sounds familiar

Finally feeling appreciably disconnected, took longer than I’d guessed but officially arrived earlier this week as a perceptible shift in attitude and outlook.

And we are truly rambling now, deciding where to go each morning when we wake or choosing to stay put if the current digs pull harder. I’m convinced this new approach has a large part to play in the mental corner turned.

It’s time then, I suppose, to stop a moment and take stock. What epiphanies, if any, have I had? What mysteries of life now have greater clarity? I wanted to do this early on in the trip and evolve it as we go, to sort of watch how my impressions morph and develop.

I chose to keep things brief, not capture reams of revelations but rather simple bullets. Maybe that brevity makes these supposed truths less impactful, but it felt right and I need to get to the kernels before I can expand, anyway.

So here are the “truths” I’ve captured thus far:

• I am living too fast
• I have too much stuff
• I eat poorly
• I am too sedentary
• I create my own stress
• I choose how I live (thou mayest!)
• I enjoy listening to people
• I enjoy talking to people
• I enjoy building relationships

That’s it; that’s the whole of it. Ten weeks of reading and writing consideration and the solitude of self-communion and that’s the meat, or maybe the grist.

I wanted to get it down, get it out, so that I can come back to it and revise, build, reverse.

Hugs.

This morning I met Bob at the RV park. Bob came rumbling through, driving a diesel pickup in all browns, fitting for the desert.

I was outside as he drove by and slowed. Through an open window he hollered cheerfully, “How you liking it here?”

A bit about “here,” first. We had parked for the night in Douglas, Arizona, a border town, after spending a day kicking around Bisbee (“Mayberry on acid”). We just needed a stopping place for one night and picked an RV park which was basically the front parking lot of a golf course. Nothing fancy, but it was quiet and cheap and had full hookups.

Anyway, based on his interrogative greeting I initially assumed he may be a campground host. I answered that we’d had a great quiet comfortable night had enjoyed our brief stay.

Turns out Bob wasn’t a camp host, just a gregarious campground permanent resident. We talked for a good 15-20min, him sitting in the driver’s set parked & idling and me hanging my elbows into the open cab as I leaned against the truck.

“Backroads Bob,” they called him. He’d traveled all around the country but was now here at this Douglas RV park for good as he’d scored the golden gig. He works nine hours a week doing odd jobs for the golf course and RV park and in exchange gets free electricity, water, sewer, and WiFi.

His passions, other than traveling, are cooking and mixology. He’s converted the back of his toy hauler to shelves to accommodate his spices and ingredients and liquors and mixers. He’s befriended the golf course bar staff & through them has wholesale access to a wide array of craft booze & microbrews.

Bob was a super happy dude, and interacting with him brightened my morning considerably. Even moreso when, after shaking hands on our initial goodbye, he walked back over with a dropper bottle in hand.

“I made you a martini for later, I’m a bit of a gin nut.” He goes on to tell me of the local Arizona distilled gin, high-end vermouth and homemade juniper bitters he used. “If you guys were here longer I’d have you over for dinner and drinks,” he says.

We shake hands again and I’m sure to get his contact info so I can send him my impressions of the drink this evening.

Can’t wait to try it. Road life.

It’s almost 7am. I’ve been up for about an hour. I like being up early before everyone else.

We’re still in the desert and the mornings are cold so it’s just a bit chilly in the RV. Outside the window, a line of mountains separating sky from firmament, unbroken but for one tall Saguaro that pierces the border. Closer, creosote and ocotillo kind of lend an underwater vibe, almost like I could be looking into an aquarium.

Yesterday was Sunday, our third day here in Saguaro National Park. We had planned to go break camp and drive into town to a church Sharaun dug up online, then head back to the campground and walk over to Old Tuscon, a former movie set now turned Old West themed attraction with saloons and gunfights and shows.

At church, however, we got invited out to lunch by some of the members. Having truly regretted passing on a similar offer once before on the trip, we’d made it a rule that we’d always accept if the chance again arose. Thus we found ourselves eating hospitality-funded burritos at a local Mexican joint with some great people.

And that’s how and where we learned that the very day we were in town (Tuscon proper) was the final day of a weekend-long Dia de los Muertos festival, which was to culminate in a huge procession of humanity walking through the streets in memory of their loved ones who’ve gone before them.

We decided to ditch the Old West and instead experience the procession. And it was a day of magic. One of those spontaneous decisions which unpredictably spawn pure magic – the epitome of what we’re hunting through this trip.

It’s easier for me to try and recount said magic with less words vs. more: There was skeletal facepaint, flower crowns willed into existence from Dollar Store booty, tamales purchased from a front yard. We climbed atop the RV to watch, and climbed down again when the procession drew us in, walking with the masses for a block or so.

In the end the spirit of the whole thing clutched me and I found myself emotionally engulfed in the powerful purpose of the day. What an amazing occasion! What a terrific way to remember and honor and grieve and commune. And such a very natural thing for humans share, rooted in the universal experience of death and loss and memory, and yet I’ve never experienced anything even close until yesterday.

We made paper hearts to wear with the names of our loved ones, we wrote their names on ribbon and pinned them on a procession banner, wrote them again on paper to go in the urn. Letting it all in, I was unsurprised and glad to cry tears of sadness, but mostly of happy remembrance, at the spectacle. It was emotional all around in all the right ways.

That’s the stuff.

We did it.

We made it across the California border and into Arizona. It’s one small mile for the FaceDragon, but one giant mile for… oh whatever. It’s a big deal, psychologically. It’s transcending some boundary that I’ve been imagining, at least.

We did Halloween trick or treating for the kids just outside Joshua Tree National Park. On a recommendation from an NPS ranger we drove into a in a little slice of desert suburbia that was positively teeming with costumed kids. I think the sparse layout of homes and neighborhood blocks in the desert ends up funneling the masses into the most traditionally arranged tracts.

And now we are sort of purposely adrift, not knowing where we’re headed each day or where we’ll land each night. It’s working out OK, I think… I’m comforted a little by our having a “want to see list” against which we can at least plot some notion of a linear progression (there, my need to plan and foreknow bows again). Anyway, so far so good.

Peace.

Gusty winds, brown-grey rabbits, and low plants like juniper and creosote and scrub oak. Where all the plants are out to prick and stick and poke and the tumbled rocks are irresistible and must be climbed and conquered.

It’s unbelievably beautiful, so much so that a feel a spiritual kindling inside. I think of the original and indigenous peoples who once called this inhospitable place home, who knew what every plant and bug and seed and root could be used for. It’s something we’ve moved so far from…

I know also, though, that I’m as moved as I am by this landscape simply because it’s such a marked departure from where we’ve been these past weeks since getting underway. As much as I’m acknowledging my own neurosis in saying so, the dramatic change of scenery just feels like progress.

We’re moving, things are changing. Soon there will be more desert and then mountains and then huge rivers to cross and we’ll be far, far away from California and truly gone.

The desert.

I think most people would find it a little hard to believe how much I actually enjoy living full-time in this 30′ RV. It is, to be fair, anything but conventional. But guys, if I had a way to generate income I’d really consider being on the road indefinitely – no joke.

Yeah sure, everyday there’s a new tank to empty or fill, a new impossible-to-find-for-sale broken bit that needs replacing, some doodad that’s stuck or got bent the opposite way it’s intended to bend, not to mention the whole contraption is slowly rattling itself to pieces the more you drive it.

And there’s the fact that whatever you want is, by RV law, behind or under five things you don’t want but are bound to hep out and hep back again. There’s no space for anything and not enough space for everyone and almost always a line for the bathroom.

Yes there’s that and more, but, man, I really can’t get enough of the family time and sense of adventure and discovering. All the detractions have, in fact, become part of what I like – keeping the ship running, being the chief maintenance engineer, the master mechanic, the dad and husband.

Peace.

It’s like California has a hold on us, we just can’t seem to get across the border!

My inner pessimist keeps chiding me, telling me we’ve been on the road more than two months yet aren’t but a day’s drive away from where we started; that we’re laboring through some protracted failure to launch. Yes we went clear up to Seattle & back down – it’s just that “back down” bit that’s eating.

I realize this is completely symptomatic of my inability to just live-in & enjoy the moment, to not need to be looking forward to some future “then” or “when” where things will really start. We’ve started, we’re going, we’re having a blast… I have to stop discounting imagined undercards I deem ancillary to some imagined main event.

Sharaun doesn’t struggle with this, I feel like she’s just living for the day, doing much better than I at going with the wind. I’ll try to lean on her for insight.

But man, I do wish we could get out of California…