sounds familiar

We were pulling into a Walmart, nothing special in the course of this trip, when I saw you guys.

The six or seven of you were sitting in a patch of grass on the main turn into the lot. Ratty hair on face and heads, cardboard sign, two dogs, dirt-muted clothes, red plastic gas can on display, the lot. Crusties or railriders, maybe, hard to say from a glance but travelers for sure.

One of you offered a peace sign and I waved back and acknowledgement from the passenger seat.

After we passed Keaton called from the rear, “Hey dad I think those people saw your Grateful Dead stickers on the RV, they were waving and smiling and hollering!” Sharaun parked us clear across the lot from you, way over here in front of the garden center. Because of you, likely. Sometimes it’s easier than lying or saying “no.”

Suddenly I wanted to meet you guys and hear a little of your stories. I decided I’d walk over and give you $20. I separated the bill from the rest and stuck it in my opposite pocket so I didn’t have to thumb through in front of you.

I had to cross the entire lot so you saw me and knew I was coming. At shouting distance I hollered, “What’s up family?,” through a smile. Don’t know what posessed me to say that. A car passed so I couldn’t hear your reaction but a few of you stood to greet me and everything was smiles so I kept coming.

I stood among you and asked how everyone was doing. Up close I could see tattoos that told me even if you weren’t trainhopping currently some of you had before, but regardless of how you identified I quickly decided you weren’t scumfucks.

Your crew was six humans and two pit mixes, bitch and son. I met the dogs first with a sniff and head scratch. Then you. Two from Alabama, the spokesperson and leader & what I thought of as a young protege who you said you’d only recently picked up and was, “turning out to be an excellent traveler.” The mother of the group, though I doubt she’d cotton to my placing her so, and sole woman was from Michigan. Two others, a quiet but funny guy from Minnesota and one dude from Georgia who I didn’t really get to meet because he took the bitch back to the van when she got nasty with me for showing more attention to her pup than her.

You were hoping to get to family somewhere before the rains came. You’d been in California and bought a newer conversion van but you’d abandoned it in Alabama when the state wanted $300+ to renew the registration. We talked about traveling and you shared a little of your ethos, “Never take more than you need. Play it straight.”

I offered the $20 and said I hoped it helped you get where you were going. Hugs were had all around. Real hugs, like humans thanking humans for being humans. As I left and was almost out of earshot I heard Mom say, “See, I told you he was family!”

It’s a good memory. Godspeed, family.

I’ve never considered myself lazy when it comes to work.

I mean, I suppose I don’t have any clue how I’d be with traditional physical work, like driving cattle or digging wells, but in today’s modern setting, I’m a proven cubehand what knows how to ride an ergonomic office chair into career sunset.

In fact, if anything I take work too seriously, devote too much of my time to it. That should be plain to anyone familiar here, as I’ve written reams and reams about my shortcomings and struggles finding the right balance between the non-work and work in my life.

So it surprises me, then, just how strongly I feel that I could keep doing this. Lord, I know I’m wearing this theme thin lately, but it’s so strong on my mind every day. Going back to the only thing I’ve known as work seems almost stupid knowing what I’ve learned.

I’ve learned secrets.

Did you know that you can slow time? That the trees have stories? That your family is a single organism? That you can get there by walking? That water is free? That humans everywhere are beautiful? That our country is otherworldly gorgeous?

Sometimes, when we’re driving through deep rural America, where things are still done with sweat and muscle vs. college degrees and everything seems slower and more deliberate than my life back home, I think maybe I’ve only rediscovered the secret, not really learned it.

It makes me think hard about random things like ways of life that have died or are dying and why people believe what they believe or maybe vote how they vote.

It also makes me think about work, or all I know as work. And, though I don’t consider myself lazy, I must admit I’d choose to keep travelling versus going back hands-down if it were a real option. Some nights in bed I sit and think how long we could keep doing this is we just continued to burn through our savings. If it were that simple maybe I’d do it.

So, maybe I’m lazy. It’s funny, I do chafe at that idea, conditioned as I am by our culture.

Peace.

It’s funny the moments the brain chooses to take snapshots of and file away.

Sometimes I find I can’t remember much but fuzzy generalities from trips or places that are extremely important to me, yet there will be scenes frozen in my mind which seem to be of no consequence at all.

Why would I have such a vivid memory of sitting in the RV in the parking lot of a strip mall, waiting on Sharaun to buy storage baskets at some craft chain?

Of cooking ramen over the RV stove, parked in the dirt on a roadside pull-out on the forested Pacific Coast Highway, the whole rig pitched un-level enough that you could see it in the water in the pot?

Tarantulas crossing the desert blacktop, perpendicular to traffic, in little stuttering bundles of legs.

Meeting a man scavenging along the lakeshore, my family and him the only souls in sight, who walked over to tell me, “God loves you,” and offer me the unopened package of latex gloves he’d come upon because, “I figured you could use them in the motorhome.”

Choking on the smoke of a failed attempt at an evening campfire in Kings Canyon National Park, Gators football on the radio in the background.

Refilling the fresh water tank with 50ft of hose and a hand-held “water bandit” from the only accessible spigot in a campground, which was on the bathhouse and not threaded, designed to discourage said usage but of no matter to our need for water.

Pulling over near the beach in California to use white duct tape to hold the strip of plastic molding around the wheel cutout while bonding cured, after scraping and detaching said molding on a post exiting a campground. Forgetting, then, to ever remove the duct tape and now having it as a permanent vehicle fixture.

So many more. Little vignettes stuck in my head. Love them.

I sometimes feel like I’m not doing enough formal imparting of wisdom to our kids. You know, like the things people say when asked what life lessons they learned from their father. Oh, I give them plenty of information, there’s no lack of interesting (to me) anecdotal facts thrown around, but what about lasting nuggets, words to live by?

So, for a while now I’ve wanted to create a “creed” our family. The motivation for the idea came from a sad place, after hearing about the family creed of a co-worker who died when it was shared at his memorial service. But I think it was precisely that somber context – a final posthumous delivery of life-guidance from the grave – that made it seem so powerful to me. Not that one has to pass to impart that kind of power, but that those words and concepts had such an important part in the definition of the family.

I would never have considered the idea had I not heard the story above, but ever since then I’ve been very sporadically working on ideas for what I might include in a credit creed of our own.

Brevity is key. This isn’t a paragraph and there should be a relatively low word-to-message ratio, I want powerful statements expressed in few words, and I want only a handful of them. Specificity of guidance shouldn’t be too narrow, but also not to broad. Otherwise there’s really no improvement which can be made over the Golden Rule, and we may as well just adopt that (a fine idea, truly, for those not wanting to write their own).

On this trip I’ve gone back to the idea a few times, touching-up the draft list I’ve been kicking around for all these years. Right now I have too many words and ideas, and I’ll admit some statements are more like personalized self-improvement mantras than guidance to the family, but it’s a start.

• Be & do good
• Act instead of worry
• Make time for family
• Surround yourself with who you want to be
• Be resilient in failure & disappointment
• Value nature & its resources
• Learn to defer gratification
• Never stop learning & teaching
• Seek experience over material
• Take worthwhile risks

I’ll keep working on it.

I have this dream that I can get Sharaun on board and maybe one day have it drawn-up nicely enough that we could display it somewhere at the house (afraid to float this to her until she’s had an editorial crack at it herself, though, as she’s so particular about what goes on the walls).

Peace.

This morning, in conversation with one of my most trusted advisers, discussing the coming post-nomadic period of my life, aka the “return to work,” we, together, hit upon an idea that truly resonated with me.

I’ve perhaps not written plainly about it much, but the matter of “going back to work” has been on my mind steadily during the trip. For several reasons, I’ve had mixed feelings about it. I summed up the primary reason fairly well already near the end of a different writing, so I’ll link it here rather than rehash. Go ahead and read it, I’ll be here when you’re back.

Much of our conversation was working to distill the things I’ve learned, so far, from our metaphorical pilgrimage to the mountaintop, with a goal of turning them into an action-plan for the comeback. In the end, I feel like we hit on a very succinct framing and approach, and I’ll try to summarize it here:

• I am very much a product of my environment
• I am able to perform above expectations in many different roles
• Therefore, what I do is less important than the environment in which I do it

It may seem simple or even obvious, but was a big step for me to understand that the highest-value next-step for me will not be figuring out what work or job I want to do, but rather I should focus on exquisitely defining the environment in which I want to do that work or job. I’ve started doing that, and might even be finished, but I’ll save that “environmental criteria” for another time.

Lastly, while writing down the above realization, I sensed privilege that I didn’t hear this morning in our conversation. I mean, here I am talking about finding the “right environment in which to work” while there are folks out there just wanting any reliable employment and a steady paycheck. I’ll have to think about that as well.

Until later, felt good to write this down. Peace.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed living on the road is how we shop for groceries and what we buy.

Our RV has precious little storage, at least compared to our bricks & sticks home. I would estimate total pantry space at about 8.5ft³ (we happen doing to be doing coming in school, I actually did the math) and the fridge is a small dorm room size. Although there are a few other places we can stash dry goods, that’s constraints we’re under.

I’ve actually found these constraints kind of nice. See, I get a great satisfaction from using what we have vs. having tons of things we rarely use. When we were preparing for this trip we purposely tried to “drain” our food stores by rooting through the pantry at home and seeing what we could make to use what we had.

Funny how you end up with four cans of tomato paste yet still buy more when you’re at the store, because why not? You know you need it, aren’t sure you have it, it’ll keep, and you’ll eventually use it. So you have two half-used things of panko, five boxes of onion soup mix, and three tied-off bags of bulk oatmeal, etc.

Living in the RV, the limited space forces this sort of satisfying real-time utilization to happen as the normal. You don’t have room to store things for the sake of having them so you buy what you need, use what you bought, and then do it again.

This space-constrained utilization leads to a couple changes in shopping habits. (1) Since we can’t just have tons of stuff, we shop more frequently, particularly for perishables. (2) You realize that “base ingredients” are the most effective used of space as they can be combined and transformed into higher-order foods.

For instance, making your own pizza crust, bread, cookies, etc. So, instead of buying a jar of marinara, instead buy tomatoes and herbs and make your sauce that way. A jar of marinara will only over be a jar of marinara, taking up space waiting to be used as marinara, but tomatoes and herbs can be all kinds of things.

This means our shopping becomes dominated by the staples. Every week we need milk, eggs, fresh fruit and veggies. Every several weeks we need coffee, butter, flour, sugar, cheese, and meat to be frozen. What strikes me about that shopping list is how much it resembles humans’ shopping lists for forever.

Let’s take the wagon into town, we need flour and sugar and coffee and… Go fetch the eggs, pick some apples, and bring in a pail of milk…

OK so I’m wanting to come clean and be sure to clarify that we’ve not completely broken the modern American shopping model and gone full pioneer, as we do still buy prepared and preserved items on the regular (pretzels, yogurt, cereal). But, it’s definitely a change from the buy-and-horde model we were on at home.

Peace.

I’ve always liked the smell of patchouli. I know, how very stereotypical of me, the guy who counts the Beatles and Grateful Dead as a couple of his desert-island bands.

I don’t know if my affection for the scent came before, or because of, my early teenage revelation that I was a 60s hippie born into the wrong era in some cosmic accident. I’d wager I maybe grew fond of it after smelling it, along with Nag Champa, which I’m also a big fan of, in the various headshops we used to frequent in those same years.

Regardless, I really like the scent, and the way it smells on me, even though I’ve never been a big fan of wearing smells as they tend to bother me. I guess patchouli is an exception.

Problem is, no one else likes it. Like, no one – including Sharaun. I mean, I know somebody likes it, or else it wouldn’t sell, but I guess it’s a small bunch of like-nosed folk. This is why I’ve never personally used it, even though anytime I smell it on someone I remember how much I like it.

But look y’all, this trip is about doing more of what I want to do, being me without caring. So then, despite Sharaun’s rolling eyes, I grabbed a little bottle at Whole Foods when we were last picking up a Prime order from an Amazon locker.

And, friends, I love it. I smell like patchouli and woodsmoke all the time these days. I know, disgusting, but, for me, lovely. If I’m not the picture of a dude who lives on the road, I don’t know who is. Reintegrating may be a challenge.

Peace.