I mean, really, shouldn't your life be over once you shoot a bear cub?

“Take me with you.” She said, her hair had been pulled out into a frazzle. I thought she must have been agonizing over this.

I thought to myself, “Fuck. Another one.”

Since I embarked on this endless road trip I have encountered countless individuals that have begged for a chance to escape. For a while it kept me going. Kept me high on my life. Every once in a while I’d take one, if she was female, for a bit; assuming she was cute and could carry on some conversation. I don't do crazy, I don’t do married, and I certainly don’t do crazy and married.

She stood there below me, awaiting an answer, the door ajar, the moment was growing too long, I hadn’t prepared myself for this.

“You can not come with me.” I said, feigning strength of character.

“I need to.” She pleaded.

A silence passed between us; our eyes locked on eachother’s.
...It just came out;

“You have got to be kidding me." I dryly let escape. "You have a fucking incredible life. You live in the middle of who knows where and have the most stable husband, a man that sternly and... Charlemagnely looks over your home. You shot a fucking bear cub the other day. The trees here practically sing about you."

"I am completely lost," I rolled on. "You are completely found. I am not going off to find some truth. I’m going off to make a point! And...” I said, “AND... no one is going to ever give a... fucking dime to pay to care about this shit. And do yo know why? Because no fucking anyone cares about anything any fucking more.”

I was losing it. Can you tell?

“Except for people like you! You need to get away from everyone else. Well guess what? I just realized that I'm getting away from everyone else so I can write about it in my blog!. A fucking blog. Do you know how many people have those these days? HA! I love bragging about how I’m going to be a blogger and tell this amazing story about how I lived in a fucking trailer. A fucking trailer. You know who makes the main character list? No? ...of course you don’t because it’s fucking me! Oh and you'll be there!" I actually said this, "You'll be there in at least one of them. That's right, crazy lady, you'll be there on my blog. You know who is going to love this fucking blog???? You fucking people!!!”

“Anyone who has known me long enough to know I have a blog about the people I meet. You people, that live to find reasons to trick yourself into wanting to be proud of your deep seated need to escape the awful easiness of you and your bear-cub-shooting lives.”

I know I was just insane at this point but at the time, in my mind, I was simply telling her that she was crazy and I was scared of her. And in the heat of my state I momentarily realized that I was making sense. Suddenly I was so into this idea I didn’t realized that she was walking away and sobbing.

Out of ABQ

I've been in Lousianna for two days and the boat doesn't leave for another two. I've been down to the shipping office and everything is in order. I've been living a whimsical lifestyle for so long, I'm not accustomed to this stress that comes with a schedule. Ultimately, as I only know now, there was nothing to worry about; I'm early. But the three days it took just to get over the Sandia Mountains had me fearful through all of Texas that the Fates were against me.

I was chasing Interstate 40 out of Albuquerque, a slight climb across the low saddle south of Sandia Peak. Just outside of the city limits, just off the shoulder, stood a middle aged couple beside their old econoline van parked with its hood up. I pulled over shortly past them and walked back. They waved at me as I approached. Not excitedly, not desperately, but declamatory, as if that part of the highway were their land. They stood confidently, almost stoically.

Thinking I'd have been offerring them help, instead I felt more as though I were trespassing, selling vacumn cleaners to a kind but uninterested home; with the front door open and me standing nervous and dumb with a Hoover upright, I clumsily began my monolouge, "Afternoon, folks, how ya doin, beautiful day, I'm here for you, for your happiness, to simplify your life and save your marriage..."

"Everything all right," I said hesitantly.

"Oh, everything's fine," the man replied, "We just stopped to pray."

I looked over at the open hood and then back at the woman standing quietly but solidly behind him.

"And check the oil," he continued.

"God doesn't mind multitasking," the woman added with what seemed to me a flirtatious smile.

"We're done," he offered, "you're fine."

I felt guilty for my face had clearly betrayed me. It wasn't until later I discovered they were atheists who played their humor uncomfortably straight.

We introduced ourselves over the industrial hyperventilation of the interstate traffic. Terry was granitic. His shaved scalp was a smooth rock outcrop. His Scottish jawline was still apparent despite a long, unkempt beard. His chest and back were terranean, a tectonic hulk and bulk. I could not sense his strength from a distance. His clothes, off-the-rack vintage Sears, hung loosely on his frame. He had been an amateur boxer in the sixties. Never competitive, he still endured three years of touring dark, humid gyms for lack of any other interest. Forty years on and he never lost the physique.

We talked for only a short while there on the side of the road before Jean suggested I follow them to their cabin for lunch. Their cabin, though small, was of a precise craftsmanship, Terry and Jean's own, in which every joint seemed indiviudally measured and hand-cut. There was no clutter. Every accoutrement seemed purposefully chosen. Though nothing matched, it was all complementary.

Jean had shot a black bear cub only three days earlier, so I had my first taste of bear meat that day. It was tender and succulent like a slow braised pot roast. We drank cold, cheap beer and sat on the porch through the afternoon until the sun fell below Sandia Peak behind us. Jean remarked it was fine for me to park the the trailer there for the night, but that they'd be retiring early. They were creatures of habit, she told me, and Terry woke early. The next day he'd be building forms to pour footings for a house down the way. He liked to start at sunrise.
Myself, I'd hoped to be back on the road by noon. I'd use the morning mountain respite to put the trailer in order, inspired by the clean regularity of their cabin.

It was before noon, I was arrangig my foodstuffs, throwing out the boxes and cans I'd whimsically bought on grocery trips, but which I'd never eaten, and likely never would, when Jean knocked on the trailer door.

A knock on the trailer is a hollow, tinny sound, one that leaves you unfullfilled and anxious. Befor eyou even knock on a trailer, you feel invasive, knowing this is a personal space, and all the more invasive because the walls and doors are merely suggestive of security and privacy. It is like a woman wearing a revealing swimsuit, we go out of our way to pretend it is perfectly normal.

A knock and no answer; you know the trailer is small, and that its occupant surely heard you, and yet the seconds pass without a rustle inside. You keep from knocking again - for nothing seems so uncivil as disrupting the peace of a trailer. One has no such concern when visiting a house - a doorbell is rung, followed by a hard knock ont he door, followed by another ring of the bell. But it is not so with a trailer. The visitor waits anxiously, hoping to be sensed.

I paused with a can of beans in hand. Was that a tree branch blown against the side? Was that merely the door locking shut as my weight shifted the trailer? Too accustomed to my own solitude, I did not even think to ask if anyone was there. A few more seconds passed before Jean called my name.

I stumbled across the trailer and unclasped the door. Her persuasive confidence had dissapeared. She was clearly distraught.

The Need

They don’t care where I have been. They want to know where I am going. –I didn’t realize how true this was until I wrote it. And then it pissed me off. All the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met and the stories I have get lost and forgotten because they don’t care.

“Wow!” They say, when I tell them how long I’ve been traveling. “You must have some great stories! Heh heh. So where you off to next?”

Idiots. This entire country is full of them. Ok, an honorable mention to a few but boy are they far and few between. I used to think of Finn as a pretentious snob for having these very same thoughts. Eventually I thought he was rubbing off on me. Now I just think he’s right. The only difference between us is that I include myself as one of those idiots.

A free country of idiots is what I have got to freely roam. Right? WRONG! It has never been free. It has always been a measured freedom – certain inalienable rights. It’s been mostly free for white men since the beginning. For women and African and Asian Americans it became mostly free yesterday. Then there was prohibition, now there are smoking bans and we might as well believe that all of our phones are tapped. This is a subject I could write a book on and probably should. But for now I’ll leave it at that.

I am tired of it here. Here where it seems no one learns from the past. Historical events beyond 3 or 4 years ago seem to get swept into books and political rhetoric more than they become meaningful lessons in our daily lives. I don’t mean to say that my exploits are anything comparable to 9/11 or devastating hurricanes and tsunamis but don’t they say God is in the details? It is the little stories of strangers saving strangers or loved ones coming together after days or weeks fearing the worst and sometimes the worst has happened. The people who go through these traumatic times will always remember but what about the rest of us? Are we not privy to our own slice of the life-changing pie? Isn’t the point of these stories to learn from them so we might be better prepared should the same happen to us?

And then there are the stories of people like me, people who travel and have seen so many things, met so many different and wonderfully interesting and boring people. I believe these stories can tell us much about our own country. In some ways all Americans are the same and in other ways they are drastically different from region to region and of course from individual to individual. This does not interest many people. It might be said that we are a society ignorant of itself with a scarce impulse to understand who and what we are.

It angers and embarrasses me that this is my species. In a less-than-sober episode last night I began formulating a plan to get out of here. I want to go to Ethiopia, the origin of the Homo sapiens. I thought I would trace back the path of my ancestors. As far as I know most of my blood came from France so I thought I could start there and travel my trailer around the Mediterranean, through the Fertile Crescent, and down to southern Ethiopia.

There’s a boat leaving from New Orleans to Nantes, FR in two weeks. All I need to do is make the drive from Albuquerque in time to store my truck and trailer on the ship. Then it’s a 38-day sail to Antes. For the first time in years I feel a sense of real freedom. Perhaps this trip is naive but today I could not care less, I feel the need.

They don’t care where I have been, only where I am going. So I am going to where we all have been.

Maybe I'm here to enjoy the fact that I'm lonely. Maybe I'm here to suffer it.

I've forgotten all that motivated me to leave. I remember what pushed, but not all of what pulled me. I don't mean that deterministically. Not that I wouldn't argue for teleology - sometimes I do. Particularly in the company of that impressionable type of girl whose yoga classes have left her unfulfilled, the one who never found that promised qi in her pantheistic surrender to the trees of the great North Woods. I'm not suggesting I don't believe in some extrinsic finality that's drawing me to some predefined end. Nor am I necessarily suggesting I do believe.

That's neither here nor there, at least right now. That sort of conversation is reserved for Finn. And even then, only for that soft parenthetical moment between my second and sixth drink. He tends to ignore me before that. And merely tolerates me after. Stuffed penguins are like that, I'm told.

The decision to leave was equally reaction and action, each independent of the other. I was pushed. I was pulled.

Arghh. Pushed, pulled...the physical metaphor is clearly failing me here. Instead of continuing to elaborate on a fundamentally flawed theme, like some fifteenth century monk contributing intellectual accretion upon accretion to the failed concept of geocentricity, tweaking each elliptical orbit with an endless array of exceptions all to defend earth's centrality, I will, in an equally flawed extension of the previous metaphor, recant like Galileo before the pontificate ("Eppur si muove"): I was not pushed, I was not pulled.

I will accept responsibility for my actions. I hitched my trailer in visceral reaction to The Event. That's true. And it was clearly obvious to everyone who knew me at the time. But also, I hitched my trailer in visceral reaction to desire, to inchoate longings which had entangled all my thoughts, like a web spun around my soul.

Forgive my imagery again. A web? My soul? Soul?! This isn't something I would rationally accept (and again, for clarity, it is not something I would rationally reject either). We are, each of us, insignificant waves on the shore - the final visible evidence of a wind from a distant fetch, a force propagated across the ocean surface carrying with it all the factors of its creation. Soul? I cannot escape the momentum of my own humanity. Nor should I. Soul. I don't need to accept or believe in this thing to share in it.

Could I have written "like a web spun across my being?" Certainly. But "being" invites a tsunami of ontological questions which the reductive simplicity of "soul" avoids. So trite a descriptor as "soul" is hardly found. I'd wager if there are any students left in the seats of the departments of theology, they do not reflect on the nature of the "soul". It is a caricature of our essence.

Clearly my use of the effortless metaphor "web" then justifies the attendant use of an equally effortless construct as the "soul". So the phrase stands.

I have not saved today's bottle caps. Nothing but my memory now marks the number of drinks I've had already. Judging from the shifted eyes of that contemptuous penguin straddling the shelf beside my jar of desert sand - I've had at least six. At four or five he would have been nodding agreeably, putting in his own two cents. But now, the sun within an hour of the horizon, he stares dejectedly out the window, the crack in the glass splintering the fading light of the sunset.

I don't often think about The Event. For starters, there's no pressing need to anymore. It never comes up in conversation with the people I meet. You'd be surprised by how rarely a stranger will ask what set you adrift with a trailer in tow. They don't care where you've come from. They want to know where you're going.

The Essence or Gist

I’m sitting in my trailer and I’m watching this episode of northern exposure. It’s just making me think about life and what things are important and what things are not. I want to share them with somebody and all I’ve got is this empty trailer. A couch, somewhat of a kitchen, some clothes strewn about and... beer, a waning scotch glass, just... just someone that could listen and maybe be a sounding board, a mirror for reflecting on these thoughts that in the moment are so important but for the rest of the day they’re... they are chicken feed, they are nothing. I have these grandiose constructions of what life is all about and what’s important and somehow I only know about them when I’m in this trailer.... alone and wishing for company.
And maybe that’s the thing, you know? Maybe I’m just here to enjoy the fact that i’m lonely. The cracked window is... ignorantly and... and ineptly trying to air out the smoke. I’ve got a stuffed penguin who sits and watches the weather go by the window. He does this whether I’m here or not. I just want some company. I want someone to share in my roaming palace. My traveling toaster. Toasting my soul.

..................................................................................

2:00 am or there about. Another night typical for this one. I’m sitting in my trailer and I’m watching Northern Exposure. It’s making me think about life and which things are important and which things are not. I want to share these thoughts with someone and all I’ve got is this trailer... a couch, somewhat of a kitchen, some clothes strewn about... beer, a waning scotch glass, and smoke after slowly burning smoke.
Just... just someone that could listen and maybe be a sounding board, a mirror for reflecting on these thoughts that in the moment are so important but for the rest of the day they are... they’re chicken feed, they are nothing. I have these grandiose constructions of what life is all about and what’s important and somehow I only know about them when I’m in this trailer.... alone and wishing for company.
And maybe that’s the thing, you know? Maybe I’m just here to enjoy the fact that I am lonely. The cracked window is ignorantly and... and ineptly trying to air out the smoke. I’ve got a stuffed penguin who sits and watches the weather go by the window. He does this whether I’m here or not. I just want some company in my traveling toaster. Toasting to my soul.

Babydoll

When I met you, you knew exactly what you wanted. You knew exactly where I would fit.

I don't know what you thought of me the half dozen times I came into the store. You were always talking with the river guides. You were their only girl of summer.

I bought a can of beef stew. Then a pack of crackers. Then a roll of toilet paper. Then a lighter. The next day I bought a loaf of bread. Then another can of beef stew. That second can was just an excuse to see you.

You'll never read this, so I can be honest: I loved you, but I didn't think you were all that attractive. Not at first. There wasn't much else for distraction there at the Three Forks KOA.

You were drunk when you stumbled past my site.

"Nice lawn," you said, snapping your tongue on your teeth. I thought you were flirting. It was weeks before i realized you clucked like that with all your nasal stop consonants.

"Nice lawn."

I'd been on the road so long I couldn't tell ironic from wholesome. I just wanted to fuck. I wanted to fuck you.

I was sitting in a plastic chair on plastic grass. A cigarette hung limply from my lip. Tom Waits played from the trailer. And I asked if you wanted a beer.

Babydoll, you have a wonderful ass, but...well, shit, that night it could have been any girl walking by and I would've asked her to stop for a minute.

After half a bottle of Johnny Red and 3 beers, you were nothing to me but the rock of your hips and the pinch in your jeans. I don't say that to be cruel. I loved you, babydoll.

"Nice lawn."

You never liked that grass carpet outside my trailer. You thought it was ironic at first, and maybe some of it was, but irony only works if there's an audience. You can't be ironic by yourself. You thought my lawn chairs were ironic too. You talked about them as if they were allusions to something else. As if I didn't use them to sit in, but to inspire thoughts about leisure. I hated thinking about leisure. And those chairs were beautiful to me. Elegant aluminum tubes. Simple. I spent months looking in ten different states for that three tone nylon webbing. Brown, orange and cream. You thought the colors were like an affected mustache.

No doubt

The awning over the outdoor living room made of plastic grass and folding furniture. The water-beer in the styrofoam cooler. The leashed lap dog yapping at the strangers that walk by on their way to relieve themselves. The impermanence... oh the impermanence.

Life was going to a movie. Life was thinking about the next trailer park. Life was a party celebrating the lack of tornadoes that year. It was the entire country and maybe a bit of Canada but it never was here nor there. Life was sitting. It was moving and then sitting. Sitting until my ass was part of the chair. A daze of lackadaisical "bliss". When the knife carved the turkey that year I was thankful for a bug zapper.

Sometimes I had doubts about my life. Maybe there was something I was missing, something I could produce, or something to calm my dull anxiety. Looking over the past years where i've carved myself this little niche -Oh hey! It's snowing out! Sorry, the first snow of the year always brings the kid out in me. It' nice to remember the magic sometimes.- Anyhow, I began to think that perhaps predisposition has nothing to do with cause and effect. It is more about a mindset, a paradigm, a dimension. The doubt was for lacking the foresight to see where I'd end up but it's also only based on an opinion of worth. An opinion! I can change that anytime I like.