Have Camper: Traveling, Traveling

On the Road; Lake Hartwell, GA. Photos courtesy Bonnie Lewis, 2016.

The Actress and her husband, the Inventor, set off on a life-changing adventure a couple of months ago, and the Husband’s not saying much about it, but I can tell he’s feeling sad that one of his best buddies is moving away. Actually, the Actress and the Inventor are moving and moving and moving – they’ve sold their house, put a lot in storage, a lot at Goodwill, a little at our house, and tucked what will fit into their little camper; by the time you read this, they will be far south. 

Some of the usual suspects are fueling this move – children and grandchildren who live in that direction, arthritis, and it’s just too darn expensive to keep up a house and pay NH real estate taxes when you’re both retired and living on Social Security. But the Actress and the Inventor are going to do it in an interesting way – they’re going to live in their camper for two weeks in a campground, then move on every two weeks to a new campground in a new place, visiting their kids and seeing interesting places and, they hope, doing interesting things along the way. Interesting, but not too interesting – they don’t want to activate the old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.

They’ve got all the bare necessities with them, and a few extras, including a binder of articles to read on the beach and as they’re traveling, with some photos to remind them of the Old Home Place. When the winter winds are howling about our ears and we risk getting stabbed by sharp icicles every time we go out the door and the only way to get warm in bed at night is to take a pack of dogs with us or else fill the foot-end full of hot, microwaved rice bags, they’ll still be in summer clothes, baking their toes in hot sand next to some wave-lapped coast, listening to the gentle breeze riffle what stands in for leaves on some exotic tree. 

Come black-fly season, they’ll head north again, to spend the summer and nice part of the fall in a nearby campground in a settled camp site and slightly larger camper. They’ll have summer jobs, and will catch up with their old friends, and do some stuff that might – compared to their adventurous winter – seem kinda boring. Then again, it might – compared to their adventurous winter – seem a comforting and relieving return to normal. And come cold weather, if this year’s adventures were good ones, they may do it all over again.

This plan of theirs is interesting to us old folks – it’s the kind of thing we might have eagerly done when we were youngstahs, and, in fact, what many of us did do, one way or another. Between the two of us, the Husband and I moved something like 60 times between getting out of college and finally buying a house; at one point I remember saying, “The apartment’s getting dirty. Is it time to move yet?”

The British Car Gal has been saying how, after she retires, she’d like to get one of the “tiny houses” that are becoming popular, and which are, in theory, portable. I understand the draw – it would be interesting to see, first of all, whether one could tolerate living in such cramped quarters, and secondly, figuring out with so little storage space available, exactly what is necessary and practical to have, and exactly what, of the unnecessary things we accumulate, one would choose to find a place for and what discard.

Back in the dark ages, my friend the Sweet Fella lived in a house – some people would call it a hut – on communal property populated by a group of people dedicated to living as lightly on the land as possible. Basically, his shelter was a tent with one solid side, erected on a wooden tent platform, located on an old farmstead in the Northeast Kingdom. To get to any of the dozen home sites or the old farmhouse where everyone went to bathe meant hiking a mile down an ancient dirt roadway, then off through woods to whichever shelter site you were headed for. The folks living there shared a garden, had no electricity or phones, shared outhouses that were reached by following a path from wherever you were through the garden to the far side; and lugged their drinking and cooking water to their home sites from a spring at the bottom of the hill. The winter several of the women were pregnant, someone’s father loaned the group a snowmobile to use in case of emergencies.

The Sweet Fella’s structure had a small woodstove in it which kept it surprisingly comfortable in winter, and in summer he cooked in a fire pit near his back door. Clothes and books that weren’t in use were stored in giant metal bins, to keep the mice out; same for food which, since there was no refrigeration, had to be harvested or bought frequently, except in winter when there was walk-out refrigeration. Dish-washing was accomplished outdoors, under a huge old pine tree, and often waited for a useful rainstorm to arrive, to avoid having to haul extra water. 

“My life is one giant camp-out,” the Sweet Fella used to say. As he got older, the constant physical effort required just to eat grew exhausting, and he eventually moved to more complex, but simpler to use, living quarters. But while he was there – for more than a decade – it really wasn’t uncomfortable, just very time-consuming and required planning and ingenuity (and finding the loo in the middle of the night could be interesting). I used to muse how, because he chose that life, people used to think of it as interesting; had he not chosen it but lived that way of necessity, he would have been called  homeless.

The Actress and the Inventor are living more like a turtle this winter, carrying their home with them. We can barely wait to hear the tales of their journey. But I think, for myself, I’ll turn my back on the lure of the open road, and try to feel adventurous wielding the snow shovel.

Originally published in the Concord Monitor on January 8, 2017, as “Into the Great Wide Open.”