I’m sorry, but if you say “I won’t work” to us creatures of Judeo-Christian heritage, it’s the same as saying “I’m shiftless.” And if you admit to teaching your children lazy ways, well God damn you. It gives us, who have the proof of might to justify the truth of our philosophy, the divine obligation to do our best to straighten you out. And if we can’t get you to see how terrific our kind of work is, or at least how wonderful it is to establish fiefdoms and build fences, well, we’ll just have to pick you up and dump you in a nasty place with no water and no cable television. In other words, if we can’t exploit you or your land profitably, then we’ll exile you.
This line of thinking is the reason that Native Americans own most of Palm Springs, California, real estate that ranks with the most valuable in the country. Who could have guessed, a century ago, that a barren stretch of desert would become as trendy as Fifth Avenue? Indians in Arizona are having an ultimate laugh next door to Scottsdale, where their once valueless reservation is juxtaposed to some of the city’s most exclusive residential developments.
And then there’s the casino phenomenon, which started with bingo parlors sixty miles east of Los Angeles, and recently culminated in an enormous gambling hall even closer than that to New York City. What was I saying about trying to ditch things you want to lose in secret places? Well, it doesn’t work with people any better than it does with nuclear waste. Hidden wrongs are cancers, quiet murderers that extinguish peace as utterly as open war.
Peace can be as elusive as freedom, I thought. If it can’t sprout in a single breast, it can never sweep the land. As we drove east once more, I knew my challenge was to find harmony within. I had to find a way “to fight no more forever.”
Chapter 9
A Sharp Stick in the Eye
Standing on the Plexiglas Elevator
I dreamed I looked down and found I wasn’t standing on anything. Below me was an abyss, a rock chasm with tiny white rapids crashing at the bottom. Suddenly a hand touched my shoulder. I turned to find a being—an angel?—standing beside me. He was smiling. “You haven’t noticed,” he said, “But you’re standing on a Plexiglas elevator. That’s why you haven’t fallen.” I looked at my feet. They were indeed supported by something hard, even if it was invisible. I knelt down and rapped the surface with my knuckles. The being seemed to be right. We were standing on a transparent platform.
“I hate heights,” I said.
The being laughed. “I followed you out here, you know. You’re the one who climbed up to the edge of the canyon and stepped off.”
“I did?” I asked incredulously. “You didn’t bring me here?”
“I followed you here, sweetheart,” he said. “I thought you might panic when you looked down. I thought you might not notice the elevator.”
And then he was gone. I stood on my invisible pedestal for what seemed like an eternity, afraid to move, afraid to break the spell. The air was cool and still, and if I listened carefully, I could just hear the sound of the river far below.
Suddenly an eagle flew past my head, and I awoke. Idaho was outside my window.
Telephones from the Future
Northern Idaho is like a store-bought cheesecake. It spends most of its life frozen, but when it thaws out, it’s so delicious you want to eat the whole thing at one sitting. It’s the same way Californians in the 1980s felt about Sandpoint and Coeur d’Alene and Sagle and Koetenai. They were sick of smog and traffic and commutes, and they could sell their houses for sums no one else in the country could believe. One ordinary split-level in a Los Angeles suburb could be swapped for a dream house and fifty acres on Lake Pend Oreille. Many of them failed to realize they were getting seven months of arctic winter thrown in for free.
We stayed at a small, oversubscribed campground in Coeur d’Alene. Driven by a desire to shoehorn as many tents, trailers, cars and campers into two acres as he could, the owner had split and re-split all his electrical connections. Black cords were draped over tree branches and dangled from telephone poles, a snarled black licorice web. We should have known better, but we plugged ourselves in. Meltdown occurred immediately, and our super-strength surge protector exploded in a puff of smoke. When I tried to make a telephone call, we discovered that our cellular system had been lobotomized by the same jolt. I suppose I should have been grateful that nothing else met its end, but I was an hour away from a deadline, and I wasn’t in a mood to be looking for silver linings.
And here’s why I’ll always have a soft spot for Coeur d’Alene. We drove into town to look for a fax machine or some other device by which I might achieve data transfer. The most imposing building was the tall resort hotel right on the edge of the lake. “Maybe they have a ‘business center’” said Mark. “And even if they don’t, we could have a drink in the bar.” Escapist it might have been, but it struck my fancy perfectly.
But we never made it to the bar. In the lobby, someone whose boots I’d like to kiss had installed telephones at a marble counter top overlooking the lake. You could sit in a comfortable chair and call anyone you wanted using a credit card. That alone would have been pleasant, but my mood soared when I discovered that these phones had been shipped to Idaho from the future. They had data jacks on the side.
I did not walk. I ran back to the Phoenix and packed up my laptop. One more time, I’d found a wormhole to cyberspace. One more time, I’d filed my story the good new-fashioned way.
As marvelous as the phones at the Coeur d’Alene resort were, they couldn’t erase the fact that our cellular system was now useless. It took four weeks, hundreds of dollars, and a very nice man in Spokane to get it working again.
“No Mortgage, No Gardener—You Must Save a Lot of Money”
Which brings me to another topic that never seems to go away. Wherever we roam, in the flesh or online, we never cover very much ground before we hear someone saying, “It must be great to be able to live so inexpensively. No mortgage, no gardener—you must save a lot of money.”
Well, here’s the truth of the matter. It’s a fact that if you have only a shoestring, it might stretch farther if you live in a trailer than just about any other style of housing. I mean, what are your choices? A cramped apartment? A motel that charges by the week? It’s not hard to find a trailer for practically nothing, and trailer parks are generally nicer places for kids and dogs than apartment houses. You might even be able to plant a garden.
Please note, however, that the one thing the trailer home does not provide is mobility. Shoestrings don’t stretch far enough to buy tires and gas and overnight camping spots. If saving money is your object, the wheels won’t turn.
In 1998, you could rent a spot in a decent trailer park for $150 a month. The same establishment charged $28 a night for those who wanted to stay just a day or two. That adds up to $840 a month, which is a pretty hefty markup.
If you stayed in one place, you could get telephone service for as little as $8 a month. Between long distance calls on pay phones and our cellular bill, we shelled out as much as $850, and that was before we started publishing a website. For a year, our cell bill never fell below $1500 a month.
Oh, but surely you’re unusual, I hear you say. Most people wouldn’t be so fanatically wedded to the notion of mobile communication. Well, it’s true. Most people aren’t. But most people are mobile only when they’re “on vacation,” or “on a trip.” It’s temporary. To see whether we truly qualify as fanatics, ask them to do without their home telephone for a month, and while you’re at it, take away their cable television and daily mail service.
Speaking of mail, it’s something else that’s usually free to the receiver if you stay in one spot. That changes when you’re all over the map. We had a shipping address in California. All our mail went to a company that held on to it until we told them via long distance telephone call where to send it. They packed it up, affixed new postage, and sent it off to catch us. If we wer
e moving fast enough, they’d have to send it “overnight.” Everything included, it cost us about $50 to get a week’s worth of mail. Sometimes it was more, if we were lucky enough to pay overnight shipping charges on a California telephone book or a fat mail order catalog. And sometimes it missed us, and we’d have to cough up the dough to do it all over again. And sometimes we’d get somebody else’s mail.
The vast disparity between living on a roll and “living in a trailer” makes for fascinating juxtapositions in campgrounds. In a city, the rich folks are cordoned off from the poor ones by carefully maintained lines of demarcation. You don’t find a shanty next door to a chateau. But in a trailer park, you can! A rolling Versailles might be parked right next to a decrepit camper with rotting tires. You can find the richest people in America parked cheek-by-jowl with the ones who have the least. You can peek over the dashboard and watch the Vanderbilts dine on bone china while watching a big screen TV. Ten feet away, Ma Kettle, Pa Kettle, and five little Kettles are outside eating beanie weenie out of a can.
We were Vanderbilts on a Kettle budget. Our vehicle looked like something a movie star might drive, but we had no idea how we’d pay our next phone bill. Our income was practically nonexistent, but nobody looking at us would have guessed.
Because we weren’t poor. We were too overprivileged to qualify, even when our pockets were empty. We were rich, even though we ate beanie weenie and wore socks with holes in them.
All of which makes me wonder. Were we rich, and pretending to be poor? Or were we poor pretending we were rich? Are appearances deceiving, or are they dead giveaways?
Once, when we were lost in a maze of narrow streets in Alexandria, Virginia, two men in worn jackets and dirty trousers approached us. It was a cold night, and the temperature was dropping. The men had pulled their collars up around their ears. “We need money to stay in a hotel,” the taller one said. We had just been wondering the usual, how to buy gas, how to get food. Mark said, “We don’t have any cash.” It was true.
“I have to go to a money machine,” Mark continued. “Maybe then I can help you.” We drove on, and two blocks away, we saw a bank on a corner. An automatic teller machine glowed near the door, and, miraculously, there was room to park right next to it. Mark got out and extracted forty dollars, which brought our balance alarmingly close to zero.
We drove on, moving circuitously through the narrow old streets. We had no idea how to find the two men again, and we weren’t entirely sure we wanted to. Then, suddenly, blocks and blocks from where we’d first met them, they materialized in front of us. They smiled and ran up to Mark’s window, greeting him like an old friend.
“We knew you’d come back,” said the taller one. Mark reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. “Thank you,” said the man. “Now we can stay in a nice hotel.”
“God bless you,” called the other, and they sprinted away. We found a highway, drove south, and, after seeking the indulgence of the night guard, spent the night in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
I’m Nobody. Who Are You?
The day after the fire, when I was technically homeless, I remember driving to a supermarket to buy a toothbrush and shampoo. As I left the store, a man wearing a filthy pea coat and pushing a shopping cart stuffed with plastic bags and old blankets asked me if I had any change. “I’m homeless,” he said unnecessarily.
I gave him my change, thinking all the while, “You’d probably be surprised to know that I am, too.” But I wasn’t. Houseless, maybe, but homeless, no. There’s a difference, and it has nothing to do with physical reality.
Even though our business burned, we were somehow never “unemployed.” After the fire, I read in the newspaper that self- employed people who were wiped out could get unemployment benefits. I showed the story to Mark, and he went to the unemployment office to find out how it all worked.
He returned within an hour. “I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I walked in the door and took one look at that sad line and the burnt-out people behind the counter. ‘I can’t be unemployed,’ I said to myself. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m just not cut out for it.’” Just as I had found I wasn’t homeless, Mark had discovered he wasn’t unemployed.
We act like unemployment and homelessness are absolutes, that they’re appropriately descriptive of situations beyond an individual’s control. They aren’t. They’re just words, as formless as any other abstraction. They float harmlessly in the ether until someone screens them onto t-shirts. People see them, and they say, “Hey, that’s me,” or “Hey, that’s Joe.” Emblazoned on a chest, they become labels. Plucked out of the world of ideas and given three dimensions, they wield the power of concrete immutability. They start looking like truth. They start defining personality. They are the emperor’s new clothes, mass produced for all takers. They are the most expensive raiment in the world, even though they’re often proffered with a handout. Their price is freedom, and while you’re busy exchanging it for a mess of pottage, it seems only fair to throw your pride in too.
“It’s easy for you to say,” you may well reply. “You’ve never been truly hungry or truly poor. You’ve got an ivy-covered education and skin as white as snow. What can you possibly know about real lack? My god, you drive around in a truck built for an Arab prince. You’re leading the life the rest of us are scrounging toward and may never achieve. Who the hell are you to talk about the price of freedom?”
“I’m nobody,” says my Emily Dickinson side. “Who are you?”
Who are you, really and truly? People everywhere wear the labels that give them what they need and identify the role they play in the world. They wear “homeless,” and “jobless” and “rich” and “privileged.” They wear “mother” and “brother,” and “cop” and “robber.” But no matter how plastered over in epithets a body becomes, somewhere underneath the shell there’s a winged victory, a free spirit that bears no onus of label, no weight of lack. It knows no hunger, needs no clothes and wallows not in ephemeral quagmires.
It’s a nobody, because it can’t be taxed or jailed or scared. It’s invisible until that fateful moment when it thrusts a sharp stick in the eye of apparent reality. “Nobody’s hurting me!” the Cyclops cries. Nobody. That invisible being, that free spirit, that magic self that defies gravity. It’s me. It’s you. We’re standing on a Plexiglas elevator, looking at a river crashing miles below.
Chapter 10
Eastern Winter, Western Thaw
Separate Snowdrifts
Whether you’re in Texas or Tennessee, if you ask someone the best time to visit, they always say October. Since I can’t have twelve Octobers in a row, I’m loathe to squander one when it rolls around. Have you seen the Smoky Mountains as fall steals over their ridges and valleys? Have you watched the autumnal sun slide down over the gardens of Monticello, the Craters of the Moon, the Golden Gate? October’s a golden month, summer’s payoff.
That first year on the road, October surrounded us with a canopy of glory, but I hardly noticed. Looking back, I have to tell myself that the Midwest clothes itself in brilliance before winter sets in. I can barely remember the whirls of autumn leaves born on breezes over golden fields. I was blinded by self absorption. I wallowed in private desolation no exterior paradise could penetrate. I skipped over fall and withdrew into a winter of discontent.
As much as I had hoped to find peace inside myself and in my relationship with Mark, it still eluded me. Was I feeling the vacuum left behind by the fire? Was stuff important after all? Did I miss the solid ordinariness of my commuting days, the predictable comfort of a house on a hill, a car in a garage, the six o’clock news? Could it be possible I wasn’t meant to be a wanderer after all? “No, no, no!” I screamed in silence. “It’s not that at all. I don’t want it back. I don’t. I didn’t miss it when I first saw the black gap, and I don’t miss it now.”
If not that, then what? It was a question whose answer was as insc
rutable as Mark’s dark silence. We were strangers, he and I, lost in a foreign zone of unexpected conflict. Mark wanted to spend the winter in Wyoming. I couldn’t understand why. Why shovel snow if your house has wheels?
“I want to see if I can do it,” he said.
“I don’t,” I replied. And that was one of our friendlier interchanges.
Before the first hibernal flurry, we parted. I caught a plane to the east coast, climbing aboard with little notion of what I might do or where I might stay. I passed afrigid winter in Montreal and New York, proving, if nothing else, that weather wasn’t what dragged Mark and me into separate snow drifts.
What sucked us into a winter of despair? At the time I was snowblind, unable to see through the opaque storm that raged in my soul. Looking back, though, it’s as clear as a blue sky after a blizzard. We’d planned and schemed, but mostly we’d just dealt with superficial issues, like where we’d go and what we’d see. We thought we’d done a good job of choosing a new path, of reinventing our lives, but we’d ignored the invisible tie that bound us.
We’d taken our relationship for granted. It was fireproof, after all, like all truly important stuff. Love exists on another plane, impervious to mundane disaster. It was supposed to conquer all, wasn’t it? If it was as wonderful as it was supposed to be, surely it didn’t need tending and weeding. Shouldn’t it just flourish on its own?
Maybe the answer should have been obvious, but it took a season in the deep freeze before a new light glimmered. If our lives were to blossom afresh, our marriage needed at least as much attention as our wheels. We had to look at it as willingly as we’d looked at the black gap, and it was up to us to decide how to redefine our partnership.
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