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@@ -1,72 +1,129 @@ -I have never felt at home anywhere. When I was very young I desperately wanted to be somewhere else. 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? Obviously myself they said. 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 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 nine-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 BMX 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. +## Prologue -I caught a taste of that freedom and never wanted anything else. I looked for more places 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 flights of Monarch's 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 it was right that mockingbird, it was not my world. It was surrounded by but cut off from the everyday world by a mere two feet of hedge. I found the freedom of exploration again. And again. Everywhere I went, so long as I went. +"Happy juice?" -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 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 glass, 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. The 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 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. +"Yes. Happy juice." -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 consumate 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 farther. 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) 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, 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, I was just going and going and going. +William is laughing. The red vinyl cushions of the diner booth give both of us an unhealthy pink aspect. -As you might imagine this did not mix well with education. I did manage to graduate from high school and I 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 I could make an even quicker getaway 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 pale next to the horrors of the Inland Empire. +"Don't ever use that phrase again." -Around this time I hit upon my first way to combine travel and making a living -- music. 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 Fugazi and Husker Du and tk and tk 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 shows. 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? +"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. +"Look. It's not you. Well," he hesitates, "it is you, but you can't help it. It's your genes." +"How is this supposed to make me feel better about having no home, no job and no real future in our culture?" -up in the mountains, to the vast fields of spring wildflowers in the eastern deserts, to ever shrinking shores the great salt lake. +"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 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 had no use for me, I felt something when I was traveling that I have never felt anywhere else -- I felt at home. +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. -I no longer felt the vague but persistent despair that would overtake me starring at plaster walls late a night. I would feel the sense of elation and freedome I got some nights when I slept on the couch and cracked the window enough to feel the humid night wrap around me to the cound 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 piece. I took to sleeping on couches even in my homes. 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. +"It's your fault really, I read all this that book you gave me." -I snatched trips where I could, as we all do. Why do we take vacations? Why does the concept exist? I think it's because we can only cage ourselves for so long before we go crazy. Americans can do it for 50 weeks and then they need a break. Europeans have less space to beding with, they need to roam further and for longer to feel at pieces, that's why they give themselves +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. -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. +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. +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. -In a previous life I was a nomad. So were you. If you grant previous lives as a possibility that is. We were all nomads, humanity is nomadic by nature. We only lost our nomadic ways in the last couple hundred years. That anyone feels at home stuck year round in the same place seems to me about as unnatural as it gets. +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. +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. +"Oh no question," William takes 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 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. +> 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. -John Steinbeck felt similarly, writing a journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. +> 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. +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. +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. +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. -That absolute feeling of detachment — that space to think and frolic in a little world that’s all your own, that feeling of absolute relaxation when sheer distance from the source renders commitment and obligation moot — is one of the hidden joys of travel, and is ultimately what ropes you in for the long haul. Travel is a psychological enema: you pass through security into the airport terminal, you buy your ticket and step onto the train platform and everything else just flows out and washes away. +Still, I have never felt at home anywhere but on the road, moving. -and knew very little the only certainty that I could ever cling to +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. -and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. +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. +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 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 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?*. -## Prologue +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. + + +--- + + + +## 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. -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 feel 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 just transcend. The Travco has that thing not one can put their finger on, but everyone feels it. -The engine makes a gutteral 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, but it's satisfying. It's the kind of roar that makes you say, screw it, let's go. +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 of 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. +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 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, 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 fired it up, pointed it downhill, and we were on our way. The first few corners are nerve-wracking, the kind of white knuckled terror-inducing driving I haven't done since the very first time I sat down behind the wheel. Or the time in Thailand that I claimed I could ride a motorcycle when I actually had no clue. Or the time I said I could climb a 5.9 crack up the side of sheer slab of granite in California's San Jacinto mountains despite never having been on a roped climb in my life. -The prudent man would have done some sort of test drive I suppose. Meh, screw that, let's go. +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 was uphill) 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 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. 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. @@ -86,14 +143,15 @@ The Travco cuts across some normally pretty rigid race, age, class and social li 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. So you have all this dopamine associated with the thing you want, but then when you actually get the thing, well, no more dopamine. 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 see it. Yesterday my wife and I stood sat on a picnic table where we were camped just staring at it and giggling like children. +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. -tk +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 Mooring of Starting Out +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. -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. My wife wanted something else. Somewhere else actually. 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. +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. 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. @@ -134,25 +192,7 @@ A good plan takes your mind off the fear, off the unknown unknoable future. It f -## Cuts - -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 - - - - -I had no idea that all that fiberglass was encasing a rather small, underpowered Dodge 318 engine bolted to a solid steel, 1969 steel, frame, I did not know at all what it was capable of, even less what I was capable of. Neither of us had any idea what I was doing. - - -How I end up here - - - - -That's how you find yourself five feet in the air, strapped to a 27 foot long 1969 motorhome with no clue if the brakes even work. I have driven somewhere in the neighborhood of 250,000 miles, that's what you might call, planning, but this is the first time I've strapped myself to a 27 foot long monstrosity in unknown condition and promptly set off into unknown roads, barreling down a mountain on narrow streets through a town I arrived in a scant 2 hours ago. |