path: root/prologuev1.txt

## 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.