Scratching the Horizon

by Izzy Paskowitz

  4

  Establishment

  Can’t say for sure which came first, the camper or the call of the open road. It’s our version of the classic chicken vs. egg question. No one in my family can agree if my father hit on the idea of living full-time in the camper because he got his hands on a quality used rig or if he decided to quit his job and move us out of our house and then went looking for a vehicle. So which came first? I’ve heard Doc tell the story both ways and each version seems plausible, reasonable. And my mother’s no help; she backs up my dad whatever way he’s telling it, whatever sounds good, and by this point they’ve both told the story so many times they can no longer separate the facts from the fictions.

  Does it even matter? Probably not, except to me and my siblings. Everything we were, everything we would become … it all turned on this right here, and I guess it’d be nice to know it turned from some proactive, willful decision by my parents. If they’d given it some real, clearheaded thought. And if it happened in a more what the hell sort of way it’d be nice to know that, too.

  Anyway, what I get from my parents is that it probably happened in fits and starts. Maybe our first trip to Israel as a family lit something in my father, same way his own first trip to Israel set him off on a whole new path. All of us on the road like that, living in such close quarters, relying only on each other … maybe it got him thinking. Or thinking back to conversations he’d had with my mother, all along. Remember, they’d started out living together in her Studebaker, on the beach in Mexico. I’ve seen pictures of that car and it looks like something for the scrap heap, but they were happy. They had what they needed. They camped; they fished; they fucked; they surfed. It was all right there. So it’s possible this idea of living on the road, of just picking up and being completely untethered and free, had been a part of their plan since they first got together. It’s possible they were just waiting until Mom stopped spitting out all us kids, one after the other.

  Waiting until it made sense—that is, assuming it ever made sense.

  The way I remember it, the way we picked up and hit the road, it was almost like a sleight of hand. Like it came about on its own. There was no big announcement or kickoff ceremony. We’d moved around the previous few years, from one small house to another; it was no big thing. We’d gotten used to my father quitting or getting chased from one job or other, and to the downtime that sometimes found him between jobs—downtime that conveniently fell in the summer and left him free to hang with us and his surfing buddies at the beach … until the money ran out and he had to go looking for another gig.

  So when the money ran out yet again and it came time for us to move from our little house on La Moree Road in San Marcos, a small suburb outside San Diego, we just kind of stumbled into a twenty-four-foot camper we’d had in our yard the past while. That first rig was a Ford Establishment—a cab-over, Class C camper. It had some miles on it, by the time my father got his hands on it, some wear and tear, but it was in decent-enough condition. Wasn’t the most comfortable ride, but it was reliable. When I think back on it, it seems kind of ironic that it was called the Establishment, because the rig represented our escape from all these established norms and conventions and routines; leaves me thinking there was some executive at Ford with a sweet, sarcastic sense of humor.

  That La Moree house was in a rural part of town, out by a chicken ranch, and it wasn’t unusual for my father to park a couple different vehicles out back or off to the side. He was always trading one ride for another—a car for a truck, a board for a bike.… We’d already used the camper a bunch of times for weekend trips to the beach, for longer road trips here and there. It was familiar, and filled with all our crap, just like any other room in our house. It’s just that one day we looked up and there was no house.

  We were gone.

  Now, I’m sure there was a lot more to it, but this was how it registered for me. This is what I remember. And there’s a great, buried truth in my take, even if my memory is off—namely, that it was no big deal, all of us moving into the camper and heading out. Really, it wasn’t.

  Plus, it was summer, and those days we were in the habit of heading down to the beach by the nuclear power plant in San Onofre, where there were great waves and a state-run campground; even when we had our house in San Marcos, we’d stay at San O for days and days at a stretch, so at the top this stretch was no different.

  To hear my parents tell it now, it sounds like they had some sort of grand plan, to hit the road and follow our whims, but I don’t believe that’s how it went down. That’s just the romantic, revisionist way to look at it. I believe it was more of a transitional thing, a temporary thing. It just kind of happened. We’d had to sell the house, for some reason or other, and we’d hang in the camper until the next move presented itself. Only there was no next move, except to roll on down the road to the next parking lot, the next campground, the next beach.

  It helps to realize, too, that this was the early, early part of the 1970s—which was all tied into the laid-back, free spirit, California dreamin’–type lifestyle of the 1960s. I’ve always believed it was a sign of those times that my parents were even in a position to consider dropping off the grid. Don’t think it would have ever occurred to them ten, twenty, thirty years earlier—or even ten, twenty, thirty years later. It fit with the times. With this one move, my parents seemed to embrace that whole counterculture movement, which was weird because in almost every other way they were supertraditional, superstraightlaced people. No, they didn’t exactly care if we went to school every day, especially if the sun was out and the surf was up. But they didn’t drink or smoke or fool around. They weren’t hippies or dropouts. They had good, solid values—do unto others and all that. They were smart, caring, disciplined in their own ways. They believed in God, although they couldn’t always agree on what He looked like or what we could ask Him to do for us, or even how to go about asking.

  One day we looked up and we were in the middle of a freewheeling, counterculture lifestyle that had almost nothing to do with us, and underneath there was this emerging surf culture that had taken off in and around Malibu and all along the California coast. Back when my father started surfing down at Mission Beach as a teenager, there were maybe hundreds of surfers; now, thanks to the Beach Boys and Gidget and Endless Summer and a burst of activity on the California surf scene, there were millions. And it wasn’t just the sport itself that had taken hold; it was the whole package, the easy mind-set. Surfers tended to be cool, bohemian, drifter types—at least, that’s the picture that took shape, although most of my dad’s hard-core surfer pals were also hard-charging drinkers and partiers. That wasn’t my father’s way, but it was the way of the beach. You surfed hard, you played hard … and you worked hardly at all. That was the ideal, to free up your days so that when the surf was up you could paddle out. And here we found ourselves living a surfer’s wet dream. We could come and go and do as we pleased, and I think a lot of our surfer pals sparked to that, in their own ways. Can’t say I blamed them. We lived without restraint, without constraint. We followed the sun, our moods, the tides. We would not be bound to any one place, to any one set of expectations.

  Might not have started out like that, might not have been my parents’ intention, but after a while folks started to notice. Our life wasn’t meant to be a statement. But surfers would hear what we were up to and want to check us out; and even more than that, they wanted in. We’d tapped into something bigger than any of us could have ever imagined; soon, people were writing articles about us, and pointing us out on the beach, and reading more into our lives than we were. More than our lives could justify.

  Turned out we could throw an awful lot of shit in and on that camper. We’d pile our boards and bikes up top; by this point, we all had our own boards; some of us had two, a longboard and a shortboard. This left a lot of room in the cab for us to cram our must-haves, but when it came time for all eleven of us to go to bed we were jammed in good and tight
. We were already used to sleeping on the floor, on mats, on the beach … so this was no different. There was a big bed up top, in the cab-over portion of the rig, and that’s where my parents slept. The youngest, Joshua and Navah and maybe Salvador, slept at the foot of their bed to start. And the rest of us fought for position in the back of the camper, staking out our own territory. The way it worked was the biggest kids got dibs on the best beds, only they weren’t really beds; they were more like pads or mats; from time to time, maybe there’d be an actual mattress.

  There was a breakfast table in the corner, and at night we’d turn that into a little sleeping area. There was also a side sofa that flipped out into a bed, and we could fit three or four of us on it when we were little. Basically, each of us claimed a tiny piece of camper real estate and called it our own, and at night, if you had to go outside to pee, you’d almost always step on a couple brothers on the way.

  Us older kids tried to sleep as far from our parents’ cab-over compartment as possible, because they went at it just about every night. Like wild animals, they went at it. They had a complete lack of inhibition when it came to sex, which meant we got an earful. If you weren’t careful, you’d get an eyeful, too, although I suppose there were worse ways to see and hear your parents. Reporters would pick up on this, because we made a joke out of it, but when they asked him about it my father would put it back on them. He’d say, “Would you rather they heard their father beating their mother?” It was the make love, not war sentiment of the day, rubbed in our faces every single night. Soon as we were old enough to figure what our parents were up to, making all that noise, we thought it was gross and funny; they’d fuck, and we’d giggle, and the little kids would giggle right along; they had no idea why they were laughing, but they saw us big kids laughing and that was reason enough. Eventually, even the littlest ones picked up on what was going on; to this day, my sister, Navah, jokes that having to listen to my parents’ loud fucking every night scarred her for life.

  You know, in their own, weird way, my parents modeled an especially loving, intimate relationship for their children. They were completely devoted to each other, completely crazy about each other, completely supportive of each other. And they couldn’t keep their hands off each other, which was kind of nice. Yeah, it weirded us out, as kids, to have to listen to all their groping and grunting … but it was kind of nice.

  One of the first things my father did when he got the camper was remove the holding tank and receptacle part of the toilet. He thought the trapped methane would kill us, being closed up inside that camper all day, every day. Plus, he was still worried about his asthma, so he was determined to breathe clean air—which was tough to do in a recreational vehicle, with all those fumes coming in through the vents. But, mostly, it was disgusting. The toilet would fill with all our piss and shit, and the piss would slosh all over the place as we rode, there’d be muck all over the bathroom, so he pulled it out and had us shit in these tiny little blivet bags. That’s what we called them. We’d do our business and tie them off and leave them off by the side, in neat, tiny rows.

  Wish I had a picture of that now—a bunch of shitted-up, knotted-up blivet bags, up against one of the camper’s walls. All neat and tidy and good to go.

  My father fitted us out with a row of cubbies—little cubicles all our own, where we could stuff all our worldly possessions. In mine, I kept my clothes, a couple bathing suits, and a journal. That was one of my father’s requirements, once we stopped going to school, to write every day in our journals—and for the first couple years we stuck to it. He made an effort to check in with us every once in a while, to see what we were writing. He was still in the habit of going around the horn and asking us to share something we’d learned each day, and writing was another way to keep us thinking and looking at the world in new ways.

  After just a short time on the road, my cubby was overstuffed with my hobbies and interests. For a while, I was big into photography. I got an old Nikon camera, one of those underwater Jacques Cousteau models, and I started taking a lot of pictures out in the water, documenting all our trips and adventures. I did them all on slides, because they were cheaper to develop and easier to store. For another while, I kept jars of sand from all the beaches we visited, which I lovingly labeled. Shells, too. Actually, a couple of us had really nice shell collections going. But when things started to get a little crowded after so much time on the road my parents decided to put all our stuff in storage, and after a while my father got behind on the bill and our stuff was tossed. The owner of the storage place sold what he could and threw out the rest. The lesson there was to keep it simple. To pare down. We were already living pretty simply, down to the bare bones of what we needed, but after that we cut back even more. After that we learned not to get too, too attached to material things.

  For laundry, we’d hit the nearest Laundromat, usually as a family. We’d put it off as long as we could, and when the funk finally got to my mother she’d drag us down for a couple loads. Sometimes, she’d just take the little ones while the rest of us were off at the beach, but my parents liked it when we were all together. I don’t remember being any kind of help on these cluster trips to do our wash, but we hung out and goofed around and tried to keep out of trouble. Sometimes, while we were busy with the wash, my father would set off foraging for whatever it was we needed at the time—and we always needed something. Whatever money he managed to save when he was working, we went through it quick enough when he wasn’t, so before we were too long in any one place my father would go out and see what he could see. He used to call it cockaroaching, and he’d go cockaroaching around, looking for deals on food, surfboards, places to park the camper, sideline work for us bigger kids. Wasn’t exactly begging, but he definitely had his hand out—and folks were intrigued enough by our story and by the sight of us that a lot of them wanted to help out.

  Even at ten, eleven years old, I hated to see my father out asking for stuff. I knew the deal. I knew we didn’t have any money. And I also knew we didn’t have any money by choice. In my little-kid head, this made a difference. After all, my father was a doctor. All of his friends had money in the bank. His friends from medical school, from the jobs he left behind … they were all rich. Back then, doctors made a ton of money. They had nice houses, nice cars; their kids had nice clothes. If he’d just worked at it, and saved some of it, my parents would’ve been all set. But he was never any good with money—probably because he was never any good with work, either. It wasn’t that he didn’t see the need for money; he just didn’t attach the same value or importance to it as everyone else. He was generous to a fault. If he saw someone in need, he emptied his pockets. But then he’d be in need—we’d be in need!—and I don’t think he ever made the cause-and-effect connection.

  Yeah, Doc. No shit. You give away your money, there’s nothing left for your family. That’s usually how it happens.

  Once, after the roof of our camper collapsed in a killer rainstorm, my father was looking at a bunch of bills he couldn’t pay, so he hit on one of his nutty schemes to make fast money. He’d heard on the radio that the price of silver was sky-high, so he scraped together whatever money he had and traded it in at the bank for dimes. Bags and bags of dimes. Then he had us kids sort through these bags of dimes to see if we could find any old silver dimes, which the government had stopped making a couple years earlier. A lot of these dimes were still in circulation, so my father thought he could unearth a couple fistfuls of them and we’d be all set. We sat around the small table in the camper, sorting through these bags and bags of dimes. For days and days, we did this. We worked in shifts, and after a couple days we’d turned up maybe two or three of the old dimes, which turned out to be worth only two or three times more than a regular dime.

  All that work, for fifty fucking cents.

  The idea was whenever my father started scraping at the bottom of his accounts he’d push himself to get a job. At one job, he used to get paid in crisp ten-d
ollar bills. He walked around with a wad of crisp bills, which he’d peel off one by one. Eventually, the wad grew thinner, and then it disappeared altogether, and we’d set off looking for something, someplace new. He’d take out this big book that listed different medical jobs all across the country, and he’d pick some out-of-the-way place he and my mother thought might be interesting and that’s where he’d apply. He’d work in hospitals, clinics, wherever there was a need. He had this romantic notion that he was bringing twenty-first-century medicine to some of these backwater places, but it’s not like he was on any kind of cutting edge. He wasn’t really up on the latest advances or techniques, and he certainly didn’t have any equipment or resources. He kept his medical license current; that was about it. He treated Native Americans on remote reservations, and migrant workers in New Mexico. Some of these places hadn’t seen a doctor in years, so he always got the job, and for a while there’d be money coming in … until my father got restless or the waves turned out to be shit or the weather started to turn and it was time for us to break camp. There was always some new adventure, some new beach, some new part of the country … and my folks were open to all of it.

  The idea, now that we kids weren’t going to school, was to build our days around surfing. That was the key part of the whole transaction, only it didn’t always work out that we could surf. Sometimes we’d be landlocked, like the time we lived in Portales, New Mexico. Or, for another stretch, in Martin, South Dakota, near the Nebraska border. They’d never seen people like us in South Dakota—and we’d never seen snow! Didn’t know what to make of it at first, until one of us figured out we could ride it. We spilled out of that camper like caged monkeys, busted out our boards, and rode the hills just beyond where our camper was parked. The local muskrat hunter and Indian kids wanted nothing to do with us. Wouldn’t go so far as to say we brought surfing to the region, but folks certainly scratched their heads and wondered what we were up to.