path: root/book.txt

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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?



up in the mountains, to the vast fields of spring wildflowers in the eastern deserts, to ever shrinking shores the great salt lake.

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 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.

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 

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.


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.





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.





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.

and knew very little the only certainty that I could ever cling to 

and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.








## Prologue

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

The turn turns out to be nothing. I pump the brakes a bit, take it nice and slow and slice around the corner like it's not even there. After that the road straightens out as it heads through downtown Mars Hill.

At the first stop light I pull up close enough to the car in front of me that the entire facade of the Travco is visible in the back window. I start laughing because it is quite simply the coolest thing I've ever seen. Over the course of the next 18,000 or so miles this will happen over and over again whenever I stop and catch a glimpse of this thing in some window or mirror. It's that thing about the Travco that captivates, delights. I am quit confident that the Spanish poet Lorca, would say the Travco *tener duende*. 

The Spanish word Duende is mostly untranslatable, though English dictionaries try with phrases like "a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity". I think it's that last word that matters. To have Duende a thing, a work of art, must have come from somewhere, whoever had it must have reached deep within or far out into those vast uncharted, unchartable spaces that we cannot name, but recognize. You cannot fake a journey these places. Everyone recognized a fake. You cannot fake duende.

Duende what gives you chills when you hear Beethoven's ninth symphony, why makes you smile when tk or cry standing in front of a painting. I think the closest we have in English is the word soul. Not soul as in religion, but as in James Brown. Soul as something that is becoming, not something become. Soul is not out there or in you, it’s the place where you meet the out there.

Some times duende is very individual. Sometimes it's broader. With the Travco it seems to happen to just about everyone. On the way from Mars Hill back to Athens Ga, where we were living at the time, I get 180 miles of smiles, waves, thumbs up and cheering fists raised. 

The first time I stop, at a rest area on I85, a man is up at the window asking if he can take a picture before I've even taken off my seatbelt. "What is this thing," he asks, "it's the coolest thing I've ever seen". This will happen hundreds of times more over the years and eventually I realized no one wants me to tell them what it is, the name doesn't matter, it simply exists and people want to acknowledge that it exists.

The Travco cuts across some normally pretty rigid race, age, class and social lines in America. I get smiles and waves from the kids lounging on skateboards, smoking cigarettes behind a gas station, a well dressed middle age couple coming out of an antique store in Fletcher, NC, an old man walking through Anderson, SC tips a baseball cap to me, and driving though the predominently black neighborhoods of tk everyone I see looking my way is smiling and waving. I may be cheating a little, it is the south after all, we really are friendly.

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.

tk


## 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. 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.

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.

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. 

One symptom of my least American Americaness is that I don't like new things. At the time my car was a 1969 truck I'd inherited from my father. tk tk tk exampels of loving old things, things made of metal, made with care, made with pride. We traded all that for a bunch of junk imported from overseas. And ming you it's not junk because it was imported from overseas, it'd be junk if we made it, but I don't think we'd make it. I see people making things in America and it isn't plastic junk. It's computers from Denver or tk from tk form tk. and so on. When we put our hearts into it, America makes wonderful things. Things we need, not things we want. Fuck stuff.

I turned to the internet. As you do. I searched for vintage travel trailer or something of that sort. I found out about Shastas, I learned about airstreams, I learned about a lot of things like that and then one day, I don't remamber the specific terms I plugged in, but I came across my first Travco. People often name their Travcos, this one was called Myrtle. Once I had the name I plugged it in and, to put it cheaply, I fell in love. 

I also found the Bumfuzzles. 


## The Big Blue Bus

It became the big blue bus the minute our kids saw it. None of us remember who gave it that name, but it stuck, for us at least. It also became the neighborhood attraction, which it would remain for the next eighteen months I spent gutting it, rewiring, replumbing, repaneling, and rebuilding it into something that was livable for a family of five.

How exactly I was going to do that I didn't really know. All I had was vision in my head of what it would look like when it was done. This was, fortunately, enough to sustain me even when I ran out of time, money and self confidence. I never wanted to quit, in fact quitting or giving up on it never entered my mind. I knew when I started that on the other side of this massive undertaking lay a totally different life that was going to be much better than the one we had before it and I never considered not getting to it. There were times when it took immense will to keep going, and my blood sweat and tears are figuratively and very literally in the Big Blue Bus, but I never once thought of stopping.

I have, thus far in my life, found that there are very few things that you can't do given sufficient time and money with which to work on them, *provided you have the will to do them at all*. If you have that will you tend to find at least the time, and once you find the time you often find you don't need nearly so much money as you thought, though often you need much much more time than you thought. It also helps to know the right people. If you don't you'll need to seek them out. I knew nothing about electricity when I started, but one of my good friends was an electrician. I knew nothing about plumbing when I started, but I did know a plumber. 

Not everything was easy though. I knew nothing about engines and unfortunately I didn't know a good mechanic to teach me. I mainly ignored the engine in the beginning. Focus on what you can do, do it and when it's done move on to the next thing.

There will no doubt be plenty of things you think you are absolutely no good at -- I can't learn a foreign language to save my life -- but the truth is, assuming you're of sound body and mind, the things you are not good at turn out to really be things you lack the will to do. We beat ourselves up about these things sometimes, at least I do. I spent years thinking I was somehow an idiot about languages, and I am, but not because I'm an idiot about languages, everyone is an idiot about languages, but because I lack the will to change that. 

This conversation requires that we define some terms though. Like will.

I will. That's the opposite of waiting. Will is action. Will is getting up off the couch for no reason and walking to the wall opposite you and touching it for no reason other than you willed your body to do it. You did not wait until you felt like it, until it was convenient, until it was right, until it was perfect, until you wanted to. You will it and it is done.

I used to wait for things to be right, to be perfect, to be easy. Slowly though I realized that waiting is a kind of will, it's just a lack of will. I know from experience that nothing good ever comes of waiting. The question is what happens between this realization and the point where you actually get off the couch and walk over to wall. Some of it is purely practical. We don't own a television, which means we don't spend our time watching it, which free up a trememdous amount of time in our lives. this is the single biggest, easiest thing you can do to reclaim your life and develop your will -- throw away your television.

The other practical way to get off the couch and over to the wall is to make a plan. It might be a terrible plan, it will probably be a terrible plan, mostly likely you will go do whatever it may be in a way that's nothing like the plan. The plan is irrelevant, but the planning is very important. There are only two ways to beat the fear you feel inside. And the thing stopping your will from making its way in the world is mainly fear. 

One way past the fear is to sit around waiting for it to pass. That way does not work. The other way is distract yourself sufficiently until you are able to move yourself forward without noticing that you have done so. I was able to get in the Travco that first day and go barroling down the hill into the unknown because I had a very simple plan: drive up in the morning, pay for the thing, drive it back. I was simply doing what I had planned to do. 

A good plan takes your mind off the fear, off the unknown unknoable future. It frees your mind from fear so you can catch your breath and think. That's why armies plan, it's why sailors carry charts, it's why everyone writes things down on a calendar. We all love a good plan, the real trick of planning though is actually start doing the first steps of the plan so that you move forward without realizing that you've done so.





## 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. 



## Chapter on Building home

Quote from https://faircompanies.com/videos/meden-agan-small-island-getaway-seeks-old-greek-simplicity/

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, how do you want to do that? What you want out of a home? You have to question everything all the way back to the beginning -- what is a home?

I ran across an interview with the Greek architect Takis Yalelis many years after I had been thinking about these things that nicely summarizes the idea:

"home is your surroundings," says Yalelis, "it's not a house, it doesn't mean that it has four walls and a door and window and air conditioning and all that. It's where you live." For most of human existence how you lived, what you called home, was dictated by the natural world -- the building materials you could obtain, what you needed shelter from (cold? heat? rain? snow? etc) and then within those limits people expressed themselves. We no longer express ourselves through our homes and I think that's emblematic of so many of our problems, we have trouble expressing ourselves in so many places because we don't have the opportunity to do it in so many others.

"Four walls makes a shelter," continues Yalelis, "and then you start making choices about that shelter, whether you want to enter and exit, do you want to stay in there forever, whether you want to get rained in, whether you want to have a view of the outside and what kind of view and why." 

Until I started working on the bus I had never made any real choices about my homes. I had rented what I could afford, purchased what seemed like a good investment (it was) and was reasonably nice, but I had never sat down and though about how I wanted to enter and exit my home (through a door?), but then when I started to think about these things I realized that all these choices I had not made, had consequences. To pick a very simple example, I have always had solid doors with very little, if any, window to the outside world. That has a set of consequences and affects how I'm going to view the world. If I had a glass door, that would have a different set of consequences and so on.

Arguably even the bus is not really me expressing myself, at least on the outside. On the inside though we did get to express ourselves, my wife and I agonized over quite a few details in the way that I've noticed fanatics tend to do. Two years into our life in the bus, I flew into Denver to meet with company that had started to build computers in Denver. Yes, computers, built by had, in the United States. Their story comes later in this book, but as I sat at the initial meeting listening to the owner of the company talk about how they had spent years designing these computer cases, agonizing over the way the power button clicked, how the wood veneer fit into the metal and all the other details they sweated, I recognized that same fanaticism Corrinne and I had when we designed the bus. Once you start to realize that you can express yourself through the things you create, that you are in fact expressing yourself this way all the time, but once you take charge of that, once you start to bend it to your will, to express your will through the things you make you have make sure you get every detail right. 

That doesn't mean you hve to get every detail right the first time. In fact you can't. Expecially if you're building a home,. You hve 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, whateverthat might mean to me a that moment.

That is perhaps the great lesson in building your home, realizing that your home is never done, it is not a thing, it is a process, and that process never ends. It helps to reinforce this lesson when you home breaks down and leaves you sitting at the side of the road, covered in transmission fuild and oil and grease, fumbling in the gravel for a wrench, seating and swearing and wondering what the hell is wrong with you that you can't just rent an apartment like everyone else and get on with the business of living. 

But I can't, it isn't me. And so it goes.


Quote from https://faircompanies.com/videos/meden-agan-small-island-getaway-seeks-old-greek-simplicity/:

"What you call home, your country, the place where you come from, you're probably not going to describe a house. You may describe a tree, the weather, the lighting, the food, maybe the music." - Takis Yalelis