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June 25, 2021

I’m back for my second nap in the back of my truck parked at the public library in Hattiesburg. I’ve been trying to write about Hattiesburg, Elijah Jones and the whirlwind tour he gave me last night and this morning, but I think the two margaritas, the old fashioned, five cigarets and a special Elijah nightcap involving rum, watermelon vodka and a blend of guava, mango and Hawaiian Punch has my brain dialed to dim. Oh, and I’ve already failed at not having beef. Didn’t I proclaim abstinence just yesterday?

Last night was celebratory so a little overindulgence is to be expected since I haven’t seen Elijah in 42 years. I was just 13. He was 23. I think some of you have heard the story. 

Elijah worked at the 7-11 down the street and I would go there to buy candy and then hang out with him. We became friends and he took me to see the movie Superman. A black man and a white boy was an odd pairing at the time in Mississippi.  Maybe it still is, but not the black and white part anymore. Things have changed for the better. Much better.

When Elijah quit working at the 7-11 all those years ago I wondered what happened to him. Little did I know he had just moved to help open a brand new store across town where he became the manager. Hattiesburg had five 7-11s at that time. Now it has none. They’ve all become plain old gas stations or various quicky-type markets, all without exception looking somewhat run down. The red and green-striped marquees are gone or painted over. 

Elijah isn’t sure why all the 7-11s are gone. Every other chain and franchise in the world seems to be bustling in Hattiesburg these days. The business section of old Hardy Street has been extended more than four miles west past I-59 since I was here. There are Targets, Bed Bath and Beyond, Home Depot, Office Depots, three Walmarts. Even Wells Fargo has made its way here.  All that area was farmland before. 

Elijah ponders what his life might have been like if he had stayed with 7-11 instead of hitching his wagon to the Richard Simmons enterprise. His mom was a go-getter and Elijah says he got that from her. The Southland Corporation that owned 7-11 was huge and Elijah believes he would have climbed pretty high in that environment. He got a degree in radio and television from the University of Southern Mississippi with a minor in journalism. That, no doubt, came in handy for what he ended up doing instead.

The last year he was with 7-11 Elijah started working on his weight. 

“I had been avoiding going to the doctor,” he told me. “When I finally had a reason that made me go they weighed me. This was at the hospital. They had to take me up to the maternity ward because they didn’t have a scale big enough to measure me on the regular floor. I was so embarrassed that I was up there with all those white ladies with their new babies.”

Elijah related how he thought he weighed around 300 pounds: 

“When I got on the scale I saw it go right past 300. Then it went past 400. Then 450. When it got to 484 and finally stopped I couldn’t believe it. I tell you Eric, that night when I went home I sat down on my bed and just cried. But something changed inside me. Instead of giving up I got angry.”  

The next time I laid eyes on Elijah it wasn’t in-person but on tv. For some reason (Elijah says it was destiny) I was watching the Richard Simmons exercise show. Simmons was a spectacle but not part of my normal repertoire of Gilligan’s Island, I Love Lucy and a half dozen other syndicated reruns. When I saw a thin black man come from behind a screen on the television stage holding up a pair of bluejeans with a waistband the size of a lawn-and-leaf garbage bag I ran close to the tv. He was introduced as Elijah Jones. He had lost so much weight it was hard to recognize him, but I could see it was him through his eyes and his toothy side-smile that makes him look like one of the animated kids from Schoolhouse Rock.

After the television shoot Elijah hung around Los Angeles for a week. During that time a position working on the show opened up. Elijah had gone back to see the show as an audience member. The crew was at a loss for how to fill this low-level yet important position on short notice when somebody said, “Hey Elijah is still here. He could do that job.”

So that was the beginning of Elijah’s time with what he calls the Richard Simmons Empire. He ended up working 37 years with Richard Simmons working his way up to becoming his manager.

If anyone wants the scoop on Simmons you don’t need to listen to what the New York Times calls the morally suspect podcast Missing Richard Simmons. I can tell you. He’s done with fame…and it sounds like people in general. Elijah is upset by the loss of a very close (nonsexual) friendship. It’s likely that Elijah was his closest friend—at least for some period of time. But it sounds like Simmons has quit all his friendships except for a very few people who work for and help take care of him.  

But back to the story of Elijah and me. It was one that I thought was through until about a decade ago when I met the writer Beth Lisick. She was working on a book that eventually came out titled, Helping Me Help Myself. In talking about it she mentioned that she had taken one of Richard Simmons’ Cruise to Loose Caribbean Tours to relate in a chapter of this book she was writing about self-improvement fads. I asked if she met a black man named Elijah on the cruise. Yes! He was Simmons’ right hand man. “They were almost inseparable,” she said. 

It struck me as quite strange that as a tween in 1978 I’d had a short friendship with a 7-11 clerk in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and now in 2009 I was meeting a person at a bowling alley in Albany, CA who had met the person I knew as a kid. I had to reach out to Elijah. 

I went to the Richard Simmons website and in a contact box I typed in a message asking if someone named Elijah worked for Richard Simmons. I said my name is Eric Robertson and I knew him when he worked at 7-11. He took me to see Superman.

The person who read the message contacted Elijah and well, here we are today.  

p.s.—After my second nap it started raining. Yesterday when Elijah and I ate dinner there was a downpour that must have lasted thirty minutes. The street was a river. When I checked the back of my camper last night there was water again! That’s after adding caulk around all the windows in New Orleans. Fortunately, after my second nap in the library parking lot it started raining again and I was here to find the culprit of the leak. It’s coming in around a brake light at the top back of the shell. Easy fix with more goo!

p.s.s.-Bonus. I’m still out here in the library parking lot. It’s 6:43 and they’ve been closed since 5:00 but the wi-fi is still working!

June 24, 2021

I’m a bit of a mess right now. Ironic since I’m staying in the beautiful uptown New Orleans home of my college girlfriend Julie and her fiancée Dave and not in the truck. Denton overwhelmed me a bit. If I don’t get to that issue in this journal entry I will. I’ve already done plenty of writing about it. I just need to hone it into something that a person might actually like to read. 

But beyond the flood of thoughts and ideas around my Denton visit, there are things that have needed more immediate attention here in New Orleans. Julie and Dave went out to do exercise at their gyms this morning and I began to use that time for packing up and for calling Apple support to fix some email issues I’ve been having. In between downloading a new security recommendation I went out to my truck to start arranging things for leaving today and found there have been water incursions in the last few days of downpours. Remember what I said about bad things being good for jogging memories? Now the thought came into my head very clearly from when I was working on my truck—make sure to caulk those windows on the camper shell after you put them back in. 

Now I’ve got my mattress out of the truck standing up in Julie and Dave’s back yard with notebooks lined up on a ladder that hangs on their back fence. It’s the only place I could find the sun hitting. There are lots of beautiful live oaks and other trees in this neighborhood, but with all the shade and 99.999% humidity, it’s hard to dry things out. I’m sure they will come back any moment and wonder why Jed Clampett and his hillbilly family has taken over their yard and left the doors and tailgate open on a truck in front of their house. Thank goodness I know Julie well. I’m pretty sure my predicament will illicit a good laugh. 

Rain has been a theme this week. I left Denton in a downpour on Monday. Downpours mean traffic accidents and I was in a jam on I-35 going west about to go do a little more sleuthing to find the Shady Oaks Ranch. I was sitting there not moving much for 15 minutes. When I finally inched my way close enough to an exit, I went down the ramp, under the freeway and got back on the interstate going the other way. That’s one of the nice things about urban boondocking. Traffic jam? Exit town and don’t look back. 

Actually, I probably will look back. My understanding of Denton is just not done yet. I really would like to find out what happened to the Shady Oaks Ranch on my way back to California in August. I know this much from trying to find the ranch Monday morning: that Northeast area has been chopped up. It’s still rural, but the rural is corralled and in the process of becoming contained. There is literally an interstate circle around the city now. No big news here. You’ve all heard of bypasses and getting on “the loop” to avoid downtowns. Well, now fingers are making their way off the loop. When enough fingers make their way off the loop then the city might make a second loop. On google maps cities start to look like bomb blasts or craters with the concentric rings of freeways and more concrete than plant life. 

This is a good time to clarify something. In the course of talking with a librarian at the North Denton Library branch she clued me in that the greater Denton metropolis of Denton County has a population of approximately 950,000 people. The 150,000 I quoted earlier is only for the city proper. This explains the insane growth which I haven’t really given you a good visual for yet. Unfortunately I’m starting to feel a bit like the cloth that gets pulled together when a loose string is pulled. All the places I’m visiting are stacking up and although I’ve made time to write about them I haven’t had enough time to stretch them out, pat them down and make them presentable like a well-set table. That is the challenge in the coming weeks while still visiting Hattiesburg, Tallahassee, Winchester and Sewanee. 

“Take it bird by bird buddy, bird by bird.” I hear Anne Lamott’s long dead father talk to me and I’m letting him help me out here. I need a long sigh of relief…and maybe a beer.

——–

Before I left Denton I had a happy discovery. Londonderry Lane Apartments is not the only place that remains. The KOA I lived in after Shady Oaks is still there, albeit called by another name: Destiny Dallas RV Resort.

The office staff at the RV Resort let me drive through to see my old haunt. It’s now only for long-term camping and the host did not want me walking through because she thought it might make some residents nervous. 

Most places aren’t improved by age, but the old KOA looked better than ever. They do a good job with upkeep but the main reason is nature—the trees are twice as big and twice as many as when I was living there 44 years ago.

I became a very good pool player in the gameroom at the KOA. I looked through the window glad to see they still have a table. A groundskeeper—a Vietnam vet who would have acid flash backs while he was on the riding mower—gave me a few handfuls of quarters painted with red nail polish every few weeks. 

“Use these quarters on the pool table—not for candy or anything else,” he said. 

If you remember how pool works you know the looser pays. As I got better and better I was sticking fewer and fewer of those red quarters in the pool table and the groundskeeper, or whoever was making money off the table, was making more and more off me—their little eleven year old hustler. 

Another memorable moment at the KOA was when a famous lion tamer came through with all his big cats in a paneled big rig trailer. The lion tamer camped across from our spot on the back row of the campgrounds. (These spots were reserved for long-term residents.) He was a bleached-blond man in his late fifties who walked around with his shirt off showing the hundreds of white scars of varying length and angle that stood out from his tan body. 

I smelled the big beasts before I saw them. They were in their trailer at the front of the grounds. The panels had been lifted and propped open with long boards. I felt sorry for the big cats. There was a double-deck of eight barred cages each containing a single lion or tiger. It was a hot day and most were flopped over panting.

As a final note I’ve decided to stop eating beef…or at least to cut way back. Seeing a truck load of cattle on their way to the slaughter house did it. Of course, I’ve seen that many times on the road, but something about their soulful eyes this time…

June 22, 2021

My sister and I lived in a tent for a year as children. It was a big, heavy, green canvas thing. Folded it weighed about sixty pounds. On the interior were poles to help it stand—sort of like columns in a grand house, if you have a generous imagination. In the upright position it sort of looked like a capital letter M raised in the middle and squished down on the sides. Like this:

In the sixth grade I was, for the first time, one of the shortest kids in class—if not the shortest. Little did I know this distinction would last through the tenth grade. At least the height allowed me to stand up without bending in the middle of our tent. My sister didn’t have that luxury. 

As a teenage girl coming into her own toward the end of 9th grade she probably wasn’t as happy as I was about this Tom Sawyer-like adventure. Nevertheless, we managed to coexist—me on the right side and she on the left. She may have had a moment where she felt like she needed to clarify the demarkation, but the devision was pretty clear given the rectangular footprint and the egress flap in the middle. 

The history of how we ended up living in the tent goes like this: 

We were in the ramshackle farm house. My parents (while working full time jobs) were intent on getting back to the land as so many young people of their generation were. Rodale’s Organic Gardening and The Whole Earth Catalog were popular publications around my house. The farm had been a small, working dairy in its day. The old house, with sagging and uneven floors, sat on 14-acres of land with three barns including the low-ceilinged milk barn with it’s rough concrete floor and feeding trough and seven iron head clamps for the cows. They bought a Red Jersey milk cow which I had the pleasure of naming Fern after the book my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Ann Hall, was reading us: Where the Red Fern Grows. We had a quarter horse named Sugar, laying hens and two calves bound for slaughter when they became steer. Fern had birthed Bo and we bought a black Angus to join the suckling. Triangle was named for the white mark on his forehead. 

My parents planted an impressive quarter-acre garden with bountiful crops of beans, tomatoes, okra, and potatoes to name a few. The year and a half or so spent on the farm was an intense time of real and metaphorical fruition. My parents had a knack for this life for sure, but given the demands of their regular jobs it wasn’t likely they could keep milking a cow twice a day forever, not to mention keep up with all the other tasks of a working farm.  Besides, change and adventure seemed to be their greatest love. 

My fifth grade friend and classmate, Donald,  told me that his family was moving back to California and that their Texas ranch house was coming up for rent. His dad was an airline pilot for American Airlines. He may have been doing training out of the new Dallas International Airport. They could well afford the rental on a house that was actually a modern mansion. 

I told my parents that we should move into it. Mom and Dad had already been apprised of its wonders by a few visits I’d had to Donald’s.  I was surprised when they thought about and enthusiastically agreed. 

The house sat in a valley down a half-mile long dirt driveway off Teasley Lane a mile or so past a neighborhood of affluent homes.  It was where Teasley changed from a main neighborhood feeder vein for south side of Denton into a rural highway. It’s where country began again.

The half-mile long, dirt drive leading to the property ended at a pad of perfectly smooth white concrete that wrapped around to a three-car garage. The mansion was an all-electric wonder with wall to wall powder-blue shag carpeting, central vacuuming with hoses that plugged into the wall, five bedrooms, a thousand square foot living room with anteroom, five bathrooms each with silent-flush toilets, a swimming pool, a grand patio with an eight foot circular fountain and an immaculately clipped pure green lawn that spanned the homes long front and curved around to the pool. So perfect was that carpet of green that it must have contained enough glyphosate to evaporate any weed seed floating through the air even before it landed.  

This manufactured eden sat like an island in the middle of a vast acreage of fenced off grasslands which rippled with the wind and measured time in the shadow of clouds drifting across it. Hundreds of acres spanned the North and South and to the West there was a lake stocked with bluegill, bass and crappie. A back pond on the East side contained catfish and water moccasin. The pond sat in a basin just before the land sloped up to a thin forest behind which sat, hidden from view, a state school where severely mentally disabled people were institutionalized.

Little sound, except that made by nature, made it to this island. From the lake at the front of the property you could hear thirsty engine manifolds sucking air as drivers put a heavy foot to the floor speeding away from suburbia. For a viewer,  a car’s forward momentum could look like a mirage in the distance. It might seem as if a land rocket was making ground, pulsing unevenly, through curtains of warm air.

This is all the long way around to saying that my parents, for the experience of living in Shangri-La, blew all their money. The electric bill alone was $300/month. That’s 1976 dollars. Along with the rent,  it was way beyond their means. Dad also bought a used, but almost new, Cadillac to balance the picture of him as a wealthy oil tycoon or cattleman. 

I’m not sure what blew all their money meant—whether they used up all their savings or went into debt—but their solution to get back on track was to buy a 19-foot-long pull trailer, find a place to haul it and stick us alongside the camper in a tent. 

That’s the condensed version of how we ended up in a tent—first at the Shady Oaks Ranch followed six months later by the Denton K.O.A.

June 21, 2021

Two weeks ago, when I was in the Trinity Alps I opened a can of smoked baby clams to eat with some crackers. Inside, I was shocked to find that there were only four clams and they weren’t babies at all. They tasted okay but lacked a little of the delicacy of the smaller ones. When I was in Moab I opened another can. This one was filled with the expected babies— about 10 or 12 clams in all—tender and delicious. Last night I opened a third can. This can had about 30 or 40 tiny, baby clams in it. They weren’t as delectable as those medium babies that I’ve come to expect. They hadn’t developed much innards and were mostly skin. There was also a little sand in them. I ate ‘em anyway. 

I tell you this story to ask which can of clams do you think Denton is like? Well…(drumroll please)….it’s like the first can of clams with the big ones, except the can is the size of a picnic table. 

It seems that everyone in Denton or coming to Denton wants to own a McMansion that is packed into a McMansion development with outdoor malls. I don’t mean to disparage these homes. They are beautiful and look to be well-built. But they are big and they have obliterated the farms and ranches that were here when I was here 47 to 42 years ago.  I looked up the current population of Denton which is close to 150,000. That’s three times the size when I lived here. 

On the positive side, I’ve seen quite a bit of diversity. An old Asian man jogging in the park waved at me this morning followed by a middle-aged East Indian man who was also jogging and said hi. A young African American man was busking yesterday on the town square playing some sort of electronic beat box. It was slightly better than annoying which lead me to believe there is an appropriate level of tolerance in this town. I also noticed black families and other minorities in some of the upscale neighborhoods I drove through. 

I’m composing this journal entry this morning at Evers Park. I’ve made an oatmeal breakfast and tea here for the past two mornings. I boondocked Saturday night in the back parking lot of the last apartments I lived in when Steve Martin was putting arrows in his head. Last night I slept in front of some apartments between one of my old elementary schools and my best friend’s house in the fifth grade when “Rock the Boat” could be counted on in the roller rink I went to with him. ( Mike moved to Minnesota the summer before sixth grade—making our friendship brief and intense in the scheme of things.)

The mosquitos have gotten a piece of me each night. I’m reminded of that drawing I’ve seen on signs at mass transit train stations. It shows the profile of a yellow stick figure staring down with a dotted line going from the pupil of his eye to a couple of lines on the ground with arrows indicating the space between the lines. The sign says, “Mind the gap”. 

My gap is the space between the tail of my pickup and the end of my camper shell. The shell is about an inch and a half longer than the truck bed and that’s where those little buggers are getting in. I stuff a blanket in but there are still holes. I’ll have to find a solution. 

I’m just telling you this to avoid the hard topic of talking about place here in Denton. The change is just overwhelming. I tried to write about it yesterday but I was dissatisfied and tired of my efforts. I’m trying to remember Anne Lamott’s advice on writing in her book bird by bird, which is, just what the title says, to take it one bird at a time. (Contrary to what you might think of the title the book is about writing not birding. But just let me say that the Great-tailed Grackle’s are out in abundance here in Evers Park. Yesterday I saw one chasing a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher.) 

But back to the topic. On another day I will try to describe what the change is like her in Denton, but for now let me summarize where I am with the six places I lived from ages 8 to 13. In order they are:

First apartment—haven’t found it and probably won’t due to the fact that by the time I arrived in Denton I had developed an acute near-sightedness that went undiagnosed for that first year. For all practical purposes I was blind to distance and lived and went to school on little floating clouds surrounded by the fog of the more general world. Getting glasses in fourth grade was life-changing. It felt like a chorus of angels were singing to me when I first put the new glasses on my face and went running across a grass lawn. Suddenly I could see individual grass blades and my whole body was foreshortened as if my eyes were cameras pointed at my churning legs. At home, on my top bunk, the textured ceiling two feet from my face turned from a soft, rolling landscape to sharp mountains with deep cut valleys.

The Ramshackle Farm House—Gone. House and Farm.

The Texas Ranch House Mansion—Gone. Mansion and Ranch.

The Shady Oaks Ranch—Gone from what I can surmise. Further exploration required. 

The Denton KOA—Gone. There is a KOA out in Sanger, but I can safely say the KOA I lived in is gone though I still need to go by there to see the land. 

Londonderry Lane Apartments—Still there but now named Forest Ridge Apartment Homes. Some newer apartments around the corner are named Londonderry Oaks. I really think they should have kept the original name. It is on a street named Londonderry Lane after all. What strikes me as funny is that the place I lived in with the least character is now the only place I lived in Denton that I can gaze on to help spark memory. 

The plan today is to try to suss out these last places that I’m not clear about. I did reconnoiter the general area of The Shady Oaks Ranch this morning after suddenly becoming aware of where I was and how to get there. Becoming clear about where I was involved suddenly remembering an unintentional, yet hurtful, insult I overheard about the cheap, plastic skate board I’d just successfully petitioned my dad to buy for me at a five and dime-type store we were in. It’s strange how many memories about place are linked to negative memories. Does my brain need some fine tuning or is this just the natural order of things? The other place I will look for today is the land that held the Denton KOA where I learned to be a pool shark—pool as in billiards. Although, come to think of it, I did play my share of sharks and minnows in the campground swimming pool. 

I may leave Denton tonight and get some distance toward New Orleans where I’m going tomorrow. Might even treat myself to a motel room and the shower I’m due for. 

June 19, 2021

This day five write begins on the heels of last night’s write. I haven’t gone anywhere. It’s the least traveling I’ve done since I began this travel journal. I did rearrange my body at some point in the night to get under a sheet. Hard to believe my little battery operated fan cooled me down enough to want to do that. 

Last night’s write proved to me again that mornings work best for writing. My eyes were giving out by the end. The brain was no longer leading but being lead—pulled like an old horse that doesn’t want to go anywhere. It was all I could do to drag and drop those pictures to finish the write—and I’d had such high hopes. While still in the restaurant parking lot I’d brushed my teeth and prepared the camper shell. (Another boondocking tip to prepare yourself before arriving at your parking spot.) I threw a novel and my new road atlas in back for perusing. I even put a hand-written list back here that I thought I’d transfer to my computer. High hopes indeed. 

I’m not sure if this waking in the wee hours is a nervous habit I will have boondocking. When I was parked below the cave, I slept through both nights waking at a reasonable time. Maybe knowing I had permission and a friend within screaming distance gave me a different level of security. 

But I don’t feel insecure here. Five hours ago, when I settled in I had my worries about it being a Friday night in Tucumcari. Those worries were unfounded. This town is shut up tight. The most partying going on right now are a few birds that seem to think 3:30 am is a good time to start celebrating the coming sun. Their pitch is sort of a low, bicycle-wheel-squeak—not as high as hummingbirds that make the sound of rubbing on a balloon with a wet finger—and not so fast. It still sounds like a DJ scratching a record except this DJ has been sipping mojitos all night and there is only one drunk guy left on the dance floor and the scratch isn’t about starting something but shutting it down. 

About an hour ago I heard someone park near me. I listened. The person got out and shut their car door quietly—something I didn’t know you could do with a car door. No footsteps though the next thing I heard came from a more distant place—the barely perceptible rubbing of keys, the turn of a lock, a small squeak of the apartment’s front door and then the door closing—again quietly.

Now if I don’t go back to sleep tonight—which I probably won’t—I’ll definitely need a nap after hitting the road. I plan to fill up my gas tank before I leave and also the red MSR container that goes with the used Whisperlite International that I bought at a camping supply store back in Moab. Did I mention that? It was a good find. Apparently used ones are hard to come by. I knew my friend Marlow would have a good recommendation. 

I woke thinking about the number of places I lived in Denton, Texas: six. A new thought came to me that in today’s world, especially for a single person or a young couple, that really isn’t much. But my parents did have us kids. My sister is almost three years older than me. I was a new eight when we arrived in Texas. Leslie would have been ten, soon-to-be eleven. 

One theory I have about why my folks moved so much was that my parents were trying to escape each other and didn’t fully realize that to do that you have to move without the other person. Another notion is just that they were sort of adventurous and liked new things. It was probably a little of both. 

My parental units did eventually escape each other after my sister and I had left the nest. Were they appreciably more happy without each other? Not sure. I think so. 

There is a rooster crowing now in this town of empty lots, broad streets and small houses. It’s a sign. I think I’ll see if I can go back to sleep. 

June 18, 2021

I’m in Tucumcari, parked two blocks off of old Route 66.  This town has learned the art of dilapidation. The wind is blowing with that whipping sound you hear in Westerns. Tucumcari has all the elements of being abandoned and occupied at the same time. Feels like I’m in kind of a rough neighborhood, but I’m not hearing any screaming. It’s Friday night which worries me more than if it was Tuesday. I’ve parked outside of some single story apartments. Parking outside apartments was one of the recommendations I got from boondocking friends. The temperature isn’t too bad—I’d guess low 80s down from the 100s. 

It was a long drive from Moab. I stopped three times for short cat naps, once for gas and once for a soda, but no long stays anywhere. The snack bag on the seat next to me was lunch. The scenery was amazing. I wasn’t ever in what is officially called Monument Valley, but that was one of the types of landscapes I passed through. It felt like I was in the rumpus room of the gods where they had left their marbles laying around and stacks of rocks.   

I thought about getting a motel here in Tucumcari, but decided I’d rather spend money on a good meal. Got it! Del’s Restaurant—Catfish dinner with cole slaw, pinto beans and a Modelo beer. I stayed in this town about 20 years ago in the Blue Swallow motel. Still there. Looks a little spiffier now like some hipsters got a hold of it. Each room comes with a garage to park your car. At the time, I imagined it was a place well known by gangsters trying to stay hidden from the law. Speaking of gangsters, I tried to go see the car Bonnie and Clyde were in when they got turned into Swiss cheese. That was when I was coming through Primm, NV a few days back. It is held at Whisky Pete’s casino. I went in and all I found was two, big, empty, locked cages. I talked to a bartender. Apparently the owner takes the cars on tour around the country every so often. 

Okay, enough of the chit chat. Tomorrow I arrive in Denton, Tx—my 4th childhood hometown, but number one in number of places I lived. We started out in an apartment. I can’t remember the complex’s name. I don’t think I’ll find the apartment and knock on the door and say, “Hey, I used to live here?” That would be weird…and depressing. But I will find the complex. The apartments were the standard four to a unit. They were brick and all looked the same except for the number of bedrooms.   I think our apartment had two bedrooms and that my sister and I slept in one. Why else would I have been on a top bunk? From that apartment we moved to the “Ramshackle Farm House”. From there we moved to “the Mansion”. From there we moved to the Shady Oaks Ranch (not in quotes because that was its real name). My sister and I lived in a tent at Shady Oaks for six months and then we moved to the local KOA where we continued living in the tent for another six months. From there we moved to another complex called Londonderry Lane Apartments. 

So that’s the kind of excitement I’m going to be exploring in the next few days. Why? I really don’t know. I wish I could be more like eyewitness news—You’ve got questions. We have answers. But my brain is a mystery to myself full of half-baked notions. 

No pictures from the road today except this morning before I left the cave. Here are some from there: 

June 17, 2021

I’m staying in Moab visiting a friend who lives in a cave. I’m going to stay another night. I mean, how often do you get to stay in a cave? 

Actually, I stayed in my pickup. Marlow has a driveway that leads to his cave but you have to have a four-wheel drive to get to the top of it. 

“What kind of vehicle do you have?” asked Marlow when I arrived in town.

“A Ford Ranger,” I said.

“Four-wheel drive?” he asked. 

“No. Two-wheel,” said I. 

“A Subaru has made it up there,” he said. 

“I’ll give it a try,” I said. 

I did. It didn’t work.

Marlow bikes into town each day with his dog Flix—a decrepit, 14-year old greyhound that is mostly skeleton and hide and walks with wobbly straight legs reminiscent of a damaged Transport Walker in Return of the Jedi. The dog gets in a pulled cart once she is too tired to trot. This is happening sooner and sooner. 

Marlow spends his days in town.  His office is in a businesses’ basement room set off of a larger room filled with the things that get stored in business basements—old air conditioners and such. The price is right—free. 

He works there in the basement on his latest novel, Geyser Rush. His other books, Island Despair and the three-part novel, Wet Exit, are for sale in town at the bookstore. The cave is plenty cool inside for working in this heat, but there is no cell phone or internet. The cave is plenty cavernous. A new friend—a young art teacher who works on the Pineridge Reservation—has his tent set up at the front of the cave for the next few days. Marlow’s permanent tent is way in the back.

Someone owns Marlow’s cave—94-year-old man whose ancestors were early white settlers. He owns a lot of the caves and property here on the Colorado River. Marlow pays $100 a month and has a $1,000,000 view. It’s strange to think anyone can own something that is such a beautiful part of nature. Other cave dwellers, ones not on this road, live further away, completely off the grid, and for free on BLM land. They come into town on motorcycles, resupply and then are gone. Some are outlaws. Some are mental cases. 

“Putting down roots on BLM land isn’t allowed but they are so far out there and hidden they’ll never be found,” Marlow said.  

Abrupt subject change—shit. 

Have you ever noticed that sometimes you find yourself doing something you haven’t done in years or even decades and then all the sudden you are doing it in close succession? For me, that would be shitting in the woods. I have now done that three times. Twice when I was backpacking in the Trinity Alps last week and then again this morning. And here is what I have found—shitting in nature is not an easy thing. 

Balance alone is difficult. My theory now is that it is best done completely naked although my most successful shit so far was my first one in the Trinity Alps where I leaned against a rock on a hillside. It’s gone downhill since then; not the shit—my abilities. 

I won’t go into detail about the failures of this morning, but let’s just say I was ready for the first bath of my trip. I can say that most of it went into a gallon size ziplock bag (not having a shovel to bury it). It’s the small amount that didn’t go in, but ran down the edge that caused a mess. 

Shit is the kind of thing that you don’t want to touch and it seems that because of that—because of your trembling hesitation and awkward movements to avoid it at all costs—it ends up getting all over you. Conveniently, the Colorado River was flowing right past me. Unconveniently, the embankment was steep and rocky without a shelf or beach near the land where my unsuccessful shitting took place. But Marlow had told me about a place where the road first hits the river that has a beach, so after almost killing myself to wash my hands I went back to my truck and drove there. 

Marlow’s “beach” was actually just a few flat rocks the size of cafe table tops, with a few more submerged in the water close to shore. The climb down there was twice as high and steeper than the previous spot, but the fact that there was a landing pad made me willing to make the effort. While I was at it I grabbed some shorts that needed washing (an unsuccessful peeing effort while driving 80 mph on I-15, but that’s another story not worth telling). 

After making it to the mini-beach, I sat down on one of the two rocks submerged in about two feet of the silty water. I soaped myself up with some Dr. Bronners (biodegradable and harmless I’ve been told) and had a satisfying bath, washed the pee shorts and threw them back on shore and my toiletry bag which I had somehow managed to get some of the leaky poop on. 

As I sat there I started to notice little nibblings on my legs. I looked in the water and saw dozens of minnows. Soon the dozens turned into hundreds and, by the end, the hundreds may have become a thousand. I sank lower in the water and minnows starting taking their little pinching mouthfuls of dead skin—or whatever it was that they found satisfying—from all over my body. 

I ducked my face in the water leaving my ears out. The minnows nibbled my cheeks, the corners of my lips and even ventured into the vestibules of my nostrils. The water churned around my head making the sound of a simmering pot. I opened my eyes and it was like looking through a microscope into a petri dish of swarming animals with whipping tails. I focused on the feeling. It was much like turning you face up to a winter rain that includes tiny pellets of ice. Where my skin was most sensitive—on the eyelids and under the arms—it was almost too intense, bordering on painful. 

I thought about putting my mom’s ashes, ten years ago, in a different river across the country where I’m going—a sunny day on a dock in Tennessee. Mom’s ashes poured in the water dispersed in grey clouds and as the clouds dissipated suddenly sparkles appeared—white flecks of bone reflecting the light like tiny suns in a galactic cloud. Then minnows appeared, pecking at the white flecks, sparkling themselves. 

So this leads to another question related to place. Where does the spirit go when we die. Does it pass to a bird or a whole genus of minnows? Is memory spirit? Is feeling spirit? Where is this home we are all searching for? 

Maybe spirit is our home. 

June 16, 2021

It may end up being better that I make these journal entries in the morning before a long day of driving. Last night I didn’t have many brain cells left. Still, this morning is a little early. I am parked about 10 miles east of Barstow, CA just off Interstate 15 near where Highway 58 splits into I-15 going North and I-40 going south. I’m parked on a service road in an area that serves as an unofficial truck stop across from a Travelodge and an all-night diner. The Mojave National Preserve was just too unknown. On the phone last night, driving through the dark, Jillian gave me permission not to venture there when she said she’d gotten a flat tire from thorns in the desert. That’s all I needed.

There must be between 20 and 30 big rigs parked here and they’ve been coming and going all night. I have earplugs which I just now put in. I didn’t think to use them when I pulled in last night at 11:30. My sleep was fairly solid despite the hammering of idling engines, the hum of generators and the nearby whine of highway tires providing the frictional median between concrete and encapsulated humans surrounded by tons of plastic and steel being propelled through space. That we do this: move about the earth in an incessant fashion within various states of frenzy—all in a seated position—is a great feat of science. And just to think, soon we will no longer need to be seated but might lay on our backs and look up at the sky just as we might relax beneath a tree on a warm day in the park. 

Speaking of warm, it is about 80 degrees right now. I’ve been asleep on top of the sheets. This exact time one week ago I had multiple layers of clothes on and was stuffed in a sleeping bag inside a tent and I still couldn’t get warm six hundred miles north of here in the Trinity Alps. 

Ill-equiped, I will take the heat over the cold any day. This warmth would be much more doable if the battery operated fan I bought four days ago would work. That was the greatest disappointment when I finally crawled my way into this little shell and locked myself in with chains attached between the tailgate and truck body and vice grips on the lever of each handle latch. At least I feel safe. 

I have a canister of bear spray and a knife I keep within reach—neither precaution taken during my recent backpacking trip. However, I do have a large bag of food inside the cab on the front seat. No need to hang it in a tree which would be hard to do, anyway, in this treeless landscape. I guess I could attach a rope and throw it onto the roof of the diner if truckers were prone to breaking windows to get hold of apples and Pirate’s Booty. 

I have black out curtains on the front and back windows of the camper shell and doubled curtains on the sides that let in a little light. It was no easy thing rigging the inside with the proper hardware and I have Jillian and her sewing machine skills to thank for the tailored look. I was just going to throw up a couple of boards at each end but this is much better. 

Now that I’m just about done with this day’s journal entry, I’m energized and ready to go, but it’s still dark outside. I’d much rather see the landscape in daylight as opposed to not seeing it at all. Apparently there are mountains to cross to get to Las Vegas. I’ve never been to this part of the world before, but I could be driving upside down on the moon for all the information that headlights on a dark road give. 

Now that I’ve got my wits about me, I realize it was just wishful thinking about the diner across the street being 24 hours. A peak through the curtains reveals its unlighted, sad, emptiness. Nothing is stopping these truckers though. Air brakes are snorting like bulls all around me. Engines are revving. It might be time to put on my pants and hit the road.

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.