Surprises

It’s been a while. As many/all of you know, my plan was to insulate the van and finish the interior by around February, but I didn’t get done until May 7th. On May 8th I drove the winding backroads out through western Maryland and into West Virginia, then took a day to rest and go hiking in Dolly Sods Wilderness. My second day on the road, I drive the twisty-turny highway down through Charleston. West of that, sometime in the afternoon, the highway straightened out, and I hardly needed to steer anymore.

What am I going to do with my hands? I thought, astonished.

Since early January, I’d been either work-working or working on the van: typing, sawing, drilling, sanding, staining, sealing. I love my parents and am grateful to them for letting me stay at their place, for years while I paid off my grad school loans and for months while I worked on the van, but as the months went on, I felt like I had died and my time there was some kind of Tantalean afterlife. I was always about two weeks away from being done — then another two weeks, then another. And since the van isn’t an end in itself but a home in which I hope to live a different/better life, I felt like I was perpetually on the cusp of starting a new thing but would never actually start it. It was like I was watching myself at the event horizon of a black hole.

And like a black hole, it sucked.

Now that I was finally on the road in van v2, the possibility of stillness seemed overwhelmingly strange.

I should’ve taken up knitting, I thought.

Since May 8th, I’ve been working, readjusting, catching up, and figuring out how to live in the van here in Colorado, which is a little different than living in the van in Florida like I did last year. I took a week’s vacation. I’ve been writing a little. I’ve been walking a lot.

There are a lot of things I plan to write about in this space. But I’ll start with surprises.

I should not have been surprised that it took me four months to finish the van. But I was. Enough said about that.

I’ve been surprised by some of the things I’ve struggled with:

It’s hard to recycle. A Google Maps search for a coffeeshop turns up a hundred Starbucks, but a search for “recycling” gives you offices for the companies in charge of curbside pickup, old-car scrapyards, and county landfills. Public collection sites sometimes exist, but they’re not intuitive to find. In Leadville, where I stayed for a few weeks, I found the recycling dumpsters by sheer luck as I was driving by the high school football field.

I’d expected it to be a little difficult to find places to stay that have decent cell reception. The thing I didn’t expect (but should have) was how much time that process would take. Exploring backroads is pleasant to me, so until now, I’ve never thought of it as something that’s time-consuming. There have been a couple of times recently when I’ve spent two hours driving to a beautiful area with no cell reception, I need to drive another hour to try another spot, and the work that I need to do isn’t getting done.

I’ve also been surprised by the things that I haven’t struggled as much with:

I expected getting supplies to be an ongoing challenge. Planning and building van v1 last summer and not knowing how bad the pandemic would get or how long it would last, I was ready to carry a month’s worth of supplies: food, toilet paper, toothpaste, deodorant. I always had extra of everything just in case there were random shortages. I still have a gallon jug of hand sanitizer in my storage bench, plus about a year’s worth of tampons. Going to the grocery store still stresses me out, and I don’t go very often — maybe once a week or two — but everything I need is findable, at least so far.

I was expecting that I’d try to eat healthy and get more exercise once I was living in the van, but I wasn’t expecting it to actually have any noticeable effect. I’ve been in terrible shape the last few years, and it bums me out. But I’ve been trying to walk an hour or so every day, plus at least one short hike and one long hike during the week. I feel better and stronger than I did two months ago, and I’m slightly less flabby. A steep hill that left me gasping for breath when I first got to my campsite near Leadville was not all *that* difficult two weeks later. This is a very good surprise.

Surprise! The van stalled out on a bumpy forest service road, 20 miles from the main highway and 10 miles from any cell phone reception. Fortunately, most people who drive down these roads are really just there to camp/hike/fish and wouldn’t murder someone even if given the opportunity, so I was able to get rides down the road to make the necessary phone calls. After six hours of waiting and being super disappointed in AAA, I had the van towed 60 miles to a garage in Montrose. The tow truck driver was a super nice guy, and on the long drive he told me about how he found towing much more interesting than construction-material hauling, about the custom motorcycles that he was building for his friend and his son, about how we both enjoy the solitary rituals of waking up early, and about his struggles with PTSD and stress management after three tours in Iraq. I spent the night in the auto shop’s parking lot and was there when they opened the next day.

The problem was tricky to figure out, but one of the mechanics was really good at diagnostics and got it after several hours of process-of-elimination work. A wire connected to the ignition had a bit of bare metal sticking out of the connector, and as I bounced around on the road, the wire was swinging around under the dash, made contact with another piece of metal, shorted out, and blew the fuse to the van’s computer. The mechanics fixed the wire, replaced the fuse, and sent me on my way.

Three weeks later and 60 miles away from the site of my first breakdown, the van stalled out again. This time, I could re-start it, but it would stall out whenever I braked, so it probably wouldn’t be too safe to continue driving it through the mountains. I spent the night in a small trailhead parking lot by a river outside of Telluride, and in the morning I got towed back to the same garage in Montrose.

I also requested the same towing service, Ol’ Red’s, and was hoping I’d get the same driver again. But it was a different, much younger driver, who looked about eighteen and was accompanied by his girlfriend, who looked about sixteen. I watched as these two very young people worked together to raise my four-thousand-pound van onto a platform about four feet off the ground and secure it with chains for the sixty-mile ride. As we headed north, I told them about how I’d gotten a tow from their company a few weeks earlier with a very nice driver.

The girl in the front seat, who had been texting, paused. “That’s my dad,” she said.

Back at Performance Muffler, the brilliant diagnostic mechanic again spent a couple hours trying to figure out what the problem was. It turned out that the wiring to the van’s mass airflow sensor had sneakily worked itself half-unplugged, plus the fuel filter — something that should be changed every 30k miles or so — hadn’t been changed in about 300k miles, so it wasn’t working too well. Whoops.

The van has been running fine ever since, but I’ve discovered that electrical surprises are one of my least favorite kinds of surprises.

The national forest around McPhee Reservoir, just north of Dolores, isn’t a rugged landscape. It’s gently rolling hills, broken up by a few small canyons and covered in ponderosa pines and bushes. So it wasn’t surprising that the forest service allows ranchers to graze cattle there, but it was surprising that they allow full-grown bulls to wander around. Several times, when I was out for a morning walk, I encountered Trail Bulls. They were about six feet tall and ten feet long, with red eyes and muscles bulging beneath their hides. They did not seem inclined to move, and one time one growled at me. (Yes, I know it was technically a grunt, but it sounded like a growl.)

I can read horses well enough to know when one might act defensively or aggressively, and I can figure out when it’s safe to try and shoo that horse out of my way. But I don’t know cows (or bulls) at all. Would a bull move aside if I, say, yelled at it? Waved my hiking poles or my (red) backpack at it? I didn’t try it. Once I was able to circumnavigate a Trail Bull, but most of the time I just turned back.

This was before the second van breakdown, so I asked my young tow truck drivers if they had any experience with cattle (they did) and if it was possible to shoo a bull. They said the bulls should move out of your way if you yell or throw things at them, but I still don’t feel quite confident.

I’m not surprised to encounter people on the trails. But I am surprised that I’ve enjoyed some of these encounters. During the pandemic, I would get anxious when I saw other people out walking: were they wearing a mask? Would they keep their distance or try to pass too close? Probably half the people I passed seemed to share those concerns, so it wasn’t as if I was doing a lot of chatting on hiking trails. But now, especially as I push myself to go slightly longer distances, it’s interesting to encounter people. We both think: what are you doing out here?

A couple weeks ago, I met a man who had through-hiked the 160-mile Ozark trail and hoped to do the 300-mile Colorado Trail in a few years, when he’ll be in his early fifties. He warned me that he had spotted what he thought was a mountain lion near the trailhead, and had seen tracks. He told me about his woodworking hobby, how he liked to visit construction sites where the workers had cleared trees, find a good section of tree trunk and give it a second life. He turned off the trail to get back to the campsite where his wife and kids were making breakfast, and I kept going up towards a high pass between two mountains. The trail was on the steep side, and since I was a little tired and my legs were slightly sore, it was more than I’d bargained for.

As I was sagging, standing on the trail, a backpacker came up behind me. He was in his mid-sixties and dressed all in gray. We were moving at the same unspeedy pace — walk a little, rest a little, repeat — so he offered to walk with me up to the high point. I forget his name, which wasn’t memorable, but his trail nickname is the Cajun Turtle. He’s from Louisiana and works as a travel nurse, and he got addicted to hiking when he was working in an ER in New England. He’d hiked the whole Appalachian Trail and parts of the Pacific Crest Trail, and now he was doing the whole Colorado Trail. He told me about some of the many places he’d been and how his trip had been going so far, and about his wife, who didn’t know much about camping when they met but was genuinely interested, enough to backpack 300 miles of the Appalachian Trail with him, but not as obsessed as he was, and how they’ve made that work. We walked together for about an hour and a half, and at the pass we stopped for a snack, keeping an eye on the pair of marmots who probably would have taken the food right out of our hands. I turned around and the Cajun Turtle kept going south, and he is out there still.

Another thing that should not be a surprise but always is: my bad habits and patterns are still with me. Living in the middle of the woods makes me feel calmer, but I’m not any kinder, more inwardly free, more ethical, or even more functional. I make terrible use of my time, procrastinating on things that I should do or actually enjoy doing, things that aren’t even that hard, until I’m an anxious, enervated mess. At least half of my thinking is overthinking. I eat slabs of cheese on a tortilla instead of making the vegetarian chili I have in my pantry.

It feels like it should be possible to travel to meet a different and better version of oneself, just like it feels like you should be able to drive back in time. The possibility of a different reality is so close, but for some reason, we can’t get to it directly. There’s only the slow work of trying to address my own bullshit: push forward and then rest, call out and then let go.

I’m lucky to be able to do it in a beautiful place.