Follow that pilot car

This week I've been diligently performing my role as pilot car. Being the pilot car means I'm a leader, not a follower, or I guess you could say, first I'm a leader, and then I'm the ultimate follower, after I pull over into the slow lane and let all the traffic behind me speed by. But until there's a passing lane or nice long turnout, everyone is stuck behind me, and I'm the leader. I take my role seriously, setting the pace just under the speed limit. Except on downhill grades, when with a gravity assist, my old car can get up a head of steam. 

In addition, to being a pilot car, I have other roles I'm diligently performing. For example, I've already mentioned I'm a traveler on the road less traveled. What that means is I don't tend to conform to norms. I live by another set of rules. Oh, don't get excited, that doesn't mean I am a jerk (at least not intentionally). The rules I live by have to do with things like freedom, autonomy, and independence. I guess you could call those principles, rather than rules. Rules are, like, get a good job, find proper housing, and don't pick your teeth at the dinner table. Principles are more along the lines of live and let live, let your freak flag fly, that sort of thing. 

I take my role as a nonconformist as seriously as I do my role as pilot car. When you feel called to do something, probably you should do your best at it. Hm. Well, when I write something like that, being a professional devil's advocate, I always see the loophole punched by Satan, if there is such a thing. Like, if I wanted to be a dictator, should I strive to be the best dictator I can be? Or, if I want to build a house in a sensitive ecosystem, I should strive to build the biggest bestest house I can? Hm. Clarity eludes me. I'm hot. My portable fan died. It gets really hot and stuffy in my car before the sun goes down. It's hard to think coherently, much less write. 

I drove from Bend to Portland today. I've been to Bend once before, in the early 1990s, I think. I didn't recognize the place. It looks like they took Portland and plopped it down in the high desert. Once I got outside the city limit, though, I recognized the high desert terrain. My grandfather used to run cattle on the range outside of Prineville. As I strolled along 97 with a train of cars and trucks behind me, I saw many herds of cattle, but also what looked like groups of wild horses. The land is breath-takingly beautiful, if you like wide expanses of dried grass punctuated by withered trees, dark green bushes, and scrubby brush, with forested mountains in the distance. Nary a cactus in sight. It's beautiful. It's also blazing hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. Lucky for me, I happened along on a relatively mild day. Blue sky, fluffy clouds, not too hot once the sun came up. 

I'd forgotten how majestic Mt. Hood is coming at it from the east. That is one impressive peak. Highway 26 winds over it's southern shoulder, uphill and downhill around curves with scary dropoffs. Views of the mountain appear through gaps in tall timber. Sadly, I couldn't saunter to appreciate the sights because of the train behind me. There's not much snow on the mountain this time of year, but this road goes through the snow zone. Glad I didn't have to chain up (I don't carry tire chains), I stopped at the rest area at Government Camp. The women's restroom was equipped with two long wooden benches, I assume for outdoor enthusiasts to remove their skis and snowshoes before using the facilities. 

Last this week, I left Eugene feeling I'd done my due diligence. Not the place for me. I returned to Portland, picked up my meds, and hit the road. I took a day trip to Maryhill Museum up the Columbia River Gorge. I spent one more night in Portland, and decided to visit some towns between Portland and the coast. Then I thought, well, as long as I'm halfway to the coast, I might as well go all the way. I meandered over to Florence and stayed at the Chinook Winds Casino with dozens of motorhomes and trailers, the occupants of which (I assume) spent most of their in the casino gambling, smoking, eating, or whatever people do in a casino. From my perch on the edge of the upper parking lot, past the rooftops of cars and timeshares I could see ocean for miles. 

I took time in Florence to look at a possible low-income senior housing option I'd found on one of those apartment listing websites. The onsite manager laughed when I asked about a one-bedroom apartment. 

"We have 250 people on the waitlist, honey," she said. "Residents have to die before a vacancy opens up. It could be several years. Priority is given to victims of domestic violence."

I realized then something I should have seen weeks ago: All the listings for rentals shown on the apartment rental sites are bogus. It's all a clickbait scam. Not one of those listings has a vacancy, and most of them have closed their waitlists. On the bright side, if there is such a thing, I'm number 29 on a waitlist for a place in Junction City. That's something. Not sure what. 

I went south on 101. At Reedsport, I headed inland to explore Roseburg. From there I drove through Grants Pass, Medford, and Ashland. I spent a cold rainy night at the Welcome to Oregon Travel Center, and from there drove a long lonely road through big trees to Klamath Falls. After eyeballing Klamath Falls and finding it lacking, I moseyed on up to Bend and spent the night parked on a peaceful side street next to the Sheriff's automotive facility. 

I'm done looking for "traditional" housing for now. I've spent a lot of time and gas driving in circles in places I don't care for, just to conform to the be sheltered at all costs mandate that pervades my local zeitgeist. I'm shooing away the black cloud of despair. If I'm meant to be housed, I will be housed. Meanwhile I will keep living my life as creatively as I know how, no matter how many people I piss off, no matter how many cars stack up behind me. I lead the way on the road less traveled. Come along, if you want. Or not. You free spirit, you. 

I choose the road less traveled

As I was sitting at a laundromat in Anytown, USA, yesterday, washing my skivvies with the neighborhood hoi polloi, I saw the photo of my mother that I taped in the front of my calendar. I remembering taking that photo. I was standing outside her retirement home window, which was in lockdown from COVID-19. In the photo, she's smiling and waving at me, as if she hadn't seen me in days (I visited daily), as if I were a long-lost friend, as if I were something special. I look at that photo often.

My mother had many friends, and she kept in touch with them until dementia claimed her free will. I don't know how she did it. Maybe that's because I am a diehard introvert, and she was a diehard extravert. Having friends probably made her marriage tolerable. Having friends probably gave her respite from child-rearing, a job I don't think she really wanted. 

Over the course of her life, she gathered a group of high school buddies, a cohort of nursing classmates, and a posse of librarians, and she took time to nurture those friendships, mostly in the form of sending cards and calling on the phone. Later, she learned how to butcher an email, but by then her brain cells were in tatters. 

She went to high school with a bunch of girls, who met every few years at Shari's for lunch. This must have been an elite bunch. I don't remember meeting more than one or two of these gals, ever. 

I was more familiar with her nursing classmates. She attended nursing school in the 1950s with a small tight-knit gaggle of tough women who went on to work, get married, have kids, and retire. They dragged their husbands to annual reunions, some of which were at our house, spread out on card tables in the backyard under the maple tree. The nursing classmates even had a round-robin letter to keep everyone updated on the news: whose husband had died, who broke a hip, whose kid got into rehab, who got Alzheimers, who was in a carehome, in lockdown, incommunicado. 

The librarians met for book discussions and pie, again, at Shari's, once in a while at Red Lobster. I had moved away by this time in my mother's friendship continuum, so I only knew the librarians by name. 

One by one, the friends died. Mom was not the last friend standing, but by the time she came to the end of her road, she couldn't correspond with anyone. She could barely remember who they were, even with photo-prompting. (She always knew me, a fact for which I am grateful.)

I look at my tiny circle of friends, dwindling year by year, and think, I am not rich in friends the way my mother was. She once told me to have friends, you have to be a friend. I try to be a good friend to the friends I have, but I don't have many. I'm realizing having only a few friends puts pressure on the few I have. With more friends, I could distribute my complaining more equitably, so no one person has to bear the burden. 

I think when I finally find a place to land and settle, I can apply myself to the task of growing my friend circle. If I can stand to reach outside my comfortable solitude, that is. 

Speaking of settling, I spent a week driving in circles in the Eugene metro area, verbally abused by the GPS lady, whose passive aggressive use of the bong sound is starting to get under my skin. I would probably hear that sound less often if I obediently followed her instructions without question, but sometimes that arrogant GPS lady is wrong. I admit, though, as I putter along the neighborhood streets, waiting for the cue "Turn here" and hoping I choose the correct driveway, I'm thankful for her guidance. I can't imagine what my life would be like trying to plot my route on a Thomas guide. The single best invention ever was the GPS lady. If the internet ever goes belly up, I'm going to park somewhere and get a bicycle. 

I don't like Eugene, just to let you know. I did my best to like it. I kind of liked its blue-collar neighbor, Springfield. Cottage Grove, Junction City, and Veneta are kind of charming. The problem is, there's no housing that I can afford. The few facilities earmarked low-income senior housing seem to have wait lists with more than fifty people ahead of me. There's no sense skulking around Eugene, hoping something will come open. It could take years. The fear foisted upon me by friends and family almost made me think I could tolerate the hell of sleeping at Home Depots until some facility called, just so maybe in a few years, I would not be homeless. 

Nope. No can do. Life moves on, and I'm going with it.

This is a very odd life. But it is what I have right now, so it's up to me to live it as creatively as I can, no matter what other people think of my choices.

The gift horse can sometimes tear your lips off

I'm coming to you from Track Town, USA, otherwise known as Eugene, Oregon. The weather finally cooled enough for me to leave the misty gray coastline and head inland to look for housing options in the Willamette Valley. I'm not sure this area is the right place for me, but it feels more right than Arizona or Texas. 

Every time I leave a safe haven, I feel a surge of trepidation. It's stressful not knowing where I am going to park at night. Oregon so far has been much less friendly toward nomads, compared to Arizona. The "no overnight parking" signs are hard to miss. It's clear some nomads ignore them, but I am not charmed at the prospect of getting "the knock," especially after I'm asleep. So, when I see those signs, I check the apps and look for other options in the vicinity. So far, I've been able to find places, although last night I tried three locations before I felt I was safe enough and legal enough to park without hassle.

My much-adored cousin arrived at the beach house on Monday. We spent time walking on the beach. She gave me the tour of the town. I saw some of the local sights. We talked a lot. Well, after a while, she talked a lot, and I listened. She had a lot to say. As I listened to her tell me the minutae of dividing and selling the acreage of her parent's house in Portland, I realized we had never spent that much time together, alone, just the two of us.  

My cousin did everything right in her life. She went to college, learned a useful skill, applied it for her entire career, and retired with a pension. Along the way, she married, had two kids, built wealth, and got divorced. Then she inherited some wealth. Newly retired, she now has two houses and the financial freedom to do as she pleases. Her health is excellent, she said. Perfect cholesterol, no heart problems, no osteoporosis, definitely no vertigo, and what's more, she's recently lost twenty pounds. She was triumphant that her skinny pants finally fit. If only her kids weren't a bit messed up, life would be perfect. (I'm so glad I'm a childless cat lady!)

On Wednesday, I volunteered to help her fetch a carload of firewood from a local friend's woodpile. She planned to use it in her woodstove. As she drove through the forest, she kept up chirpy patter about the houses and the people of the area. I can't match chirpiness. Little Mary Sunshine I am not. Even on a good day, I just don't have the energy. I started to feel a bit bludgeoned by her chirpiness even before we arrived at a huge house recently built on the edge of forestland. New sprinklers watered new grass. Beyond the grass was a narrow forest of tall timber. Beyond that was a view of the Pacific Ocean. 

The homeowners were outside puttering in their yard when we pulled in. My cousin turned her ebullience on them. After introductions, they ignored me. I stood nearby and looked at the trees. 

Eventually we got busy loading wood into her car. Her exuberance transferred to throwing wood enthusiastically into a wheelbarrow and then ramming the wheelbarrow up a short incline to the car. Her movements were punctuated by frequent utterances to show she was on top of it: "there!" she said a few times. "There!" I started thinking maybe I wasn't moving fast enough and stepped up my game. Then I thought, this is stupid. I'm overweight, out of shape, and plagued by an irregular heartbeat. No way was I going to keel over and have them trip the air raid siren to call out the local volunteer EMT. So embarrassing. 

I slowed to a steady pace. As we filled the car to the ceiling with wood, I made a remark about making sure the wood was secure in back so if she slammed on the brakes, we wouldn't get plastered against the dashboard.

"You always look on the dark side, don't you?" she said as she crammed more wood into the car. 

I should have made a joke at that point. If I weren't so irked, I would have come up with something goofy to show I was impervious to her mild criticism. I know she stabbed me in a loving way, as only family can do.

I can't say she's wrong. I do have some skill at playing devil's advocate. It's a special knack of mine. However, having been a school bus driver, I know what happens to precious cargo when you slam on the brakes. That is what I said.

"Oh, I didn't know you drove a school bus," she said. 

Today as I drove through the back country southwest of Eugene (yes, I took a wrong turn, but yes, it sure is pretty country), I thought about how every inch of this land is claimed and conquered by people who were smart enough to be born into wealth or who had worked a good job, saved their money, and bought land. Or who had married someone who owned land. Lots of ways to get a piece of the American dream, it seems. Unless you are trudging the road less traveled. 

"I recognize I come from a place of privilege," my cousin admitted after she described her opinion of the nation's housing shortage. She didn't blame me for my situation, but she didn't have much empathy to offer, either, which is all I wanted. Most of my friends and family wish I'd just settle for some kind of shelter and get on with life, so they don't have to worry about me anymore.

To that I would say (if I were asked), your fear is not making my situation any better. I'm beginning to realize, for most people, fear of homelessness is the ultimate existential fear. Possibly worse than climate change. 

I need to stop whining. My loved ones can't fix the housing shortage, so instead, they try to fix me. That's what loved ones do. It's the American way. 

There's a saying: You can't go to the hardware store for bread. There's another saying: Expectations are premeditated resentments. I brought my own, so I deserve what I get. 

I think I'm over the desert

Have you heard it said, "When one door closes, another door opens"? What are we supposed to make of that? It's not a truism, is it? It's barely a platitude. It feels like one of those foundationless, woowoo sayings similar to "Do what you love and the money will follow." Dumber advice probably exists but I can't think of it offhand. And as long as I'm pondering doors, who are these anonymous, faceless purveyors of door wisdom, and how do they know so much about the nature of doors? 

Is it human nature to slap a pithy aphorism on a situation in an effort to understand it? Imagining life as a series of flapping doors might be useful in a glass-half-full kind of way, but claiming when a door closes, another one opens seems like bunk based on wishful thinking. Doors, paths, cliffs, holes in the sidewalk . . . We use metaphors as proxies for the options we face. Do I want what's behind Door No. 3? Do I want to take the path less traveled? How long will I spend wallowing in the messy bog this time?

Speaking of messy bogs, I succumbed to cheese this week. Organic mozarella, how bad could it be? Thanks for asking. Apparently, mildly bad, but day after day, getting more bad. Badder. I hate to throw away food, even if it is possibly going to kill me.

As I drove from Phoenix to Tucson last week, my vertigo waves started accelerating in intensity. I thought, what the heck? Is it the stress of returning to my uncertain life? It's not like being on the road was such a carefree walk in the park. Then I saw the clouds boiling up over the mountains. Since then, we've had a week of weather. Daily, my head is a swamp of vertigo waves. The crackling in my right ear is as loud as a freight train, rolling through every two minutes or less. 

On the bright side, I visited a new ENT this week. I performed more or less adequately on another hearing test and answered yet another battery of questions. I like this new ENT. He studied at the University of Portland. Maybe, if I'm lucky, I will receive some actual vestibular testing and be granted a plausible diagnosis. However, he admitted he'd never met anyone having two-minute oscillating symptoms. I can sense another MRI in my future.

I look fine on the outside, as long as you don't count my ragged hair and shapeless clothes. You have to watch out with vestibular patients. We are unpredictable. I felt the staff in the ENT office observing my demeanor. Am I a crazy anxious patient who will require counseling and drugs? Or am I calm, credible, and worth the benefit of the doubt? Patients with vestibular problems are notoriously ignorable, mainly because vestibular issues are not well understood. It's easier to tell us it's all in our heads. Just do some volunteer work, you'll be fine.

So, apart from the existential question of what is happening in my brain, the next big question on my mind is where to go next. I'm sorry to report, the subsidized housing options in Phoenix have waitlists that are one to five years long. Priority is given to disabled folks and families. The odds of me getting in while I'm still independent and autonomous are very slim. Not impossible, though. 

I could put my name on a waitlist.

But now I realize, I don't want to be in the desert anymore, anyway. I thought I'd never get tired of being warm, but now the temperature is ramping up to brutal, the AC is pumping dry air into my lungs and nose, I'm blowing bloody clots, and I can't go outside except super early or after the sun goes down. What kind of a life is this? I think I am over living in the desert. 

Maybe I'm just cranky because I can't find housing I can afford here. If the desert had welcomed me, maybe I'd love it more, I don't know. I feel like Goldilocks sometimes. Nothing is ever quite right for me. Story of my life. I keep trying to write a new story, but I always regress to the mean. I'm an introvert, I prefer to live alone, I'm an artist, I can't hold a job for very long, and I like being warm but not too warm, dry but not too dry. Somehow, at my age, I don't think I'm going to easily change.

Uh-oh, I feel a cheese attack coming on. I'll catch you next time.

Dodged another opportunity

I'm hoping my housing search is going to be a Goldilocks tale of too much, too little, and just enough. If I were any normal person with a normal life and a normal job, the just enough housing option would look something like a modern apartment in a safe walkable neighborhood with stores nearby and no snakes, lizards, or roaches living under the sink. However, as all seven of you blog readers know, I don't tend to take the road most traveled. Last week I dodged the opportunity to live in a tiny stone casita in the desert. This week I toured a tiny mobile home in an RV park situated by an open field next to the freeway that would take me south to the border or north to Phoenix, depending on my frame of mind. 

Mobile homes are bizarre, present living situation notwithstanding. Having grown up in an old farmhouse solidly squatting over a concrete basement dug into wet Pacific Northwest soil, this newfangled mode of building feels oddly unfinished. I'm not used to the prefab, temporary nature of mobile home living. These buildings begin their existence in a factory, getting outfitted with lightweight accoutrements made of plastic, fiberglass, and fake wood paneling. Then they get loaded on a massive truck for an aggressive trip to the mobile home sales lot. You've probably been stuck behind half a house leisurely blocking two freeway lanes during rush hour traffic. From the sales lot, they get purchased and trucked to their final destination, usually a mobile home park, where they perch primly on concrete piers a few feet above dry dirt. And there they sit fading in the sun, changing owners from time to time and moldering into vinyl dust. Manufactured homes aren't quite the same thing as mobile homes, being somewhat, well, less mobile, right? To be honest, anything that doesn't require a constantly replenished coat of paint on its peeling clapboard siding doesn't really deserve the moniker house. Just my opinion.

On Friday I found my way south and west to a straight two-lane stretch of road edged with several RV parks and mobile home parks. These are not the same thing, by the way. RVs, no matter how big their widescreen TVs, are not considered mobile homes, even if you live in them full time. As soon as the temperature hits 85°F, RVs unplug their shore power cables and drive away to cooler climes, leaving vacant concrete slabs. In RV parks, a few folks park their travel trailers and never leave. As gravity and weather take their toll, these little trailers sag and sink toward the dirt, weighed down by homemade awnings, canopies, gewgaws, and strings of lights. They start to look like weird plants that grew up out of the ground. To keep out these bottom feeders, mobile home parks don't allow transient RVs to overwinter. If you have an RV, you park it offsite in a respectable storage facility and fetch it when its time to make like a snowbird.

The property I sought was an RV park with a mix of buildings (can I call them buildings?). Some were tiny travel trailers, a few were larger trailers no longer near any sort of tow vehicle, and a couple were single wide mobile homes. The rental I was going to tour was one of these single wide mobile homes, renovated in the recent past with a small addition built to the side to create a dining area. This mobile home had three doors to the outside and a postage-stamp size yard that butted up next to the side yard of a heavily decorated sagging travel trailer parked in the next lot. I found this trailer mesmerizing. All my gypsy nomad genes sprang to attention. (I'm not sure I actually have any of those genes but I'm a romantic at heart, drawn to the caravan lifestyle, and I don't mean Dodge Caravan! More like circus wagon, festooned with flags and ribbons.)

I sort of wanted to tour that travel trailer but I dutifully followed the manager into the mobile home. Fake fireplace, check. Multiple doors, check. Oh hey, vinyl floor in imitation hardwood. That was a nice touch throughout. There wasn't much to see. The place was pint-sized, chopped into a tiny living room, a dining area, and a bedroom in the back. The kitchen was carved out of the space in the middle, edged in a half-wall like a taco bar. The sink was okay, the fridge was big, the cupboard under the sink was clean and mold-free. The bathroom was next to the kitchen, also very small, with a pale brown plastic tub circa the 1970s and a white porcelain toilet that looked much older. The owner apparently renovated the kitchen but spared the bathroom, no doubt wanting to retain some of the quaint old-fashioned charm. Well, who wouldn't.

Is it time to explore my prejudices at the idea of living in an RV park? As the manager advised me on how to present my finances for best results, I imagined myself telling my sister I rented a mobile home in an RV park next to an open field by a freeway. It took me a moment to identify the feeling that frissoned up my spine. Was it . . ? Yes, it was shame. Why? Who do I think my ancestors were? My grandmother came from South Dakota and put half-and-half on her Rice Krispies. I cannot deny my roots. My genes would fit right in at a trailer park. It's just my snobby education and upbringing that tells me I deserve something better. 

I’m really out of my comfort zone here in the desert.  Landowners own the wealth and rent slum-pit trailers to elderly, low income, and undocumented. There are no laws to protect tenants from unscrupulous slumlords. Maintaining trailer homes and mobile homes is expensive. People in RV parks are often living in substandard housing with no recourse. Complaining results in evictions. The only way to win in the desert is to own the land.

Homes in Tucson's neighborhoods reflect the culture and the weather. Buildings are low profile, built out of cinder block or brick, stucco or adobe. The architecture is so different from the northwest. The heat dictates design. There is no water here, not in the air, not in the soil. Lack of water dictates landscape design. I'm shocked at the rare sight of green lawn. The ground is dust. There is no dirt, just dust. Roofs are flat (no need for slopes to handle snow). Awnings are deep to cover doorways and windows (or they should be, but not all apartment windows have awnings). Windows are tiny, barely letting in light. Everyone covers their windows to ward off the blazing sun. In the middle of the day, they hunker in their dark air-conditioned caves or blaze around the streets at 50 mph in their air-conditioned SUVs. 

The light here is a miracle. The moment I step outside, the heat is a strange toasty blessing I can't refuse. It envelopes me and sucks the air from my lungs. It cannot be ignored or avoided, only embraced. Bare mountains encircle the city, crisp and clear viewed through air that contains zero moisture. The blue sky canopy beckons me up, up, up. This place is closer to God than a lot of places, I bet. It's bathed constantly in raw sunshine. The sun strips off the veneer of lubrication and hydration and leaves only the parched elegant bones. No meat, just a bit of tough sinew holding moments together in a string of experiences, which I gather for blog fodder when I venture out to compete with the speedsters. This is not an oasis. This pueblo is not built on clouds but on desiccation and dehydration and dryness. D-words denoting desertification. The only waves are in my inner ear, washing me up on the shores of BPPV where I’ve been many times before, hoping to find a place to rest without losing my balance.

Which is why I can’t take showers.

Wait, time out. Joe Biden needs me to send money right away. Sorry, Joe. Okay. I'm back.   

Digging for drawings to illustrate my blogposts is fraught these days. To find the drawings I scanned last year, I have to scroll through photos of my former life. It hurts. I scroll past photos of my domicile, my neighborhood, my mother, and the one I really want to avoid, the last one of her lying dead in the ER, eyes closed, mouth open. I see photos of all the stuff I donated on Freecycle and Craigslist. I get weepy over photos of my efforts to downsize, to sort, to pack, and to pare my life to fit into a U-Box and a Dodge Grand Caravan. (I don't know what is so damn grand about it.) 

I filled out the application for the mobile home, attracted to the open fields next door, which reminded me of the fields behind the farmhouse of my childhood. It would only cost $35 to apply and I would probably be approved. But after a night to contemplate the prospect of living in an RV park, I decided once again that I'm not the right person for that place. I don't know what interesting experiences I'm passing up, but we know that when we turn away from one path, we end up going down another. No matter where I end up, there will always be things to blog about, and as long as I have internet access, I remain your faithful chronic malcontent blogging from the Hellish Hand-basket.