My new home
I had just squirmed into my rooftop tent and flopped like a fish on the mattress. The mosquitoes were dense that night and I was trying like hell not to let any in with me. Success. I raised my fists in the dark and congratulated myself, and then lay there listening to them buzz against the netting, a few inches from my face, desperate to get in and finding no way forward.
Twenty years with Cindy and it came down to this. A Subaru bought in a panic in Washington, a tent bolted to the roof of it, and a partner and two dogs I'd left behind. Cole and Beatrice.
In the final months of living in Europe I had decided I was coming back to the US, buying a van, building it out to live in, and hitting the road. I researched it extensively and spent way too much idle time watching van build videos. I narrowed it down to a Ram ProMaster, or the smaller ProMaster City. My ticket back only went as far as Washington, DC, a city big enough that I should have been able to find the van I wanted, drive it to a friend's place south of Asheville, buy some tools and start the build. I had an Airbnb rented nearby. I figured two weeks to make it livable, another two to a month of finishing work.
Then I drove multiple vans and gave up on the whole idea. Maybe it was the 6 plus months of driving small cars in Europe. Probably it was realizing how long it would take to get on the road, and I did not have that kind of time in me. So I bought a rooftop tent instead. A tent that lives on top of your car. Park anywhere relatively level, pop the top, pull out the ladder, and you're done. No build, no shed, no month of work. It was the lazy way to go. Maybe that was all I had in me at the time.
Then I found the small Subaru to put it on and bought it in a panic.
I still had to figure out how to store gear in the thing. My old neighbors put me up in their basement for a few days and, more importantly, lent me their tools. It took the better part of three days. In the end I had a built-in system with drawer slides for the cooler and the stove, ample storage, and a splashy coat of terra cotta paint. It was good to have something to build. Three days of measuring and cutting and sanding, and nothing else battling for space in my head.
I left Asheville for a trial run of the new setup, still waiting on the cargo shipment from Brussels. The shipping agent said it unloaded in Charleston and might be trucked to Asheville in a few days.
More waiting. I ended up in Georgia, near the Tennessee border, in a wildlife management area. Whatever that is. Getting here meant driving through some deeply rural country, and the differences in income along the way were extreme. Huge glowing white mansions and then trash-surrounded mobile homes, all within a few miles of each other. A staggering gap, and I couldn't stop looking at it.
Six miles up a rocky dirt road there were six primitive campsites. At one end, the party crowd, muscle vehicles and yappy dogs and loud bad rock music well into the night. Next to them, an old woman who spent the whole day shuffling around in a hair net and a house dress.
Georgia Camp
But I'm right next to a babbling stream and it has been good. I found myself just sitting and looking at the trees. Later, unable to move, I did nothing but watch a beetle wander through my field of vision. It was the first stretch in months when I wasn't running from something. My old life, my fears, my shame for not being able to work out my childhood shit and ruining my marriage.
So I sat in the forest drinking tall boys of PBR, and I waited.
The last thread to my old life
The shipment was the last thread holding me to the old life, and it had gotten absurd. When we left Asheville we packed a double pallet, boxes and furniture, everything we thought we'd want, and shipped it to Europe. Brussels, I think. It sat in Brussels the entire time. Three months in Albufeira. Three months in Cézeres. Six months of paying to store the contents of a house we no longer had on a continent we were only visiting, and I never once opened it.
I decided to leave in France. I had the pallet shipped back to the States, to a warehouse in Asheville, which meant it crossed the Atlantic twice to end up a few miles from where it started.
Before that, though, there was Montenegro. I was the one with the European passport. Cindy wasn't, which meant she had to leave the Schengen area, so we drove from France to Kotor in the car we'd leased back in Albufeira, hers now until the lease ran out at the end of the year. She'd rented a villa at the top of a hill so steep and so tightly wound that the drive up felt like an argument with physics. Mount Cindy, I called it.
I stayed a week or so. I don't remember much of it, which tells you something. We have pictures of our time there together. Both of us smiling in a selfie. The perfect facebook photo. But underneath it all we knew the marriage was ending. Then she drove me down the coast to the airport in Dubrovnik.
Saying goodbye was gut wrenching. There is no better way to say it and I've tried. Twenty years. Countless adventures, most of them hers as much as mine, all of them ours. My life, my love, my memories, and the two dogs all of whom had given me more plain joy than I knew how to account for. All of it standing there in a parking lot in Croatia, and then me walking into the terminal alone.
She sorted out the Schengen problem eventually. Left on her US passport, came back in on her Canadian one, a workaround I never would have thought of. She was always better at that than me.
So: Asheville, warehouse, U-Haul. I opened the pallet right there at the loading dock and moved it all to a storage unit a few miles away. Twenty years of accumulation, twice across an ocean, into a metal box with a roll-up door. What I actually wanted was the camping gear. That was it. That was the whole errand. The rest of it would sit in the dark and rot until I knew what to do with it, and I did not know what to do with it, and some part of me understood that I might never come back for any of it.
The well travelled pallet
And it kept being late. Every day I waited, and every day I thought, it will be here tomorrow, and I can finally get on the road. Two weeks of that. Tick tock, tick tock.
In the last days of waiting I decided to head out for another trial run, this time to the Outer Banks. In four years of living in Asheville I never made it to the eastern edge of the state. In my head I had a romantic vision of what it would be: a home to writers, pirates, the Wright brothers, wild horses. I wanted it badly. I think I needed one thing to be what I'd pictured.
It wasn't. I sat in mind-numbing traffic winding up to Kitty Hawk and started laughing, and the laugh had a bad edge to it. One long tourist strip mall. Fried fish joints, tourist traps, drive-through "beverage" stores. I'm still not sure what was served there.
Where were the pristine dune beaches of my internal Wright Brothers film? Where were the open expanses where the boys tested and tested and tested again? Why was their sister's involvement in all this left out of what I was taught? I digress. I was doing a lot of digressing that week. It was easier than thinking.
I found the Wright Brothers Memorial next to the Lowe's home center. Not a celebration of what they did. A memorial. It sat in a wide expanse of manicured lawn. No beach. No windswept sand. Just lawn.
I drove to the entrance and turned around before paying the ten dollars. I'd seen the actual first airplane at the Smithsonian and didn't need a replica. I'd read a decent account of everything that led to that flight and the company the brothers built afterward. I didn't need to ruin the version in my head any more than the tourist encroachment already had. That was the story I told myself, anyway. The truer version is that I had gotten very good at driving up to a thing and turning around.
Searching for the beaches I still believed in, I drove south. Past the Jurassic Park putt-putt, past the pizza shops, the three-shirts-for-ten-dollars stores, all the rest of it. And finally there it was, the Outer Banks of the movies. Houses on stilts at the edge of an endless beach. This was what I had been looking for.
It was incredibly boring.
That was the part that scared me. I had found the thing and felt nothing. I drove as far as the road went, which wasn't a choice so much as a fact, because no ferry was running from the last island to the mainland. Then back up past the beautiful beach houses and the realtor signs offering me a small piece of paradise for a small fortune, and I drove toward Asheville. And I drove. And I drove. The driving was the only part that worked. As long as I was moving, I didn't have to arrive anywhere and be the person who had left.
Once the shipment came and my world was finally settled, or at least stored, I had to decide where to go. Maine. It must be beautiful this time of year. Three days of driving and there I was, Bar Harbor, Acadia. One of the must-see national parks in the country. Right down the road. Twenty-five dollars and it was mine.
The problem, again, was people. They were everywhere. Crawling over the rocks like ants working a carcass. I know how that sounds. They were just families on vacation. But I had come a long way to be alone with something large enough to put me back together, and I couldn't get near it for the crowd, and I couldn't stand to be around that much ordinary happiness. I turned around. I left and drove south.
I consoled myself with a thirty-dollar meal. A beer, the world's saltiest fries, and a genuine Maine lobster roll, market price of course. Then I headed west. I didn't know where I was going. Just west. I found a free campsite near the state line on one of the apps I'd downloaded, plugged it in, and got lost.
With my phone no help at all, I went into a convenience store to do the thing I hated most, which is ask someone for help. The girl behind the plastic panel was draped over the counter, hair hanging like a curtain across her phone.
"Hello," I said. "Do you have a map?"
She jumped up and looked at me wide-eyed, startled that a customer existed, though one had walked out thirty seconds before. "What?"
"Do you have a state map?"
"We have this." She hauled a giant state atlas out from behind the counter, fumbled the scan, then got it. Twenty-six ninety-five.
"That's a little rich for my blood," I said. I was fascinated by her accent. "I just want to know which way New Hampshire is."
That caught her off guard again. "Well," she said, "the one time I went to New Hampshire, I went that way." She pointed in the exact opposite direction from the one I was sure I needed.
The one time. Twenty years old, maybe, and she'd left the state once. I stood there feeling something I couldn't name and didn't want to look at directly, which was that at least she had a place she belonged to. I got in the car and drove the opposite way from where she'd pointed. I liked my odds. Soon I was on the road I expected, and the mapping software finally agreed with me.
An hour later I found the campsite and settled in for the night. I lay in the tent and listened to the mosquitoes and thought about Cole and Beatrice, who did not know why I was gone, and about Cindy, who did.