path: root/cuts.txt

#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.

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

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

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

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

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


# Prologue:


Because Ice Age adventurers are hard to question these days, science backed up and asked a slightly smaller, more manageable question -- why are some fruit flies more adventurous than others? 

Not all fruit fly larvae behave the same. Most pop out of their eggs and go for the nearest food. That's easy enough to understand. Others though, they do not go for the first food they find. They go further. Why would a tiny fruit fly larvae wiggle right past food on some quixotic quest for... well, no one knows what they're looking for, no one know why they do it. All we do know is that whether or not a fruit fly larvae stops for the first food it finds or keeps going, hitting the open road as it were, is reliably determined by the presence of what scientists call the rover allele. When there are more rover alleles, the larvae goes on a quest, one that, incidentally, almost always leaves them dead at the edge of that petri dish. "Their journey more important than living," as Childs puts it. 

Move to more complex organisms and the same division occurs, though mapping behavior to specific brain structure and chemicals gets much more complex. Broadly speaking, at the group level, there are what biologists call sitters and rovers. 

No one has done as much work what science calls sitters and rovers as David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist from Binghamton University. Most of Wilson's work has been evaluated through the lens of social behavior, which paints sitters as wallflowers and offers wallflowers an evolutionary reason for their wallflowerness. As a wallflower I appreciate this angle, but I think the same studies have much to say about travelers, adventurers is perhaps a better word. In his most famous experiment Wilson put traps in a pond of pumpkinseed sunfish. The rover fish, the adventurers, were the first to investigate the traps. It's not hard to imagine how that ended -- at the edge of their petri dish as it were. The sitters on the other hand did just fine because they never felt the need to investigate the traps. Score one for the sedentary. 

But sitters don't always come out ahead. In another study Wilson moved the fish to a new pond and it was the rovers who thrived because their drive to explore meant they found food before the sitters. Score one for adventurers. 

More importantly though what this shows is these are not individual evolutionary strategies, they species-level strategies. In other words, the world needs both sitters and rovers, each will survive different scenarios. 

For humans the determining component, the key difference between sitters and rovers, appears to be the size of D4 dopamine receptors in your brain. The bigger D4 receptors the more like you are to be what Childs calls "the kind of people who are reckless or adventurous, in need of something new." The size of D4 receptors even correlate to how far prehistoric individuals wandered. Looking at remains ranging between one thousand to thirty thousand years old, scientists found that elongated D4 receptors are more prevalent among those who migrated as compared to those who maintained a long genetic history in one place. 


Over a few cups of coffee I managed to calm down. Somehow the notion that it wasn't me, it was the D4 receptors helped, even if, deep down I wasn't sure I bought that hypothesis at all. It's a correlation after all, a possible contributor, not cause and effect. And how did I come to have larger D4 receptors, assuming we travelers do? Is it hereditary? If so how is it transmitted and why? More broadly I started to wonder why the removal of agency seemed to make me feel better. Less responsibility for my actions? A way to avoid the consequences of my actions? If it's my D4 then I can't help it, I *had* to do it. 

"It's context I think." William is swirling the last of his Guinness around the bottom of his glass, making whirlpool. "Our culture is in its late materialist phase. You need a solid argument in favor of rejecting the culture, but you can't transcend your culture, so your rejection has to be crouched in the dominant metaphor of our culture, which is science." He swallows the last swirl and looks around the diner.

"The part I find hard to swallow is the loss of agency. If it's my D4 or what have you, then I can't control it and I can't change it. I reject that notion".

"Why?"

"I don't like it."

William laughs. "I don't either, but what are you going to do?"

I consider this for a minute. What am I going to do? I am not going to panic, I am not going to worry. I am going to just keep breathing. I am going to go.

I'm about to say this when William starts to slide out of the booth. "It's late, time for me to go home." he says as he stands. I thank him again and flag down the waiter for another cup of coffee. I fish out my notebook at I watch William's dark form disappear into the shadows of downtown Athens. 

---


The waiter comes by with another cup of coffee for me and beer for William. "The ones that are," William continues, "have more D4 dopamine receptors. They do more with dopamine. That's you I guess, you need more dopamine."

I'd dragged him out of bed after midnight because I need reassurance that I wasn't crazy. I needed to know that I wasn't about to ruin my life in some irreversible way. I've known William for more than twenty-five years, he'd already seen me do far crazier things than get rid of all my belongings, pack my family in a 1969 RV I'd half restored and set out on some kind of crazy road trip adventure. 

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



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.



"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." from https://www.vagabondjourney.com/what-we-travel-for-quote/

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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.

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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. 



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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.


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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.