Weirdos on the road

Mike (not his real name) is a flabby grizzled aging man with no front teeth and a cute roly-poly dog named Roxie. I met Mike and Roxie this morning at Buffalo Park. He's parked his 26-foot Class C RV in the gravel strip outside the main parking lot for the past month or so. I don't know if he ever leaves, because I come and go. Everytime I've been to the park, he's been there. 

Today as I was changing out of my walking shoes into my sandals, I saw him pull out a doormat and a folding chair. He placed them outside the open side door, took off his shirt, displaying flab and a drooping chest, and sat in the chair, soaking up some nice healthy high-index UV rays. Rock music blasted from somewhere inside. A short-legged fat brown dog laid down on the rug beside him.

Pretty soon, his dog got a stick from inside the RV and begged him to throw it. Because I was parked just a few yards away, I went over to say hello to his dog. That's when he told me his dog's name was Roxie. 

Roxie brought the stick to me to throw. I did my best and ended up almost putting Mike's eye out. Good thing he caught it. I was never much good at softball, although we won City Champs when I was in seventh grade, no thanks to me.

Anyway, Mike obviously hadn't spoken to anyone in a while. I recognized the symptoms of social isolation, because I feel them myself. Even though it soon became obvious that Mike was a jerk and a crook, I still enjoyed the interchange. I kept listening, and he kept talking while we took turns throwing the stick for Roxie. 

Married with kids, divorced from his addict wife, who got cancer and died two months later, after he'd had to sell his house and all his toys. Camarillo, CA, I think he said, even though he has Georgia plates on his RV. 

"I used to be a landscaper and an electrician until 2008, when all the work dried up and I got behind in my bills."

I made some sympathetic noises. 

"I had the best front yard in the neighborhood. I designed and landscaped it all myself. I paid for it by padding my clients invoices. I had a smart taxman. You can get away with anything if you put your mind to it."

I felt compelled to respond with some inanity about living with myself at the end of the day. He displayed no chagrin.

"Where you going next?" I asked.

"Back to Georgia to help someone with some work, and then I think I'll head back to California. After that, Idaho. I want to do some fishing."

I thought to myself, wow, a true nomad. 

"I'd really like to meet a woman," he said, "but all the ones I meet just want to know how much you make, what you got. Nowadays, instead of asking what you like to do, you ask, how many prescriptions pills do you take, what ailments do you have. I met a couple cougars. They just wanted to know how much I was worth."

I clucked my tongue in sympathy. "Have you ever been to Quartzsite in the winter?"

"To the swap meet?"

"Yeah, and to the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. You might meet a nice nomad woman there. Kindred spirits and all that."

He looked interested. 

After 15 minutes, I was feeling the heat. The clouds had moved aside, and relentless sun was blazing on my neck. I checked my watch. The mall opened at 11:00 a.m.  

Clouds have persisted the past couple days, which means solar has been iffy. I left the forest this morning to charge up the power station that runs my fridge. Now I'm at my favorite table in the mall, watching parents stroll past with their manic children and listening to old pop music echoing in the rafters. Not old by my standards. Depeche Mode seems like just yesterday.

I need some road friends. I'm sure there are some non-weirdo nomads out there on the road. Creative people who aren't jerks or crooks. I'm trying to be more outgoing. I'll sift big timber until I find them.

Join me in the silence

I remember when my family used to visit my grandfather's cattle ranch in the high desert east of Prineville, Oregon. For a city kid, the silence of the open country was profound. At the time, I wasn't sure I liked it. Jets were tiny white dots in the sky, speeding toward Portland International Airport. They left contrails but made no sound. 

Living in silence in an age of constant noise can be disturbing. At times I feel very alone and disconnected if I don't have music or talk radio playing in the background. Other times, I sink into the silence like sliding into a warm bath. Mm. Bath. Haven't had one of those in a while. I digress.

Camping in the high desert of Flagstaff, Arizona, gives me a similar feeling. On a Sunday morning, nobody is up. I'm the only one walking along the gravel road, heading to who knows where, someplace I've never been. A few cars pass, kicking up great clouds of dust (implanting seeds of my future resentments). Before long, more cars, more people, and wonder of wonders, the sound of gunshots. Yep. There's a shooting range not far away.

Nothing shatters silence like gunshots. 

This is mining country. The mining companies moved on and left craters, half craters, slag heaps of gravel. The half craters make really good shooting ranges. I made the mistake of driving in that direction, seeking a better cell signal. I found the cell signal next to the shooting range. Two men were there, one supervising, and one sitting at a folding table aiming a long gun at a target some yards away. Blam! Then a few minutes later, blam! This morning was quiet, but around 9:00 a.m. the gunshots began again.

So there's that. 

On the bright side, I met a guy who addressed me as "neighbor," and we talked for a bit. His name is John. I hope I remember that. He lives in a trailer, drives a red car, rides a bike, goes shirtless, wears a Christian cross on a necklace, and has a mother who worries about his well being. Fellow neighbor, fellow nomad.

It's beautiful in the forest. Last night I dreamed it was on fire.

Walking in the early morning sunshine in a timber forest in the high desert puts me in the here and now. It's the safest place to be when one is homeless. Living today for a better past is futile. Living in the wreckage of the future is crazy making. The only safe place is the present. My demented mother was a Zen master. I learned a lot from witnessing her decline. 

I don't know if I'll live long enough to see my own decline into dementia, and even if I do, there's a good chance there will be no facility to take care of me until I die. My retirement plan is fentanyl. I can only hope my brain holds out long enough to score some and my courage holds out long enough for me to take it.

On that sober note, welcome to a new confounding fresh hell. There's room in the hand basket for you, in case you want some company on your own hellish descent.

High-class homelessness

After weeks of hiding out in Portland, living in parking lots of public parks during the day and trolling Portland streets for safe places to park at night, I finally hit my limit and left town. The weather sucked, as it often does in early summer. The beach was great, but eventually the nice casino security people would have told me to move on, can't stay there all summer, sorry. Portland was not welcoming me. I'd been to all the medical appointments, picked up all the meds, retrieved the junk mail from my brother . . . There was no reason to hang around a city where I was not welcome.

So I hit the road. From Portland I drove through Bend, then east toward Salt Lake City, then south Utah to Cedar City. I stayed at rest areas of questionable quality and a very nice Walmart parking lot, until finally I found a nice forest road just north of Flagstaff, and that is where I am right now as I'm typing this blog post. 

On my road trip, I was reminded of the dubious power of being the "pilot car"on a two-lane highway with few passing lanes. The so-called pilot car is the car that is going slower than the rest of the pack. I can count on one hand the number of times I actually passed a vehicle going slower than me. One was a truck going up a steep hill. One was a truck towing a camper. He passed me later.  I'm slow on the climb, but I'm speedy on the descent. Gravity is still working, even if other things in life aren't.

Like any society, homeless people have a hierarchy. You could say we have a class system. The lowest class homeless person is the person (usually a man) who curls up under a tree on a public sidewalk and throws a blanket over his head. He could be dead, he could be drunk. Odds are he would prefer not to be sleeping on a sidewalk. 

At the other end of the homeless continuum are the people who live in shiny new Sprinter vans, tow enormous fifth-wheel trailers with new Dodge Ram pickups, or drive new Class C camper vans, the ones with the bed over the cab. I would add the folks who drive giant Prevosts but if they can afford a luxury motor coach, they most likely own several houses, so I would not classify them as homeless. They may have been bitten by the wandering bug but they always have a home base to return to when they get tired of driving their entire house along a narrow two-lane highway. 

In between these two extremes are the rest of us, everything from tents and tarps pitched along the freeway verges to broken down motorhomes to minivans and sedans. There are a lot of unhoused people out there. If you know what to look for, they are easy to spot. The problem with stealth camping in a city, as I've previously discussed, is that homeowners (in the nicer areas) know how to spot a car that is not part of the neighborhood. In the bad parts of town, nobody cares, which is why any car can be a target for gas thieves. I digress.

At the Walmart parking lot, a woman pulling a little trailer with a relatively new SUV parked near me. She had a dog with her. She went shopping and came back with a load of stuff. The wind had kicked up, and a man came over to help her with the loading. He told her he was living in his truck and pointed to a nice pickup parked nearby. He asked where she was headed. She said nowhere, she lived in Cedar City. He said he did, too. 

Where do I fall along the unhoused continuum? Glad you asked. Compared to the street sleepers and tent dwellers, I'm definitely high-class homeless. I have a relatively new, mostly presentable soccer mom minivan. I have everything I need with me. I know how to keep myself clean, fix food, fetch water, and take out the trash. I practice leave no trace, I don't wave my arms and yell like a crazy person, I'm nice to dogs and their walkers . . . In short, I try to be a good member of the community.

And still, I'm not welcome. Homelessness is a crime in many places. It's not illegal to park your car overnight on Portland city streets but you'd better not be sleeping in it. Kind of like, you can buy a condo but you'd better not paint it bright pink. There are rules made by cities to keep residents safe. Many of these rules make sense. You don't want someone setting the neighborhood on fire just because they felt like making a decent cup of coffee instead of buying the swill at McDonald's. Homeless people are not considered residents. They are eyesores, pedophiles, whores, beggars, and thieves. They clearly made bad choices somewhere along the way, or else they would not be homeless. 

Humans are social creatures. Whether I want to admit it or not, I feel better when I'm parked near (but not too near) other people who are living the nomadic lifestyle. Some choose it, some are forced into it, but whatever the reason, just like other members of a class, we find comfort in community. Most of us. There are always the ones who find the most remote campsites up the steepest, most rutted road and then drag a big log across the road and hang a sign that says "Space occupied, Keep the Eff Out!" Now that is an introvert.

I may have made some bad choices along the way, but one element working in my favor I had no control over: I got old enough to draw social security. If I did not have my paltry monthly allowance, I would be one of those tent dwellers, pushing my belongings in a stolen shopping cart, sleeping with one eye open, and waiting for the authorities to tell me to move on. I'm a lucky one. I can move on by choice.

My psychic friend says my situation will be changing soon, but she wasn't sure if it would get better or worse. Not sure how to react to that, so I will carry on and wait to see what fate brings me. Maybe housing is in my future. Maybe not. I think I mentioned I've started collecting stickers to put on my windows. No more hiding. I figured out I can buy adhesive sticker paper and waterproof markers to make my own stickers. If you have any design ideas, please feel free to email or text. Or leave a comment. I'm not sure the comment section on Google Blogger actually works, but you could try it.  

Meanwhile, the road trip continues. 

Where is my tribe?

When I'm at the coast, I take long walks on the beach. I aim for the middle ground between soft dry and soggy wet. I walk in the early morning after coffee but before the fog burns off, before the wind kicks up. I have a lot of time to think while I walk, which has debatable value in terms of changing my housing situation. Eventually the endorphins infiltrate my brain and I get to the point where I just don't care anymore.  It's not a bad place to be, compared to living today for a better past or trying to control the wreckage of the future.

Being in the present moment has never come naturally to me, probably because I live my life in constant fear. Fear of what, you ask? Doesn't matter. Fear of everything. Now that I actually do have a lot of danger to face, I think I can say I come by my fear honestly. But nothing much has changed. The only time the fear eases up is when I enter the present moment. To get there, for me, takes about 2.5 miles. I never get to happiness, joy, or contentment, but on a good day, I can get to neutral. 

People I know do a lot to make peace with reality in the here and now. Some meditate, some go to special classes, some join groups and seek mindfulness together. I've never been much of a joiner, preferring to be on the periphery, watching, observing, not in the middle, not on center stage. I am sometimes dumfounded that I was a teacher for so long. I attribute my 10-year career as a college instructor to the revelation that as long as they were on their side of the table and I was on mine, everything would be fine.

As I have grown older, poorer, and sicker, my interest in being around others has waned. I want community, but I can't fake it anymore. 

Part of me wants to plaster my car with bumper stickers. Here are some possibilities:

• Not all who wander are lost. 
• Art is for everyone. 
• Tell your cat I said psspsspss. 
• Hearing impaired, dizzy, half-blind, ancient tired driver, please be patient. 
• If you can read this, come on in for coffee, enter through tailpipe. 
• Hey, NIMBYs, if you want to end homelessness in your neighborhood, increase the flow of fentanyl across the southern border. 
• I'm hungry, and your dog is looking pretty tasty right now. 
• Push if you think it will help; I could use the money. 
• I brake for no reason, get over it. 
• How's my driving? Call 1-800-upyours.

It's not me talking. It's the Keppra.

I always come back around to the futility of thinking and feeling. The Universe, if it responds to humans at all, doesn't give a crap about what we think and feel. Change only comes if we take action. 

Action is not hard to do. The hard part is trying to predict the consequences of the action: Will the outcome be good or will it be bad? Then I have to go through the whole thing of defining what is good and what is bad. What if my actions lead to disaster? What if my actions hurt someone? What if my failure to take action is the wrong path? What if I should have turned there instead of here? What if I do nothing? What if I do everything? 

There I go, back down the rabbit hole. The only way out, for me, is 2.5 miles on a windswept foggy beach.

Invisible but still a threat

You know you aren't in Southern Arizona anymore when an older woman living her car feels the need to pull out her stun gun and press it when you walk by her car on the way to your own little house on wheels. I didn't know what it was, having never seen a stun gun or Taser, so I didn't have a reaction until I walked by, got in my car, and Googled what does a Taser sound like? 

The only visible difference between us, besides that her car was a lot nicer than mine, was that she was Black and I am White. So there you go. Usually I am invisible, but not to her. I'm guessing her lived experience was a lot different from mine and possibly not in a happy way, if she felt the need to rattle her weapon when I walked by. 

I visited a childhood friend this week. Remind me not to do that. To some people, I'm an outcast, I'm a pariah. Wrong life choices, yada yada. To others, I'm a curiosity, a specimen to be examined and interrogated. My beloved Arizona friend is the only one who checks in regularly to see how I feel about being unhoused. We figure it out together. To everyone else, I'm shunned, ridiculed, or ignored. 

My new unicorn, I mean, PCP, prescribed a stronger statin to help prevent stroke and heart attack. Unfortunately for me, it enhances diarrhea. I hope the symptoms are on the wane, and I'm glad I stocked up on plastic bags. You haven't really experienced van life until you have diarrhea in your car. There's nothing quite like it. 

My labs show that I'm still slightly anemic, ho hum, old news. He didn't seem to think it warranted any hand-wringing, so I'm not going to worry about it. I spent the past couple years freaking out about health stuff. I'm so over it. I'll try to up my vitamin game but other than that, I will carry on. Everyone dies sometime. 

Meanwhile, rain. More rain. Showers. A little break, followed by more cold rain. A big reason I left Portland (besides that I could no longer afford rent here) was the incessant cool gray wet weather. I have a link to a temperature map on my phone. Today, almost every place in the continental U.S. is warmer than it is here. As soon as my meds are refilled, I'm leaving this slogfest.

I'm not sure where I will go next, because as you know, weather doesn't stay long in one place, whether we want it to or not. I haven't mastered the skill of traveling with the weather, but I plan to work on it over the next few months. Assuming I don't get tased by a paranoid fellow traveler. Or yelled at by a crazed homeowner who thinks the street in front of their house belongs to them.  Or sideswiped by a semi. Or bled dry by car repairs and dental work. Or shamed into nonbeing by my so-called friends. 

Resisting and persisting in slow motion

The theme of the week is persist and resist. Persist at the personal my life sucks and then I die level, resist at the existential cosmic no kings very bad hell bummer level. Maybe I shouldn't try to make a distinction. If the planet goes belly up, whining about persisting at the personal level is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

I tried to find another metaphor but I'm not finding my words today. Uh-oh, stroke, you might say. TIA. High blood pressure. You might be right. More important, who or what can I blame? Too much salt. Not enough salt. Who knows, who cares. Words are meaningless in this new era of name stuff anything you want. Want to call it the Gulf of Your Name Here? Go ahead. Mapmakers might protest, but who cares about tradition?  When elephants are in charge, vegetation is shredded, water sources are fouled, and everyone get trampled in the end.  

I'm sure I'd feel better if the weather weren't so volatile. Welcome to my head. Wherever I am, there it is, rattling like a tin can full of tiny angry pebbles. I hope I can hit the road for a while next week. I'm getting tired of trolling the same old neighborhoods for stealth parking, pretending I am a local (in fact, I was, once) and hoping nobody will see me getting up to pee in my jar in the middle of the night.

Speaking of persisting, I met a unicorn this week: my new PCP. Dr. Mario was nice, but he looked worn out, and it was only 9:30 in the morning. He reviewed my meds and suggested some referrals, but he didn't ask many questions about me. Like, what do you do, what's your life like? I filled out some forms before the appointment, answering questions like how often last week did you feel depressed, and how often does someone verbally or physically abuse you. Wow. Compared to some, I'm living a life of luxury, apparently. In my experience, doctors don't read those forms. They like to hear it from the dying horse's mouth. So the fact that he didn't ask about me made me think he was too tired to care.

One of the mark-a-box questions was yes or no, do you live in an insecure housing situation (e.g., with a friend or with family, in a tent, in a car, on the street, etc.). I could have lied but then what? Sooner or later, I'd be outed as a nomad (i.e., a person who pretends they live in a vehicle by choice so they can live a life of freedom and frugality), and then I would have to explain, justify, defend . . . Ho hum. 

So now it's in my medical records, if anyone bothers to read those forms. I can't imagine how anyone could. The forms I filled out with a Bic pen were essentially unreadable. The line spacing was crammed, the fonts were miniscule, and there wasn't enough room to write much, let alone explain, justify, or defend. 

Nobody cares, anyway. Healthcare professionals don't have time to care. Healthcare professionals are underpaid and underappreciated. Who can blame them for phoning it in? I bet they are still waiting for their award for surviving on the front lines of COVID. They don't realize the rest of us have moved on to the next existential crisis. (That would be the assault on democracy, in case you are keeping track of crises).

Good news, I now have a stronger medication for high cholesterol, so I'm sure the thing that will kill me will not be a stroke or heart attack. It will probably be the daily grinding realization that people (and when I say people, I am referring to Americans) are too stupid to live and will take everyone and everything down with them when they self-destruct. What a waste, but nothing lasts forever.  

Meanwhile, we persist and resist, if we are able and inclined. 

There's lots of room in the handbasket for you. See you in hell.

Normalizing the nomadic lifestyle

Spring in Portland is an on-again off-again phenomenon. Now you see it, now you don't. Now it's sunny, oops, now it's raining. A couple nights ago I parked in a great spot under a tree. Wind came up overnight. Around midnight I heard a monstrous din on the roof of my car. Bam! The roof rack rang like the Liberty Bell. I lay awake wondering if the tree was going to fall on my car and crush me into my foam mattress. 

In the morning, I discovered a pine cone on the roof, and not a big one. Maybe there were more pinecones, maybe even a small branch that flew off when I drove to the park to make coffee. Wind, is what I'm saying. Sun, rain, wind . . . This is spring in Portland.

I grew up in it, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. The weather was the main reason I moved to Tucson. The weather in Tucson is the main reason I'm back in Portland. You see how this works? No place is perfect. I'd have to be driving all the time to stay in good weather. Spring just sucks, no matter which way you look at it. Sure, it's a welcome respite from winter, but the volatility of spring is hard for me. My head won't settle.

Volatility seems to be the theme of the week. The weather, my head, the stock market . . . Ho, hum, who cares about money, la la la. Nothing I can do about it, and we shouldn't trouble our heads over it anyway. Best to leave it to the experts who obviously know better. 

Speaking of knowing better, some of my family members apparently blame me for the housing shortage. I don't know why they give me so much credit. I'm not a land developer. I've never owned anything but a series of used cars. Not a house, not a condo, not even a shed. As far as housing goes, I tend to think of myself as powerless over supply and demand. 

I know I'm in the doghouse with my family member when I text a picture of a walking path in the Sandy River Delta and they write back, "Playing tourist?" What do I do with that? Almost every text I send receives a reply ending in "Any leads on housing?" I understand my family member is concerned, and I'm trying to have empathy for their fear. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I'm done trying to live my life so they don't have to be afraid.

I know I've said this before. 

Speaking of getting old, I went hiking in a nature park I love and dropped my straw hat. A friend phoned me while I was walking, and as we were talking, the sun came out, and I realized my hat had departed my pocket. I retraced my steps, holding the phone over my head when I went into hollows and behind hills. Eventually I'd walked the entire route twice. I headed back to the parking lot. Some kind soul had found my hat and left it on a rock where I would see it. I probably dropped it the moment I left the restroom. 

I knew the hat would return to me. So many things do. But sometimes the Universe decides someone else needs the item more than I do, no matter how much I cherish it. Every time I walk away from my car, I prepare myself for the possibility that it won't be there when I get back.

The reason I mentioned the dropped hat is because when my mother was alive, I learned to follow one step behind her so I could retrieve the things she dropped. Used tissues, of course, but also sunglasses, hats, gloves, scarves, cigarette lighters, and cigarette pouches. Purses. Those little dealies that can hold a pack of cigarettes. I was grateful that someone put my hat where I could find it. And I still feel chagrin that I dropped it in the first place.

On the bright side, I got double my steps in that day. 

I often wonder what I did to create this strange situation. I don't feel responsible for the lack of affordable housing. I know many seniors are in the same boat. Car, I mean. I wonder if I should seek a communal housing situation, maybe a big house of five other women. We'd share a couple bathrooms, share the cooking and cleaning, maybe give each other rides places, and watch old movies together. 

If that sounds like fun to you, you are not like me. To me, that sounds like utter hell. Even one roommate was too much for me. When I imagine the amount of time and energy it would take to find and maintain that type of housing situation, I am more certain than ever that being a nomad (i.e., living in this car) is the right choice for me.

Maybe someday I will stop feeling ashamed and talk about this as if it were a normal lifestyle. Maybe if more people knew that old ladies were living in their cars because the rent is too damn high, the Section 8 lists are closed, and the only way to get an apartment in senior housing is for someone to die, well, maybe then society would see that there are many ways to survive and even thrive while living an alternative lifestyle. 

Meanwhile, I skulk around the streets, troll for parking places, and wait for my appointment at the DMV. Once that happens, I can get my car registered and plated and get the heck out of Dodge. Well, I drive a Dodge, so I don't mean that literally. It's a figure of speech. You know what I mean.

On my way to hell in a handbasket. See you there.

Welcome to Oregon, now go away

When did the Department of Motor Vehicles turn into such a bureaucratic pithole? I've been to several DMV locations in the greater Portland metro area. They all seem designed to accomplish one goal: make customers wait so long they finally give up and go away. Why did I think Oregon would welcome me back? How naive. It's almost as if they resent me for leaving. Every DMV face (with one exception, the woman who took the photo for my new license) expressed the same sentiment: We told you so, loser. 

That's me transferring my resentment onto the hapless, abused, long-suffering employees behind the glass walls at the DMV. The first day, I walked in, thinking, okay, maybe a couple hours to get my license transferred and my car registered. Ha. Some locations let you make an appointment online. Walk-ins are "standby" customers, meaning you receive service after the appointments are served. My ticket was S171. The leaderboard said next to be served: S30. I'm not good at math, but even I could tell there was a long line of people ahead of me. 

I hung around for a while, then went out to my car and ate breakfast. When I went back inside an hour later, they were serving S60. It was about 2:00 p.m. The office closed at 5:00 p.m. I gave up and made an appointment. The only appointment I could get that wasn't a month out was at a far-away location for two days hence. I grabbed it.

The kind, patient GPS Lady led me to the place. I got there an hour before it opened, two hours before my appointment. Walk-ins were already lined up on the sidewalk in cold, windy rain, waiting for the doors to open. 

About 45 minutes after my appointment time, my number came up. A530. Yay. The guy behind the glass wall gave me a fake smile. It wasn't even noon. I could tell he was already fed up and burned out. I was able to apply to get an Oregon license (only $64, not a real ID because I didn't have two pieces of ID with a residence address), but I wasn't able to register my car because I didn't have the original title. Arizona doesn't print vehicle titles like Oregon does. I had the mistaken impression it could all happen online. Ha. Joke's on me again. So now I'm waiting for my Arizona title to arrive at my brother's house, so I can surrender it to Oregon and wait for a new title and license plates. 

I confess, there were moments I considered giving up. However, once you've started going over a waterfall, you cannot change your mind and paddle back upstream. In Oregon, your car registration and driver's license have to match. I'm either all in on Oregon, or it's back to Arizona, still with no permanent residence address, still not able to rent a mailbox anywhere.

It's cold here right now. It's a typical Portland spring: intermittently windy, rainy, and cloudy, with rare moments of blue sky. Day time temperatures are mid-50s to low 60s. Nights are just below 40 F. Early mornings are the worst. Waking up before the sun to frigid air is brutal. Getting up to pee in the night is no fun either. 

There are many places to park on the street for a minivan like mine. I blend. But I can't stay in one place anywhere. In Tucson, the nomads in town hang out in a huge parking lot by the bike path. Nobody hassles you when you put out your solar panels. When you get sick of traffic, you can drive an hour to get to BLM land and camp for free, work on your car, cook food, and enjoy the desert scenery with great cell signal for internet. There's nothing like that near Portland. I never thought I would miss Tucson. But for a person living in a vehicle, Tucson is Death Valley. Not possible. It's 90 F there this week, and it will only get hotter. Then monsoon, and the fun really begins. Been there, done that, turn around, don't drown. 

Portland has been overcast, rainy, and windy since I arrived last week. That means my vestibular issue is churning. It also means I can't recharge using solar. Without power, I can't run my fridge, so I put it into storage, and now my menu consists of items that don't require refrigeration. That means small portions I can eat in one sitting. Being vegetarian means no canned tuna or chicken, no chunky beef chili, no chicken noodle soup. Being sensitive to food additives and chemicals means no ramen, no cup o' noodles. I have a little ice chest, but getting small amounts of ice daily is a major hassle, not to mention expensive over time. A 7 lb bag of ice is only a few dollars, but I have to dump most of it on the ground. 

Yesterday I traded four hours of gasoline taking a peaceful trip up the Columbia River Gorge to recharge my power stations. It was a nice drive, but it would have required another four hours to get to 100% power. In Tucson, I could drag my power stations into the mall, one at a time, to recharge at the counter where the unhoused plug in their phones. The mall here has only USB ports, no AC outlets. I did a little reconnaissance to find an accessible outlet. I found one by a bench across from Annie's Pretzels. Another adventure to look forward to while I wait for my documents to arrive in the mail.

This is such a strange way to live.

Being in Portland, the city of my birth, brings up a lot of grief. Certain parts of town remind me of things I'd rather not think about. The death of my father, my cat, my mother. The schools, the parks, the roads. The city looks different, after four years away, but some things are the same: the weather, the potholes, the unhoused.

I don't regret leaving Portland. I do regret moving to Arizona, but now that I'm here, I appreciate what Arizona gave me. In Arizona, I was one of an armada of nomads. There were license plates from everywhere there, Minnesota, Michigan, Montana, on sprinter vans, motorhomes, and trailers. Snowbirds are a thing. Maybe as summer approaches, Portland will start to fill up with nomads from Arizona, and I won't feel like such an outsider. Maybe next winter, I'll sprout a pair of wings and follow the sun south, back to the desert.

Meanwhile, I lurk in the neighborhoods I grew up in, sniffing out parking spots that aren't directly in front of someone's house, on streets that aren't too busy or populated by broken down RVs and tent cities, where I can blend in and pretend I belong in that place, just another neighbor, just another visitor staying with a friend for a night, to be gone at daybreak. 

I'm a character in my own novel

I've been dividing my residence between the Homewood Suites parking lot in Tucson and the BLM Ironwood National Monument land just west of Marana. It's a peaceful hour-long drive between my two residences, meandering through open range, cotton farms, housing developments, road construction, and suburbs, culminating in the land of the unhoused near the Rillito River. I walk on the bike path almost daily when I'm in town. When I'm out in the desert, I mostly hunker in my car out of the wind and blazing sun, only venturing outside to rescue my solar panels when they blow over.

A few minutes ago, a swarm of bees flew past me. I heard them coming before I saw them. I don't think I have ever seen bees swarm. It's easy to forget this is wild land. Although I was in the city when I saw a coyote burst out of the brush and dash across a six-lane highway. It looked confused and a bit desperate as it ducked through the parking lot of a medical clinic. I lost sight of it after that. Wild things come into the city. When I lived in the mobile home park, I saw lots of coyotes, javelinas, myriad birds, a bobcat, a baby rattlesnake, frogs, armies of jackrabbits, and one tarantula. In Portland, we had possums, raccoons, worms, and birds.

My vestibular system tells me when the weather is changing, which is just about all the time. Today I predicted something, and now the wind has picked up. Dust obscures my view of the mountains. I've come to appreciate the rugged beauty of the desert. It's spectacularly unforgiving. Every plant tries to kill you as you walk by. 

I'm making plans to move my stuff to a yet-to-be-determined storage unit somewhere in the Portland metro area. After I get all my documentation lined up the way DMV and the car insurance company prefer, I can get a virtual mailbox service and continue to live life until the next crossroad takes me in a new direction.

I try to approach each person with compassion, unless they are wielding a chainsaw. Then I have a choice to make:  get out of the way or stand up and risk losing a limb or worse. I don't want my blood to be spilled for no reason. I want it to mean something. As if somehow I'll be able to see what unfolds after I'm gone. Ha. I fall into the trap of believing mortality is for others, not for me. 

Meanwhile, I'm learning to handle the nomadic life with ease and grace. Or I was, until the USPS decided it needed to crack down on fentanyl dealers sending product through the mail. Darn, that was a great second job. Oh, well. Now I have one job, ostensibly ushering dissertator wannabes through the dissertation process at a for-profit higher education institution based in the Midwest. I can't seem to get away from for-profit higher education, even though I believe it is pretty much an invention of the devil, designed to suck money from the pockets of people who can't afford it. In the case of my employer, the tuition rates are surprisingly affordable, which means the company sucks money out of the pockets of its contingent faculty. 

Did I mention flies? Got a lot of those. A few honeybees, too, which I try not to kill. I rescued a moth last night. The sky in the desert is a light show of stars. I haven't seen a sky of stars since I was a kid.  

I'm finally making some progress on my book, the third book of the trilogy I began several years ago. This one has been much harder to write than the first two, mainly because I wrote the first two by following the characters wherever they led me. If you want my advice, and I'm sure you do, I recommend you work out a deal with your characters. Give them some free rein, but don't let them drag you away from the outline. When you get to the final book in your series, you will have to wrap up all the loose ends you left hanging along the way. You won't get another chance, and if you let your characters run wild, they will trample your bleeding corpse and disappear over the hill, laughing.

I used to think my writing had to offer something pithy and meaningful. I wanted to write literary prose, use unusual words that make people crazy, and tell deep stories with profound moral lessons. You know, a book that will win literary awards, and maybe gain a review from the New York Times. Now I know that if you want to be a best selling author, all you have to do is write a romance novel that gets picked up by a director and made into a TV series. See, easy peasy.  

That is not the kind of writing I do, so I am not destined to be a best selling author. However, I love immersing myself in the lives of my nutty characters to see life through their eyes. Instead of trying to fence them in, I encourage them to run wild through the meadows. Because I write low-dread stories, they don't rip their clothes off as they tiptoe through the tulips. Neither do they stumble up on maggoty corpses when they take naps in the hollows of oak trees. My characters want what we all want: happiness, love, power, and lots and lots of money. 

Okay. Gotta go. A desert rat just ran under my car. That means I'll soon have a nest of babies eating the wires under my hood. 

Catch you next time.

The long strange trip is not over yet

This week I was reminded once again that there are penalties for being a nomad. The USPS, in an effort to stem the flow of drugs through the mail (they say fentanyl but I assume they really mean mifepristone), is requiring all people who rent mailboxes from mailbox companies to produce two pieces of ID that show a residential address, and the addresses have to match. I have neither. What that means is the mailbox I've rented since I moved to Tucson four years ago is now going to be closed at the end of the month. 

I wish the mailbox company would engage in some "good trouble" and stand up to these new requirements, but I can understand their desire not to be put out of business. They will be losing a customer, and I bet I'm not the only one. However, I just renewed for a year last December, so I have eight months left on my box lease. They knew this was coming, and they waited until now to notify me. And here's the bummer: no refunds. Yep. They lose a customer, and I'm out about $250. Plus, soon I will have no mailing address.

What a strange trip this has become. I am having a hard time assimilating the ups and downs of the past ten years. Well, twenty years. Hell, get real. My entire life has been a series of . . . I don't know what to call them. Self-centered fearful choices might be one way to describe them. Safe roads rejected in favor of the most weedy overgrown crumbling cliff-edge trails I could find. 

In other words, I did this to myself.

That's one way to look at it. 

On the other hand, I did not create a shortage of affordable housing. I did not create the tendency for some members of society to ignore, exploit, or abuse senior citizens. I certainly did not vote for the human chainsaws tearing the US democracy into bloody bits. It must be a heady feeling to believe you can destroy a 250-year-old democracy on a whim, and do it in three months. It's a remarkable feat, a breathtaking demonstration of what happens when circumstances place wealth and power in the hands of insane megalomaniacs. I can destroy things, too, but I'm a lot slower. 

Some of my crankiness might be attributable to Keppra rage, but not all of it. There are lots of other reasons to be irritated. I've had some moments of irritation over the past week after compulsively watching the independent media channels I've started following. I know what you are going to say: Carol, why do you watch that stuff? It's almost like you want to be bludgeoned. Almost like you enjoy your simmering rage. Could be you are correct. I always choose the road less traveled. I'm sure you never feel that way.

It's not just meds and politics. Weather is pissing me off, too. Wind and rain are the product of air pressure changes. That means when there's weather, I'm dizzy all the time. My head is like an unbalanced washing machine stuck on spin cycle pounding the wall and making dishes fall out of your cupboards. That would annoy just about anyone.

Consider me annoyed. 

Meanwhile, I'm relocating my domicile to a place where I have the documentation I need to rent a new mailbox. That would be my brother's address. So, back to Oregon I go to become an Oregon resident again, before I hit the road for parts unknown, waiting for the affordable housing shortage to end. 

Wherever you go, there you are

Wherever you go, there you are. It's an old adage, but a good one. Wherever I go, I can't escape myself. I keep trying, but my body goes with me. That means my noisy brain, my vertigo, my aching hip, and my cranky attitude, it all comes along for the ride. There's no escaping the prison, until the final moment when the curtain comes down. Whoever said the body is a temple was clearly having an out of body moment.

I'm writing this from the desert in Quartzsite, Arizona, parked near (but not too near) several large 5th wheel trailers, a toy hauler, and a couple giant houses on wheels, aka motorhomes. The wind just kicked up again. It's been crazy windy the past few days, which corresponds to the turmoil in my vestibular system, so that is how I know I have a new job: barometric expert, not to be confused with a barista, which is more common and way more useful. All I can do with my special barometric prediction ability is predict when the freight train in my head is heading downhill toward a crash. What am I talking about? Thanks for asking. Wind occurs from clashing air pressure systems. Changes in air pressure wreak havoc on my 8th cranial nerve.

I can hear you saying, Carol, what the heck are you talking about? Sorry. I got lost in my mind for a minute.

Speaking of crashes, how about that democracy? Two presidents walk into a bar. It's an old joke. Plus, it's so funny how you don't know what you have til it's gone. Someone ought to write a song about that.

Meanwhile, even a poor homeless person like me (what I mean is, even a broke nomad like me) can't live peacefully under the radar. My mailbox people notified me last week that I need to update the form that allows them to receive my USPS mail. I filled out the form four years ago when I rented the box, so, no problem, right? Well, the USPS has decided that in order to weed out the . . . undocumented? . . . I guess, so the undocumented won't sneak a ballot in a forbidden slot? . . . the USPS now must have two forms of ID with matching residential addresses.

I'm currently between addresses.

I will have to assume my thinking position, which is flat on my back with a pillow over my face. I'm sure by the time I wake up, I will have figured out my strategy.

I'm reminded frequently that it costs a lot to be poor. Everything costs more, takes longer, and feels worse, compared to being traditionally housed. I see only two options: get a job and/or share housing. Given rental prices anywhere in the West and Southwest, I would have to make at least $25 per hour just to earn enough money to pay rent and income taxes. That's assuming I don't eat. And that someone would hire me. And that I wanted to work until I die, to pay rent in a place I don't belong. As far as rooming with someone, , no thanks, been there, done that, survived it, it was grand, don't want to do it again.

Now I'm just rambling. Sorry. The wind is unsettling. The state of the world is unsettling. Some people have the fortitude to unplug, but I find myself compelled to watch the disintegration of civilization. I knew it would happen, but somehow I thought it would be speedier than this. Slow motion train wrecks look so cool on TV but living through one is really tedious. Just crash, already. Let whoever is left pick up the pieces and carry on.

No, we have to have the Sam Peckinpah version of the end of the world. The blood, gore, insults, and humiliations are taking forever, like a Korean romantic comedy. Why make sixteen episodes when you can tell the story in six? Boy meets girl, on again off again, bim, bang, boom, happy ever after. Why drag out the drama when you know how it's going to end? Let's just have World War III and get it over with, the war to end all  stupid human civilization, once and for all. The ratings will suck, but maybe we can beam it out into space. The Muskrats on Mars might enjoy it.

I wish I could see the faces on the aliens who come to excavate Earth. I'm sure they'll be, like, what idiots ruined this lovely place? They'll spend decades trying to decipher the religious significance of plastic. 

Once again, we're on our way to hell in a handbasket. Umbrella drinks all around. See you there.

Where do we go from here?

Greetings from sunny Scottsdale. Yes, I'm back in paradise, walking the dog, taking out the trash, and pretending I'm a friend of the family and not the hired help. Am I a guest who happens to get paid $25 a day to feed and walk the dog? Am I just here for dog love? It's a curious conundrum I don't spend much time contemplating. What's the point? It's great to have dog love, and did I mention there's a tub?

Meanwhile, I am getting some writing done. The third book of this trilogy is not obedient. The characters are determined to develop themselves, as if I have nothing to do with their goals and dreams. The plot stopped thickening about thirty pages in. Now it's so thin, it's running off in all directions like the coffee I keep knocking over in my car. Just like the drips of stale coffee, I keep finding loose ends, blind alleys, and pointless panoramas. Who cares if my hero steps in a bucket? Is that necessary? Or is it just a joke that means nothing to anyone but me? 

In the end, I have to write for me. If I don't find it funny and entertaining, then what's the point? I'm not writing to impress anyone. I'm sure not writing to earn money. I'm sad my one and only fan has been contending with the L.A. wildfires. She may not have a house anymore. It's unlikely she will be replacing the previous books she bought from me, let alone buying this new one, if I ever finish it. Still, it's heartwarming to know I once had a fan.

I have a mental map of my life. A gold star proclaims "you are here." The path behind me is unchangeable but blessedly hazy. I remember snapshots of humilations, regrets, and unfulfilled dreams but not much else, not without photos to prompt me. The path in front of me might be predictable, if past performance were actually a predictor of future results. However, if you have ever invested your IRA in small cap funds, you've seen the disclaimer. You may not have read it, assuming the market would always rise, but the warning label is there. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. You could lose everything. Then again, you could win the lottery. Just because my past trajectory suggests disasters will compound in my future doesn't mean there aren't other possibilities. 

For example, my writing might get discovered by someone who has enough presence to influence others to buy my books. I know it's not likely, especially given that TikTok is on life support and possibly dead. I have a Ph.D. in marketing, after all. The first challenge for any new product, even before being findable, is to generate awareness of its existence. My books are findable, but nobody knows they exist. It stands to reason: Readers have to know about my books before they might consider buying my books. Sadly for me, I am a social media avoider. I'm also an extreme introvert. Therefore, my only hope is magic.

I am not retreating into magic for the next four years, in case you are wondering. I am keeping my options open. I might write postcards, I might submit exhortations to certain politicians to stop being assholes, I might drive my minivan to Washington and sit outside the Capitol Building with a sign. I'm not sure what the sign would say, but the internet will help me find an appropriate meme. With any luck, I'll make the national news, especially if I self-immolate. If I were young, attractive, and persistent, like Greta, no worries. However, I'm old, wrinkled, and tired. Nobody cares. It would take a seriously drastic action to make the front page of the New York Times. I'm not sure self-immolation would actually be newsworthy. Everyone would claim it's AI and Photoshop. Nothing is real anymore, not even self-sacrifice.

Plus, if I did something that final, I'd miss the show that is coming. Like a typical reader, I want to keep turning the pages to see what happens. The ending might be disappointing, maybe a bit bloody, but sometimes it's the plotlines and characters that keep me going. 

Tips for coping with reality

Now that I live in my car, I'm a new person. It's as if all the years of art school, business school, teaching, editing, taking care of my mother are artifacts of someone else's life. Who am I now? That's always a useful question to ask, if you want to do a reset in the here and now. I'm not normally interested in being in the here and now (as if I had a choice), but as a seeker, I always enjoy figuring out how to reframe my current situation so it doesn't make me insane.

I still have moments of surreality. The sordid necessities of living in a vehicle tend to outshout my curiosity about understanding it. Worries such as, do I have enough trash bags, water, wipes, and alcohol take over worries about more esoteric considerations (like who am I? Where did I come from, and how soon can I go back?). Mostly, I've come to accept my strange lifestyle. (I know you are going to say, Carol, shelter solutions exist: you can always share housing, get a [real] job, marry a rich person, win the lottery, move to another country . . . any number of possibilities, so quitcher whining.) I will not give your comment any energy by responding, except to say, where did you come from and how soon can you leave?

I hope vehicle dwelling is temporary, but I know it's real. 

Right now, I'm parked on Bureau of Land Management land outside of the town of Quartzsite. You might wonder, why there, Carol? Thanks for asking. Quartzsite is the winter roost for vanlifers, who drive many miles to escape the snow, ice, and cold rain back at home. The winter gathering started a few days ago and will run through the week. I'm not a very social person, but I do enjoy being around other people who are doing the exact thing I'm doing: living in a vehicle. Some are in fancy motorhomes and travel trailers, some are in posh sprinter vans, many are in minivans, and I even saw one intrepid nomad who lives in her Smart Car. I'm going to stop complaining about my lack of space. Compared to that car, I live in a mansion. 

The main thing I like is that nobody here thinks I'm weird, bad, or wrong. In fact, everyone here supports, applauds, and celebrates this nomadic lifestyle. Some are part-timers, some are full-timers, but we all have one thing in common: We live life on wheels. 

I'm a helping person, so in case you are thinking about downsizing into a home on wheels, here are a few tips. 

• If you use something, put it back right away. Odds are, if you put it down somewhere, you will never find it again. If you lose something, check where it's supposed to be (and check again, no, I mean, really check). If it's not there, check the trash. Check under your blankets. Check the space between your mattress and the wall. If you don't find it, you either dropped it at Walmart or you're sitting on it.
• Resign yourself to the idea that you will buy things repeatedly because (a) you forgot you already bought it or (b) you forgot where you put it. 
• Don't be alarmed if sometimes you just sit there, wondering what to do next. 
• If you cook with a portable gas stove, stand upwind, use a wind screen, and don't spray water on hot olive oil if you want to keep your eyebrows. 
• Give some serious thought to the question, how many pillows do I really need?
• Expect to pay three to four times as much as you should have spent on your build as you come to accept how little you really need to have a healthy useful mobile life. Get used to going to Goodwill. You won't have time or space to sell your castoffs on eBay. 
• Get more trash bags, wipes, and paper towels than you think you could possibly need. You will need them. And dump your trash quickly and often, or be prepared to smell poop all night.

There you have it. My tips on surviving life on wheels. Yes, there are constraints to living in a small space, but the upside is if you don't like where you are, you can drive away. Of course, wherever you go, there you are, but that's a different post.

Hope your new year is off to a good start.

Cheers from the Hellish Handbasket.

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. 

Outer solar system or bust

When I was an adolescent, I shared a room with my sister. A large black fly got in through the window and hung around. We named it Fred. Fred was big and slow, and he didn't make a mess. Fred was a perfect pet. One day our father visited us in our room after work. He was still wearing his senior trooper uniform and tall boots. Fred made the mistake of flying by, and our father clapped his hands. In a moment, Fred was flattened. 

"Dad, that was Fred!" we cried. Dad looked both surprised and sheepish. He probably thought he was doing us a favor. I don't recall if we had a funeral. I'll have to ask my sister. If she's still talking to me.

Despite misgivings from family, I'm firmly committed to continuing my epic roadtrip. After Portland, I headed east and then I turned north, hoping to avoid the heat wave that was coming to the west. I passed through Spokane and then crossed the border into Idaho. I spent the night in Coeur d' Alene. After the artsy energy of Spokane, Coeur d'Alene felt lacking for some reason, or maybe it was just the uneasy night I spent alone in a Fred Meyer parking lot. In any case, I didn't feel a connection to that city, so onward I went. I crossed the Idaho panhandle, winding through spectacular forests, thinking, oh boy, one tossed cigarette and we are literally toast. Note to self: avoid living in a fire zone. And on a flood plain. And while you are making a list, try to avoid earthquake fault lines, tsunami zones, tornado alley, and gulf coast hurricanes. I guess that leaves Corvallis.  

I made it as far as Missoula, MT, before the wildfire smoke in western Montana caught up with me. I checked the smoke map and saw that I was caught in a eastward drifting plume. I liked Missoula. Charming college town. I'd never live there in the winter, not being a cold weather person, but in the summer, it would be a great retreat from the Arizona heat. I would have stayed longer if not for the smoke. After two days, I left Missoula and kept going east, hoping to outrun the smoke plume, if not the heat. 

I found a place to park in Bozeman that felt pretty good. In the morning, smoke obscured the view of the mountains. My lungs and eyes were burning. I had planned to stay another night, but I was more interested in breathing, so I filled up the gas tank and hit the road, thinking, Billings, maybe Billings. 

The smoke map showed Billings on the edge of the smoke plume. Argh. I'd asked the long-suffering GPS lady to lead me to a mall, and she delivered. I parked in the lot outside the main entrance and checked the smoke map. I could have gone indoors and breathed fresh air-conditioned air along with a thousand other pairs of lungs. But what about after the mall closed? Where would I go? Assuming I wanted to avoid spending $150 on a motel room. 

It didn't take long to figure out Billings was not going to be safe, so I got more gas and resumed my route on 94 east. A few hours later, I fetched up in Miles City, Montana. The sky was clear when I got here at about 1:00. The temperature was a toasty 92°F, hotter than the Oregon coast, but not as hot as Phoenix. 

Now I'm sitting on a side street around the corner from Walmart, parked in the shade, waiting for the sun to go down, and wondering if I could get in trouble for transporting flies across state lines. 

Yes, I've unintentionally picked up a few winged hitchhikers on my journey. Usually my windows are closed when I'm driving to avoid losing my nice cool AC air. However, when I stop, when it's hot, I have to open the windows or run the risk of melting in my own juices. Right now my door is open and I've given up the fight. I've been overrun by flies. Not biting flies, not giant cluster flies, not slow and lazy flies. Just zippy little dudes curious to see what new smells and tastes have come into their territory. Yum! I have given up trying to shoot them with my only weapon:  a little plastic spray bottle of 70% rubbing alcohol. They seem impervious, and I'm almost out of ammo. It's hard to type with flies crawling on my arm and dive bombing my head. I don't know why I think my life is more important than theirs, but I'd still like to murder them. Sadly, they outnumber me, and they are fast. If only I had wings. Or some better ammo. 

Speaking of wings, I'm on my epic roadtrip, as I mentioned, and it seems some of my family aren't exactly happy with my bid for freedom. My theory is that they are envious because I'm free to travel and they are not. I'm trying not to let their fear and criticism stop me from enjoying my adventure. I imagine a rubberband stretched between me and the west coast. The further I push eastward, the tighter the band stretches. 

"Why don't you go back to Oregon?" family said.

I said, "What's in Oregon?"

"What if you get sick? What if you break down?"

"Medicare and road side assistance," I replied.

"What do you want?" they said. "What are you running away from?"

Those questions flummoxed me, so I consulted a friend to help. "Adventure and nothing," she texted.

I got back on the other text thread. "Adventure and nothing," I typed into the text window.

After some more back and forth during which I felt the box around me tightening, I finally texted, "Why don't you want me to have my adventure?"

After a few beats, the message came back: "Go, have your adventure! Have fun!" The subtext, I think, if I'm reading the faint smudges between the lines correctly is, go, have your adventure, even though I'm stuck here. Go, have fun, even though I'm not having any. 

I almost caved. I almost turned around, partly to assuage the fears of family, and partly because the smoke was getting to me. I started getting scared. Even though I know only the courageous cross the Continental Divide, doubt and fear cluttered my mind. 

Then I thought, when am I ever going to have another chance like this? If not now, when? I didn't get my adventure when my family member got theirs, gallivanting overseas. Did I worry? Of course! But I never said, don't go, better go back to Oregon where it's safe. I spent five increasingly intense years taking care of our mother. Five years during which I was blissfully unaware of all the physical maladies that would soon plague me. (Well, except for the vertigo, which started in 2015, but certainly all my other infirmities weren't yet on my radar.) 

Let's face it, sooner or later, if we live long enough, we become the primary adult caregivers in our own lives. I feel old age breathing down my neck. Decrepitude, dementia, and broken hips are just around the corner. Soon I won't be able to attempt a journey like this one. So, let the adventure continue! Next stop: outer solar system, or the Enchanted Highway, whichever comes first!

Finding myself in the now

One thing I've disccovered about living in a car is that my environment requires me to be present in the moment. Being present has never been my preference. In fact, I've gone to great lengths to avoid being present. For many years, I was a bystander in my own life. Back then, I didn't realize how great I had it—I was born in the right place (the U.S.) in the right time (the late 1950s) to loving if mostly out-to-lunch parents. I went to a mediocre public school, learned right from wrong (although I frequently chose wrong), and I had the right color skin (pale, prone to freckles). I was lucky on so many levels, but all I could see was what I lacked. In my self-centered distress, I did whatever I could to check out. 

Now, living in my car, I can't check out of anything. That is a byproduct of mobile living. I drive a lot. Checking out while I'm driving is not wise. About fifteen years ago, I had a dissociative episode while driving at night in rainy fog, and it freaked me out, but good. I did not know if I was driving a car or snuggled at home in bed. I wasn't sure I was conscious. I was not even sure I existed. I made it to the Christmas party, but that experience left a mark. Now I make sure I am parked before dark. 

Now-ness is physical. I am reminded of the physicality of my existence every time I pee in a jar or poop in a plastic bag. There is no handle to flush away the bioreality of my disgustingly repetitious human systems. I live in a perpetual hazmat zone. 

Preparing food is a Tetris game. There isn't enough room in this small space to lay out everything I need all at once. To use that thing, I have to move this thing. Everything happens on the bed, well, I think of it as a couch. The dry things come out of ziploc bags. Those must be stowed in their cubby before I can add the wet things. Adding blueberries is easy. Apples are a little more complicated, requiring a chopping board and a knife. Everything has a place, and everything has to go back in its place the moment I'm done with it, otherwise I will cave under a tsunami of stuff. The things that don't have places clutter up the aisle. I hate that. I'm gradually paring my possessions down to essentials, like a hiker packing to trek the PCT. 

On the bright side, I'm learning the beauty of now. I think it's hilarious. Now-ness is the temple of meditators, not of senior nomads like me. Well, I should speak for myself. It could be that all other senior nomads spend an hour meditating on their yoga rug before they hit the road. Not me. When I wake up, usually it's time to beat it, before some homeowner looks out their window and says, honey, that van is still there, do you think we should call the police? Sometimes I sleep at stores that allow overnight parking. I don't like the feeling of waking up to find my car surrounded by employee cars. I feel like a lazy bum. They are all in there working before dawn has cracked, and here I am rolled up in my blankets like a mole in a burrow, hidden (I hope) behind my homemade window covers. 

But this is where I am, in the now. It's confounding to be this present. I'm coping the way I always have, by pretending I'm not here, this isn't me, it's someone else living this bizarre life, dealing with the fallout of the structural shortage of affordable housing. 

The apartment manager I talked to last week said she was in the same boat. 

"I'm getting old," she said. "Sooner or later, I'll have to stop working. My apartment comes with this job. Where will I go then?"

"They need to build more affordable housing," I said. 

"They never will," she said. "They don't care about people like us. We don't matter."

I left feeling somewhat vindicated that I am not the only Debby Downer in the world, but also thinking, crap, I could be living in my car for a long time before my name bubbles to the top of a wait list somewhere. 

So, let me channel the optimist in me: I have a working car that should last a while (having spent $2,400 last week to make sure), I have money in the bank, and I have few obligations. I don't know how you would interpret these three facters, but to me, they all add up to one thing: road trip! 

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.