Stop thinking and start doing

I'm at the Tucson Mall. Locals have informed me there are better malls in this city, but I haven't seen them. Driving in a city with no interior freeways is tedious and fraught. It's less stressful to stay in one area, and that area for me is Northwest Tucson. I like this mall. So far, no shootings, and the food court is amazing if you want burgers, pizza, pretzels, and rofles. What's a rofle, you ask? I have no idea but the pictures make me drool. 

I use the mall as my office. When it's 99°F outside, I see no alternative. I discovered there are two long counters equipped with power outlets and tall chairs. If I don't mind a billion people wandering around in front of me and behind me, yellling and laughing, I can get a lot of work done. I can plug in my laptop and charge my phones, if I remember to bring the charging cords with me. Plus, and here's the great thing about this mall setup—I can recharge my power stations. One at a time, of course. I put the power box into a shopping bag and lug it from the parking lot into the mall. My "big" power station is only 800 watts. It's not huge but it's heavy. I'm breathing hard by the time I stake out my space at the counter. The upside is, that power box charges super fast. It can go from 44% to 100% in about an hour. 

My other two power stations are smaller, more like 250 watts. The infant versions of power stations. They take longer to charge because they are old technology. 

You might be wondering why I don't recharge with my two solar panels. Thanks for asking. I will tell you why. It is considered a faux pas to deploy solar on mall property. They don't want you setting up camp in the parking lot. Visitors to the mall are there to shop, not make themselves at home. Not only that, it's brutally hot in the sun. No sane person spends time in the sun here. You are asking to be dead. If I were camping in the forest, and if I could have a combination of sun and shade, then I'd pull out my solar panels and get busy soaking up the free juice. The next best thing is to rub against the hoi polloi at the mall. 

I'm learning to make peace with this odd lifestyle. I will say, it's a challenge at times. I'm called to a new level of consciousness about the most basic activities of daily living. The other day I thought I had lost both my phones. You can imagine the frantic search that ensued. One day after I finished pumping gas, I almost left my debit card in the pay machine. You can imagine my utter horror. Now when I get gas, I have a mantra, essentially, "Carol, don't be a stupid girl, be a smart girl, don't be a stupid girl, etc." So many things can go wrong because there is a lot more to keep track of.

I've been visiting my possessions. They are stored in a 5 foot by 5 foot cubicle at a storage facility across the street from Lowe's, one of my favorite shopping destinations. I get sad when I visit my stuff. To avoid constant sadness, I'm getting rid of it. Well, most of it. The shelves I built, the drawer units I bought at Target with such hope, so much household stuff, my two gray IKEA rugs, even Mom's old flattish-screen TV, long obsolete. I feel deep chagrin and regret when I think of the many many dollars I have spent transporting and storing stuff I don't need anymore. It's so humbling to realize how little I really need to survive. It's not a badge of honor, though. I've never been bombed. I've never walked a thousand miles to emigrate to another country. I've got a minivan. Living in luxury, compared to many. No complaints from me. 

The other day I was parked at a park where nomads often park. A park ranger dude drove by in a little green cart and stopped to make sure I was okay. He knew I was in my car. He said if I ever need water or anything to let him know. His name is Jerry. He said he was homeless for a short time, living in his car. I'm guessing he's probably not voting for the candidate I voted for, and yet, he was the soul of kindness. This is how it is these days. Mobs cannot be trusted. Group think is real. And yet, when you have one person talking to another person, sometimes the humanity in all of us comes out, and I think there might be hope. 

I try not to think too much. Thinking is less productive than doing. I plan, don't get me wrong, but I try not to weigh the value of one thought to the next, one moment to the next. Thoughts are like moments, they come and go and have no power on their own. I admit I sometimes have opinions about the value of certain thoughts and moments, but I have accepted the reality that I don't control anything—not people, not the weather, not neurologists, not traffic . . . it's no use wasting time thinking about it. I focus on doing the next thing on the list. It's never sit here and think. It's more like go get water, get gas, get food, go to the mall, recharge batteries, write a blogpost. You know. The activities of daily living, the Hellish Handbasket way. 

Another day of fresh WTF

I'm back in Tucson, just in time for the big October warmup. Fall weather here is unpredictable. Eventually it will cool off. Then the days will be lovely, and the nights will be freezing. When you live in a car, weather matters. It's kind of all you think about. Today was about 80°F, hot in the sun and nice in the shade, which is why I'm back at my office, the underground parking at the mall. 

Tucson has a mountain. It's pretty tall. Like, tall enough to have snow in winter. It's just over 9,000 feet. Locals go up there in the winter to ski. In the summer, they drive up there to escape the heat in the valley. Hiking trails go all over the mountain. There's a little town somewhere up there, so I hear. I've never been. 

I don't care about the little town. I hear it's packed with sweltering Tusconians. I don't mind that they might stink with sweat. I just don't like hobnobbing with the hoi polloi, or anyone else. No, what I care about is a safe, cool place to park overnight. I have heard there might be dispersed camping up there. It's national forest land, which means technically you can park up there for free for either seven days or fourteen days, if it's not designated as private land. I'm a little nervous. I have a feeling it's going to be another one of those dirt/gravel road situations: steep grind in and hell skid out, with no place to turn around, and woe to me if it starts raining. I'm sort of over off-roading in a minivan. Really. There ought to be some sort of law. 

Speaking of voting, I mailed my ballot yesterday. I was going to drop it off at a library in Oro Valley. I mapped to the place and found out the dropbox won't be deployed until tomorrow. Rather than sit on the ballot another two days and then drive 45 minutes to any dropbox in the city, I put it in an actual mailbox at an actual post office. Fingers crossed. 

Speaking of WTF, the head med is not working well anymore. Ever since that low pressure front moved into Prescott (that was last Monday), my head has been back to non-normal, meaning the washing machine and the typewriter are at it again, chipping away at my serenity. Needless to say, I'm going to give that neurologist a good talking-to. Stay tuned.

Oh, lord. Time out. Someone has cranked up Billie Eilish on their car stereo. In this underground parking lot, the song bounces off the concrete, creating a wall of cacophony. I can feel the bass in my gut. There ought to be a law against this, too. Well, I can hardly complain. It's probably another nomad seeking respite from the sun. No. Spoke too soon. Just two young women, enjoying their favorite song before they lock up their cute shiny car with heavily tinted windows and go shopping for cute shiny handbags at Dillards. With so much room in this underground space, I don't see why other drivers have to park right next to me. There ought to be a law. Remember the six-foot rule?

Speaking of the six-foot rule, yesterday I was at a park and saw the beat-up camper rig of a nomad couple I used to see regularly last spring. They have signs all over their camper and truck: No trespassing, smile you are on camera, and practice social distancing, keep a six-foot distance at all times. I was sad to see that summer had not been good to their camper. The trailer part extending over the cab slanted askew at a new and terrifying angle. It looked like they had strapped it together with one of those cargo strap things. 

I wanted to ask them where they park overnight here in Tucson. I haven't seen them at Walmart. As I was gearing up my courage, a young man rode his bike along the bike path and stopped next to the camper. He apparently took a substance of some kind. Within minutes he was sacked out boneless in the dirt. The woman in the camper got out of the cab and shook his shoulder a few times and then got back in her truck. I guess she thought he was okay. I kept waiting for EMTs to show up, but they hadn't appeared by the time I left to find my parking spot for the night.

This morning I was at the park again, making coffee and waiting for the farmer's market to open. The kid's body was gone. Around 10:00 a.m., the camper pulled up and parked in the shade. 

Multitasking on the road

Greetings from someplace in Arizona. Yes, I am back in the brutally hot sunshine state. I guess soon every state will be brutally hot, but probably after I'm dead, so at least I don't have to live through that. This is bad enough. I'm doing my Goldilocks routine again, searching for a place that's not too hot and not too cold. Like most hothouse flowers, I require optimal temperatures to feel my best. 

I'm in Prescott, hanging out at a park with all the other travelers who live in their cars. I have figured out my wild camping routine. Wild camping means finding places to park overnight in a city. First, I search Google Earth for a park with a big parking lot. Street parking is no good. You can't deploy solar panels across from somebody's house. They will think you are stalking their children. In a park parking lot, normies come and go, doing their pet-walking, jogging, or biking thing. The ones who stay all day are people like me, the ones who would rather not waste gasoline driving all over the state just to charge up their batteries. I'm sitting in the sweltering shade of my car with a solar panel spread out on the roof. The battery that powers my fridge is slowly sipping power from the sun. Meanwhile I'm blogging. Look at me go, I'm a multitasker.

After my cross-country expedition, I still have no answers about where to look for housing. All the states I visited are lovely in the fall, but would not suit me in the summer or winter. California is beyond reach, financially, so that leaves Washington and Oregon. Both states are gloomy, but of the two, Oregon is a little less gloomy. Bright side: As long as I'm mobile, if the weather sucks, I can move on.

Happy birthday to me. I'm 68. Sometimes birthdays invite a reflection on the past year. In my case, I'm inspired to consider my entire past, the choices, events, and circumstances that led me to this lifestyle. I might add a page to my blog chronicling my timeline. I assume nobody will read it, or when they arrive there by accident, they will read two lines and quickly click away to assuage their boredom on another website. The timeline would be for me. There will come a day when I won't be able to pull together a timeline. Even now, the sequence and details of events are hazy. People and pets are fading into the mist. Certain events—my cat's death, COVID, and my mother's death, for instance—are gashes in the timeline, leaving a lingering trauma that probably will outlive me, but dates sometimes get fuzzy. 

I still can't believe this is my life. Sometimes shock hits me. The surreality of this existence flows over me like a massive wave, driving me deep, so I can't breathe for a moment. Then I surface and get on with things: Do I need water, do I need to dump trash, is my fridge powered up, do I have clean clothes, is there gas in the tank. The minutae of my daily life, just moving from task to task, getting it done, not thinking too much except beyond the next few minutes. 

There are people like me everywhere. Now I can spot them easily. Most of them aren't in soccer mom vans, but their ineptly made window covers are a clue. A rooftop box, a hitch box carrying a portable generator, a general dustiness, back window piled high with blankets... When the occupant gets out of a car and brushes his teeth with a bottle of water, spitting in the sand at a rest area, you can figure he is a nomad. 

Where do we go when the park closes? Thanks for asking. Walmarts used to open their parking lots to vehicles of all sizes. Not any more. Many Walmarts have posted signs to indicate they don't allow overnight parking of any kind, probably from all the shootings and trash. Those rascally nomads. Sometimes Walmart allows cars but not RVs and trucks. Sometimes there is a fringe of unpatrolled spaces in the wayback, where the riffraff is allowed to park. Back east, Walmarts were much friendlier to overnighters. Here in the west, not so much. However, you can almost always park overnight at a home improvement store, if you don't mind the employees who come and go in shifts all night long. After about 3:00 a.m., you will be the only car in the parking lot. If you don't mind that, for a few hours, it's quite peaceful. The other standby is Cracker Barrel, traditionally a welcoming respite for overnighters. 

In some ways, I am invisible. Older white gal in a nondescript white minivan. There are thousands of us cruising the streets of America. Not all of us live in our cars, but possibly more than you would think. In January I will find them in Quartzsite, Arizona, the traditional winter home of nomads. They will come from all over the country seeking desert sun. I will find my tribe there, and the moments of surreality will fade for a while. When everyone is living in their car, suddenly this lifestyle is normal, and it's all of you stick-and-brick folks who are the weirdos. 

Savoring the flavors

For the past month, I have made a slow boomerang across the country. I started in Oregon in early September, moving east state by state until I got to Boston, where I made a hard U-turn and started the slow return trip west. Now it's early October, and I'm in New Mexico. Arizona is just over the horizon. I could go south to Tucson or straight ahead to Flagstaff. It's not hard to decide: The temperature in Tucson today is 106°F. Flagstaff is 79°F. You pay attention to weather forecasts when you live in your car.

I'd like to say I learned some things. Probably I have, but I can't enumerate them because I've assimilated my experiences, which is another way of saying I don't remember much. Impressions, some feelings, a few snapshots, some reflections. 

For example, I've seen a lot of trucks. I don't think I fully appreciated how this nation's entire supply structure relies on trucks. Knowing this, I don't begrudge them idling their engines all night long at rest areas, because I know they are carrying the paper towels and Triscuits I will soon be buying at the Walmart down the road. 

I have a renewed commitment to not eating animals, especially beef. I saw cattle grazing in open pastures and cattle crowded into dirt pens, already half lifeless as if they knew they would soon be hamburger. I cried. 

I have compassion for the multitudes of raccoons, possums, skunks, squirrels, birds, and deer that got popped by fast-moving vehicles and then pummeled over and over until only a blood stain on the road marked their passing. I saw it happen. A hawk flew down from trees on the verge and smacked into a fast-moving SUV passing me on the left. I braked and waited to see where the bird would land. It fell into the middle of my lane. I made sure I didn't flatten it with my tires. I doubt it would have felt it if I had. I'm quite sure that bird was dead. I feel deep chagrin realizing nature and it's wildlife were here first. Humans are the encroachers. We wreck everything.

Speaking of wrecking things, some humans wreck more than others. I traveled the Trail of Tears. Now every billboard is hawking Native American artifacts, as if White settlers didn't commit genocide as they barb-wired the Plains. I could have visited museums and gift shops to see how humans have commemorated the decimation of cultures and their way of life. I'm not much of a tourist. I didn't stop.

Humans aren't all bad. Some humans are very creative. Case in point, the Uranus Fudge Factory. Cadillac Ranch. A church billboard stating "Weed love to see you" (not sure if that was a typo or what). 

Now that I'm back in the west (New Mexico), I miss the swells of dense green trees in West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas. Who knew Kentucky was all perfectly mown lawn? Who could have imagined Arkansas was a misty green paradise? I sampled the air and savored the colors in every state I visited. And no, in case you are wondering, I did not visit any museums. I did not see any national parks or stay in state campgrounds. I wasn't a tourist. I was an explorer, a documenter of a personal odyssey. 

The logistics of this lifestyle keep me grounded in reality. Besides the challenges of personal hygiene, I have to find safe places to park overnight. Rest areas are good, but noisy. Cracker Barrel is a popular RV destination, safe but cramped. Lowe's and Home Depot are mostly good, if you don't mind workers coming and going all night. Mall parking lots are verboten: security will roust you with the knock. Walmarts are no longer consistently welcoming to travelers, having learned the hard way that some travelers cannot be trusted not to trash the place. 

Another challenge is keeping my power stations charged. Because I can't easily deploy my solar panels, I must keep moving. The power stations recharge when I drive. I ran out of power once, when I was in Minneapolis for a few days to see a friend. My fridge died. Since then, I try to drive at least three hours a day. You can cover a lot of ground in three hours. In Montana the freeway speed limit was 80 mph. In Minnesota the minimum speed limit on the freeway was 40 mph.

Sometimes I felt compelled to drive because of wildfire smoke or heat domes, even when I would have preferred to take my time. For instance, yesterday I drove six hours through three states to get to a place where I wouldn't fry. That's too much driving for me. 

After I have my final video call of the day, I will move on from this rest area. The amazing view over the craggy brown rocks and scrubby desert trees doesn't offset the stench of an overworked septic field. All around this tired old rest area are signs asking "How did we do?" and "How would you rate this rest area?" as if they know their rest area stinks. Some states have lovely rest areas, with huge tiled rest rooms that I could easily live in, if they would rent out a corner to the unhoused. 

In another few days I'll be back in Arizona. The adventure continues.