Day 1 – Tehachapi, CA

June 15, 2021

I’m in my office on the tailgate of my pickup truck in a parking lot at a Del Taco in Tehachapi, CA. It’s 6:39 pm. The evening is pleasant and cool. I had hoped to be at the Mohave National Reserve by this point but a slow start and numerous road construction points on the highway has kept me from getting there. 

This trip is an exploration of place—specifically all the places I lived with my nuclear family—two parents and a sister—before finally leaving for good to go off to college. I won’t be visiting the towns in the order in which I lived in them. By age that would be Winchester, TN (0 to 6 months), Sewanee, TN (6 months to 4 years), Tallahassee, FL (4 years to 7 years), Denton, TX (7 years to 13 years), Hattiesburg, MS (13 to 19 years). Instead I will be visiting in order from west to east—Texas, Mississippi, Tallahassee and then north to Tennessee. 

I’m a little unsure what my intention is for this trip. It is not mere reminiscence. Is it a search for my true home? Is it an attempt to really find my place in this world? Do we all have such a place? How much of place is a physical location and how much of it is where we are mentally?

My plans were to stay in the Mohave National Reserve tonight, but it will be dark by the time I get there. Will I feel safe not knowing what is beyond a small circle of vision? 

If I have the energy to keep pushing, I may try to make it to a Walmart parking lot in Las Vegas that, according to the RV Parky app, allows people to park overnight. Will I feel safer there under the lights with big rigs running noisy generators?

It’s getting late. I don’t have any place to be, yet I will have to find a place.

Earlier in the day, at the back parking lot of a Chevron gas station in Madera, CA, I watched two hawks hunting for prairie dogs. (I didn’t know we had prairie dogs in CA but that’s what they looked like.) Farm workers were in fields across the street. 
Before stopping in Tehachapi I visited the Cesar Chavez memorial in the Tehachapi Mountains. I met a park worker named Mario who knew Cesar Chavez and marched with him in the early 70s.
There was a memorial garden with native plants at the Cesar Chavez National Monument. I like what this one says.