“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…”
This week hasn’t been all that great. After sitting through four days of dust storms in the New Mexico/Arizona desert, I headed up into the mountains of the Continental Divide between Lordsburg and Silver City. While making a turn to find a campsite, I was struck from behind by a van, and then an SUV. It bent up my bumper and caused some damage to the bus. For some reason, the State Trooper saw fit to give me a ticket–which I’m fighting. I’ve never heard of someone getting rear-ended and it being their fault.
Sometimes you can just tell things aren’t going great from what someone will say, or a look you get. Skoolies are not regarded with the same value as say a million dollar pusher bus or a fifth wheel camper. There’s an element of homelessness to the rig. Suffice to say if I had been driving either of those instead of a bus, my vehicle would have been as totaled as the two that hit me. I’m grateful for the protection my home on wheels provided. I’m very grateful that nobody was seriously injured in the wreck. Now I have to deal with court and with insurance companies. So it goes.
What is happening in America is wild. I wish they would come up with a different word other than Unprecedented. It’s chaotic. It’s feverish. As a student of history and the human condition, I am not liking where this is headed. My thoughts take me back to that wreck. How everything slowed down and condensed into a day which you immediately knew was going to suck, but you couldn’t do much about it while it was happening.
Up in the hills around Silver City, I parked to gather myself, to get some work done, and to lick my wounds. A couple days after the accident, I was awakened at about 2:20am to the sound of gunfire, really close by. Someone in a two door sports car, like a souped up Acura or something, was blasting into the night, not fifty yards from where I slept. When they were done, they peeled out of there and headed back onto the highway. You know, the one where I got a ticket for making an “improper turn.” I went back to sleep. One unfortunate thing about life on the road is the numbers of unhinged dumbasses you will come across. Like the time I was awakened at 4am by drunken screaming of the Star Spangled Banner right outside my bus.
Little did those creeps know that the next day when I headed out, I saw their car parked about half a mile away. Oregon plates. I left them alone, because the world is mean enough without becoming mean yourself. Part of the reason I’m out here is to find Peace. Not the psychedelic kind you buy with mushrooms or hallucinogens, but the kind you discover on mountain tops or voyages across the ocean.
It sounds a lot more romantic than it is sometimes. Many days on the road are spent running out of things like food or fresh water. Gasoline. Or measuring out your last $10 to do a load of laundry or buy fuel for your heater. Something is always breaking. Internet is spotty, making some days very lonely. You always seem to be watching the rest of the world pass you by, like the view from a porthole on a boat, watching the land slide away and the ocean take you back into itself.
There are days I seriously think about quitting this way of life. As the Arcade Fire song, Sprawl II says, “Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock.” Out of seven submissions for my book, I have gotten five rejection letters so far. It feels like I am deluding myself that I have any degree of talent, much less enough to write a book about a subject most people probably don’t even care about: my life story. Maybe I’m just being tough on myself.
Yesterday I took some photos in Silver City, just before the snow started to come down. Last night was cold, but my heater kept Penny and me warm enough to sleep. The new newsletter for Visit North Park dropped (show it some love if you are interested) and I was happy to get some research done on my latest story for a magazine. I was able to find free water in town and spent the balance of my meager tax refund (about $100) on a new fresh water hose, some potato chips and dip, some groceries, and batteries for my flashlight. Just in case I have to see who the hell is shooting at me at 2am ever again.
I believe in Synchronicity. There’s no other way to look at it. On the road there are just too many patterns, too many coincidences. An endless highway with forking paths that somehow take you to a place you need to be. Even if you hadn’t planned on going there. Maybe whatever happened with the accident the other way will turn up something down the line that makes sense.
I was talking with a friend the other day, and though I was hiding my frustration with being broke as hell–as a GenXer and a man, my toxic trait is telling people I’m fine when I’m not–she asked me what it is I do to make a living on the road. It’s not my 987 followers on TikTok, I can tell you that. I told her about my blogging and copywriting, the articles I write for magazines. It doesn’t pay much. She said, “Wait, you are working to support yourself as a writer, full time?” In this day and age, something like that is pretty rare, I’ll admit.
I hadn’t thought much about it lately. Losing sight of the forest for the trees, I guess. I just think about struggling to afford the rising costs of food and gas and making due with tea when I really fucking want coffee–in a paper cup with the little plastic to-go lid that somebody else has made. I think about the dinners of boiled bacon and potatoes or oatmeal for breakfast and something for a late lunch/early dinner to stretch my food supplies. Meat is a luxury. Eating at a restaurant is as irresponsible as a weekend long bender. And it leaves me feeling about the same amount of regret, to be honest.
I hadn’t been thinking about how I am doing what I’ve always wanted to do. Could I use a little more cash-flow, yes. But someone told me the other day they are living hand to mouth themselves and they are paying a shit-load of money for rent to do it. I guess the big difference is my house can get into fender benders and theirs probably won’t.
In this life I am meeting new people all the time, even if it’s just a parasocial friendship, but some of my closest friends are people I haven’t met yet in real life. It’s the world we are living in. How is that any different from keeping in touch with someone you grew up with and still imagine them as they were at 15?
Today, an old friend from back in high school sent me a picture of an old Underwood typewriter. They said it reminded them of me and they thanked me for writing about my adventures. I heard that message at exactly the time I needed it. Right when I was seriously thinking about giving up. I hadn’t heard from them in years and years. Why just then did they choose that moment to say hello?
Sometimes I forget that what I am doing isn’t just about me. I often brush off when people say how jealous they are, or that I’m “living the dream!” I can only think about how I’m going to empty my marine toilet at the next rest stop I can find with a vault shitter. It’s not glamourous. It’s frustrating, tedious at times, and this way of life means I don’t have the stability to be the guy who gets to shoot his shot with the pretty lady or at the very least take a fucking bath on a cold night just to relax.
But I am writing. I’m seeing the United States. I’m getting to meet new people and understand myself a little bit more every day. I’m learning gratitude, even for those days when things suck and I’m looking at shattered pieces of the only thing in the world I have left sparkling on the asphalt of a New Mexico highway. I’m grateful for people who tell me they follow my adventures, and those who might be struggling themselves but pitch me a donation for keeping them entertained. I’m grateful for every sunny day and every thunderstorm.
To my friend in Dublin, I got a large flat white and two books at a used book store. Thank you!! And thanks for reading!
Maybe that’s why what is happening in my country right now scares the hell out of me. I’m watching a beautiful people slide down a slippery slope. The eyes of the world are upon us and a lot of us aren’t going to be on the right side of history. I think a lot of the people running things in our world are lacking in what truly makes us human: Empathy. Our “leaders” haven’t had to want for anything. They don’t know what it’s like to have an insurance claim denied or knowing that a parking ticket might mean they can’t keep the lights on that month. They can’t see past the gleam of a $900,000 watch or through the tinted windows of a limo. They haven’t given the last dollar in their wallet to another traveler who approached a them in a parking lot for some change so they could eat.
And it’s starting to show.
Anyway, I’m going to keep doing what I do for now. Maybe the world needs me to bear witness and tell the story of how it all fell down. I wish that story didn’t need telling, but here we all are.