I’m leaving soon on another camperland adventure, towing my little R-pod trailer to Big Sur, California, where I’ll work from home for a good part of the remaining winter.
Twenty years or so ago I was there with my tent, and I recall it as one of the most beautiful stretches of America—and perhaps anywhere—that I’d ever seen. It’s a land of towering cliffs alive with the breath of some unseen ocean creature who exhales a regular mist in the mornings and evenings that makes the land disappear. It is a painting by a master, magic by a wizard, a stretch of coastal perfection, nature so beautiful it seems unreal, like a postcard you want to climb inside of and mail to every human on planet earth: wish you were here.
And of course, a lot of them are: California’s beauty is no doubt part of the reason it’s the most populous state. And Big Sur is among its crown jewels, a land where humans carve highways into cliffs along the Pacific, roads that will someday erode and disappear as the coastline falls into the ocean.
It seems like just yesterday that I was returning from the Southwest, and I suppose it was only late March that I did so. On that trip I worked my way slowly across the land, camping and working from my RV from various places in West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, then back through Nevada, Arizona again, Utah, Colorado, and home to Minnesota.
But after skipping from place to place, state to state, I became exhausted with the constant moving and planning on the fly. So this year I’ve booked six solid weeks (and then who knows where) in just the Big Sur area, where I’ll move manageable distances from campground to campground (since most allow a max of 10 or 14 days). It’s still a lot of driving: 2,300+ miles by the route I’ll take, made a little longer because I’ll drive south and then west through Albuquerque to get into warmer weather quickly (my camper isn’t 4-season) and avoid the Rockies.
It feels to me like it’s time. I’ve had enough of this grim and gray and need the sun and new scenery. Today I began loading a few things and going over the camper, and you can’t help but feel odd when prepping a camper in 15 degree weather. Plus, there’s always some inner trepidation when the departure date approaches. It’s bound to be an adventure, sure, but adventure implies risk. My vehicle could break down on some gravel road, or I could crash pulling a small house on wheels at a high rate of speed. I could get burglarized (again). The bugs could be bad. Who knows what will happen this time? Moving is always riskier than standing still; you willingly put yourself into an unstable or less stable situation than you would by simply staying put. It’s more a question of payoffs.
Travel is, for me, an energizer and a palette cleanser. You escape from school or work and head to some new and unfamiliar (or less familiar) land and your surroundings change, and so you think just a bit differently, and act just a bit differently, leaving old habits and routines behind while gaining the opportunity to view them from some distance. You say goodbye to (in-person) friends for a while and talk more to strangers.
If you think of your life as a story that you tell yourself every day—to reinforce to yourself who you are—travel is an opportunity to rapidly introduce new characters, new settings, and new plots into your story. It’s an opportunity to change your own narrative, even if only slightly, and never again will you be quite the you that you were before you left for this, the next chapter.
Just a note that my posts here will likely become more frequent and will generally be about my experiences traveling, rather than about whatever it is that I do here when I’m not writing about traveling. If that’s not your bag, feel free to tune out for a couple months, and please do check back sometime later in March when I’ll be back to writing about exciting stuff like depression, Arby’s, and taxes.
Also, I can barely believe it, but I wrote my second poem of 2024 just in the nick of time after thinking I might be getting dumber even faster than usual during a few days last week. It’s not great, but I love the rhythm of the 4th line a lot. Happy New Year.
Feeling stupid
My brain feels like a bunch of dead ends
A thought pops in
Then burns out before I can grab it
Neurons firing blanks between synapses blown like enemy bridges in battle
The blood-brain barrier has been swept away by a relentless onslaught of little enemies gleefully passing over their poisons like the bucket brigade at a five-alarm fire.
At this stage it feels too late to count sheep
And in any case they only dwindle in number and quality of wool
as the lambs alight and sink into the hot neural core
Down, down into the medulla oblongata,
Their little hockey puck feet are the last to go
Cloven now,
the body does one thing
The brain another
Free to go our separate ways at last.
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