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diff --git a/aspen-trees.txt b/aspen-trees.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..292543e --- /dev/null +++ b/aspen-trees.txt @@ -0,0 +1,66 @@ +The forest has eyes. + +Trees full of eyes. They watch. They shimmer. They shake. They know. + +We're 8,000 feet up the side of a mountain in the southeastern corner of Utah. Our tent is crowded in by white-barked, black-eyed aspen trees. The tangle of roots is so dense there's no room for the tent stakes. Crammed in a tiny stand of lumpen, but grassy ground, we put the stakes back in the back tie the tent off to the trunks of trees. + +Above us a cover of glimmering green teardrop leaves quake at the slightest whisper of wind. You can trace these tiny flows of wind through the shuddering leaves, slipping and sliding around like the ghosts of children running and laughing, pursuing some unseen trail through the air. + +The sun rises early here even in late September. I'm up before dawn, creeping out of the tent, shivering and fumbling, trying not to wake my wife and children as I make coffee in the dark, standing a few feet from their heads. One day I pulled it off, no one wakes up. I take my coffee and sit on the massive trunk of a fallen aspen, watching the red orange light of the sun race across the dusty silence of the distant desert plains. A line of light slowly works its way up the mountainside to where I sit. That first blast of light and faint warmth. The day begins. + +I can see the grass by my feet now. A few minutes later the white trunks around me burn with orange light. The leaves shimmy in the warming air. The forest shakes off nighttime drowsiness, welcomes the sun. The tree tops sway with the rising wind, leaves ruffle, a reedy voice moving through the forest like a tremor. + +We're here because two decades ago I stood on a picnic table and snapped a close up photograph of the "eye" of an aspen tree. I processed it into black and white and used it as a kind of talisman on the internet. When I website asked for a profile photo, I fed it an aspen tree. Pretty soon everywhere I went on the internet, there I was, a singular eye in a tree. The more I stared at it the deeper I feel into it. Somehow, I felt intertwined with that aspen. I considered trying to find the same tree. I dug up old maps, talked to the girlfriend who was with me at the time, but I was unable to narrow it down much beyond central Utah. I decided I needed other aspens in my life. We headed for southern Utah. + +The word aspen comes from the Greeks, aspis, "shield." Shields that watch you. Watch over you? + +There are three species of shields left in the North America. Around us are Quaking Aspen. All aspens shake in the slightest of breezes, sometimes when there's no perceptible breeze at all, which is where the Quaking comes from in the name. It can be unnerving at times, a forest full of shaking leaves. Especially when your shaking forest also has the distinctive eyes that aspen trunks bear, the places where branches have dropped from the trunk as the tree grows. + +The aspen arrives somewhere in the middle of the forest succession cycle. Sometime after the grass and small shrubs have done the hard work of improving the soil. The aspens thrive until those first pines begin to steal their light. Then they wither and disappear, but they rarely leave completely, even when the visible evidence of them is gone. Once the lowland hills and mountains of the western United States were awash in aspens, the shudder of leaves murmuring through valleys, across the wetter, greener plains that stretch to the east of my coffee drinking perch. Today aspens are less common. Most grow in the northern regions of the United States, Montana, Idaho and especially as one of the early succession species in the northern arboreal forests of Canada, where they're joined by the their distant cousins the birch. Some aspens still manage to hang on in Colorado, and even Southern Utah, like the stand we’re camped in now. + +Aspens have been declining for a while, but they've really suffered over the last century. It's getting warmer, which they don't like. And humans have radically decreased the number and size of forest fires, which they do like. Aspens thrive after a burn and are later crowded out by pines, spruce and fir, which all outstretch the Aspens and steal their light. Aspens survive the fires that destroy pines, spruce and fir and then minute the earth has cooled they're coming back. + +Aspens are limited by their one requirement to thrive -- sunlight, lots of sunlight. + +It's possible this is the source of my affinity for them. I too need light. My body is chronically low in vitamin D, a nutrient most easily made when you spend time in the sun. Put me inside, or in dark, grey places, and I wither like an aspen overshadowed by a spruce. + +Aspens are clever though, more clever than I. They don’t "die" even after they've been crowded out by the taller species like spruce and fir. Instead they just stop existing above the soil. A stand of aspen is considerably different than the trees around it. Aspens are rarely individual trees. Instead they grow like rhizomes, like giant white asparagus. Aspens are not really trees, the trunks we see are not the soul of the plant. The truth of Aspens is under the ground. They are massive root systems, some as large as twenty acres, that send up white trunks, which then sprout leaves. But even the leaves aren't necessary. Beneath the striking white bark is a there’s a thin photosynthetic green layer that allows the plant to continue synthesizing sugars even without leaves. Winter means little to an aspen grove. + +Death also means little to an Aspen grove. The one we've been camping in for a week now is of indeterminate age. I could find no reference to it ever being measured. It's remote national forest land, in our two weeks there the only thing approaching authority that we saw was a water specialist who tested the water from the one faucet in the middle of the campground. I asked him how the water was. He asked how long I was staying. + +He didn't know of anyone studying these aspens, nor did he have any idea how old they might be. There is a grove a few hundred miles to the north of us that's know as tk and is over 80,000 years old. Some believe it's much older than that even. 80,000 years is staggering. + +Trees are intelligent. Mystics, occultists and gardeners have known this for millennia, science has been slower to get there, but it is getting there. Among the revelations of the past decade is good hard evidence that the forest talks. Trees talk. They talk to each other, to other plants, to the soil, to the bugs eating them, possibly even to birds, animals, and humans who bother to listen. Trees talk mainly with chemicals, but that doesn't make the conversations any less real. + +What this means is that there's an at least 80,000 year old intelligence sitting somewhere up in the Utah hills. So far as I know no one has attempted to talk to it, though I would assume the researchers who studied it. + +and no one is trying to talk to it. It's very likely, even if we could find meaning in its language, that we would have no idea what it was saying. What would you know after 8,000 years? What would you have seen? What would you understand? How would you see the world? Tk is watching the 280th generation of humans to have lived since it was born. It's understanding of human life would come from work on a scale many of us might find unsettling. + +age + +the restless shifting of great passenger pigeon flocks. + +aspens, birch, age, tendrils lacing through the earth, sensors of vibration, an intelligence 8000 years old, what would it say? What could it say? What is there to say over time spans so massive? If you want speech you have to die, maybe you could stretch it out two or three hundred years. Perhaps some a thousand, but after that words would break down, there would be no way to convey. I think of people who went too far into any one thing, their minds came back shattered mirror shards reflecting a world you can tell is beautiful and perhaps a little frightening, but reassuring too, but never fully communicable. + +They haunt the halls of institutions, the newspaper piles under freeway over passes. I learned to use chopsticks from a man who'd been somewhere and never fully come back. Somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam or Indiana or Washington DC, depending on which version of the story he was telling. Crazy people get labeled that but they aren't, not most of them. Most of the ones I've spent time with were just tell stories either at odds with the primary story of our time or sideways to it in some way that made them incompatible with it. but if you spend time with them you can find that patterns in their stories, the internal logic of it, these things will rarely vary. Of course we seldom spend enough time with such people. They tend not bath much and rant without listening and hide behind wall of necessity. I read too much Tolstoy too early in life and have consequently never minded crazy people. Unless I need to get somewhere on time, if your pressed for time crazy people are the worst because few of them understand time in any meaningful way, they've been cast culture and consequently out of time. There is nothing to do thirty minutes from now, there is no thirty minutes from now there is only now and before now. I used to sit downtown Laguna Beach where a number of homeless people gathered to spend their days begging for change, collecting cans and otherwise trying to come up with a bit of cash for alcohol and cigarettes. I was young, a friend and I would sit around in the evenings playing bad cover songs for fun, trying to convince ourselves that if we could play out here we could play anywhere. People would drop change on the guitar case. We gave it to the bums, which made us a lot of friends in a hurry. One day some do-gooder came by with a bunch of Chinese food from a restaurant up the street, one of the sort who believe that they know what people need and they don't need more drink and cigarettes. I was indignant about the whole thing, but Steveo, the most talkative of the bunch that hung around, shushed me. "Free anything man, never complain about free anything. You don't want it, pass it on." The woman handed me a box of Chinese food before I could stop her so I took Steveos and advice and said thank you. I sat there with the little white and red box all warm in my lap, wondering what Tolstoy would have done. The woman had given me a pair chopsticks, but I was looking around for a fork because I didn't have the slightest idea how to eat with chopsticks. Finally I asked Steveo, who made sure he was one who ended up with the plastic bag full of napkins. I had already learned that what the homeless value is not often what the rest of us think they value. Napkins, toilet paper, towelettes, were all surprisingly coveted. I asked Steveo for a fork and he stared at me like I was insane. I remember it so clearly because it the only moment that entire summer I spent hanging around with him, that I ever heard silence coming from him. It wasn't more than a beat or two, but he stopped talking and stared. And then launched into a story about the Vietnamese regugee he met on leave in Bangkok who taught him to use chopsticks. He never asked if I needed to learn, he never remarked on the fact that I didn't know now, he just launched into a story, complete with demonstration, which after twenty minutes or so had me using chopsticks to eat cold, greasy show mein noodles. + + + + + +I planted a risom once, asparagus. It beguiles you with this notion of never ending production, renewal, rebirth, food forever. All lies. Mine grew spindly and tough, like cordage, something you could rig a tall ship with, anchor a backstay, perhaps flog a sailor drunk at his post. Certainly nothing so frail and tender and purple green delicious as the picture on the curious sack of roots, the root ball the package called them, that arrived in the mail two days before. + +It was winter, a cold, grey, premature dark winter afternoon. I was sitting at the desk where I used to work, looking out over the two hugelkulter mounds we sometimes called a garden. I was dreaming of spring, of light green aspargus soup with a gentle sprinkling of mint leaves, warm crusts of bread dripped in olive oil and salt, all of eaten outside on the porch in the warm sunshine and shade of Magnolia flowers and Iris blooms, the sort of half drunk midwinters dream that will make you do dumb things, like pull on a jacket and stumble out in the cold bleakness looking for a shovel. + +I turned the soil. Half rich red Georgia clay that lurked everywhere beneath the suburban infatuation with sod we inherited when we purchased the house, and half a dark loamy peat that came in bag from the home supply store, now sodden with rain and overrun with ants carrying little white beads I figured were eggs. Can't ruin dirt I reasoned and picked up the plastic bag gingerly by the top corners. I walked fast and managed to carry it over to the garden without too many ants scurrying onto me. + +I picked a spot up against the fence and started to dig. The air was cold and dry and the skin on my knuckles split easily when I swung the shovel too close to the chain link fence. + +I tossed in the knot of roots, trudged around the house to the back door where I took off my muddy boots and promptly forgot all about apsergus, spring and anything that might have hinted at warmth. + +It was the last time I seriously tried to garden, to bend nature to my will. + +"And even the most silent must sing a song of love" + + +[^1]: This number is larger than the generally accepted 20-25 years for a generation, but is based off Nancy Howell's work with the Dobe !Kung, a contemporary hunter-gatherer people of Botswana and Namibia living somewhat akin to how all of humanity lived until roughly the thirteen century, and therefore a good average to use for deeper dives into the past. I took Howell's averages, 25.5 for women, 31.8 for men and averaged them to come up with 28.65 years to a generation. @@ -1,8 +1,8 @@ ## Prologue -I've been waiting for this night all my life, this is the last night. Tomorrow it's the road. +I've been waiting for this night all my life, this is the last night. -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. +Tomorrow my wife, our three children and I will climb in a 26-foot-long, 7-foot-wide psychedelic blue fiberglass jellybean of an RV built in 1969 and head off into the wilds of the American road. I've thought this night, about what it would feel like a thousand times, but I never got it right. @@ -139,45 +139,31 @@ I watched her walk up from the beach on the thin spit of sand that split the dun Couldn't we all? I thought. Except for the part where we have to pay for it for more than a week. -I swirled the warm yellow beer in bottom of my bottom and watched it foam. Then it hit me that she wasn't talking about the beach house we'd never be able to afford. - -She was answering a question I'd asked two days ago. Over the years my wife has 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. I never realized how jarring this habit of mine was until it started being done to me, which I suspect was part of the plan. It took me a minute to remember the earlier conversation in which I'd said we should try living on the road full time. - -Okay, I could live like this. Without that. That for this. This without that. Is that possible with all this? - -We had a house, suburbs, kids, cars, stuff. That stuff. We'd decided some time ago that that, it wasn't for us. That life felt like costume we'd tried on. It was fun for a while, but now we were ready to take it off. Set that aside, move on. Try something new. - -It could have been that we'd had one too many beers, but we convinced ourselves we should go somewhere else, do something else... anything really. What we should do was unclear, but something other than that. - -This. I could live like this? This out there? This ocean in front of me suddenly seemed bigger, seemed like it was pulling me out into it, over the horizon toward something I couldn't see, but was there. What was over there? Somewhere the Yucatan, then beyond that Nicaragua, where we'd been for a month a few years before. We'd liked it, so we had decided to look into going back. A friend of ours was living down there at the time, she seemed to love it, and her already being there would make it a little easier, or so we figured. 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 on his own, then we'll go. It was a plan. We like plans. We never follow them, but we like to make them. - -I had a nagging doubt about this plan from the beginning though, there was a voice in the back of my head telling me not to go so quickly. What is kept saying was, "What about America?" - -In 2014 when we were making plans - -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 swirled the warm yellow beer in bottom of my bottle and watched it foam. Then it hit me that she wasn't talking about the beach house we'd never be able to afford, she was answering a question I'd asked two days ago. Over the years my wife has 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. I never realized how jarring this habit of mine was until it started being done to me, which I suspect was part of the plan. It took me a minute to remember the earlier conversation in which I'd said we should try living on the road full time. 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. +It was also a way to shelter the kids a little bit. If got some kind of travel trailer and drove around the country for a few months, a year, some time anyway, they could get used to traveling, but still have a familiar space to call home, something of their own. 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. And a picture of a Dodge Travco. -Two days later she was who found the Travco that was to become our home on the road. +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. Which is a long way of saying that if it was build recently, I probably don't own it. -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. +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. 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. -Which is a long way of saying that if it was build recently, I probably don't own it. +It wasn't that I particularly loved old things simply because they were old (that would be my wife), rather just that they were better made, accomplished the tasks I wanted to accomplish 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 of my wife's minivan and was confronted by an inscrutable, sealed up sea of plastic. I wasn't about to try to live full time in a sea of plastic. -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. +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, pipe organs made in Virginia, 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. I know that now, at the time I just thought the Travco had soul in a way not other RV did. -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. +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. -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. +When my wife came up off the beach that day and said, okay, I could live like this, one the road in a Travco, we were dug in deep. We had a house in the suburbs, picket fence, kids, lawn mowers, cars, two week vacations, stuff. All that stuff. All that stuff stood between us and a Travco. We decided we would not rush. Our twin daughters were two, we had a boy due to arrive in a few months. We decided that night. We'll stay put until he's walking on his own, then we'll go. It was a plan. We like plans. We never follow them, but we like to make them. -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. +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. -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. +But that's what my wife manage to do. Two days later she found the Travco that was to become our home on the road. I still don't know how she found it, but clearly it was meant to be. Not two couple weeks after we decided we wanted one it was sitting in our driveway. -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. +That was when I slowly began to realize what I'd gotten myself into it. Suddenly two years did not feel like a long time, starring at the water damage and broken paneling and corroded wires and missing isulation and two years from now suddenly felt alarmingly soon. + +The Travco 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. 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. @@ -191,9 +177,7 @@ Not everything was easy though. I knew nothing about engines and unfortunately I 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." +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. @@ -201,9 +185,9 @@ For most of human existence how you lived, what you called home, was dictated by 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. +Corrinne and I spent a lot of time designing the bus. Once you start to realize that you can express yourself through the things you create, 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 doesn't mean you have to get every detail right the first time. 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. @@ -213,6 +197,9 @@ But I can't, it isn't me. And so it goes. ## Chapter 2 +"Travel is a returned to the simplicity of being a hunter-gatherer. + +"You need to find food, shelter, the sorting of bad omens from good, and the appreciation of the miracle of being alive. @@ -1,6 +1,27 @@ #Chapter 1: + + + + +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 + +--- + + + +It could have been that we'd had one too many beers, but we convinced ourselves we should go somewhere else, do something else... anything really. What we should do was unclear, but something other than that. + + +I had a nagging doubt about this plan from the beginning though, there was a voice in the back of my head telling me not to go so quickly. + +In 2014 when we were making plans + +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. + +--- + 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. diff --git a/prologuev1.txt b/prologuev1.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4abde91 --- /dev/null +++ b/prologuev1.txt @@ -0,0 +1,120 @@ +## Prologue + +It was my last night in Athens and I spent most of panicking. + +It was after 3 now, most of the panic was over. There was only one other person left in the diner with me and he looked to be passed out. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, I watched rivulets of water trace patterns down the frosty window pane. I heard the hiss of a broom on the sidewalk outside, the barman next door, cleaning up before locking the doors for the night. + +The waiter refilled my coffee a final time, at this rate I wasn't going to sleep anyway. Tomorrow we'd hit the road, but I had an hour or two before my sleeping family would miss me. I pulled out my notebook and wrote down what William had said. *Just try it. It's not like they're going to pack up and move Athens GA the minute you leave. Getting your old life back is the easiest thing in the world.* + +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. + +"You're not going to want it back." I had been about to ask why when the waiter came by with another cup of coffee for me and a beer for William. "Once you go you'll find something out there that keeps you." + +"I already know I want to be out there, it's the rest of my crew I'm worried about." + +William considers this for a moment. "They've done studies on fruit flies," he says finally, "some are adventurers, some are not." + +The general sense of panic I'd been feeling all evening was starting to mix with the acrid burn of late night coffee rumbling around in my already knotted stomach. I was starting to think perhaps I should have stayed in the hotel room, staring at my reflection in the cracked bathroom mirror, listening to the torrent of rain pounding on the roof, and white knuckled my way through an anxiety attack fueled by uncertainty and self-doubt. Instead I now found myself in a diner well past midnight with my oldest friend comparing me to fruit flies. + +He sees my exasperated face and shrugs. "Look it up." + +Later I do. He's right. He's almost always right. I made a note of it, but then forgot all about it. The trip came along and washed it away. It's not until several years later when I am reading Craig Childs' *Atlas of a Lost World*, an attempt to trace human migration into North America, that I run across the adventurous fruit flies again. + +Childs wants to know why anyone who has a reasonably content life, as it seems safe to suppose an Ice Age era human probably had, with plenty of game around, relative safety of the tribe, a family to provide for and so one, why would such a person attempt to venture across thousands of miles of ice just to see whats on the other side? The answer turns out to lie in a dopamine receptor know as D4. Or I should say the answer may lie with D4. + +Because we can't go find an Ice Age adventurer to talk to, 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 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...? No one knows what they're looking for, no one know why they do it. 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 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 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. + +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. Good. My family and I will be just fine, we will drive our vintage RV to where the food is and beat all those other people trying to find food. Except that sounds alarmingly like a zombie apocalypse survival scenario. + +"Oh no question," William had said as he took another sip of his beer, "you're definitely who I'd want to be with in a zombie apocalypse." + +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." + +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 evidence goes even further than that though. The size of D4 receptors 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. + +> 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. + +> Too high in D4, though, you’d never be seen again, a seed blown beyond all horizons. + +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. + +There was no going back. My wife and I had already sold our house, given away 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. + +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 elongated D4 was making me and everyone around me likely, as Child's puts it, to "never be seen again," that we were a seed about to be blown beyond the horizons of the life we used to know. + +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. + +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? The truth is I have never really felt at home anywhere. Except when I was traveling. Moving. In motion. Becoming rather than become. + +When I was 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 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 circular bit 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 found it odd that everyone else seemed so sure about me as well. + +I grew older. I began to move. I was in motion. 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. + +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 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. 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?*. + +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. + +By senior year of high school I had all but dropped out, and spent as much time as I could zipping around the state. I thought nothing of throwing a couple cans of Dentimore Stew (a quick and easy travel meal I picked up from trips with my father), along with some Sterno to heat it, in a bag with a jacket and fresh pair of socks -- to this day I refuse to put on yesterday's socks. Douglas Adams and I part company in our packing lists, I've never needed a towel, that's what yesterday's t-shirt is for, but fresh socks are a necessity -- and heading out for a weekend trip of several hundred miles per day. I made day trips to San Francisco, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Death Valley, I didn't care when I got there, I didn't care when I left, as long as I was going and going and going. + +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. I was ready to go and I went. I went and I never came back. I did return, I did stop moving again. I did all the things they said I should do and I found all of them to empty and false. I began to plot an escape. This time not just for me, but for my family as well. I began to study nomads, to look at how they moved through the world, where they went, how they got there and how those strategies might be applied to modern America. I settled on the idea of the mobile home, the RV or van, but I could never afford an RV, it would take years to save the money to buy one. + +I looked at used RVs, but they tended to be poorly made and falling apart. 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. + |