I started to plan working from the road mostly because Minnesota’s winters were beginning to challenge my enthusiasm for continuing to live. I actually enjoy snow, don’t get me wrong. Before I left I was really getting into cross-country skiing. I like downhill skiing, too, and snowshoeing, and ice skating. And I’m always up for sledding.
No, the problems I have with winter are the common ones: it lasts too long, it can be brutally cold, and there isn’t enough sun. Mostly, it is the lack of sun. This makes my decision to once move to and live in Anchorage, AK, seem like an odd one. But it was a bit of a paradox. I knew winters there would be tough, but I also saw it as a land of untamed adventure where anything could happen. Outdoors and adventures have long appealed to me, and Alaska seemed like the place to find the biggest and best of both. Mostly what happened, though, is that I got really depressed and smoked a ton of pot.
It’s an odd thing, working from a camper. There’s a tension I didn’t expect. You are, in some respects, trapped between two competing worlds. In one world, you’re working your typical 9 to 5 job in or around your camper. In the other world, when you’re in and around your camper, it’s hard to set aside the idea that you are kind of on vacation, because hey, camper.
But the reality is that your vacations are just your weekends and whatever days you take off, like regular life. So at your home without wheels, maybe there’s some stuff you’d rather be doing, but you have to work. On the road, there’s lots of new stuff you’ve probably never done before that you’d rather be doing, but you have to work. In both cases, the problem is work. Retired people figured this out and said, “Well, I’m done with this shit.”
I usually enjoy my actual job, and I often enjoy labor, but I’ve always kind of defined “real” work as physical work. To this day, I feel my greatest sense of accomplishment when I lift something heavy and move it from one place to another. Or when I hit something with a tool, or dig a hole and put something in it. That’s work. Sitting at a computer is not work. It’s just a world that humans made up because digging gets pretty tiring after a while.
After “work” today, I hopped on my bike and hit the highway outside Hunting Island State Park, cruising fast to get my legs back under me. I came across a nature trail and biked over a long boardwalk stretching through the salt marsh. The sounds of the road faded as I got deeper into the marsh, and the sounds of this new world opened up: birds I didn’t recognize, wind stirring the salt marsh cordgrass to play its own melody, and my wheezing from being out of shape. It reminds me of duck hunting in the sloughs of South Dakota, where I would go with my dad as a kid. I never took to the duck hunting part, but I always loved the outdoors and the seclusion.
Soon the boardwalk met with elevated land, and I continued down a sandy path and came across a creek weaving through the salt marsh, paused there and watched the sunset, saw a fish jump and thought I might have to come back and cast for him. Walking on that path stirred something in me. Reminded me of backpacking trips. Of hiking for hours, day after day, with the only goal one foot after another. Eat. Stay hydrated. Talk to your friends if you’re with them. Have a fire.
I love an unpaved path. To see it unfold in front of you, not knowing what’s around the next corner, but knowing many others have gone before you on this well-traveled trail, and so while it’s unfamiliar it’s also not terribly dangerous. I realized that this is what I have been missing so far on this trip: when you are beach camping on flat land, the opportunities for trails can be slim. On Wednesday I head inland again to a national forest where I should find those opportunities.
With the sun now set, it was getting dark quickly and my bike doesn’t have reflectors so I pedaled back to the campground, my leg and arm hairs collecting hundreds of these tiny black flies called biting midges that the locals call sand-fleas or just “bastards.” They are relentless and impervious to bugspray of any kind. Many of them went into my mouth and I felt gratified having them die in there, because they deserve it and I’ll kill them anyway I can.
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