you have that will you tend to find at least the time, and once you find the time you often find you don't need nearly so much money as you thought, though often you need much much more time than you thought. It also helps to know the right people. If you don't you'll need to seek them out. I knew nothing about electricity when I started, but one of my good friends was an electrician. I knew nothing about plumbing when I started, but I did know a plumber. +At the time our car was a 1969 truck I'd inherited from my father. When not driving that I rode around on 1974 heavy-as-a-boulder Schwinn bike, typed a good number of words on a pre-war Underwood typewriter, and still lugged around a film Nikon. It wasn't that I particularly loved old things simply because they were old, rather they were better made, the accomplished tasks in a simpler way and were easier to repair. I could crawl under the hood of my Ford and figure out what was going on. I opened the hood and my wife's minivan and was confronted by an inscrutable, sealed up sea of plastic. -Not everything was easy though. I knew nothing about engines and unfortunately I didn't know a good mechanic to teach me. I mainly ignored the engine in the beginning. Focus on what you can do, do it and when it's done move on to the next thing. +Before we had kids my wife and I used drive around the Georgia countryside hunting down out of the way "junk shops" looking for old things, things made of metal and hardwoods, things made with care, made with skill, made with pride. The way everything used to be made. -There will no doubt be plenty of things you think you are absolutely no good at -- I can't learn a foreign language to save my life -- but the truth is, assuming you're of sound body and mind, the things you are not good at turn out to really be things you lack the will to do. We beat ourselves up about these things sometimes, at least I do. I spent years thinking I was somehow an idiot about languages, and I am, but not because I'm an idiot about languages, everyone is an idiot about languages, but because I lack the will to change that. +Somewhere along way we lost that care, skill and pride. We let our culture take a turn, traded quality for quantity. We developed an insatiable need for stuff that could only be satisfied by cheap imitations of what we once had, now made of plastic and imported from overseas. And mind you it's not junk because it was imported from overseas, it'd be junk if we made it, but I don't think we'd make it. I see people making things in America and it isn't plastic junk. Whether its computers made in Denver or tk or a thousand other cottage industry efforts to reclaim the mantel of quality over quantity, when we put our hearts into it, America makes wonderful things. Things we need rather than things we want. We can get back to what we once had, but it isn't going to be easy. We've got some serious addictions to kick. -This conversation requires that we define some terms though. Like will. +I knew from the beginning we weren't going to travel around the country in some plastic RV made yesterday and likely to fall apart tomorrow. I started to research vintage travel trailers. I learned the names of things I recognized from a childhood full of nights around the campfire in campgrounds throughout the west. I discovered Shastas. I learned about things with the most wonderful names, Silver Streaks, Spartans, Aristocrats, DeVilles, Scottys, Silver Queens. I was hooked, I wanted one. I bought one. I brought it home. I had buyer's remorse. The dopamine was no longer there. I sold it. I mostly gave up. Then one day I was searching for something else entirely when I came across my first Travco. People often name their Travcos, this one was called Myrtle. It was everything I wanted in an RV. Once I had the name Travco I plugged it in and everything else disappeared. There was only one. -I will. That's the opposite of waiting. Will is action. Will is getting up off the couch for no reason and walking to the wall opposite you and touching it for no reason other than you willed your body to do it. You did not wait until you felt like it, until it was convenient, until it was right, until it was perfect, until you wanted to. You will it and it is done. +The problem is that there aren't many Travcos left in the world. I've been active in the Travco community for years and to this day I have only seen four others like ours -- blue and white. And for us, there is really only one color a Travco should be, blue and white. Which is to say, the likelihood of finding a blue and white Travco just a couple days after deciding that yes you want do this, that you are ready to go, is slim to say the least. But that's what my wife manage to do. I still don't know how she found it, but a couple weeks later it was in our driveway. -I used to wait for things to be right, to be perfect, to be easy. Slowly though I realized that waiting is a kind of will, it's just a lack of will. I know from experience that nothing good ever comes of waiting. The question is what happens between this realization and the point where you actually get off the couch and walk over to wall. Some of it is purely practical. We don't own a television, which means we don't spend our time watching it, which free up a trememdous amount of time in our lives. this is the single biggest, easiest thing you can do to reclaim your life and develop your will -- throw away your television. +It quickly became the neighborhood attraction. People gave directions based on it -- on the right you'll see a big blue bus thing, keep going another half a block and our house is on the left -- and, for the next eighteen months I spent gutting it and rebuilding it into something that was livable for a family of five, the parade of visitors never stopped. Everyone wanted to talk about it, whether it was to talk about how great the '60s were or how much better made things used to be, the Travco seemed to inspire something in nearly everyone. -The other practical way to get off the couch and over to the wall is to make a plan. It might be a terrible plan, it will probably be a terrible plan, mostly likely you will go do whatever it may be in a way that's nothing like the plan. The plan is irrelevant, but the planning is very important. There are only two ways to beat the fear you feel inside. And the thing stopping your will from making its way in the world is mainly fear. +Lots of people asked what I was planning to do with it, which was the hardest question for me to answer. I didn't really know. All I had was vision in my head of what it would look like when it was done. This vision was, fortunately, enough to sustain me even when I ran out of time, money and self-confidence, which I did. -One way past the fear is to sit around waiting for it to pass. That way does not work. The other way is distract yourself sufficiently until you are able to move yourself forward without noticing that you have done so. I was able to get in the Travco that first day and go barroling down the hill into the unknown because I had a very simple plan: drive up in the morning, pay for the thing, drive it back. I was simply doing what I had planned to do. +I never wanted to quit, in fact quitting or giving up on the goal of building a livable home out of it never entered my mind. I knew when I started that on the other side of this massive undertaking lay a totally different life that was going to be much better than the one we had before it, and I never considered not getting to it. There were times when it took an immense effort of will to keep going, and my blood sweat and tears are figuratively and very literally in the Big Blue Bus, but I never once thought of stopping. -A good plan takes your mind off the fear, off the unknown unknoable future. It frees your mind from fear so you can catch your breath and think. That's why armies plan, it's why sailors carry charts, it's why everyone writes things down on a calendar. We all love a good plan, the real trick of planning though is actually start doing the first steps of the plan so that you move forward without realizing that you've done so. +I have, thus far in my life, found that there are very few things that you can't do given sufficient time and money with which to work on them, *provided you have the will to do them at all*. If you have that will you tend to find at least the time, and once you find the time you often find you don't need nearly so much money as you thought, though often you need much, much more time than you thought. +You also need to know the right people. If you don't you'll need to seek them out. I knew nothing about electricity when I started, but one of my good friends was an electrician. I knew nothing about plumbing when I started, but I did know a plumber. +Not everything was easy though. I knew nothing about engines and unfortunately I didn't know a good mechanic to teach me. I mainly ignored the engine in the beginning. Focus on what you can do, do it and when it's done move on to the next thing. +The practical part of building a home turns out to be rather easy, but to live on the road at all requires reconfiguring your life in significant ways. To really live this way you have to strip things back, not just reducing what you have, but stripping back your definitions of what it means to live on this planet. You have to question everything all the way back to the beginning -- what is a home? +I ran across an interview with the Greek architect Takis Yalelis many years after I had been thinking about these things that nicely summarizes the idea: + +"home is your surroundings," says Yalelis, "it's not a house, it doesn't mean that it has four walls and a door and window and air conditioning and all that. It's where you live." +For most of human existence how you lived, what you called home, was dictated by the natural world -- the building materials you could obtain, what you needed shelter from (cold? heat? rain? snow? etc) and then within those limits people expressed themselves. We no longer express ourselves through our homes and I think that's emblematic of so many of our problems, we have trouble expressing ourselves in so many places because we don't have the opportunity to do it in so many others. +"Four walls makes a shelter," continues Yalelis, "and then you start making choices about that shelter, whether you want to enter and exit, do you want to stay in there forever, whether you want to get rained in, whether you want to have a view of the outside and what kind of view and why." +Until I started working on the bus I had never made any real choices about my homes. I had rented what I could afford, purchased what seemed like a good investment (it was) and was reasonably nice, but I had never sat down and though about how I wanted to enter and exit my home (through a door?), but then when I started to think about these things I realized that all these choices I had not made, had consequences. To pick a very simple example, I have always had solid doors with very little, if any, window to the outside world. That has a set of consequences and affects how I'm going to view the world. If I had a glass door, that would have a different set of consequences and so on. + +Arguably even the bus is not really me expressing myself, at least on the outside. On the inside though we did get to express ourselves, my wife and I agonized over quite a few details in the way that I've noticed fanatics tend to do. Two years into our life in the bus, I flew into Denver to meet with company that had started to build computers in Denver. Yes, computers, built by hand, in the United States. Their story comes later in this book, but as I sat at the initial meeting listening to the owner of the company talk about how they had spent years designing these computer cases, agonizing over the way the power button clicked, how the wood veneer fit into the metal and all the other details they sweated, I recognized that same fanaticism Corrinne and I had when we designed the bus. Once you start to realize that you can express yourself through the things you create, that you are in fact expressing yourself this way all the time, but once you take charge of that, once you start to bend it to your will, to express your will through the things you make, you have make sure you get every detail right. + +That doesn't mean you have to get every detail right the first time though. In fact you can't. Especially if you're building a home. You have to first build it the way you think you want it, then you have to go live in it and learn how you actually use it. I've never heard of anyone getting it right the first time. Even now, after years in the bus, I still have a running list of improvements I want to make to make our home both more functional and better at expressing what I see when I close my eyes and imagine perfection, whatever that might mean to me at that moment. + +That is perhaps the great lesson in building your home, realizing that your home is never done, it is not a thing, it is a process, and that process never ends. + +It helps to reinforce this lesson when you home breaks down and leaves you sitting at the side of the road, covered in transmission fluid and oil and grease, fumbling in the gravel for a wrench, sweating and swearing and wondering what the hell is wrong with you that you can't just rent an apartment like everyone else and get on with the business of living. + +But I can't, it isn't me. And so it goes. ## Chapter on Building home @@ -222,3 +211,13 @@ But I can't, it isn't me. And so it goes. Quote from https://faircompanies.com/videos/meden-agan-small-island-getaway-seeks-old-greek-simplicity/: "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." - Takis Yalelis + +## Bibliography +### Prologue +1) Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America, Craig Childs, New York : Pantheon, 2018. +2) Natural Behavior Polymorphism Due to a cGMP-Dependent Protein Kinase of Drosophila Science Vol 277, Issue 5327, August 1997 +3) Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology David Sloan Wilson, 2006, co-edited with E. O. Wilson +### Ch 1 +1) Takis Yalelis on homes comes from the video: https://faircompanies.com/videos/meden-agan-small-island-getaway-seeks-old-greek-simplicity/: + +## Footnotes diff --git a/build.sh b/build.sh new file mode 100755 index 0000000..5269909 --- /dev/null +++ b/build.sh @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +#!/bin/bash +pandoc -o place-without-postcard.epub book.txt --toc --css=epub.css +~/./bin/kindlegen place-without-postcard.epub @@ -1,4 +1,62 @@ +#Chapter 1: + +There will no doubt be plenty of things you think you are absolutely no good at -- I can't learn a foreign language to save my life -- but the truth is, assuming you're of sound body and mind, the things you are not good at turn out to really be things you lack the will to do. We beat ourselves up about these things sometimes, at least I do. I spent years thinking I was somehow an idiot about languages, and I am, but not because I'm an idiot about languages, everyone is an idiot about languages, but because I lack the will to change that. + +This conversation requires that we define some terms though. Like will. + +I will. That's the opposite of waiting. Will is action. Will is getting up off the couch for no reason and walking to the wall opposite you and touching it for no reason other than you willed your body to do it. You did not wait until you felt like it, until it was convenient, until it was right, until it was perfect, until you wanted to. You will it and it is done. + +I used to wait for things to be right, to be perfect, to be easy. Slowly though I realized that waiting is a kind of will, it's just a lack of will. I know from experience that nothing good ever comes of waiting. The question is what happens between this realization and the point where you actually get off the couch and walk over to wall. Some of it is purely practical. We don't own a television, which means we don't spend our time watching it, which free up a tremendous amount of time in our lives. This is the single biggest, easiest thing you can do to reclaim your life and develop your will -- throw away your television. + +The other practical way to get off the couch and over to the wall is to make a plan. It might be a terrible plan, it will probably be a terrible plan, mostly likely you will go do whatever it may be in a way that's nothing like the plan. The plan is irrelevant, but the planning is very important. There are only two ways to beat the fear you feel inside. And the thing stopping your will from making its way in the world is mainly fear. + +One way past the fear is to sit around waiting for it to pass. That way does not work. The other way is distract yourself sufficiently until you are able to move yourself forward without noticing that you have done so. I was able to get in the Travco that first day and go barreling down the hill into the unknown because I had a very simple plan: drive up in the morning, pay for the thing, drive it back. I was simply doing what I had planned to do. + +A good plan takes your mind off the fear, off the unknown unknowable future. It frees your mind from fear so you can catch your breath and think. That's why armies plan, it's why sailors carry charts, it's why everyone writes things down on a calendar. We all love a good plan, the real trick of planning though is actually start doing the first steps of the plan so that you move forward without realizing that you've done so. + + +# Prologue: + + +Because Ice Age adventurers are hard to question these days, science backed up and asked a slightly smaller, more manageable question -- why are some fruit flies more adventurous than others? + +Not all fruit fly larvae behave the same. Most pop out of their eggs and go for the nearest food. That's easy enough to understand. Others though, they do not go for the first food they find. They go further. Why would a tiny fruit fly larvae wiggle right past food on some quixotic quest for... well, no one knows what they're looking for, no one know why they do it. All we do know is that whether or not a fruit fly larvae stops for the first food it finds or keeps going, hitting the open road as it were, is reliably determined by the presence of what scientists call the rover allele. When there are more rover alleles, the larvae goes on a quest, one that, incidentally, almost always leaves them dead at the edge of that petri dish. "Their journey more important than living," as Childs puts it. + +Move to more complex organisms and the same division occurs, though mapping behavior to specific brain structure and chemicals gets much more complex. Broadly speaking, at the group level, there are what biologists call sitters and rovers. + +No one has done as much work what science calls sitters and rovers as David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist from Binghamton University. Most of Wilson's work has been evaluated through the lens of social behavior, which paints sitters as wallflowers and offers wallflowers an evolutionary reason for their wallflowerness. As a wallflower I appreciate this angle, but I think the same studies have much to say about travelers, adventurers is perhaps a better word. In his most famous experiment Wilson put traps in a pond of pumpkinseed sunfish. The rover fish, the adventurers, were the first to investigate the traps. It's not hard to imagine how that ended -- at the edge of their petri dish as it were. The sitters on the other hand did just fine because they never felt the need to investigate the traps. Score one for the sedentary. + +But sitters don't always come out ahead. In another study Wilson moved the fish to a new pond and it was the rovers who thrived because their drive to explore meant they found food before the sitters. Score one for adventurers. + +More importantly though what this shows is these are not individual evolutionary strategies, they species-level strategies. In other words, the world needs both sitters and rovers, each will survive different scenarios. + +For humans the determining component, the key difference between sitters and rovers, appears to be the size of D4 dopamine receptors in your brain. The bigger D4 receptors the more like you are to be what Childs calls "the kind of people who are reckless or adventurous, in need of something new." The size of D4 receptors even correlate to how far prehistoric individuals wandered. Looking at remains ranging between one thousand to thirty thousand years old, scientists found that elongated D4 receptors are more prevalent among those who migrated as compared to those who maintained a long genetic history in one place. + + +Over a few cups of coffee I managed to calm down. Somehow the notion that it wasn't me, it was the D4 receptors helped, even if, deep down I wasn't sure I bought that hypothesis at all. It's a correlation after all, a possible contributor, not cause and effect. And how did I come to have larger D4 receptors, assuming we travelers do? Is it hereditary? If so how is it transmitted and why? More broadly I started to wonder why the removal of agency seemed to make me feel better. Less responsibility for my actions? A way to avoid the consequences of my actions? If it's my D4 then I can't help it, I *had* to do it. + +"It's context I think." William is swirling the last of his Guinness around the bottom of his glass, making whirlpool. "Our culture is in its late materialist phase. You need a solid argument in favor of rejecting the culture, but you can't transcend your culture, so your rejection has to be crouched in the dominant metaphor of our culture, which is science." He swallows the last swirl and looks around the diner. + +"The part I find hard to swallow is the loss of agency. If it's my D4 or what have you, then I can't control it and I can't change it. I reject that notion". + +"Why?" + +"I don't like it." + +William laughs. "I don't either, but what are you going to do?" + +I consider this for a minute. What am I going to do? I am not going to panic, I am not going to worry. I am going to just keep breathing. I am going to go. + +I'm about to say this when William starts to slide out of the booth. "It's late, time for me to go home." he says as he stands. I thank him again and flag down the waiter for another cup of coffee. I fish out my notebook at I watch William's dark form disappear into the shadows of downtown Athens. + +--- + + +The waiter comes by with another cup of coffee for me and beer for William. "The ones that are," William continues, "have more D4 dopamine receptors. They do more with dopamine. That's you I guess, you need more dopamine." + +I'd dragged him out of bed after midnight because I need reassurance that I wasn't crazy. I needed to know that I wasn't about to ruin my life in some irreversible way. I've known William for more than twenty-five years, he'd already seen me do far crazier things than get rid of all my belongings, pack my family in a 1969 RV I'd half restored and set out on some kind of crazy road trip adventure. + ---------------------------- up in the mountains, to the vast fields of spring wildflowers in the eastern deserts, to ever shrinking shores the great salt lake. @@ -12,10 +70,15 @@ In a previous life I was a nomad. So were you. If you grant previous lives as a ------------------------ +It was in a shabby hotel room in little Rock Arkansas, while watching two men in ski masks rob a van in the parking lot across the street, that I hit upon my first way to combine travel and making a living: music. I turned away from the window and said to Mike, "hey, let's start a band." Then we called the cops about the van, but they never showed up. + +Somewhere along the way I sat still long enough to learn a few chords on the guitar and I was young and dumb enough to believe that like Minor Threat and Husker Du and Fugazi and The Minutemen and R.E.M and all the rest of the bands I loved, I too could make a living driving around the United States playing punk rock shows. + +-------------- I pull into a gas station, but it proves too small (the tank is in rear and these pumps were not 27 feet from the door of the building) so I leave. My parents, who were in town to visit their grandkids and graciously agreed to give me a ride to Mars Hill, stop at the gas station and go inside and later report that the entire gas station is talking about the Travco, speculating on the year. -On reflection, I am perhaps prone to doing things with an unjustified amount of confidence. This far I've been lucky. Silly brave me pointing that beast down the hill with such brazen confidence doesn't realize +On reflection, I am perhaps prone to doing things with an unjustified amount of confidence. This far I've been lucky. Silly brave me pointing that beast down the hill with such brazen confidence doesn't realize @@ -33,6 +96,31 @@ That's how you find yourself five feet in the air, strapped to a 27 foot long 19 +------ + +turned out the lights early and let the warm nights carry me off in my imagination as I chased sleep out the window and into the night. + +For years this was how I got by, dreaming of future filled with travel and live music and perhaps if we worked hard and stuck to our guns, a modicum of fame and fortune -- what's not to love? + +As it turned out a lot. Not only was the fame and fortune not forthcoming, a significant portion of my band did not exactly relish a life on the road the way I did. The bass player believed in something he called "the future", which although he could not define it very well for me, seemed to include selling cars. My friend and fellow witness to van related crime eventually decided photography was the art he preferred. The drummer had a baby, which put a damper on his touring desire. At least the drummer was William, who, if not touring, was still around twenty years later, on the opposite side of the country, to meet me in diners for anxiety-fueled discussions about evolutionary biology at all hours of the night. That's a lot more than most people get out of their bands. Still, after three years, almost no band related travel, and no significant fame or fortune other than a long string of colorful stories about biker bars, skin heads and tk, we called it quits. + +The failure to combine travel with a way of making a living exploded in my life a bit like a bomb. A realization came in the wake of that explosion: it can't be done. Perpetual travel is for the rich, the famous and the already successful. The road to Paul Theroux crumbled long before I could walk it. + +I fell into what I now realize was a depression. At the time I just felt bored, restless and generally only happy when I pouring as much alcohol and other intoxicants into my body as I could lay my hands on. + +I stopped traveling for the most part. I moved across the country to a small rural town in Georgia and got a job working in a restaurant kitchen. I went back to college and got a degree, which I mailed to my parents. They seemed happy with it. I met a girl, then another, then another. + +I followed one north, to Massachusetts where I found my own restaurant to run. I was ordained in the church of the Red Sox, I learned how to cook beans in new ways. I bought a lot of books. I did not travel. I accepted what life handed me, I asked nothing more. + +The girl I had followed north was much smarter than me and she saw things I did not. She made plans to travel to Europe. Without me. I remember the day she told me. It was like a ton of books fell on me. Literally. I slumped against a bookshelf when she was talking and one of the shelves collapsed and quite a few books, probably not a ton, but quite a few, fell on my foot. + +We had couple good fights about her plans, but looking back I can see that what really bothered me wasn't the end of the relationship, it was always going to end, it was the reminder that I could have been traveling, that I could have been slumping against the glass of the bus window, not a bookshelf, that I could have been in that state of flow, that place I belong, and I wasn't. + + +------------- + +It would be a really good story if I told you that I realized right then I needed to travel again, that I dropped everything and got back out there and just did it like a truly D4-saturated, roving pumpkinseed sunfish. +But that would be a lie. That's not what happened. Instead I packed up all my stuff and headed back down to Athens GA to resume the life I'd left there three years before. I went back to my old job. It was offered. I took it. I was looking for a place to live when an old friend came through town on a visit from Australia where he'd moved a few years before that. He showed me some pictures from an island I've long since forgotten the name of somewhere off the coast of Thailand and there was something about the image, it looked like it was take by someone leaning their had against the window of a bus, looking out at the sea, there was a line of dark thunderheads lining the horizon, turning the water blue gray in the distance, but crystal clear closer to shore, it was the kind of photograph that perfectly captured that feeling I used to get -- the freedom of movement. diff --git a/epub.css b/epub.css new file mode 100644 index 0000000..34ec1af --- /dev/null +++ b/epub.css @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +/* This defines styles and classes used in the book */ +body { margin: 5%; text-align: justify; font-size: medium; } +code { font-family: monospace; } +h1 { text-align: left; } +h2 { text-align: left; } +h3 { text-align: left; } +h4 { text-align: left; } +h5 { text-align: left; } +h6 { text-align: left; } +h1.title { } +h2.author { } +h3.date { } +nav#toc ol, +nav#landmarks ol { padding: 0; margin-left: 1em; } +nav#toc ol li, +nav#landmarks ol li { list-style-type: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; } +p { + margin: 0; + text-indent: 1.2em; +} +a.footnote-ref { vertical-align: super; } +em, em em em, em em em em em { font-style: italic;} +em em, em em em em { font-style: normal; } |