Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

I’ve been in a funk for days, ever since those bastards robbed my campsite of, it turns out, $1,319, $81 short of my insurance deductible and therefore not reimbursable. But the paranoia they’ve left me with is the worst part. I’ve bought locks now for everything. I’ve locked my trailer hitch to my truck with a locking pin (I didn’t know such a thing existed). I’ve got a lock and chain for my propane tanks, and my generator, and even have the battery wrapped in chains, like the ghost of thievery past to remind me of the misdeeds done upon me. At a Lowe’s in Henderson, NV, 20 miles away, I had a guy cut me a 7 foot section of chain. I was thinking of going with the big chain, but I asked him and he agreed that no matter the size, if they want to cut it, they will. Bolt cutters come in all sizes, and so do saw blades. But often the illusion of security is a deterrent in itself, and so that’s what this is. 

Simultaneously, things on my camper have been failing. The fridge isn’t working right, and the camper isn’t charging the battery, and so since my solar was taken, which had kept the batteries topped off in the sun and perhaps even masked the charging problem, I’ve been running my generator half the day to keep power on for work. So now I’m officially the guy at campgrounds I used to hate: the guy who runs his generator constantly and disturbs the natural sounds of the outdoors. But little I can do. I’ve ordered a solar panel to be delivered to a UPS store in Boulder City, NV, on Friday, which should help some, but I’m not replacing all the solar that was lost. 

It has been a week of just too much worry, too much inconvenience, too much cost both to my wallet and my psyche. When I get back, I think I’m going to sell this camper, and I’m going to think about what I want to do in the future: double down or give up. Buy a bigger, more secure and reliable camper with everything I need for prolonged stays on the road, or call two winters of this a good enough adventure. It’s been a bleak and trying week in my mind and I haven’t been as able to pull out of it as I thought I would. Being stolen from sucks, but having it done while doing the thing you love, being outdoors, is more of a betrayal than I would have expected. 

That said, after a week scrambling to figure out how to keep the camper going well enough to keep working I finally got out on a hike tonight, my first since Friday when everything was taken. I started late enough that I walked the last half hour in the darkness, a hike down 5 miles of a 30 mile train track with tunnels that were once used 24-hours a day to bring the steel and concrete that built the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, a monumental feat of engineering 60 stories tall (726 feet) and 50 feet thick with 5 million pounds of concrete and steel, holding back 250 square miles of water—the largest manmade lake in the U.S. All around it you can see where the high water mark rolled back, down 150 feet since 1998. 

There I was, walking the old train trail and tunnels, hundreds of feet above Lake Mead and looking out over what was once a massive valley with mountains all around before it was flooded and Mead was made, and I started to think, “How much do all the people in the world weigh and what if they were all in this big valley right now? Would they fill it up?” This is why I like hiking so much, because you end up with these deep, important questions in your head. 

So I figured that since there are about 8.2 billion people in the world, and let’s say the average weight is about 125 pounds (I’m just guessing), that would equal about 1 trillion pounds of people on the planet. Then I looked it up and Google said it was closer to about 750 billion pounds of people, so I wasn’t far off and I’m not the only person who had that thought. I probably just overestimated the weight of people, I think, because I’m 215 but babies probably really bring the average down. So anyway, this reminded me of a previous question I’d given considerable thought to in the past: How much do all the boobs in the world weigh? 

And for that math, I figured that since the average pair of breasts weighs about 3.5 pounds, and roughly half the population is women, and about 1 billion of those women are under age 15, there are likely about 10 billion pounds of boobs in the world. Which is a comforting thought, I think. 

As I was walking back through these tunnels in the dark, I looked up at the 40 foot ceilings and saw dark spots, bats hanging there, probably waiting to get me, but then maybe I’d turn into Batman, because he was scared of bats, too, and it was a bat incident that drove him to conquer his fears and become an iconic superhero. But he also had a ton of money and was pretty athletic, so I was thinking at best I’d be a middle-aged, broke, kind of fat batman, a bald batman, one who can’t run fast or jump far and seems unlikely to save anyone, even himself. And so I just hoped the bats didn’t shit on me, and I shuffled along, the last one on the trail on this cool winter evening in Nevada. I am Baldman.