 
## The Road Has Eyes

## A Relationship, an RV and A Wild Ride

## by Art Rosch

Smashwords edition Copyright2015 Art Rosch

The names of the characters in this book have been changed to protect their privacy. Cover photo and design by the author.
Table Of Contents

Chapter One: Up The Creek

Chapter Two: Meeting My Soul Mate

Chapter Three: Yertle

Chapter Four: It's All Down Hill From Here

Chapter Five: Building Relationships

Chapter Six: I Might Have A Little Gas

Chapter Seven: Apache Mastercard

Chapter Eight: Meeting The Old Ones

Chapter Nine: Back To Indian Country

Chapter Ten: The Time Of The Raven

Chapter Eleven: Under Its Wing

Chapter Twelve: Katrina's Wrath

Chapter Thirteen: Texas Rangers

Chapter Fourteen: Disneyland As Hell

Chapter Fifteen: No Room At The Inn

Chapter Sixteen: Doing The Limbo

Chapter Seventeen: Conversing With Animals. The Ferals

Chapter Eighteen: Meetings With Remarkable People

Chapter Nineteen: Coach Watching

Chapter Twenty: The Fugitives

Chapter Twenty One: Bankruptcy Blues

Chapter Twenty Two: The Feral Cat Wars

Chapter Twenty Three: The Psychic Speaks

Chapter Twenty Four: Animal Farm

Chapter Twenty-Five: Now, Farewell

Chapter Twenty Six: And So....

Appendix: Brand Names, Leveling Jacks, Climate Control, Plumbing
Chapter One: Up The Creek

"How could you be so stupid?"

I was looking out over the mesa and talking to myself. A hot wind was blowing bits of sand and dust into my eyes. I wiped my tears with my sleeves and protected my face by making a visor with my hands.

My memory was suddenly jolted to a time almost forty years ago when my father had spoken those same words to me. I had good reason to remember the moment. Dad had seldom been so angry.

I had been granted use of the family car for three hours on a Friday night. When I arrived home, fifty six hours later, I felt like my eyes were spinning in different directions. I had checked in by phone twice in all that time, and had said something like, "Everything's okay dad, the dust motes are really colorful and pretty soon the sun will know my name. Don't worry I'll be home soon."

The car was fine. I was stumbling over imaginary boulders that were actually little pieces of gravel. I hadn't quite come down yet.

My father is normally mild and calm. This time he was frightened and furious. I don't blame him. He was discovering that his oldest son was taking much stronger drugs than the benign Mexican Pot he had overlooked on several occasions.

He tried to keep his voice from shaking. "What on earth have you been doing for the last two and a half days?"

Rather than be honest, I shrugged and used a sulky whine that is the male adolescent's indication of witless lying.

"Uhhh, I don't know," I said, fidgeting and not meeting his eyes. "Guess I just lost track of time."

Generally, when I was in trouble I had no problem dishing up convincing stories. Now I was exhausted. I could not think! I knew my response was pathetic, but I had no idea how to confess to my dad that psychotropic drugs were involved. I didn't know how to explain why my friend and I had just finished burying a bust of Beethoven in his mother's rose garden. How could my father possibly understand the motivation for such a deed?

We had spent a prolonged LSD weekend in my friend's parents' big empty house. All through the night, whenever we gazed at the composer's frowning lips and fiery eyes we felt scolded, accused. The bust of Beethoven looked completely alive. He scowled down upon us like a disapproving parent.

"What's wrong with you, Ludwig?" I implored. "You were a revolutionary! We're just doing the same thing in our modern way. You look like you're about to explode!."

He replied in German, which was just as well. He said something using the word "vernichtung" which is a word that Hitler was fond of using. It is a word meaning "annihilated", or "destroyed". Finally, we dug a hole, took the bust off the mantelpiece and put Beethoven under two feet of fertilizer. After that, we felt much better. We had annihilated HIM!

"Don't tell me you don't know," dad riposted. "You KNOW... you just can't tell me without making yourself look like a fool." He was right about that. It was the mid sixties and my dad knew what was happening. He knew what I had been doing and said, simply, "How could you be so stupid?"

The words hurt. I wanted my father's respect. I didn't want to admit to being an idiot but I knew he was right.

I was sixteen then, much older now, and I was as disappointed with myself as my father had been all those years ago.

Again, I answered weakly.

"I just didn't know," I replied to this voice of memory, "I didn't think it through. I thought it would be easy. I thought we could do this, one- two- three."

The thing that I thought we could do, one- two- three, was go camping in Utah in the middle of July. The temperature was well over a hundred and there wasn't a spot of shade. We were isolated and in trouble.

Yes, I was stupid. I had led myself and my partner down a certain famous creek without a method of propulsion. (There is, by the way, at least one real place called Shit Creek. It's in Ireland.)

We were the worst campers in the world. We were camping at the wrong time, in the wrong place, with the wrong equipment. We were dog sick. Our heads were aching, our joints felt like someone had poured hot glue into every ligament.

The heat was stifling and we were at twelve thousand feet. We had a dose of altitude sickness that we were too naive to recognize.

We had arrived late the previous afternoon. We set up the tent in the middle of the desert near a leafless tree and a boulder the size of a bus. We ate while we watched the sun set over the buttes and the sandy wastes. Then we reveled in the beautiful star-lit night. We had done it, we had arrived!

By ten the next morning we were utterly miserable.

We had driven from the west coast, pushing hard across Nevada, traversing the salt flats of Utah's Great Basin. We traveled on a mix of coffee and adrenaline, eating hideous truck stop food. Our car's air conditioner insulated us from the desert reality outside. We had no clue what awaited us.

Then it hit us like a hammer. Heat exhaustion, altitude, bad food, caffeine and long hours of driving. It was a deadly combination.

At that moment we felt helpless. Outside the tent there was choking dust, a torrid wind and smoke from Colorado forest fires. Add to these miseries the existence of a trillion tiny white gnats, enough to get into every crack and orifice of our gear and our bodies. We had arrived during some kind of mating phenomenon. The bugs were frenzied with pheromones, they gathered in great opaque clouds which drifted towards our tent until we were lost in a storm of little white insects. We couldn't see our hands in front of our faces.

The next day they would abruptly disappear.

It was probably a hundred twenty inside the tent. Occasionally, I would stick my head outside, and find it even worse. The sun made me so dizzy I couldn't stand up. I prayed for a cool breeze. I didn't have the strength to be outside, nor did I have the strength to endure being inside. Fox and I dragged our sleeping mats to the tent's door and lay there, half in, half out, turning ourselves every now and then to alternate head and feet.

"I think I'm going to die", Fox said.

She was the color of an old bed sheet. She was serious.

"Do you want me to do something? Find an emergency room?"

Fox thinks she's going to die four or five times a year. I knew she would refuse. She is terrified of doctors. She would rather die than see a doctor. She thinks that if she lets a doctor examine her, he'll discover a terminal illness and tell her she's going to die. I know this logic is like a mobius strip, it leads endlessly nowhere, but that's Fox.

"Look at you," she said, "You couldn't drive, you can't even stand up."

"If I have to," I offered, "I'll drive. I don't know if there's an E.R. within a hundred miles, but....."

"No no no, don't go to the trouble. Maybe I won't die."

She got to her knees and lurched out of the tent in time to empty her stomach.

I pressed my palms to my forehead, trying to rub out the headache that sat like an anvil atop my skull.

At the time, I blamed part of our dilemma on age, as if camping were limited to young people. The end of my youth had come hard. I seemed to have gone from young to ancient without stopping off at middle age.

I was fifty two, Fox was forty eight and it was July in the desert. We were dumb rookies, not hardened adventurers. I hadn't been in a tent since Boy Scout camp. If an eleven year old had come along, he would have rolled his eyes and sneered at me.

Why were we killing ourselves with this poorly planned trip?

Fox had compelling reasons for wanting to see the area of The Four Corners. A few months previously, she had learned that she was half Apache. This came completely out of the blue.

Give it a moment to sink in.

She was supposedly the child of a Swedish father and mother. On a trip back to the old Iowa homestead she was shown her birth certificate and a few other documents. They had been kept by Aunt Inge, the only remaining member of her generation. Fox learned that she was the illegitimate child of her father and an Apache woman named Star In The Morning.

Things began to make sense. Fox had black hair whose strands were thick as cables. She was slow to anger, but when she saw an injustice she could become a turbine of formidable rage.

Growing up on a farm, she saw a lot of animals being mistreated. These situations acted as a trigger to her rage. She often charged into a situation with fury, chastising a farmer for whipping a horse or prodding a cow. She was a little black-haired girl, standing between a farmer and his livestock. She was considered totally nuts.

She had a spooky ability to speak with animals. She was called an "ear", what is now called a "whisperer" or, in some circles, a "Pet Psychic." She wandered the plains alone, hunting for arrowheads, sage, abandoned birds' nests. She gathered her findings into little packages, over which she made "magic".

Whether or not we know it, the blood of our ancestors paints the world in its own unique colors.

Fox understood, at last, why she had spent her life wondering why she was not like the rest of the family.

Fox's father had fallen in love. The child of this love was taken in, the secret was kept. Now only Aunt Inge remained. She had held the story forty eight years, waiting for the right time. Fox was Apache from the Chiricahua Band. She was a descendent of those fierce warriors who were impossible to subdue. They clung to their independence with a tenacity that has no parallel. When I consider these last sentences I think, "yep, that's Fox".

My own personal engine for making the trip is my enthusiasm for astronomy. I am crazy for the night sky, and for everything to do with night photography. I love lenses, binoculars, telescopes, all kinds of gear. City lights plague me. That means getting away, going to high desert, remote camps, away from the constant soaking of the sky by wasted electricity.

Our camping journey to the Southwest was something bigger than a vacation. Fox and I shared a deep bond: we both suffered some degree of chronic pain. We understood each other's limitations. What could we do? Sit around and feel sorry for ourselves? Grow old like a couple of leafless trees on a dry hillside where the water no longer flows? On the contrary, we felt a defiant need to go out and expand ourselves, to push the horizons a little farther back.

It was natural for Fox to be drawn to the epic lands of the Four Corners. We wanted to see Arches National Park, Monument Valley, the great Anasazi ruins. We wanted to see petroglyphs and walk the land of Fox's ancestors. After the revelation about her lineage, Fox hungered for all things Native American. She tracked down her native cousins and followed strings of genealogy back several generations. The idea that her people had walked the continent for ten thousand years was compelling.

How would you feel at almost fifty, if you discovered you were not as described? What would it be like to suddenly acquire a new mother, a new genetic heritage? How would you handle the abrupt and total validation of a lifetime of uneasy feelings and suspicions? Fox was having a major shift of identity.

We obtained one old black and white photo of Star In The Morning. It's about two inches square. I scanned it, Photoshopped it, did everything I could to restore it. When we saw Fox's resemblance to her birth mother, it gave us goose bumps.

Fox's life changed. She fought her way free of a marriage that had been a nightmare. She had made a vow to herself: when her three children got into college, she would file for divorce. She would no longer be subject to the blackmail of having her husband "take the kids to visit their cousins", as he charmingly put it. That had always been his ultimate threat, to snatch the kids and vanish back to the Old Country, where Fox would be unable to see them. Ever.

There were a lot of forces at play in this re-invention of our lives.

We wanted to keep traveling, but tents were not suitable. We purchased a pop-up trailer. It towed behind the Jeep and expanded into a two-bed canopy with fly-screens for windows.

We didn't know, at the time, that we were embarking on a major life-change, that within a few years everything would be turned upside down.

The photographs I took on that first trip to Utah were the turning point of my career as a photographer. I won a prize from the United Nations, and my prize winner traveled the world in the U.N.'s exhibition.

Once we had recovered from that dreadful day of illness, we found a better campsite and spent the remainder of the week driving into and through Arches National Park.

I was in a fragile emotional state. While Fox was having a wonderful experience, I was struggling with anxiety and depression.

The main road through Arches is eighteen miles long, and every curve has a new vista, a gaping impossibility. The place scared me. It was so beautiful! I felt bad for not being able to let myself go and enjoy it. The place felt like the eerie silence before a tornado strikes. It was inhumanly awesome, a land of gods and giants.

Fox's experience was different. She was possessed by spirits, she was walking with her ancestors. She had come Home.

As our week came to an end, we felt as if something had not been completed. We had not visited a major petroglyph site. We were looking for something off the beaten path. We wanted to avoid the crowded places with fenced-in panels and fact sheets in glass-encased marquees.

Fox was mingling with Native Americans. Being a distant relation of Geronimo didn't hurt. We met a local native who gave us a tip about an obscure petroglyph site. It lay down a dirt road leading to a Ute reservation. At the head of the road, a defunct town discouraged tourism. It was a mess, a junkyard, a place that had died in the sixties. There was a wrecked motel, a dozen rotting houses, a gutted restaurant. A few people still lived furtively in this ghost town.

The road led straight into a canyon, whose sides rose ever higher as we drove, bumping and dusty, into the unknown. We felt anxious and isolated as we descended mile after mile on this gravel path. Our luggage tumbled around in the back of the Jeep as we yawed our way across several dry washes. It was late afternoon, slanted rays of sun lit the eastern wall of the canyon, putting the western side in deep shade.

After almost an hour of bumpy driving, we rounded a slight turn and there, on the west side of the canyon, hanging over a deep dry stream bed, were giant ochre figures. The site was overgrown by tall bushes of wild sage, unruly stalks of white yarrow and stink-weed. The owners of the land had put up a little fence composed of two log rails. There was a single information sheet in a small wooden frame. The place was deserted, there wasn't a soul. The silence was as complete as a windless day on Mars.

The petroglyphs were from several different eras, some going back to Anasazi cultures thousands of years old. There were surreal helmeted figures with spooky blanks for eyes. There were incomprehensible shapes and signs. There were later petroglyphs layered on top of old ones, and finally there were graffiti laid down in the 1880s. There was one graffito, etched right over one of the ochre priests of the Ancient Ones. This witless white man had written, "F.S. 1885." Thank you so very much, Mr. F.S., for defacing the holy cliff wall.

On the opposite side of the road lay another cliff wall full of ocher figures, rock carvings and yet more grafitti.

We wandered dream-like for an hour among these potent signs and symbols. Fox was in another world. She was CONNECTED. She gathered sage and juniper to make herbal remedies. Her big black hair seemed to coil with energy.

After a time, we heard the sounds of a car approaching. We had slipped so far back in time that the gurgling noise of the engine came as a deep shock.

An early 80s model Buick, buffed down to its gray primer, slowly drove past us. A man from the Ute reservation was at the wheel, staring straight ahead. I had to step aside to let him pass. He was just a few feet away.

The man did not acknowledge our presence. He passed as if we were invisible. Or, I thought, as if he believed HE was invisible. There was no communication, zero, not a nod or a flicker of an eye.

The isolation of the spot was so complete that to encounter a human being felt very odd. We were a hundred miles from a town, sixty from the nearest gas station. The man was hexing us. By refusing to nod, make eye contact, turn his head slightly, he altered our reality, he put us into negation.

He scared us.

Fox and I were seized by an overwhelming sense of danger. We wanted to escape from the canyon immediately. We had used up our welcome, that was the only way to express it. Our allotment of time, granted by the residing spirits of the place, had expired. Night was falling. We got into the Jeep, quiet and apprehensive, and drove back out the way we had come. We rolled onto the interstate highway, and began our trip back home.
Chapter Two: Meeting My Soul Mate

At the time of my first encounter with Fox, I had spent my life failing at relationships. I'm surprised there isn't a support group, a twelve step program, a Failed Relationships Anonymous. If I became a member I would find a few musicians from the group and form a band. We would develop a special repertoire. We would play carefully chosen love songs, such as "Killing Me Softly" and "Crazy".

We could call ourselves The Damned If You Do.

My relationship history is pretty boring. Everyone's history is boring except to those directly involved. Let's just say that I had failed a lot and was single at fifty two.

I needed the right woman. She would have to attach herself to me like a barnacle and never let go. I needed someone who had already decided she would hold onto me, someone who would make the commitment FOR me.

I was attachment-phobic and averse to responsibility. I was becoming aware that life's clock is brief. It was time to put this childishness behind me. I decided to make a serious effort at meeting my partner.

I started visiting websites. I had been told that the internet dating world is a freak show of fantasy and bad judgment. Fine! I'm a writer. I thrive on fantasy and bad judgment. Bring them on!

I subscribed to matchmaking sites and perused the ads, looking at the pictures and reading absurdly perfect descriptions of prospective partners. Where were the neurotics, the nut cases? They're right here, I thought, hiding in plain sight.

This was the nineties. The internet wasn't so slick back then. The ads were brief and the photos took agonizing minutes to download.

Here's a typical ad: Fit female professional, petite, 38. Loves reading, wine, fine dining, romantic walks on the beach. Looking for financially secure man with sense of humor.

My problem with these ads was the way people presented themselves as generic versions of human beings. The honest text of this ad would read "Female professional running out of eggs. Obsessed about weight. Keeping thin via fiendish treadmill workouts. Loves trashy novels. Gets sloshed during dinner. Looking for generous man or will soon commit suicide."

My email box filled quickly. Having twenty or thirty letters a day was exciting. I was hoping to find my destined soul mate. I kept looking and reading, ad after ad, email upon email, and it was difficult to stop. I fantasized about finding that honest ad accompanied by a photo that would make my testosterone sit up and notice. Just one more, I kept thinking, just one more. Maybe that will be The One!

It became an addiction. Every day, I spent all my spare time at the computer. I looked at photos, exchanged emails, spoke on the phone. Once or twice a month I went on a coffee date, hoping there would be that magical ingredient, Chemistry. I met teachers, single moms, lawyers, nurses, psychologists, tarot readers and massage therapists.

Without exception, they were crazy. "Fit female professional" was a nail biter. She compulsively gnawed the ends of her fingers and spat the leavings onto the table.

She was an attorney. She kept talking through the nail biting, P-tuh. P-tuh. She spoke quickly and emphatically. While she gnawed her left hand, she waved her right hand in my face. This right hand was her way of telling me not to interrupt because her story was much more important than any of my stories. I was to shut up and listen.. It was okay with me. I didn't have anything to say. Attorney stories are incredibly boring to non-attorneys.

I'm sure the ladies found me just as strange. I think we (I mean the collective "we", the human race) would be better off if we stopped pretending to be well adjusted and wore our neuroses like outer garments, as plainly as blouses and jackets. Someone should invent a kind of portable holographic billboard, a way to display personality profiles. They could be called REALITYGRAMS . Our therapists would write them. No one is honest enough to write his or her own. For example, when a man comes into proximity to an attractive female, he can switch on his REALITYGRAM™, which will say something like " I am a needy narcissist with food addictions and a tendency towards cruel verbal 'leakage'. I'm working on these issues in therapy. I dwell excessively on my childhood abuse. I blame my mother for everything that's wrong with my life."

The dark side of one's-personality is up front, out on the table. The man I've just described, whoever he might be, could look for a woman with a hologram saying, "I am a compulsive nurturer. I can't say 'No' to anyone. I'm submissive but full of repressed rage. I cycle between anorexia and bulimia. I'm attracted to men like my father. He could verbally cut a woman to shreds and seem as if he was doing her a favor."

Instead of looking for Mister or Ms Perfect, we can look for a person with a tolerable set of neuroses and compulsions. Mister or Ms Good Enough. A person we can live with. Think of all the time and trouble to be saved!

The internet dating world is a freak show of fantasy and bad judgment. That isn't just a rumor. I had dates that were excruciating and bizarre. One night I went out with a psychiatrist who offered herself in marriage after about twenty minutes of light conversation. We had been driving around Golden Gate Park. I had parked my car in front of the Hall of Flowers and we were sitting there, chatting and inhaling the fragrant air.

"Do you want to marry me?" she asked, in all seriousness. "I need to know right now. Otherwise I'll make different plans. You'll never regret hooking up with me. I'll support you in your work. I'll connect you with publishers. Your life will be glorious. I'm a fantastic woman, sexually, intellectually. I cook gourmet food. I know volumes of poetry by heart. I can fence, I play chess...."

"Whoa, whoa!," I blurted. "Why, are you so eager to marry me? You're an extremely attractive woman. You must have a lot of boyfriends."

"You're a brilliant man," she said. "I've read your writing, heard your music. Your work will be loved centuries from now. I want to be part of that. An artist like you doesn't come around every day."  
There was a little red light going off in that part of my brain that discriminates between decisions that are in my best interests and decisions that are not. Beep beep beep beep. The familiar Star Trek Computer Voice was saying, "Warning warning, attractive objects may be less attractive than they appear!" There was part of me that was flattered and tempted. She was a fine looking woman, with blue eyes, milky skin and a glossy black helmet of shoulder-length hair. She was a socialite psychiatrist who lived in a five thousand square foot house on Twin Peaks. I had gone to her house for coffee. It was incredible. The furnishings, the view! Then we drove in our separate cars to the bottom of the hill. She was going somewhere else after our little date. I picked her up on Haight Street and we took my car into Golden Gate Park.

I thought about being supported in luxury while I played music and wrote novels. I thought about that amazing house and its view of the glittering lights of the entire bay. I was exhausted by my artist's poverty. I had struggled for decades just to stay alive and continue my work. I was worn down by the endless tension of squeaking by on a pittance.

I was actually thinking about it! I was insane to even consider it! Let me remind you that, a few paragraphs back, I make the blanket assertion that we're all crazy. Yes, I thought about marrying this woman. I just couldn't fight my way through the temptation. For ten minutes I waffled around, equivocating. I could not bring myself to say a clear "No."

My hesitation made her furious.

She grew strident. She made a sudden transformation from charming to vicious.

"Asshole!" she rasped. Her hair swung like a whip as she turned on me. "Do you have any idea what you're passing up?" She grabbed her sweater at the waist and pulled it to her neck. Her eyes burned into mine. The nearby streetlights revealed a perfect pair of medium sized breasts with taut little nipples. The muscles of her abdomen and torso were beautifully toned from regular workouts. I got the message. I didn't know what to do with it.

I babbled. "What the fu...? I...um..shit....how would I...umm?" My mouth was full of the stones of reality. I didn't know what to say. This woman was nuts! What wonderful irony!

"Take me back to my car, you fucking pussy," she finally ordered. "I need a man who knows what he wants. You had your chance, you fat hippie kyke."

This is internet dating, I reminded myself. Don't be surprised by anything, no matter how bizarre. Our world is like a locked psych-ward after the doors have been thrown open.

I drove out of the park and delivered my rejected wrathful shrink to her Mercedes on Haight Street.

This was a chaotic period in my life, a time when I frequently lost my bearings. On one occasion I accepted a dinner invitation to a woman's home. She had posted an exquisite photograph online, that of a gorgeous blonde with a sweet and tender expression.

I would be meeting her son and a few close friends. It seemed innocent enough. It seemed safe.

I rang the doorbell of a ranch house in the North Bay. The door opened with an ominous squeak of the hinges. If I had been living in a 50's cartoon, there would have been a sudden scream of tuneless brass from the orchestra. My hair would have stood on end. As the door opened my eyes would pop out on stalks and a second ghostly figure of myself would be seen separating from my body and fleeing in terror. The orchestra would follow my ghost-body with a tinny xylophone playing descending scales of silly running sounds.

She wore a hair net. She cradled a bottle of bourbon in her armpit. A cigarette dangled from the corner of her lips and sent swirls of smoke drifting into watery eyes. The makeup that was daubed on her face looked as if applied by a chimpanzee. She leered at me, smiling the ways horses laugh, with the lips flapping like big wet paddles, showing her oversized square yellow teeth. The photo in her web ad showed a fresh-faced blue-eyed beauty with the looks of a magazine model. If I squinted and imagined her in a much younger life, I could recognize the svelte beauty. There are no rules on the internet outlawing the use of images from twenty or thirty years ago. I had been hoist on the petard of my own shallowness!

Rather than bailing out at the first opportunity, I politely persevered. I didn't have the heart to reject the woman outright. I had been on two dates that lasted five seconds. Both followed the same script. I strode into the coffee shop, recognized my date by her description. I sat down. My date stood up as if she was on the other end of a seesaw.

"Nope, not my type," she said. She pivoted and walked away. Had the date lasted five seconds? Ten? It depends when the clock started. When I walked through the door? Or when I sat down?

These ladies were black belts in internet dating. They threw me to the mat, bam! I'm not like that. I could never be so ruthless.

There were a dozen or so people about the house. Something illicit was going on in a rear bedroom, where the door opened periodically to swallow people. When they emerged there was a glitter about their eyes, a skewed smile, a naughty wink. When I was invited, I declined. I hadn't come to this place to get loaded on the buzz of the day.

I protected myself by spending time with the son of my hostess. He was eleven and had a set of drums. I had once been a professional drummer. I felt I had something to impart. I showed the boy how to play a few rudiments and easy swing rides on the cymbal. He wanted to play blasting heavy metal music and wasn't impressed. He demonstrated his playing by thrashing at the drums with uncoordinated rage. I took my turn again and started doing Gene Krupa licks. This was more to his liking. He could relate to the primitive tom-toms, to the boomboombity boom.

The boy had a sad resigned look on his face. His dad was absent; his mom was a decaying alcoholic, his home a location for drug parties. He was not having an easy childhood. He had a Marine Corps haircut, the kind that looks like an oval piece of carpet glued to the top of his head. He had pimples, a few missing teeth. I could see the thug he would be in four or five years.

I digress. The story of how I met Fox goes like this: Fox kept her laptop at her best friend's house. In the course of my online meet 'n' greets, I had corresponded briefly with this best friend, and my name had gone into her Buddies List. There was a small problem, because it wasn't her computer and it wasn't her Buddies List.

Fox was a deeply reserved woman in the midst of an unspeakably abusive marriage.

The computer was with her best friend because Fox's husband spied on her. He scanned her computer, listened to her phone calls, brazenly read her mail. Her best friend's place was the only refuge she knew. She had to embezzle her own money to buy a laptop. It stayed at the best friend's house; it was her only private expression.

The next time she signed on to AOL, she saw my name on her Buddies List. "Who is this?" she asked her friend. "Have you been using my computer?"

"I'm sorry," the friend replied. "I couldn't resist. I hate sharing a computer with my son. He's always playing video games, I never get online." She looked at my name on the Buddies List. "That's just some guy I chatted with a few times."

Fox was really angry. She sent me an email and requested that her screen name be removed from my Buddies List, and she would remove mine from hers. I don't really remember how the first email morphed into several more emails. Soon we were regular correspondents. Then we started talking on the phone. The conversations were strangely confessional. Sometimes Fox fled from her home in despair and called me from her car. She barely mentioned her marriage. She listened. She was a great listener and I could talk raindrops back into the clouds.

Then we arranged to meet.

It was impossible to anticipate how profoundly we would alter one another's lives.
Chapter Three: Yertle

Amateur astronomers are a little bit nuts. I hope they will forgive the generalization, because they're also very nice people who will bite their fingers off to show you something in the sky so fuzzy and dim that you might be able to say that you see it.....or if you don 't see it, they'll spend half an hour tweaking their telescope to make sure that you see it....and then you still don't see it....but to escape from their clutches you will SAY that you see it.

Mt. Pinos, in California's Los Padres National Forest, rises to 8900 feet. It has a smooth road ending in a flat parking lot at the very summit.

It's a place where glaciers slide through mountain creases. Ponderosa pine trees twist their way down the centuries of their enigmatic lives.

At favorable times of the year Mt. Pinos' summit fills with astronomers and their gear. This has been happening for at least fifty years.

Among this tribe of quasi-lunatics are people who know where to find Galaxy M51 with a ten second tweak of a powerful telescope. It might take me ten minutes, if I'm lucky. The conversation at star parties is an utterly foreign language, but it's not really that difficult once you know the alphabet. "M" is for Messier, Charles Messier who, in 1788, compiled a catalogue of one hundred and ten prominent astronomical objects. His purpose in doing so was to warn astronomers who were hunting comets that these objects were NOT comets. The telescopes of that era were not as precise as today's telescopes. Everything that wasn't a star looked like a fuzzy blob....maybe a comet, maybe a nebula, a star cluster, a galaxy. Astronomers like Sir Edmund Halley used Messier's list to check off these false leads. Were it not for Messier's list, Halley's Comet could be anybody's comet. Sir William Herschel might be gazing upon the Crab Nebula which is M1 on Messier's list of not-comets. He needn't waste several nights seeing if the object moved in a cometary orbit. He could move on to the next fuzzy object.

Messier was doing an invaluable service to his community of scientists. In his time, discovering a comet could win a knighthood and a lifetime pension from the King. The only way to discover a comet, then and now, is to scan the sky systematically, starting at Point A and sweeping a telescope slowly and smoothly across the heavens. If something dim, fuzzy and boasting some bit of a tail is sighted, the coordinates are duly noted and then the object is observed on subsequent nights. If the object has moved, and keeps moving in a certain type of orbit at a predictable speed, it is indeed a comet.

Messier's list is so adept that it has survived more than two centuries as the major catalog of things to look for in the sky. When astronomers talk about "M" this and "M" that, it's the Messier Catalog in which they swim. Nowadays if you discover a comet, you are mentioned in astronomy magazines and the comet will bear your name

There's no knighthood. No stipend. No royalties.

The Messier Catalog keeps most astronomers busy with their maps and scopes for a lifetime. The hard-core astronomers move on to the next scientific list of celestial objects. This is the NGC, or New General Catalogue. It contains a mere eight thousand celestial tourist sites. Keeping one's ears perked in the dark of a star party, you might be invited to step over to a fourteen foot ladder leaning against a mechanism resembling a thirty inch battleship gun.

"Want to see NGC 2678?" Wow, yeah! Then you might hear a phrase repeated hundreds of times a night at any self-respecting star party: "I don't see anything."

Then there's a low mumbling, a pause. "OH! THERE IT IS! WOW!"

After the NGC the catalogues get huge, with the ICC, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDS), and the numbers go into the millions and the gazillions.

Of course you can buy one of these gazillions of stars as your very own from the International Star Registry. This is a business, not an official scientific organization. I could open my own International Blades of Grass Registry, but blades of grass lack the romantic allure of stars. A clever entrepreneur hit upon a perfect marketing scheme. Advertising is his only real expense. The inventory of products is endless. There's no regulation, no copyright infringement and the warehouse is the universe. I must admit to a grudging admiration for the man who came up with the idea of selling Certificates of Ownership for stars. It's a shameless scam, but it's legal.

Amateur astronomers are highly refined technophiles who are immersed in an alternate lifestyle. Most of this lifestyle happens in the small hours of the night at remote dark locations. It takes a special sort of madness to seek out such discomfort for the sake of a clear look at the sky.

First, there's the drive. Cities and astronomy don't mix. It takes a minimum of fifty miles distance from urban lighting to allow some of the sky's details to emerge. Considering the amount of sprawl now prevalent on the North American continent, escaping light pollution is a major undertaking. There are other obstacles, such as dust, mist, atmospheric particles and weather that obstruct the pursuit of astronomy. By default, there are certain special places where astronomers tend to gather. Mt. Pinos has been one of these places for decades. Sadly, it's losing out to the expanding light-domes of Bakersfield and Santa Barbara. Many California astronomers now head towards the Sierras or the Mojave Desert.

Astronomers love gear; lots of gear. The gear is weighty, complicated, clumsy and difficult to operate. The parking lot at Mt. Pinos on a moonless Saturday night looks as if a class of MIT graduates are preparing to repel an alien invasion. Telescope tubes point skyward in all directions. Red LEDs are the only illumination. Red light does not compromise night vision. If someone turns on a white light, there will emerge from the parking lot an ominous snarl, sinister enough to turn big Hell's Angels into cringing mice. Little red lights zig zag across the asphalt. Blinking and beeping, night-vision computer screens show sky maps and tracking data. If I were less militant, I would pity the innocent lost tourists who drive into the Mt. Pinos parking lot with headlights ablaze. It happens, once or twice a weekend. The hapless tourists are destroying dozens of precision exposures, possibly months of hard work by astronomical photographers. I've seen a mob of blinded astronomers chasing a family of lost campers out of the lot, waving their red flashlights in rage. They were screaming "lights out! lights out! lights out!" The lost family from Minneola had no idea what they had done. They were simply terrified and reversing direction to make good their escape.

I recognize that there are different categories of astronomers. There are hard-core "gearhead" astronomers, many of whom are involved with astro-photography. Astronomers are as competitive as any athletes. The photographers compete to get better, cleaner, deeper photos. They vie to capture the most distant and obscure galaxies.

Astronomers of the "I can find anything in the sky" group are a lot of fun at star parties. These are the people who are locating the most obscure nebulas and galaxies and rattling off their names. "There, my fellows, is the Stephens Quintet, sometimes known as 'Hickson's Compact Group 92', a cluster of five galaxies with signs of gravitational interaction". Twelve feet away at the next telescope a diminutive sixty five year old woman named Carolyn commands a queue at her giant scope.

"If you avert your eyes slightly to use the more sensitive rod receptors," she instructs, " you might get a glimpse of the famous Horsehead Nebula, or B33, which is contrasted by the presence of IC 434 in the same field of view". The competition spreads across the site. Numbers fly, arcane tidbits of astrophysical knowledge are imparted.

The consumer part of astronomy has shown stunning evolution. In ten years the development of what are called "Go To" telescopes has achieved perfect refinement. It is possible to walk into a store, buy a telescope for under fifteen hundred dollars, set it up that night and align it by pushing a few buttons. No knowledge of astronomy is required. The Go To scope will whirr, its arms will move as if driven by a ghost, and it will locate any of forty thousand targets in the night sky without human assistance. It's spooky. "Real" astronomers regard it as an invention of the devil.

I enjoy lightweight simple astronomy. I take nothing but my eyes or a set of binoculars, and sit up all night in a trance, partaking of the insane beauty of the night sky at a place where it has not been spoiled by civilization. I revert to the awe of my ancestors at the nameless and timeless mystery of night, stars, comets, planets, the immense panoply of our human heritage, up THERE, no admission fee, UP THERE!

It breaks my heart to think of the numbers of people who will live their lives without seeing the Milky Way or a really dark night sky in all its majesty.

What I am describing is one of the great motive forces for my desire to go camping. I want to live outside the orb of our culture in remote places, while still partaking of that culture's comforts and electrical devices. It's a tricky tightrope to walk.

We made two trips to Mt. Pinos. We were slowly ascending a learning curve. Lesson number one: do not drive on California's Interstate Five. It is not for civilians. It's for truckers.

In spite of painful boondoggles, we were now hooked on camping and started thinking about an RV.

After some trips to Mt. Pinos and assorted state parks, we decided to invest in a motorized Recreational Vehicle.

At this point, I began doing research into the nature of the RV. I met all kinds of people online. There were RV history buffs, collectors of strange old brands and styles and activists devoted to Green RV innovations. There was no shortage of information. I joined forums, clubs, corresponded with RV geniuses.

An RV is a collection of devices whose purpose is to take people camping without leaving behind the comforts of home. One writer likened it to operating a small city. It has all the utilities: sewage, electrical power, transportation, climate control, food storage, water and housing. There are a lot of things to go wrong with an RV. Reading the internet, I was frightened by the horror stories. There are endless catastrophes in the lives of RV owners. If a boat is called a hole down which money is poured, an RV is a volcano crater where hundred dollar bills are crisped in neatly banded five thousand dollar packets. The more complex the RV, the greater the risk.

It is the nature of the internet to distill aspects of a subject and disgorge the worst stories. I read about RV calamities. There were explosions, fires, sewage overflows, electrocutions, dealer scams, bogus warranties. I began to tremble and reconsider. I was comforted by dozens of passionate RV lovers who told me that if I did my homework I would be pleased by my success.

Fox and I are artists. We're not affluent. We live off of the tidbits thrown from the giant merry go round of American culture. We are freelance opportunists. We were considering spending an amount of money that seemed a fortune. It also seemed the answer to transporting ourselves to those places we wanted to go. If I sold enough prints from the photos taken on these trips, the RV could pay for itself. So I told myself....(sound of sardonic laughter from corner of room).

One thing was apparent when I went shopping for an RV. It's a buyer's market. The number of RVs for sale is so enormous, the choice so vast, that it becomes bewildering. Since the economy tanked, prices have dropped thirty or forty percent. There are desperation sales where beautiful vehicles can be purchased for a fraction of their worth.

After looking at a number of RVs we located the one we wanted. It was a nineteen foot "Class C" motorhome. The class C is a truck onto which is grafted a camper, with a bed extended over the top of the cab. It's a very common form of RV, a "mom pop and the kids" vacation camper. This particular vehicle was a bit old, a 1979 Fleetwood Flair, with about fifty three thousand miles on the engine. Fox fell in love with it immediately. It had signs of its age, but something about it shouted "I was only driven by a sweet elderly couple on holidays and I'll take care of you". The age of the truck scared me. But then, everything about driving an RV scared me.

By this time I had read so many horror stories about lemon RVs that I was a wreck. Stories of disaster and disappointment saturate the internet. I was frightened of having a breakdown in some isolated spot. I didn't know the safety secrets of the RV world. I didn't know about Good Sam's Emergency Road Service. For ninety dollars a year an RV owner can have a tow truck dispatched to anywhere in the US. It might take a while but a big tow will get to the stranded RV. It's like Triple A for campers. It's a great psychological comfort.

I knew nothing of this at the time. My terror of having a flat tire was enormous. I didn't know what I would do. The weight of the RV was intimidating, and the provided jack looked as if it was completely rusted into place. I was haunted by a vision of getting a flat on a deserted Nevada road, with the temperature soaring around a hundred degrees.

The spare tire on this RV is located UNDER the camper shell. In my fantasy I would get on my back to reach the spare tire, and the four bolts that held it to the vehicle's body would be impossible to budge. I would strip them, one at a time, with my lug wrench. I would cut my hands to pieces while my back was tortured by sharp rocks. Sweat was soaking my clothes, dehydration was setting in, the sun was going down, there was no cell phone signal and no cars coming by. Coyotes would howl as we huddled helplessly in our badly tilted RV, abandoned, with only the twenty gallon water tank to hold us in the devastating heat. Days would pass without a vehicle to be seen, and finally we would be discovered by a Nevada Highway Patrol cruiser who would have to radio for a helicopter to evacuate us to the nearest hospital.

This is how my paranoid imagination works.

Fox named the motorhome "Yertle". We thought it was a cute turtle name. We didn't know, at the time, that Yertle (Dr. Seuss' Yertle) was a terrible despot.

We paid for Yertle and drove her home.

There was a bit of work to be done, minor stuff. We were planning to leave for Arches National Park around October 7. On October 4, as I was taking Yertle for a shakedown cruise, I discovered that the radiator was leaking fluid at an alarming rate.

I scouted the phone book for an RV specialist. I had Yertle in his garage the following day.

She got a new radiator, an oil change, a few tweaks to the furnace. I asked the mechanic to check her thoroughly for any potential problems. He pronounced her fit.

Yertle's interior was a typical RV mélange of wooden cabinets, convertible bed/tables and a curtained upper bed loft above the front seats. She had shower, toilet, sinks, stove, electricity, a full life-support system.

Most of all, it seemed, Yertle had SOUL. I have never met a motor vehicle who seemed more animate to me, more imbued with a life of its own, a character, a personality. The more I drove Yertle, the more I felt this to be true. Down the long boring miles of road, crossing Nevada, Utah, traversing the menacing flats of the Great Basin, I spoke quietly to Yertle, and she seemed to answer.

Before I put my absolute trust in Yertle, I experienced considerable anxiety. She might be some Stephen King monster merely biding her time before the faux wood panels turned into snakes that slowly began to curl towards our throats while we innocently watched the scenery to either side of the road.

Have you noticed that in horror movies the monster strikes when the actors aren't looking? That's a sure sign: not looking. I decided that I would never be caught not looking. My attention would never wander, I would never be the guy whose girlfriend says, "Oh look what is this thing here in the bushes?" I'll never be the guy who bends down to peer, and, while he and his girlfriends' eyes are completely fixed on whatever's in the bushes, the camera (the monster) does a creepy sloowww zoom inward until at the last second the girl looks up and then: eeeeeeeeee! Scene ends abruptly with a splatter of gore and a sound something like "sploosh".

First, I had to learn to drive Yertle. She had visual blind spots in spite of the huge mirrors. Her bulk made it easy to clip trees and foliage, or poke a hole in the cabin. The visibility deficit offered the terrible possibility of squashing pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists or small cars.

There wasn't much time to practice. Our schedule demanded that we leave by mid-October.

Motorhomes are underpowered and awkward to drive. In a bad wind, on a steep grade, Yertle could trundle along at twenty five miles per hour. Her worn springs made for a shaky ride. At higher speeds, the noise was such that conversation was impossible. A long drive was exhausting. Two hundred miles, tops, was all I could endure. Yet there were days when I put in four hundred plus.

Foolishness.

Dangerous foolishness.
Chapter Four: It's All Downhill From Here

Sometimes, I wonder why people consider travel to be fun. There is so much work to be done, so much organization, so many details, so much hurry. Then, after the hurry, comes boredom and discomfort. .

Whether or not we like it, travel is an essential part of modern life. Our solution to the problems of travel was to buy a Recreational Vehicle. Right, an RV, a Winnebuggo or some sort of contraption that carries people around with a portable house. It's imperative that I travel. I'm a photographer, an astronomer. I have to go to dark and exotic places!

Fox has a different reason to travel. Fox is one half Apache, Native American. She is an explorer of an entirely new ethnic and genetic landscape.

On October 12, we were ready to hit the road. I was ready to apply my prime rule of travel: never take the same road twice unless there's no other choice. This time, I wanted to drive down highway 395. We drove up Interstate 80 from the Bay Area, then started climbing The Sierras to Lake Tahoe. From Tahoe, a couple of connector roads would lead us to Highway 395.

This is a road of classic views that parallels the eastern slope of the Sierras. It runs the length of California and beyond, to the Canadian border. To get there, we had to make a few zigs and a few zags. Once on 395, we planned to drive south to Bishop, then cross Nevada on Highway Six. Ultimately, we would make Interstate 70 and drive six hundred miles to Moab, Utah.

That was the plan. It looked pretty straightforward. Executing the plan was another matter.

The first day was one of practice, of getting used to driving Yertle. She rattled and roared. The first time I took her above fifty miles an hour I started to feel this "clunk clunk clunk clunk" as the frame jerked and shimmied. Oh god, I thought, a flat tire! Already! When I got out to look, the tires were fine. This was one of Yertle's idiosyncrasies: above fifty, she felt like all the tires had gone flat. We had to live with it. She was thirty years old. In car years, that's about a hundred and five. Yertle was spry and dignified. She kept telling me, "Don't worry, young feller, I'll get you there and back. You'll be safe."

I wanted to believe her.

The day passed without trouble, and we stopped in a campground near Lake Tahoe.

On the second day, we turned onto State Route 89. It was Sunday. Most traffic was going in the other direction.

The road curved like a desert Sidewinder. It was STEEP. The mountain terrain was gorgeous, but I was too nervous to enjoy the journey. My concentration was fixed upon driving Yertle. We climbed and we curved, through dense pine forests and around mountain crags.

I began to notice something strange about the steering column. It felt loose in my hands. I could pull it this way and that, just a few inches. I had a bad feeling, but I didn't say anything. I didn't want to alarm Fox. I didn't see much alternative but to keep driving, and hope we could get to Bishop.

Road signs indicated our altitude. We were ascending the western slope of the Sierra, six thousand, seven thousand feet and still climbing. Yertle struggled but kept going. Twenty miles an hour seemed to be her best effort. If a vehicle came behind me, I let it pass as soon as possible.

Eight thousand feet. I had pulled out to let someone pass, and when I tried to get into a lower gear as I pulled back onto the road, I discovered that the entire steering column was rotating as I shifted gears. I had no idea what gear I was in! This old Chevy had the gear indicator atop the steering column in a plastic window. An arrow moved with the shift lever and it showed the usual letters: P, R, N, D, D 1, and D2. When I pulled toward the right, the plastic window came along with the steering column. I was terrified to shift back to the left. I might throw Yertle into Reverse and destroy the transmission in a grinding calamity.

What a mess! We had spent so much money. It was the most significant investment in the span of our relationship. If Yertle broke down it would break our hearts. These fears afflicted me as I struggled around the curves. There was of course a more immediate terror: steering!

Eight thousand feet. We were coming through a place called, of all things, "Dead Man's Pass". Nine thousand one hundred feet. By this time, I could swirl the steering column a foot and a half in any direction. Yertle continued to steer, praise the lord. I steered with my right hand, and with my left attempted to stabilize and reinforce the column.

Our problem was no longer a secret from Fox.

She was calm. She said, "The Grandmothers say we will reach Arches."

Let me explain. Since her family revelation, Fox had been studying Native  
American traditions, and had met a number of teachers. She attended healing circles, ceremonies, and her gifts of intuition and vision had been growing. One of her mentors guided her towards the presence of a group of spirit guides, female ancestors and keepers of wisdom: The Grandmothers. Fox developed a deep relationship with The Grandmothers. She is an authentic Channel. She goes into a trance and sings, plays the drum, shakes the rattles. As far as Fox is concerned, the Grandmothers are very real.

Don't we all love our grandmothers?

I will admit that this sounds fruity to people without exposure to a variety of spiritual traditions. Let it sound fruity, I don't care. When Fox has asked The Grandmothers for guidance, it has been provided.

When I first met Fox, I thought she was a little crazy. She attracts unusual events like a lightning rod. It took time, but I started to come around. I started to see that she was a woman of honesty and integrity. She attracts weird events because she is, herself, weird.

What am I talking about!? I'm about to cross the tops of the Sierras with a steering column that's ready to fall through the floor of the truck!

"The Grandmothers say we will reach Arches." Okay, Fox, if the Grandmothers say so.....but I'm scared, I'm petrified that at any moment I will lose steering entirely and plunge off the side of a cliff.

Why did I keep going? I have to ask myself that question, because the sane response would have been to stop the RV and call Triple A and have them tow us back to Tahoe. The trip would be over.

I have this unfounded faith in what is called "normal reality". I don't believe that anything horrible can happen to me. I didn't want a long delay, I didn't want to wait four hours for a tow truck and then endure a hundred fifty mile tow to a garage, back in Tahoe. I didn't want to give up! A costly repair would eat up our trip money. We would slink back home in defeat.

I could steer, albeit with some labor. If I stayed in the same gear and held onto the column, I could at least get us to the bottom of the mountains. We could look for help once we reached Highway 395.

I am empirically aware that "normal reality" is a fragile construct, and that the slavering wolf-jaws of disaster haunt us at every moment of our lives. It's something we learn to live with, mostly through denial. If we truly realized how close we are to catastrophe, we would be too terrified to function.

We began our descent. Coming down, going round, and round, winding into the sun so that it blinded me, then changing directions so the sun was to my left, then my right. I stayed focused and drove slowly. Cars, trucks, campers piled up behind us, honking impatiently. I waved my left hand out the window, and some of them found places to pass. In the silent rushing air, we descended the mountains. My foot was on the brake and I eased that old Chevy round the tightest curves, holding the wheel, supporting the column. Fox was praying in a language I had never heard. The Grandmothers must have been with us. We survived. The junction to Highway 395 appeared. I came to the stop sign, breathed a deep sigh, and turned south.

Somewhere along this road there must be help. It was Sunday. Gas stations were closed. Little towns like Coleville and Bridgeport were deserted. Every shop was closed. I saw farmhouses behind fences, and I noticed that every farm seemed to have a shed full of tools. Surely there were people here who could fix a car. We stopped at a convenience store and asked if there was a local garage. We searched the phone book. Only the town of Bishop, one hundred twenty miles south, would have an open garage. So I drove, and I kept my eyes open. Something to my right caught my eye. It wasn't a gas station, there were no signs, no indications that it was a business. It was a place with some cars and some tools. I quickly braked and pulled over.

It was a small garage, and there were people about. I asked if a mechanic was available. A comfortably plump woman of about forty said "Sure, Tommy will be back in a couple minutes."

I began to breathe for the first time in hours.

In five minutes, there appeared a balding, dignified man wearing grey mechanic's coveralls.

I showed him our difficulty. He reached under the steering column with a socket wrench and gave two twists.

"There's your problem, " he said. "Somebody didn't tighten up the clamp."

He had undone the already-loose collar that kept the steering column fixed in place. "Look, here's the other bolt. Inside the clamp." The second of two bolts that held the steering column in place was swimming around inside the round black circlet of metal.

Tweek tweeek tweek, he turned his ratchet a few times, and our steering column was solid as a rock. I felt stupid. Why couldn't I have figured that out? Feeling stupid was nothing compared to the fact that I was limp with relief.

"How much do I owe you?"

"Forget about it," the mechanic said. I told him about the work that had been done on Yertle. He shook his head. "Careless, sloppy work" he said, "no excuse for that."

I insisted he take a twenty.

As we started Yertle to take to the road, he called out, "Hope those bozos didn't leave any more surprises for you."

I was desperately hoping the same thing.
Chapter Five: Building Relationships

A marriage or partnership is the building of an entire world. When you make a lifetime commitment, you are agreeing to become more like the person you have chosen. That person is agreeing to become more like you. Unfortunately, one often has the illusion that the other person is going to become more like one's self, without realizing how much of one's self will become more like the other person. "I'll teach her how to operate in my world," I thought about Fox. How naïve I was. My so-called world was like a derailed freight train, whose cargo was an assortment of jazz records, science fiction books, computer parts, t-shirts, Reese's Pieces and dirty bedclothes. I was naïve, yes. Arrogant, certainly.

It took three years, THREE YEARS, for me to make a commitment to Fox. Before that time, I wriggled, sidestepped, made excuses and otherwise tormented this most worthy of women.

What was I thinking?

"Thinking" isn't an accurate word for what I was doing. We had met. We spent time together. Fox did everything to please me, accommodate me. She made herself indispensable. I couldn't function without her. And I was thinking, "hmmm, maybe I can find a younger babe if I just hold on a while longer."

I was an asshole.

She knew we were lifetime partners. She already knew.

The odd thing is, I was the person who was looking for a relationship. Fox wasn't looking; Fox was busy getting out of a relationship. Meanwhile I specialized in the "one month girlfriend". I would meet a woman, we would do what people do, and within a month I would bail out, just at the moment the woman was beginning to fall for me. Fox, at that time, was really just another one month girlfriend, although her patient tenure had already exceeded that limit by four or five months. Every time she found out about another of my girlfriends, her pain was deep and terrible. She concealed it, of course. She was planning on winning my heart. She was too smart to create drama and make me feel trapped.

Let's call my behavior the symptoms of a complex and not over-analyze it. I've had PLENTY of analysis.

At fifty two, I had never been married. Once, at twenty six, I came close. By the time I was thirty six, my life was so badly off track that marrying a woman would have been a crime. The only woman who would marry me would have been a severely damaged rescuer. She would be co-dependent, enabling, neurotic, fragile and deeply disturbed.

Finding a woman like that would be no problem at all. There were disturbed women behind every lamp post and civic planter. They walked the streets of Fairfax and San Rafael, looking for any man with a pulse. It seemed more trouble than it was worth.

By age fifty I had done a bit of work on myself, I had come out of the nightmare, out of my personal dark night of the soul. I had something to offer. I was okay. Not great, but okay. I just had this wee commitment problem.

I'm typical of many men in my generation. We live in fantasies. We create an ideal woman: she's got a great body, a perfect face, she's funny, she wants to do everything we want to do, she's willing to cook and clean, and simultaneously support herself. She'll avidly watch football and baseball without saying a word. She never says, "We need to talk". She never asks "What are you thinking about?" Nor would she ever utter those archetypal chilling words, "What are you feeling?"

The connection between feeling and action is a very simple one. If you don't know what you're feeling, how can you possibly know what you're doing?

As I aged, the disconnect between reality and fantasy only intensified. At forty, I was convinced that a good looking woman stayed that way up to age thirty and then her looks would disappear. So I gravitated towards women no older than thirty. At fifty, I had upped the age of the looks-disappearing moment to forty. What did I believe? That some malevolent demon appeared on a woman's fortieth birthday, sprinkled some kind of wrinkle-dust on her, and BAM!, she turned into a crone? As I perused the thousands of singles ads on the internet, I stayed within that age limit. If a woman was over forty, I wasn't interested.

This sounds ridiculous, I know. I tormented myself with these age calculations. I extrapolated into the future, worrying about what I would do at around fifty five, and the age difference between me and my prospective mate would be significant and possibly inconvenient. Let's see now, I'm fifty five and I'm hanging around with a forty year old: that's not out of the question. But what if I don't find someone until I'm fifty eight, or sixty! That's getting to be a stretch! What will we have in common? We'll be of different generations! Women my age have lost their looks! But women who still have their looks are immature!

I'll bet the contents of my wallet that I'm not the only man going into middle age who has sandpapered the inside of his mind with this ridiculous calculus, with this sexist, age-ist bullcrap, who holds women hostage to X number of years, who counts the sags and wrinkles on women's bodies, consults a little table in his pocket in which he can enter information. Let's see here, punch some buttons: number of children (stretch marks)...number of divorces (stress lines on forehead, possible money from ex)..... amount and frequency of exercise (muscle tone, minimization of cellulite)....size of breasts versus downward expansion (sag)....drinks and smokes/does not drink and smoke (facial wrinkles, yellow teeth, bad breath), and so on.

This is nuts! I confess! I was one of those men! Even at the time, I knew it, knew how unfair this setup was, how insane was the double standard. How will WE feel, boys, if the ladies have their own little calculator, a little digital device in their purses into which they punch data : amount of remaining hair (combovers)....drinks beer/does not drink beer (pot belly).....hair growing on back (yuch)...number of divorces (probably a jerk/has no money left) ....exercises/does not exercise (has man-breasts)....has teeth/number of missing teeth (sunken cheeks, disgusting to kiss)......has hair in ears and nose (getting to be an old man, ain't ya?).....watches football/does not watch football (general obliviousness).....farts/does not fart/conceals farts/revels in farts(could you live with this cretin?)

There is an adjustment that needs to be made, somewhere around the age of forty five. People need to re-calibrate their mating radar to spot character and give less priority to looks. A twenty five year old man falls in love with his girls' boobs. A fifty year old man, if he's not an idiot, will fall in love with his partner's character. If he's expecting to revel in exciting boobs his whole life, he'll look like the old fart that married Anna Nicole Smith. That arrangement did not end happily.

I've been writing in this chapter about my struggle to adapt to my age. It was a very difficult struggle. I HAD to start looking for something else.

Then I met Fox. It wasn't love at first sight. I don 't believe in that. Infatuation happens at first sight, but love takes some serious time.

Let me say this right now: looks don't mean a thing. Love doesn't care what someone looks like. Love is a matter of soul, the long run, a lifetime. Love finds us, we don't' find love. Fox and I met, and love was waiting for both of us.

My manic internet searches and string of girlfriends was a sad foray into being a silly man. It was Fox who helped me meet my dignity.

I had spent years doing some of the craziest things imaginable, with one purpose: to meet my life's partner. Everywhere I went, to clubs, parties, salons, bird watching expeditions, I went with only one motive: to meet someone! I went to events that didn't interest me. I went to boring seminars, poetry readings by bad poets, turgid discussion groups. I spent time with people I didn't like. I even joined Mensa. Wow. (Mensa members, please do not take offense. I'll trade you mockeries. I'm a hippie. Mock me! You have my permission.)

All this frenzied woman-chasing came to a head when I attended a monthly singles party hosted by the local newspaper.

I had never attended a singles party. When I entered the restaurant and looked over the crowd, I realized that I was at a gathering of predators. There was a subliminal noise of growling and hissing, of lips smacking and barely audible wolf whistles. The good looking people became like human bumper cars. There wasn't enough room for the girls to squeeze into the space around The Handsome Rich Guy. It was a maniacal jostle, carried out on the dance floor to the D.J.'s disco beat.

The scrum around Hot Chick was even more ridiculous.

There are always a few major players of each gender at a party. Ms. Hot was exuding a monstrous fug of pheromones that drew men like some protozoan homing beacon. I could feel the other women hating her with arachnid intensity. She hypnotized the men with her jiggling act. "T and A" as they say, and these T's and A's were going bouncety bounce.

I began a conversation with an attractive woman, and a few moments later a man emerged from a nearby restroom. He looked me up and down disdainfully and said, "I'm already here."

I checked with the lady. Our conversation had been fun. I thought she was enjoying my company.

"Do you want me to leave?" I asked.

"He was already here," she said meekly. The man, who had thin wispy hair, glasses, and looked like an insurance salesman, puffed up his chest and moved in close to me, getting inside my personal space in an aggressive way. He came up to my chin and weighed fifty pounds less. I could have crushed him with one hand.

"I'm HERE, get it!?"

I walked away. I'm not the crushing type, although I admit there would have been a certain satisfaction in lifting this twerp and throwing him across the room.

As the evening progressed, distinctive sub-groups began forming. There were the "alternatives", that is people who dressed like hippies, punks or eccentrics. I felt that I was an "alternative". I have a tendency to wear loose, comfortable clothes. I just put on whatever is handy. I spent some time talking to a woman who dressed entirely in black, like a French intellectual from the fifties. She wore a black beret and thick-rimmed black glasses. Her name was Harry.

The "office workers" seemed to dress like cubicles even when away from them. The"Bad People", tattooed and pierced, grimaced disdainfully and often strolled to the parking lot to imbibe drugs.

There was a legion of dark curly- haired men with shirts open to the waist, wearing gold chains and Rolex watches. They danced that eternal dance, The Crotch-and-Swivel. Their heads rotated, eyes searching, arms groping in the crowd. Women jumped backwards and collided with other dancers as these hands found private places. The expression "meat market", cliché as it is, kept whirling through my mind. This was it; the erotic butcher's selection of choice cuts, laid out on a platter, a dance floor, as Abba tunes alternated with Stevie Wonder. Good god, I was dressed in athletic pants and a t-shirt. I was overmatched. I was completely out of my depth.

The final assault on my sensibilities occurred when I saw, there on the dance floor, my therapist.

My therapist.

We had ten years of weekly sessions. I had an experience with her of cataclysmic intensity. We did powerful work together. Now I saw my therapist at a party so comic and ridiculous that I sensed a foreshadowing of the end of my therapy. If she's HERE, why am I paying her to advise me on how to live my life?

I left before ten and never went to another singles party.

I met Fox by a crazy accident, through a series of coincidences. We hadn't been looking for one another. I wouldn't have gone on a second date with her, had she not already known that she loved me. I didn't know that I loved her. It was enough to feel the love coming from her to keep me in place long enough to develop my commitment. Long enough to fall in love.

In that first three years, we spent one or two days a week together. She was grinding through the most horrific divorce. Her husband threatened, harassed, withheld funds, stole Fox's money and then forced her to support their kids using credit cards. He had moved out of the house, and closed all their joint bank accounts. He broke the law in a dozen ways, and got away with it. He ignored court orders, missed legal appointments, delayed, hid his assets. It was amazing, horrifying! It left Fox weeping with agonizing bouts of rage. Fox didn't need my crap on top of all this sorrow. Yet, during our first year of seeing one another, I dated other women, continued cruising the internet. I withheld affection, concealed my feelings.

She put up with it. She KNEW.

After some time passed, a couple of years, I began to loosen up. We had been through so much together. Suffering and joys, travels and adventures. One day I wrote this letter to Fox, taking the form of a somewhat clunky poem.

I've never loved like this before.

I've never learned to love

slowly

inch by inch,

loving each part of you

like a musical instrument,

learning each part of you,

without finesse,

just willingness.

I've never loved before.

I thought love would be easy,

foolproof,

that I would see my love,

the world would explode, and you would be The One.

I expected God to bring you to me in a golden carriage,

with a sign saying "SOUL MATE".

Orchestras would play and lights would flash,

"ta da ta da!" Bob Barker would appear dragging

a long microphone cord and announce

to the world, "yes, Art Rosch, you have met

your Soul Mate, and because you've

been such a good sport, we're planning to fly you

to Hawaii!" (mighty applause from audience).

It hasn't been that way.

It has been a sly initiation,

as if I were just waiting around to be ambushed

by some cunning ninja.

I only decided not to be stupid,

to not repeat what has already failed,

what's left me alone on the sandy shore

time and again.

So, I wake up, an inch at a time,

to love,

and I am awake

an inch at a time,

to take you in,

as a baby, as a girl, as a woman, as a crone,

as a totality.

This is hard for me. I'm shallow. I just want the beautiful sexy parts.

I am so childish. I would be angry with a lover

who told me, "I will love only the good parts of you

I'll ignore the rest, don't make me see them or I'll reject you."

I would be angry.

You accepted all of me

all at once, you didn't ask questions of your heart.

That is a woman's way.

That wasn't my way.

My way was to run

and blame the shore I stood on

for leaving me alone.

Is it enough to decide not to be stupid?

Is that a path to love?

I decided to take your gifts in all their immensity

and to treat them with the care and respect they deserve.

I decided to change, because NOT changing

is to fail.

I've changed myself for you,

changed the shore on which I stand,

not looking across the sea in hopes of finding Oz.

You are Oz.

I am the fearful lion, the heartless tin man.

I have found a heart, a brain, courage to love

for I have come to accept that

love doesn't make everything perfect.

Love just makes what isn't perfect

something to share, without fear.

I have never loved like this before.

I have just come to watch the waves

from the shore.

Not alone, not anymore.

I realized something after writing this poem/letter: I was committed to Fox. This was the lifelong partner for whom I had waited. From this point on, there was no more internet dating, no more flirting or pretending to be dissatisfied with this woman. I had changed.
Chapter Six: I Might Have A Little Gas

Highway 50 through Nevada is reputed to be the loneliest road in the USA. It has a rival, and its name is Highway 6. It takes a northeasterly diagonal the entire breadth of Nevada before vanishing into the parched flats of Utah's Great Basin. It is far more isolated than 50, a hot eerie stretch of rocky desert and bare crags. There are few gas stations or stores. There is one "Flying J" truck stop a third of the way across the state. After that, there's nothing. The town of Ely (pronounced E –Lee) is the road's first destination. It's a crossroads town with signs pointing to Las Vegas, Reno, Salt Lake City. Highways 50, 6 and 93 enter and leave the town in a few confusing blocks. It 's easy to take the wrong turn, then backtrack a few miles, take another wrong turn, drive forty miles towards Vegas before discovering the error, turn around again and finally get it right.

After surviving the plunge down 89, and getting our steering column repaired, we made it to Bishop, and, god knows why, we wanted to get onto 6 and put another fifty miles on the odometer before stopping for the night.

Rule number two about driving an RV. DON"T DRIVE AT NIGHT! It's hard enough to control a bulky machine without messing with highway fatigue and caffeine nerves. I see things that aren't there. Jackrabbits the size of elephants come boinking into my path, only to be pieces of drifting newspaper.

We pushed out of Bishop after stopping at a Super K-Mart, where Fox and I got separated and I couldn't find her to save my life. I was reduced to calling her pet name. I stood in the middle of an aisle full of hosiery and started crying plaintively, "Boo Boo! BoooooBoooo!" Everyone was certain I was retarded.

"Booooo boooooo!" Where the hell did she go? One second she was right THERE, looking at skin cream, and the next, she had vaporized into the merchandise, wandered off like an un-tethered toddler. This store occupies ten thousand acres and you can't see more than twenty feet. I might never find her, or wander for two and a half years before fetching up at Customer Service. "Please, young lady, " I wheeze to the teenage girl in the silly uniform, running my fingers through my chest-length beard. "Could you use your microphone to ask Booboo to come to the lost children's booth?"

At last we were re-united by my wailing "Boooboooo!" until Fox homed in on the cry like a dolphin hearing the sonar of its pod from a hundred miles away.

We packed our cartons of milk, loaves of bread and cold cuts into Yertle in the gathering twilight. We could have stayed right there in the K-mart parking lot, perfectly legal.

Why did we continue driving? We had some naïve hope of finding a campground within the hour. As I turned onto Highway Six, Fox got out the Campground Guide and searched, but there were no listings before the town of Ely, halfway across Nevada. As I navigated the final stoplights of Bishop, a nearby driver began honking and gesturing towards Yertle. I pulled over and discovered that I had been driving with the steps still sticking out of the camper. Keep a check list, RV rovers!

After fifty miles, we came to the tiny town of Tonopah. It's a one-store town. Fortunately, the store was open. The young Native American man behind the counter confirmed that there were no campgrounds before Ely. He offered the use of the school parking lot for the night. "Lots of people get stuck out here," he said. "It's okay. Just try to be gone before school starts in the morning. Nobody will bother you. I'll tell the sheriff when he drops by, tell him you're back there. If he sees you before I do, tell him Bear said it was okay."

This kindness was touching. We began to realize that we had met kindness at every obstacle on this trip, and that kindness came in all sorts of disguises, in the most unlikely places.

In the morning there was snow on the tops of the mountains. Nevada is a washboard, an undulating series of mountains and valleys, and the roads cut straight across this ancient seabed. At the top of each peak, the view spreads down the road ahead, which goes in a straight line for miles and miles until it disappears into the next rise of the landscape. I had never expected Nevada to be so beautiful. There were huge clouds casting shadows upon the vast valley floors.

I took my bike down from where it was bungeed to Yertle's back ladder, and rode a few miles around Tonopah. Every street disappeared into the distance, with pure vanishing point perspective. The houses and ranches simply stopped, and the scrub mountains continued. It was about eight thirty before we had breakfast and hit the road. It was to be an easy day's drive: a hundred sixty miles to Ely, where we would join up with our old friend, Highway Fifty.

It was October; bright, clear, and warm in the valleys, crisp on the peaks. Yertle ran well, but I continued to be apprehensive. It's one thing to drive a car. It breaks down, you call a tow truck. An RV is another matter. We were carrying our lives in the damn thing. The water tank held twenty gallons. We had food and propane. There was no shelter on Highway Six, no trees, few roadside stops. If Yertle broke down, there was no telling how long we might be stranded, how long before a tow could get us, and how long a repair could take once the tow had been achieved. I imagined our quandary if something happened. Out here in the desert, way beyond cell phone service (even if we had one), we could be truly up the infamous creek.

Every hour or so, we'd pass a car, going the other way. Everyone was going the other way.

Gathering my nerve, I hit the accelerator, and the old Chevy 350 gurgled forth, up the highway, into the brightening day. My gas tank had been filled in Bishop. The truck seemed happy. Yertle was whispering, "Don't worry, young feller, I'll get you to Arches, don't worry."

I can't help but worry, Yertle, I responded mentally. It's my nature to worry. I am the son of my father, and my father is a world-class worrier.

Southern Nevada is an uncompromising landscape. Sandstone blocks tipped by ancient floods and earthquakes litter the northern side of the road. On the south there is nothing but miles and miles of scrub, tumbleweed and creosote bush. The stuff gives off an odd but pleasant smell, a golden-colored earthen odor. We were skirting the northern fringe of the immensity of Nellis Air Force Base, with its gunnery ranges and atomic test sites. If they once tested atom bombs here they must have considered this the most remote place in the continental US of A.

At fifty miles an hour, the noise from Yertle's engine and rattling parts made conversation impossible. The radio was useless. The portable CD player was useless. There was nothing to do but drive, and look at the landscape, however monotonous or eerie. Occasionally a vulture would mark the sky like a comma on vast blue paper.

The highway curves gradually northward, with occasional slow winding through the Toyabe National Forest. This isn't really a forest as one thinks of a forest. It 's a sparse collection of low bushes and stunted trees, where lizards, voles and rabbits compete for the scarce resources. We pushed north and east, and everything seemed okay. Then, about fifty miles out of Tonopah, I heard a high whining sound from the engine. Yertle kept on going, so I said my prayers and continued to drive.

We had entered a wide valley. It looked like thirty miles to the next ridge, and I could see all thirty miles of road, slightly undulant, like a road-kill rattlesnake, until it disappeared between the breasts of the next rise in the primordial earthbody.

I was brought to alertness by a loud bang, and a nasty smell of burning rubber. Yertle was running, but I had to pull over. I was afraid to turn the engine off; afraid she'd never start again. I got out and pulled open the hood. Pieces of fan belt were shredded all over the motor compartment. I picked them out, saving the biggest piece for reference. Fan belt for what, I wondered? How I wish I understood cars, how I wish I were a competent mechanic! Then, as I inspected the various parts of the motor, I saw a thumb-sized hole, right through the metal rectangle of the I-don't-know-what. Pieces of this metal were strewn about. It looked like a bullet hole from a high caliber rifle. It was just a case of metal fatigue. This porous, cheap material, this aluminum casing for some part of our vehicle's innards, had met its deadline.

The engine was still running fine.

What the hell, I thought. Let's go until we can't go any more.

We kept driving, praying for Ely. Seventy miles to go. Come on, Ely, come on. About half an hour later, I saw a convoy of vehicles in the distance. Two highway patrol cars were parked at the side of the road. The officers were waving us to stop.

I was glad to see a human being, a person of authority. To make that statement, "I was glad to see a person of authority", is indicative of how scared I was. I don't have anything against policemen. I have a significant resentment of all authority figures, always have and always will. I learned that there are times when one might be thrilled to see a person of authority, and this was one of those times.

We pulled out onto a wide margin. A mile down the road, a gigantic truck was hauling a gargantuan pipe, long as a freight car and wider than the entire road. I took a chance, and turned off the engine. I got out of Yertle and approached the officer.

"Sir", I asked respectfully, "can you spare a moment to look at our truck? Something broke a while ago, and I don't know what's going on."

The policeman was half my age. He was short and compact, and looked like someone who could tear three phone books in half with his bare hands. He glanced under the hood, while the monstrous pipe rolled slowly past our place beside the road.

"That's your air conditioner belt," he informed us. "And that hole, well that's your air conditioner. Looks like the belt shredded and then popped the AC unit right through the guts. Good thing it wasn't the fan belt, or you'd be stuck out here until you could get another one." He dubiously eyed our ancient RV. "Maybe take you a while to get a match; have to go to Vegas to find one."

For good measure he inspected the fan belt. "You're lucky. This one's brand new," he said. "You'll be fine." He held up the broken air conditioner belt. He rolled his eyes in a good natured way. The belt was obviously a fossil.

Greatly relieved, I thanked our benefactor, started Yertle and proceeded down the lonely road.

Things happen to people. Events are events, but our interpretation of these events overshadows the events themselves. For me, the most important thing is to view life as a process of gaining understanding. It doesn't matter whether good things or bad things happen. The process is the same.

I didn't fully understand this crazy trip. All I knew was that it had churned up a barrel full of anxiety in my guts. Whenever I reached a point of relaxation, some new threat stirred all the sediment of fear that had begun settling to the bottom of my emotional bucket.

I asked Fox, several times, 'Do you want to turn back?"

Fox is made of stronger stuff than I. "No," she always said, "We're supposed to go to Arches."

I felt like such a pussy. Men don't enjoy feeling cowardly. It's not a good man-feeling. It's a feeling that lurks in some small fetid bathroom down in the cowardly part of my soul, a bathroom with a naked bulb worked by a pull-string with a knot at the end, a bathroom with old squeaky faucets that give out brown water. It has a frosted window that's jammed shut, with a paint job where the streaky white paintbrush overswept right onto the window and the painter didn't care enough to scrape it clean. That's what my cowardice feels like, it feels like that cheap hotel bathroom and it's not fun at all. I was going to have to brace up. That's what the wise old samurai said to the Toshiro Mifune character in "The Seven Samurai". It's become an in-joke for Fox and me. "Brace up, Kikuchiyo", we tell one another. "Brace up."

And Yertle, in spite of her geriatric frailty, kept reassuring me. "I'll get you there, sonny," she whispered, "Stop worrying so much. I may be old but I've got plenty of miles left in me."

Never once did I wonder if I was completely nuts, talking to an RV. I was simply being swept along by events. What else could I do?

The landscape began to rise, as we came into another range of the Humboldt-Toyabe Forest. I looked at the gas gauge and with a shock realized that we were down to a quarter tank. Where did the gas go?! The tank was filled in Bishop, only a hundred twenty miles down the road. I had badly overestimated the mileage of which Yertle was capable. That and a headwind had drunk our gas. I had been so preoccupied I failed to fill her up at the one and only truck stop between Tonopah and Ely. I began to wonder if we were going to run out of fuel on some tricky mountain curve without a shoulder.

Fox was an active participant in all this. By mutual agreement, I was and would always be the driver of our RV. On rare occasions I would give Fox the wheel, but it was a shaky proposition. Fox, like me, is given to seeing things, especially when the light is low. A rhino can pop out of the sagebrush and give chase. Osama Bin Laden sits in the back of a pickup truck, grinning smugly. Fox isn't crazy, but she is psychic and sometimes has trouble separating vision from reality. Maybe it's the Apache blood. The closer we got to the ancestral homelands, the weirder she became. But she was calm where I was not. She was stoic where I was terrified.

Compulsively, I watched the gas gauge, then chastised myself and equally compulsively avoided watching the gas gauge. I forced my eyes to bypass the little meter as it quivered ever downward toward EMPTY. Why weren't we carrying a gas can with five extra gallons? Fox had vetoed the proposition: she had some vision of gasoline spilling all over the place and roasting us to a crisp. I always obey Fox's intuitions, but this time I was vexed. ALWAYS CARRY EXTRA FUEL! Is that rule number three? The fuel consumption of the most innocent looking RV is a ravening dragon, an elephant sucking up fluids faster than they can be replenished. Motor homes love fuel the way kids love candy or the way addicts love dope. Gimme some gas! they breathe, panting with appetite. Gimme some gas!

Thirty miles to Ely. Okay, steal a look at the gauge. It's hovering over the little line that says, EMERGENCY! hurry up and get a fill! I'm calculating. Let's see, if we are getting ten miles to the gallon, and we have three gallons, we can just get to Ely. But if we're getting eight per gallon, we're in big trouble. That's assuming there are three gallons. There might be five; or there might be two. Does the gauge read short when we're going uphill? Does it look fuller when we're tilted downward?.

Naturally, the headwind grew more powerful and our route took to yet another interminable climb up into the Toyabe-Humboldt Forest. The road was Nevada-smooth, paid for by gambling taxes, well maintained. But here on the undulant highway there was no shoulder, just a line of white fence posts, protecting vehicles from plunging down a forty foot cliff. Run out of gas here, around a blind curve, and some truck can come whamming along and crunch us like an old Pepsi can.

Yes, I admit to having a fearful nature. I am one catastrophe of the imagination after another. I always imagine the worst, and the only person who can equal me is Fox, EXCEPT when she is on a mission from The Grandmothers. If the elder spirits speak through her, she is utterly calm and assured.

I spent the next forty five minutes waiting for the engine to sputter and die. I watched the side of the road for potential escapes, and watched the rear view mirror for the following eighteen wheeler that spelled our doom, like the monster truck from that early Spielberg movie, "Duel". The forest grew thicker, looking like a real forest. Now there were signs touting campgrounds and tourist sites, in the southern approach to Ely. They were little comfort to me. The gas gauge quivered and teased me as it sat on Empty. My heart was beating in every pore of my skin. Why so scared, I chided myself? Everybody runs out of gas at least a couple of times. Yes, I responded, BUT NOT HERE! Not in Yertle, noble RV, not on a curvy road with no shoulder. The last vehicle we saw was a FedEx truck passing us, going uphill in a no pass zone, like we were standing still. People drive crazy in Nevada on Highway Six. They think the roads are empty. Crazy.

We came to a crest of the mountain range and I thought it's downhill from here! We can coast, we won't burn our precious bits of fuel climbing laboriously up every steep curve of the road. Alas! After going down for a bit, the road turned upward once again. The gauge was a on EMPTY. I played games with it. If I look at it from the side, it kinda looks like there's more gas in it. I leaned right, leaned left, but I wasn't fooling myself. Yertle soldiered onward. I was running out of gas on a road with no shoulder, I had a shredded air conditioner belt and a fist-sized hole in the engine.

The roadside sign said, "Ely—12mi". And there we were, at the real crest of the range. I put Yertle in neutral and took my foot off the gas. We coasted down and around the mountain curves. At last the ominous white fencing beside the road vanished. A few houses appeared. Billboards advertised motels and gift shops, gambling casinos, banks and auto body garages. More houses. Ely! My eyes were pealed for a gas station. I made a left onto Ely's main drag and made a beeline for the first gas station I saw. Yertle coasted over the curb, I put her in drive, lined her up to the pump, and then....and then.....she made that sound, pitta pitta pitta pitta. She gurgled and died, out of gas.
Chapter Seven: Apache Mastercard

My t-shirt was soaked through. Fox was chewing the stubs of her fingernails. Even her faith in the Grandmothers had worn thin. The fact that we were here, that we had made it to Ely, and to a gas station with the last vapors of the tank we filled in Bishop, well....that went a long way to restoring our faith in the mysterious tribal deities who had so often reassured Fox.

I think Yertle was a Grandmother, too. She had promised we'd be safe. And we were safe.

After filling up and treating Yertle to some fresh oil and window cleaning, we drove to the nearest Kountry Kampground. We checked in and drove to our site, which featured electricity, water, sewer and wireless internet. This was our first experience with a campground, with a place that would mate with Yertle in a bonanza of creature comforts and civilized communication.

I didn 't have a clue how to hook Yertle to the electrical and sewage. We didn't even have a sewer hose, so I walked up to the office/store and went shopping. We needed a special water hose for use with potable water. We needed an electrical adaptor to mate with the 30 amp outlet. We needed at least ten feet of sewage hose, plus a two-piece connector to twist into the hose and push down into the sewage drain. Once I had attached all these pieces to Yertle, I went inside and tried out our utilities. The water pressure was terrible. Yertle was canted at an angle that seemed to encourage everything to slide towards the front of the vehicle.

An experienced neighbor approached and offered guidance. Back to the store, this time to buy two big yellow plastic 'levelers'. With my new friend's help, I planted these under Yertle's front wheels and drove her up onto the resulting ramp. Bingo, we were almost level. Now, the water pressure improved, everything seemed to work. Ah, but.... advised my friend, we should have a water pressure regulator, just in case we arrive at a campground where the pressure could blow up through our toilet, sink, shower, all at the same time, creating a combined geyser that would spew out the doors of the motor home. Back to the store. Okay, so I buy a pressure regulator. Water filter? You never know what kinds of boogies can be swimming in that water, especially in remote and disaster-stricken areas where the utilities have been interrupted or never existed. Yes, a water filter. Back to the store..

The sewage ritual was a little yucky. Back to the store. Plastic gloves. We had been doing our business in Yertle's tiny bathroom for some days now, and it seemed a good time to empty her two tanks: the grey-water tank for dish and shower water, and the black-water tank, straight from the toilet. Ooh, a little stinky! And sort of clogged up. Back to the store. I purchased special toilet paper, the kind that dissolves easily in an RV, and special 'treatment' liquid, enzymes to break up the waste products. The clog didn't want to loosen. Back to the store. I bought a cleaning wand that pokes up into the entrails of the black water tank and splooshes out all the stuck material. It worked. Suddenly. GACK!

To empty the tanks, you let the water and 'stuff' flow out, and help it along by lifting the snake-like hose several times, until everything has run out. Some smart inventor has now devised a slinky-type device that creates a perfect down-hill feed for the sewage hoses, but we didn't have any slinkys at this time. Forty Five bucks! To avoid touching a three inch wide, ten foot long plastic hose a few times just because it's in contact with poop. Give me a break. These slinkys sell at campgrounds and outdoors stores all over the world. We bought one after our first summer in a campground.

It is possible that our neighbor was a schill for the campground; how was I to know? I was a rookie. I innocently took my new friend's advice on everything

I had now made so many trips to the store that I felt as though I had run a marathon. All this, after the hair raising ride up Highway Six.

I was depressed, scared and exhausted. I looked at Fox. "We can still turn back," I offered. I wasn't sure whether or not I really wanted to turn back. Part of me would have felt weak, but another part of me would have been relieved. I was having residual agoraphobia, a problem I thought I had overcome a decade ago. This wasn't exactly agoraphobia. If there is a term for "fear of new experiences", that's what I was feeling. I'll google it. Ah, there it is: Neophobia. Fear of new things and experiences. This is a perfectly reasonable phobia for one who has experienced a surfeit of trauma.

"The Grandmothers want us to go to Arches", Fox answered. "So let's go to Arches. Brace up, Kikuchiyo!"

All right. It's time to turn into the head-wind of my fear and let it blow straight into my face. Feel it and quit hiding from it! What's the worst that can happen to me? I can suffer horribly for a very long time and then die. So what's the big deal?

I braced up. That was the last time I would be tempted to turn back. From this point forward, whatever the hazards, we were going to Utah.

I thanked our campground neighbor for all the help. Everywhere we go, every campground we visit, every state park, everywhere RV people congregate, there is support to be had, no matter how dire the emergency. In cynical times, this conspicuous kindness is reassuring.

There's something comforting about an RV. It reminds me of the forts we built out of boxes when we were kids. An RV has that kid-fort feeling. Once we had settled down for the night, I found myself giggling. I couldn't explain this giggle to Fox but it was a contented giggle. A 'how did I find myself here, inside this thing?' giggle. Yertle surrounded us like a mother's hug. All her faux wood paneling, combined with Fox's homey comforters made settling into bed with a good book seem the height of ecstasy.

Until it got cold. It was October. The high desert night, with its blaze of stars, soon came into the camper and I was Ready Toby with a box of matches to light the propane heater.

It's a simple procedure, just like lighting any furnace at home. Turn the red dial to the right, to where it says "PILOT'. Hold the white button down for thirty seconds, then hold a match to the end of the little tube. When the pilot flame ignites, keep holding the button for another minute. Turn the red dial to "On". All that's left is to set the thermostat to the desired temperature and wait for the burners to ignite.

The problem was that a backdraft existed that blew out my match. It blew it out almost every time. When I finally succeeded in getting the pilot light going, and crawled back into bed, I waited for the furnace to ignite. But the furnace did not ignite. I crawled, shivering, out of bed and took the grill off the furnace once more, to see that the pilot light had blown out. I went through the procedure again. And again. And again. At last I got it going and the furnace went on with a roar.

"I'm going to sleep," Fox yawned.

"What?" I yelled over the howl of the furnace.

"Sleep. I'm going to sleep. Good night."  
"What?"

"Never mind". She got into her special custom cocoon. The way Fox sleeps is unique. It's also very sad, a legacy of her terrifying marriage. Fox sleeps on top of the blankets, with yet another blanket over her. To comfort her fibromyalgia, she puts a heating pad underneath her upper body, and has pillows to support each arm. It works for her. Most telling, however, is the fact that she sleeps with her socks on and has one foot hanging out of the cocoon at all times. This will enable her to get up and flee, or hurry to meet a command, an order, an irrational rage from her insane controlling ex-husband. Post traumatic stress dies hard in the body. It lingers, lingers, and I wonder, when will it heal? Eventually. Given enough love and support.

Fox sleeps with escape in mind. Now, after ten years, she has finally begun to sleep under the blankets. She is beginning to feel safe. Still, she fluffs up the corner and has one foot dangling free. I can say the words. I can say, "Honey, you won't have to get up in the middle of the night to defend yourself from a maniac." The words aren't enough. Fear lingers. It fades, but it lingers.

The furnace sounded like a jet engine. The interior of Yertle heated up like a steam cooker on high. I opened the window next to my face. Then, just as I was falling asleep, the furnace quit.

I couldn't leave an open pilot running all night. We'd go up like a load of dynamite. Out of bed once more. Hey, the pilot's still on! It was the thermostat. Furnace working as it should. Hallelujah.

I don't mean to imply that every RV has all this stuff with which to contend. Yertle was thirty six years old. Some of her pieces were rusty, clogged, stuck, rotted or otherwise barely functional. I'm talking about the most lovable piece of RV engineering ever invented. Yertle was going to carry us to Arches National Park, and after that, somewhere else, and so on. We just had to make running repairs, refurbishing her on the road. As our trip progressed, Yertle did too. She loved to ride! On the road, going fifty miles an hour, she was like a dog with its head out the window. Wow! I've been in a garage for twenty years! This is so grrreeaat!

That night, I went outside to look at the stars. The Kampground had its own bevy of orange sodium vapor lights, giving it a prison-like pallor. These lights couldn't dim the savage beauty of the stars. The lights of Ely were nothing under this glow from the Milky Way. The nearest city was hundreds of miles away. Reno, Vegas? Carson City? Ely was the crossroads to nowhere. South to Vegas. East to the slag heap of the Great Basin, and then Utah. Ely's a small town that bestrides a long, lonely road.

I set up my film camera on a tripod, opened the shutter with a cable release, and let it sit there for hours, pointing at Polaris through the nearby trees. Later, this photo would win a small award. A small award. Which is better than no award at all. Life as an artist is a series of small awards, ones that net zero cash, entice a handful of people to observe my work, and then it's onward to the next small award. Belief in some Big Award in the future keeps me going. Surely this erupting volcano of talent must be recognized, sometime, sooner or later. Before I'm dead, maybe?

The next morning, after loosening up with some yoga postures and a big bowl of oatmeal, I took my bicycle for a ride around Ely. Don't get the wrong idea about me. I'm not exactly a health nut. I do all this stuff to compensate for my atrocious habits. If I didn't do Yoga and bicycle daily, my over-eating at night would balloon my weight to whale-sized proportions. My cigarette smoking would ruin my lungs without constant aerobic clearing. My liver would explode from the medications that keep me alive. I HAVE to do this stuff. I'm so incredibly neurotic and compulsive that my daily dose of ingested poisons would have finished me off years ago without this rigid discipline. I have no choice. I live at the extremes of my character. I'm both very good and very bad.

Ely is like so many towns in Nevada. It's got casinos, advertised by big billboard signs. It has echoes of the mining that once went on here, an industry that has left its tailings and its ruins. There are western-style store fronts in the middle of town and Burger King, K-Mart, Walgreen's, Napa Auto Parts, the whole interchangeable erector set of America's corporate landscape, put one up here, put one up there, always the same, wherever enough people live to fill the coffers, ka-ching! discount savings, big volume, yes indeed, ka-ching!. Yet, two miles outside Ely, the road slides on a southward turn, a ten mile strip of asphalt that runs alongside an enormous escarpment, The Schell Creek Range, the top of it lined with snow, with cave-holes gaping suggestively. Nevada's beauty is unique. Always, one can see the miles of road unreeling in the distance, the cars and trucks solitary ants going nowhere, invisible until they are right upon you, whooosh! pass!, our RV rocks from the blast of air and everything clinks and clanks.

We had reached the point of no return. We took Yertle to see a mechanic in Ely. He looked at our engine and stated simply, in the frosty October morning, "If you don't need air conditioning, you got nothing to worry about. Hell, this engine's got at least another hunnerd thousand miles in her."

Excellent! Let's stop at the supermarket and then hit the road. It is but a short hop from Ely to the Utah Border, crossing the Confusion Range, I'm not kidding, it's on the map. The moment we hit the Utah border, the road changed. It was a whole new sound under our wheels. Where the gambling-taxed Nevada roads had a pleasant whirr, as soon as we passed the sign that said "Welcome To Utah"we passed in a mili-second to a stern rumble, rrrrrrrrrr. The nice wide shoulders disappeared, and there we were, in the Great Basin, one of the most depressing pieces of real estate this side of the Gobi Desert. Even the color of the road was different, it was darker, more grey-black. Utah may be full of industrious Mormons, but it's obvious that someone neglected to spend money on Highway Fifty.

Half of 50's drive towards the heart of the Great Basin is spent looking at an enormous sideways Indian Head at the crest of, I guess, the Confusion Range. I don't really know as all the maps of this area are confusing. Anyway, this enormous Indian must have always been conspicuous to travelers. Wouldn't it? Or is this just something Fox and I see because we are viewing the world through a lens more attuned to a native sensibility? There's no mention of this vast geological formation in any book or internet site. Yet, there it is, huge. We call him Big Chief. He's visible for forty miles and the mountain range divides the basin into two segments. Once past Big Chief, we enter the salt pans and the dead zone. I feel hideously sorry for the settlers who came this way a hundred and fifty years ago. How many died here, despaired here? Lake Seviers is a giant salt pan stretching out to infinity on the south side of the road. What a joke, calling this a lake. Fifty million years ago it was at the bottom of a sea. Now, mirages conjure the ancient memory of water. Look out into the distance and see the gleaming waves of heat rise off the salt, appearing like lapping surf. We stopped to stretch our legs in a drive-out next to the endless salt flat. The sun beat down, hot and merciless.

"Let's get out of here," I entreated. It was a spooky place. Salt, and the bones of the earth sticking through the primordial ocean bottom, fifty million years looming beneath our feet. That's what the Great Basin is, ocean bottom and the mineral remains, flattened by the wind into a plate of endless glittering white.

After a few hours of driving through this relentless hostility, there is a sudden change. A green field appears. Then another, another....orderly farms, houses, green GREEEN. It is Delta, Utah, a little town in which Mormon roots show through by its sense of responsible utility. There are no casinos here, the convenience stores are without slot machines, the billboards fail to titillate with lurid promos of sex ranches. Ah, Utah, one of the most interesting and beautiful states in the country. We stopped in Delta because I was concerned about my transmission fluid level. I had also noticed that there was no cap on the fluid's feeder tube.

I pulled into a little garage, got out of Yertle and petted the happy Golden Retriever who came to greet us. The proprietor followed his dog. He was a handsome young man in his late twenties. Something radiated from this affable fellow. It looked, for all the world, like simple happiness. He seemed gentle, humble, and profoundly content. That's something I don't see very often. Behind the veneer of most people there is some crazy neurosis or fear, worry, hostility, boredom, dullness, lack of imagination, ignorance... you know, all the stuff one sees in the 'world' of 'out there'. I just don't know many happy people. Every truck stop we visited, for a cup of coffee, for a tank of gas, seemed like a portal to Hell, sulfurous fumes of human misery oozing from every formica-laden surface.

The young mechanic topped our fluid off, found a spare cap, and bid us good day, no charge. I was deeply impressed by this five minute stop. The mechanic seemed like a happy man. A man who loves his wife, kids, home, work, environment. Sad, that I should be so amazed to meet one. I've been around long enough to recognize the real thing; I feel it in the gut, I know it for the truth. This stalwart, clear-eyed young fellow was a happy man who fit into his world properly.

Wouldn't that be an amazing thing to say?: I fit into my world properly. I'm not some cut up, crushed jigsaw piece, forced into the wrong shape by insane social forces.

The landscape changes after Delta. It turns green and placid, and as we drove onward, gigantic clouds a hundred miles long and fifty miles across covered the land, a huge flat layer of wet atmosphere riding along on a wind that swept southward. This particular cloud was ribbed, as if were a fillet of sole, laid out on the dinner plate of the evening sky. An hour of this and we started seeing a few buttes off in the distance and a mountain range to the east. The scent of The Southwest began to fill our hearts. Our journey was maturing, we were getting to our destination. Soon we would be back among the colossi of South-eastern Utah, in Indian Country, heading towards the Four Corners.

Our eagerness overcame our judgment, and I continued to drive through the afternoon and into evening. It was getting dark, but I felt exhilarated, my fear was finally evaporating, and I was feeling Yertle under my hands, her steering wheel now fixed and solid, her engine joyously pounding, her suspension shaking up our insides, her roar blotting out conversation, music, everything but the sight of the land.

It got dark. Having been this way before, I knew that Highway Fifty jogs up to the north, along Interstate Fifteen, for about ten miles, and then debouches at a truck stop town called Scipio.

This little hamlet was a town before it was a truck stop. Now the glare of huge Exxon and Chevron tower-signs light up the modest farm community. We had stayed at the Day's Inn on our previous journey. Now we thumbed our nose at motels, as we had our home surrounding us, on our back, turtle-wise.

The road narrows, trucks whistling along, headlights blazing. God, here I am again, violating the rule, DON"T DRIVE AT NIGHT, especially when fatigue sits behind excitement like a lurking thief.

There was nothing out here, no campgrounds or tourist stops in our Campground Book. I just kept my eyes peeled for a location, anything, a pull-out, a Flying J, a place to stop and sleep.

It was pitch -absolutely black out there, and I saw a sign in my headlights, it said "Something something Campground". The word Campground nailed my attention, and less than half a mile further down the road, a brown State Park sign caught my eye. I pulled onto the road, stopped, looked around, conferred with Fox. "Let's check it out," we decided, so I hit the gas and started driving down this road into darkness, into nowhere, remote in Utah, a few miles from the tiny town of Salina.

I had become anxious, once again. I didn't know where we were, what lay ahead, whether the road was passable. I was gambling that we'd find someplace to spend the night.

We drove for several miles, but it felt like fifteen or twenty and nothing appeared. I had a fantasy of breaking down way in this hinterland, and needing to bicycle out for help in the morning. Yes, I could do it, but a twenty mile ride to wave at passing cars for help wasn't on my agenda for the next morning. Keeping my eyes peeled for anything resembling a flat spot onto which we could pull, I did indeed see a break in a fence, and a nice broad level patch. I took it.

Maneuvering over a few humps, potholes and rocks, I found a landing spot, secured ourselves and turned off the engine, killed the lights.

Silence. Stars overhead, violently bright, bright like pinholes before a raging torch, bright like pulsating nerves, like phosphorescent closed-eye fatigue that throws geometric mandalas onto my retinal surface. In other words, I was so exhausted and over-hyped that I was hallucinating. Whenever I closed my eyes, I would see this psychedelic whirling of patterns, woom woom woom! and I knew I could not go another inch. Still, every time we stop for the night, there are things that must be done. The furnace lit, the vents opened, little stuff, and when I opened the door to go outside, I was as if struck in the head.

The Sky! The Sky! Ohmygawd the Sky! This was like nothing I had seen before, so dark and so clear that I could barely recognize the constellations because they were so full of stars that the familiar patterns became obscured. Oh, yes, there's Cassiopeia! I recognize the familiar 'W' of the Queen's Chair. All this other stuff, all these stars in between, amazing. The Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way, my favorite piece of sky, was setting in the West. This is a section dense with stars, dotted with nebulae, clusters, visible in binoculars, palpable to the naked eye. I gaped at the more subtle bits overhead, the misting fleece around Perseus and His neighbors, and Orion, there in the South, standing upright with the nebula in his sword, here visible to the naked eye. The Pleiades, the Hyades, it was so rich.

The darkness and silence were stunning. I had no clue where we were. Fox joined me and we stood, leaning against Yertle's warm hood, and the only noises were the little ticking sounds that the vehicle made as she cooled off. That, and nearby, the hooting of owls. I walked around the camper and immediately put my foot into a cow pie.

"Just leave it out here, booboo," Fox indicated my shoe. "We're too tired, let's go to sleep." It was all of nine thirty. So we went to bed. I read a book until my nerves stopped twanging like guitar strings being struck by a four year old child. Then I drifted away into a dreamless sleep.

Next thing I knew, Fox was shaking me. "Honey, wake up!" There was terror in her voice that woke me instantly. I saw the beams of several flashlights, circling the camper, shining in through our windows. There were voices outside.

"Asshole," someone said distinctly, and another person seemed to spit. I had to go out there, had to find out who was circling our wagon with apparent hostile intent. I slung my pants on and reached for the baseball bat, our one and only defensive weapon. I wasn't going to wait inside and let them come at us. I know, a few pages ago I was moaning about my cowardice but at that moment, I had no choice, I was moving on reaction and lightning logic, going on the offensive. Just as I reached to turn the door handle, the flashlights turned away, and I heard a truck door slam, then another, and another. Whew! Engines revved up, and as I looked out the window, I saw three pickup trucks swing to the right and go around us, undulating in deep potholes. Their red tail lights faded as they rose into the unknown landscape, and were soon gone. My pulse was racing with adrenaline. I thought we were going to be robbed, mobbed, invaded, destroyed, by a gang of shotgun-toting rednecks. My fingers were curled around the baseball bat. I had been in exactly two fights in my life, one at seven years and one at twenty eight. I lost both of them. With an effort, I pried my fingers loose, one at a time. I went out into the nocturnal chill, to see that everything was okay.

Were we parked in the middle of a road? There wasn't anything I could do until daylight. My watch said Four Thirty Two. Dawn was creeping into the Eastern sky, and before I lifted myself into Yertle, I saw the constellation Pegasus, the Great Horse, rising overhead.

The winged horse. A good omen for travelers.

I managed to get back to sleep after a while. Morning came. I stepped out the side door, avoiding a cow pie and beheld this: we were in the middle of a road. It branched off the road by which we had entered, and went up into the hills. It was a hunter's road, and we had blocked an early morning convoy of rifle-totin' boys, sitting there like fools in Yertle. I unhooked my bike from Yertle's back ladder and pedaled up the road. There it was, the campground, not a hundred yards from our parking spot. It was empty. Creeks ran musically through it, from waterfalls that fell straight down a two hundred foot high bluff, made of red sandstone. This was a beautiful, quiet, isolated campground, with about fifteen sites for RVs, and a meadow for tents. A little sign on the restroom, which was open and spotless, said, "This Campground was built in 1938 by the Civilian Conservation Corp." It was perfectly maintained, clean, pastoral.

On this day, with some dexterous driving, it would be possible to reach our immediate goal, Moab. The plan was to spend a night in the town at a campground, and the next day, go into Arches National Park and find a site in which to camp and stay. Utah! A state redolent with myth. It was here that the Mormons were commanded to settle by Brigham Young. But it wasn't Mormon mythology that drew us here. It was the ancient Anasazi, and the more recent Ute inhabitants, and the deep resonant archetypal geology, the way that hundreds of millions of years bared themselves on the surface of the earth. For me, photographer and astronomer, the skies and the landscapes were filling me with creative ideas. For Fox, just to be in a land redolent with Native American magic, with strong Medicine, excited her, struck a light to her nerve endings. The closer we got to the complex of National Parks that surround Moab, the more her blood sang with ancestral harmonies. Discovering that she was half Apache had jarred loose her identity and left a huge space in her psyche, a space needing to be informed, filled, shaped, imagined, created.

We were not tourists, I reiterate. We were pilgrims.

At Salina, Utah, Highway Fifty merges with Interstate Seventy. Now, for the first time, we were on a four lane interstate. There were rest stops, pull outs, Vista Points. It was a land aware of itself as a tourist destination, but that didn't bother us. There aren't any businesses or towns on this stretch of 70, it's just a drive: a VERY formidable drive. The reason for this daunting stretch of road is its beginning and ending elevations. It's a grueling climb. Going east, it's bad enough. Mile after mile, the grade gets ever more steep as it crosses a landscape reminiscent of the surface of Mercury. This is called the San Rafael Desert. Another ancient ocean bed, it rises through what is called The San Rafael Swell, and ends up climactically at the San Rafael Reef. These layers of sedimentary sandstone were deposited during the Triassic Era. The red color comes from iron oxide, and dominates the palette of the Colorado Plateau. There are formations called "Joe and His Dog," "The Head of Sinbad" and "The San Rafael Knob". The drive is forty miles of UP, UP and more UP. Coming the other way, from East to West, it's longer, about sixty five miles, and steeper. Trucks hug the right lane as they struggle against the grade. And, of course, motor homes take second place as the monstrous eighteen wheelers diesel their way against gravity.

Poor Yertle. She was barely getting twenty five miles per hour, while all around us, irritated truckers broke out of their lanes to pass. Air concussion, whipping stones, mudflap sparks, horns, all hell seems to break loose on the San Rafael elevation. Then we would get behind some weary Class A motorcoach, one of the big ones, and draft it, riding in its air wake, resting Yertle just a bit. Fragments of huge tires littered the highway, like discarded lizard skins or scorched black eggshells. Trucks on the opposite side of the highway, on the downgrade, rolled, smoking, into brake ramps, while on our side, overheating behemoths struggled into emergency pullouts. Temperature gauge in Yertle: normal. We feel like old time movie figures in "Valley of the Lost", where screaming explorers in pith helmets and bermuda shorts run between the legs of dinosaurs. That's us, inside Yertle, running between the legs of Ferguson Truckers and Safeway, FedEx and Red Giant.

Meanwhile, the landscape is becoming truly dramatic. We are now in real sandstone bluff territory, as far as the eye can see, red-brown buttes flat-top their way into the distance. Huffing and puffing, we steer into the pullout at the very pinnacle, at the San Rafael Reef itself, where a plaque explains our unique geological position, and we can look forward to what lay ahead: downhill, between flatirons hundreds of feet high. The road snakes out between these tipped up surfaces and about ten miles ahead, it debouches into a valley and rolls onward, towards Green River and Moab.

There's a Vista Point along the next piece of road. It is a spectacle, the first opportunity to take a mighty whiff of the immensity of the desert Southwest. There are shelves of giant slabs of whitish rock, out of which sprout a couple of bristle cone pine trees, those ancient twisted life forms, the oldest and longest lived plants on Earth. The parking lot simply builds off from the rock slabs, and then the view plunges down, down, and away. A drop of several hundred feet leads the eye off into canyons and dry washes that stretch forever. There is no resolving point, no river or lake, no road to lead a viewer towards anything at all. Instead, the eye gets lost, it becomes too much to take in. It's a kind of nothingness, framed by the rock shelves and the pine trees. Here we are, up here, and down there, it's a badland inhabited by marginal creatures, lizards, scorpions, gaunt hungry vultures hovering on thermals in the sky above.

Native Americans sit in lawn chairs under umbrellas along the sidewalk, near the restrooms, selling bead necklaces and dream catchers. They take Visa, Mastercard and American Express. They are as uncommunicative as sleeping iguanas. Their eyes are open but we are apparently only walking pocketbooks and charge accounts. Ask them a question, they seem not to understand English, Spanish or Esperanto. But of course they do. "Twenty Four ninety five," they say. They count out change or slide cards through portable machines. It's easier to be quiet, under the plastic parasols that shelter them from the heat. Their attitude says it all: we know your questions are naïve and ridiculous, we will tell you these dream catchers are made by our holy people but they are mass produced in China with chemically died thread. We order these "turquoise" necklaces in boxes of five thousand from Indonesia. Do we need to talk to you? No, we don't need to talk to you. Give us your money and consider it a paltry fraction of the reparations owed to us for the demolition of our entire culture.

We always stop at this place. We stretch our legs, take a pee, eat a sandwich. I photograph Fox as she plays her native drum on the rock shelf. She moves as far from the Native Americans as possible. She crouches reverently, ignoring the few tourists about. She is Here, upon the desert land, summoning wisdom from her ancestors. Fox is the most reverent, observant of Native Americans. She is unaware of the fact that I am photographing her, as she prays and plays the slender wood frame with its stretched deer skin. Thoom thoom thoom, goes the drum, "Hi yay Hi yah," she chants, and I don't understand what she chants, where she got it, from whom she learned it, but I know it is genuine. I'm not just a passenger on the train of her religion. I am a co-participant ,but it is not my religion, it just seems to invite me to hum along, to view the world as she is viewing it, as ancient humans viewed it long before science warped our imaginations or modern civilization crushed us into little men and women attached to machines for life support.

We are only fifty miles from the turnoff to Highway 191, and then another forty miles to Moab. The drive to our destination is almost over. Along the next stretch of highway, the buttes recede from the road, and there becomes a regular procession of light brown cliffs. It feels odd, it feels nowhere until we reach the town of Green River. Then, a stop for gas, a voyage into the hellrooms of the highway 'rest stop' convenience store with its coterie of lost souls, sullen truckers, heavily made up women and clueless high school counter girls. Then, onward into this almost featureless desert of cliffs, erosion, wind, salt, until, at last, the sign pointing to 191 and Moab looms up before us, and we take the exit with a sigh of deep gratitude.

Driving makes me sick. The longer I drive, the sicker I get. Driving Yertle demanded fiendish concentration. At the end of a day of driving I felt like I had spent twenty four hours inside a giant washer/dryer. I wanted to find the Kountry Kampground at Moab, check in, take a shower and relax. It was about four in the afternoon, and there was still light to be had, time to get to a spot and do the necessary chores.

Just a few miles from Moab, there is a dramatic shift as we pass through a chasm bounded by high and rugged cliffs of iron-red sandstone. This is the beginning of the surreal country of Arches, Canyonlands, the geological wonderland of a huge complex of national parks stretching for hundreds of miles.

The entrance to Arches National Park is just outside of town and it is a foreshadowing of the drama that lies within. It is a face of hewn rock, with a winding road going up and then disappearing within the park, which lays out of sight, hidden from view behind this immense façade.

Another mile or two down the road we cross the Colorado River, and then we are in Moab, a pleasant little town of bike shops and souvenir boutiques. The town is a narrow strip, four or five blocks on either side of 191 and about six miles long. East of the town is the famous 'slick rock' area that has made Moab a Mecca for extreme mountain bikers, trick riders, young lunatics, dudes, and dudettes, dressed in bicycle gear, tight colorful jerseys, spandex pants, cleated shoes and helmets.

I plan to ride in Moab, but you won't get me on the slick rock. I'm chicken. I broke my shoulder two years ago doing an abrupt somersault over my handlebars. I feel a bit too old and cautious to trust my life to a few inches of trail across an undulating terrain of smooth granite.

We had stayed at our first Kountry Kampground at Ely, Nevada, and we had been impressed with its friendly management. We wanted to stay at Moab's Kountry Kampground; that had been the plan. When we drove to the south side of town where the RV parks are located, we discovered that Kountry Kampground was closed for the winter. Most of the other campgrounds were also closed.

Uh oh.

We turned around and headed for the next RV park, now fearing that they were ALL closed for the winter. Turning into a funky looking lot filled with dented trailers and old trucks, I let Fox out to talk to the office while I took a turn around the campground. I only needed one circle. As I returned to the office, I knew Fox would be outside, waiting for me. It didn't take any sixth sense to realize that this was a dump, with its quotient of permanent residents, mired in alcohol, speed and domestic chaos. It was the kind of place that appears on episodes of "Cops".

Sure enough, there was Fox, waiting outside the office. As she entered the RV, she said, "Drunk. The lady in the office was so drunk....sooo drunk...let's get out of here."

As it grew dark, we found a clean and pleasant campground just another mile up the road. It was one of only three campgrounds open in Moab. The other two were refuges for toothless speed freaks.

There is a growing population of permanent RV residents, upwards of six million and counting. We've got wi-fi internet, satellite TV, everything we could possibly want except room for the grand piano. The biggest problem is sewage. It will always be sewage. I have complete trust in the resourcefulness of RV people. One day we will be able to break down fifty gallons of "black" products into a six by four inch brick, which will smell sweet upon incinerating in a campground fire circle.

We were about to embark upon a week of boondocking (meaning off-the –grid) inside Arches National Park. There would be a public bathroom with clean running water and a trash bin, but nothing else.

The next morning we checked out of the campground and drove the few miles to the park entrance. The weather was lovely: there were giant lenticular clouds hovering over the LaSal Mountains. They are called lenticular because they are lens-shaped, flattened ovoids full of moisture. The temperature was in the seventies. Here it was, middle of October, and there was no better time to visit the park than this very moment.

The ranger at the entrance told us there were plenty of campsites available. They were located at the far end of the park, down eighteen miles of roads curving through some of the world's most spectacular scenery.

We drove up the entry road and passed through what is called "Park Avenue", for its giant megalithic stone structures, like castles and battlements. Then the park opened before us in all its majesty.

My feelings were different than on our previous visit. I felt Arches welcoming me, I felt an intimacy with the environment. It was no longer intimidating. It was glorious.

The skies above Moab were full of strange clouds, saucer shapes and white wisps. The autumnal light was a slanting warmth, a permanent afternoon that was ideal for photography. I was in heaven!

Now, on my second trip to Arches, I felt as though I were returning to an old friend. We drove straight towards the Devil's Playground, which is at the end of the road. Just above were the campsites, about thirty parking spaces. The campground was less than half full, and we quickly found the perfect spot, high up the hill, looking east towards rounded stone formations and a vast desert.

Having decided on our spot, I noticed, as I pulled Yertle into position, that there was a man standing on top of his big motor coach, pointing a camera into the eastern landscape. I recognized his camera. It was the same camera that I used. As soon as I parked, I walked the few yards between our vehicles and called up to him.

"How do you like your camera?" I asked.

"Love it," he responded. "I just got this new lens, a wide angle, and I'm seeing what it can do."

Good lord, I thought, what a synchronicity. At that moment his lady partner emerged from the coach. She was a small woman with a shoulder length cascade of red-brown hair. She was wearing a plethora of fine Indian beadwork on a turquoise vest. She carried a small leather pouch that I recognized as an herbal medicine bag.

This was nuts.

The photographer climbed down the ladder from his roof and introduced himself. "I'm K'vandis K. K'vandis", he said, handing me his card. The card simply contained his name and an email adress.

"And the "K" stands for?" I asked.

"K'vandis", he replied impishly. "It means 'he who journeys' in the language of the Chohosh."

I'm a writer. I recognize identities that are invented for purposes of self-renewal, for comedy, for anonymity, for any number of reasons. If he called himself K'vandis K'vandis K'vandis, that was fine. He who journeys he who journeys he who journeys. Appropriate for the driver of a 38 foot Class A motor coach with eight solar panels, a high capacity inverter, a satellite dish internet connection, a powerful generator and two slide out room extenders.

Just like that, we had parked next to a pair of kindred spirits. Just like that. They would change our lives so much that it's difficult not to believe that we were led to them.

Chapter Eight: Meeting The Old Ones

I don't exactly know when the Raven thing started. Somewhere on the road towards Moab, Fox began to see ravens as totem spirits, as guides. Maybe it was on Highway Six, after the air conditioner belt had vaporized. Fox saw Ravens flying parallel to the road, and she said, "The ravens are with us, and they tell me we're going to be okay."

If a stranger said this to me on a bus, I would have changed seats. This is my partner. I had first hand experience of her integrity. I had passed through the "I think she's crazy" phase and had learned to trust her. Fox has an extraordinary gift (or curse, depending on how you view it). She has a highly developed sense of empathy towards other beings. This empathy is especially acute with regard to dogs, cats, birds, horses.....all the non-human world. She can receive images that animals project. She treats non-human creatures as equals, as colleagues on the earth, each of whom has a particular wisdom. As she explains it to me, when animals sense this respect, they open up to her. Just as people love to be heard and seen in their deepest souls, and so seldom have the opportunity, animals also love to have a witness to their experiences and sympathy for their traumas. When Fox began to read the flights of the ravens, I paid attention.

One day we were searching for the petroglyph site that had been so stirring and scary on our previous journey to the Moab area. I thought I had memorized its location, but I was wrong. We drove along the side roads leading off interstate 70, looking for the ruined town and the road leading into the canyon. What we found were many roads, and many derelict buildings, all of which resembled the route we had taken, two years ago. At last I came to a place that I felt had a reasonable chance of being the correct road. I crossed a cow-catcher, bounced into a dry wash and began heading into a parched wilderness. At that moment, two ravens, on opposite sides of the road, flew into the air, and crossed one another's flight paths, forming an "X" in the air directly in front of Yertle.

"Stop!" Fox commanded. "This is the wrong road; we'll get horribly lost. The ravens just told me."

I stopped. We had spent much of an hour looking for our mysterious site, and now I was frustrated and feeling a little foolish.

Then, two more ravens in parallel flew over Yertle, from front to back, while a third raven simply hovered in front of Yertle, balancing itself on drafts of air. "Wait here, " Fox said. "Something will happen."

I killed the engine. In about a minute I saw a plume of dust emerging from between the walls of the canyon towards which we had been driving. Shortly, it resolved itself into a pickup truck. It curved here and there but inexorably moved towards us. I started Yertle, backed up and got her out of the way. Then I stepped down from the cab and waited. Momentarily, a hefty four wheel drive pickup pulled alongside. An elderly couple was inside. They had a solid, vital look to them. The man wore a cowboy hat with a snake skin band. His wife wore a handmade shawl, and she beamed at us with patient good nature. They were full blooded Native Americans. They radiated contentment with one another and with the world. I could think of no other people who would so perfectly belong to this landscape.

The man looked at Yertle, then at me. "This is no place to drive something like that," he said, amiably. "You'd be in terrible trouble if you went down this road. The next wash would've hung you up and there ain't a tow big enough round here to get you out. Woulda had to come from Salt Lake. B'lieve me, I know what I'm talking about. Happens about once a year."

"I'm glad we didn't drive any further," I said, looking at Fox with gratitude. I searched the sky for Ravens and there they were, observing us. "We're looking for a place with petroglyphs that's around here. There's a ghost town....."

The man laughed. "That's my place, I own the land up to the reservation boundary," he said. "Just follow us and I'll take you to the road. When you're done looking, leave a dollar in the plaque, that would be fine."

Without further ado, I got into Yertle and we followed the pickup truck down the road, just a few miles, and there, sure enough, was the ghost town, and the road, and a hand lettered sign that said, "Petroglyphs 15 mi. Ute Reservation 23 mi."

The driver of the pickup beckoned with his arm, and we knew which way to go. His wife looked back and waved sweetly, cupping her fingers into her palm, again and again, until they drove out of sight.

Now everything was familiar. We clattered down the road, while the canyon became deeper, higher, more amazing, more remote. Where did we find the nerve to come here, two years ago? I know, we're dinky little adventurers, we don't go to Antarctica or base jump in wing suits off Angel Falls. I'll never kayak down the Niger River. Everyone has their scale of things and going alone into a remote canyon that we already knew was spooky, that was pushing our limits. Fortunately, the road was recently graveled. And, fifteen miles is fifteen miles. Driving slowly and carefully, we were there in just under an hour. I was so curious about the Ute reservation. What could BE there? I wondered. It's an hour and a half drive to Interstate 70 down a gravel road. There were power lines running in the direction of the reservation, so they were at least hooked up to the twenty first century. My imagination conjured everything from meth labs to Burger Kings. Unless we got an invitation, we would never know. The petroglyphs told us that this land had been occupied for a very long time. It was none of our business what went on at the Ute reservation.

The sides and floor of the canyon were full of plant life: sage, yarrow, dandelion, all kinds of grasses. Rabbits skittered across the road every twenty seconds, huge jacks, brown-red and some greys. This was an entire ecosystem, and, though the creek washes were dry, we could see what might happen during the rainy season. The songs of wrens, chickadees and cowbirds bounced from the walls. No wonder this was a sacred place, eight thousand years ago, when rain was plentiful. A sacred place, today, though perhaps no one but a few tourists worship here.

Perhaps no one but Fox and myself.

At last we came to the place, and it was exactly as I remembered. The plant life was vigorous from autumn rainfall. The ocher figures stood sentinel over the road, the canyon, the dry wash. Here and there, horse flop testified to the Ute presence down the road. Otherwise, there was utter solitude. The sage bushes were so high that as Fox and I wandered around, we lost sight of one another. I would see her emerge where the cliff face bent outward and twisted around on the west side of the canyon, where the tallest shamanic figures, the ethereal masked ones with no eyes, stood watch over the eons. A little finger of waterfall came off the top of the cliff, falling with a plink into a pool down in the wash. The place was magnificent, eerie and profound.

For half an hour or so, we wandered quietly, and I heard the sound of Fox's drum emerge from the bush, and her gentle song, "hey yey yey hey, yey yey". I joined her singing, and we made a loving duet, paying tribute with our voices to the Ancient Ones and to the Great Spirit.

It was a moment of perfection, and it came to an abrupt halt. A motor noise intruded, coming down the road from the direction of the white world, from the ghost town and rural Utah. The motor was loud and rough, it conveyed a gestalt of information: no tourist had a car or truck that sounded this way. Rough and burbling, it was an engine in poor condition, old and belching oil fumes. In that context, it was a sound that conveyed poverty, crime and violence.

I was immediately frightened. I could feel terror in my chest, pushing at my rib cage. I quickly located Fox, and we both circled towards Yertle. I was holding a very expensive camera. I stashed it away in Yertle's innards. Then, before we could do anything else, a green pickup truck came across the wash and stopped on the opposite side of the road. There were two men in the bed of the truck, two men and a teenage girl in the front seat. The driver was in his forties. The others were in their early twenties. The men looked somewhat alike: short reddish hair done in buzz cuts, freckles, bad teeth. The girl was plump, dark, heavily coated in makeup.

I will not invoke clichés about inbred red necks. (See? I just invoked them. Sorry.) These were members of a family, maybe dad, brothers, a cousin. They had a brutal unconscious look, and they were not happy to see us there.

The driver circled the truck towards the small parking area in front of the petroglyphs. He flipped a cigarette out the window. "How ya doin?" he asked. The younger men jumped from the rear truck bed and walked aimlessly around. One of them snickered for no reason, and scratched the red stubble of his head. A tattoo of a fat woman in cowboy clothes worked its way up his arm.

"We're okay, " I said. Assessing, assessing. If they wanted to rob us, kill us, they could. I tried to read how I looked to them. A burly middle-aged guy with a shaved head and an earring. Not very scary. I discerned that the business at hand was some kind of group sexual encounter with a willing and very foolish girl. We were simply in the way. They hadn't expected anyone to be here. For a few tense moments, the older man watched us, while the kids opened cans of beer and circled around us, thinking about an opportunity to rob the tourists.

The girl was more important. At last, they got back in the truck, and one of them banged on the window. "Let's go, man," he said.

The truck shaved a pile of gravel off the road and circled back to the other side. While Fox and I got into Yertle, we heard the pop of beer cans and a loud giggle from the girl. Our hearts were pounding in our chests. I looked up at the silent petroglyphs. "You've always got a surprise for us, don't you?" I thought. The darkness and the light, always intermingling. A holy place may not always be a peaceful place. It may be a place of blood and silence, of sacrifice, death and re-awakening. Something awe-ful lived in this canyon, something that pulled us in, and then chased us away.

For the second time, we left the canyon before we had intended. Just as we crossed the wash, Fox cried out, "Stop!" Her voice was so powerful that I hit the brake, rocking us both towards the windshield, then back into our seats.

Our rear wheels were still in the wash, so I finished pulling through and braked Yertle to a halt. Fox jumped from the passenger seat and went back into the wash. I saw her in the rear view mirror. She was digging in the sand and gravel, digging towards something that was revealing itself. She grabbed a nearby stick to penetrate the packed sand. Finally, she pulled a red egg-shaped object from the ground. Panting, she ran back to Yertle, and I got down that road as fast as I could.

When we were finally back in the old wrecked town, I pulled aside to see what she had taken from the earth.

She held it out to me. "Look," she said, "It called to me, I knew it would be there. I can't explain it any better than that." In her hand was an oval stone, red colored, sized to fit perfectly in a human hand. When she passed it to me, I knew that a human being had used this thing centuries past, used it to pound acorns, chestnuts, to work flint or break bones to get marrow. My fingers closed around it as if responding to its invitation. Its surface was smooth, except for several lines that had been incised at regular intervals, as if to count years or seasons. Tiny crystals glittered within the granite matrix.

"How did you find this?" I was incredulous.

"As we crossed the wash, it just spoke to me..." Fox shrugged. "I heard it...I don't know....a Grandmother once used it. See, it was buried lengthwise", she showed me. She had dug about six inches of the creek to get to it. Only a tiny arc of the object had broken the surface, but she knew it was something that needed to be found.

"There's got to be an irrational explanation for this," I commented.

Fox laughed as I passed the ancient tool back. She put it in her medicine bag, reverently, with her collection of sacred objects.

We stayed one week in Arches. Our friends, K'vandis and Juni, had been there three weeks and were planning to stay another week. When they invited us into their motor coach, we were astounded. It was huge! We had no idea that slide-outs could add so much room to a motor home. It had everything. Compared to Yertle, this was a luxury condo, with room to stretch out, work at computers, do craft projects. K'vandis and Juni had lived aboard their coach for five years. We took in this information with a stunned silence. The idea had never occurred to us, that one could live full time in a motor home. From that moment forward, we began to investigate the possibilities.

At night, K'vandis and I scouted locations to take astronomical photos. We worked at Skyline Arch, shooting the North Star right through the giant opening, letting the stars whirl around their polar fulcrum until they had produced immense circular streaks known as star trails.

When the week was over, we bid a temporary farewell to our new friends.

It was painful to leave. We barely knew the day of the week, the date, the time. We were immured in a timeless moment of red sandstone rocks, odd-shaped clouds, vast desert and bristle cone pine.

We had to go. We planned a return route, following the law of the road: try to never take the same route twice. Our return would take us north to Salt Lake City and then west on Interstate Eighty.

We departed late in the day and got about eighty miles, to Green River. There was a pleasant park, with a few RV sites and a sewage station. The fee was fourteen dollars. We pulled in through an empty ranger station, paid our fee on the honor system, and went looking for a site.

As we drove through the park, we saw a young Japanese couple riding heavily laden bicycles. I pulled over. "Ohayo Gozaimasu", I said, and they lit up, thinking I spoke Japanese. Alas, I had only a few words. They gave us a card. It said, "Japanese students across US bicycle. No English. Help thank you please."

What!? In October, these young folks were taking bicycles across the United States, speaking no English? How did they map their routes? They would have to take back roads. No interstates would allow bicycles. How were they accomplishing this amazing feat? Even with GPS, it would be a titanic challenge. Yet, there they were, in Green River, Utah, at the end of October. I wished them luck and went to our campsite.

The route north, up 191 towards Salt Lake City, took us into our first rainstorms. Yertle seemed, for the moment, to be water tight. Slick pavements, high winds, and up-hill climbs made it into a long ride. We reached Salt Lake City around four thirty. Rush hour. Driving a big lumbering RV amidst a lot of merging traffic is frightening. It requires continuous judgment: is he going to get in front of me before I reach his lane? Are we going to get there at exactly the same moment and collide? Will he slow down and let me pass? Should I slow down and let HIM pass? Brake, speed up, brake, brake, speed up. Not enough power, here comes another truck, the wind is buffeting me like crazy, almost blowing me out of the lane. Yikes! Then I saw those portable roadside warning signs that have orange letters and are set up at intervals to warn drivers of some dire condition. These signs said "Extremely High Winds: Caution!"

We found an exit and pulled off the freeway. Time to fill the tank. When I stepped down from Yertle, the wind pushed me backward. The triangular plastic gas station flags sounded like a flock of ten thousand ducks taking off at once. The tin Marlboro sign on its U-shaped mount was blown vertical. People's hats were taking off to Oz and never returning.

Here is a good law of the road, Rule Number Four, is it? IF CONDITIONS SUCK, PULL OVER AND WAIT IT OUT.

After all, we have our house, right? Food, water, light, warmth. Fox came out of the convenience store with our favorite road drink, Choco-loffee, half hot chocolate and half latte.

So I got back into Yertle after filling the tank, and drove back up the ramp to Interstate Eighty.

What was our hurry?

Once a trip is over, homesickness sets in. A curious driven state occurs, and we start chanting the ancient and venerable chant:

wanna-get-home

wanna-get-home,

miss-the-cats

miss-the-cats,

hope-the-fish-is-alive,

hope-the-fish-is-alive,

hope-the-house-didn't-burn-down

hope-the-house-didn't-burn-down.

.

Driving through and around Salt Lake City was the most miserable drive in my life. I almost killed a motorcyclist who zoomed through my blind spot, just as I was deciding to change lanes to the right. I couldn't see him. My muscles were flexed on the wheel, everything was going right right, just about to turn and then, zoom! Along comes the motorcyclist, totally invisible in my mirror. A tenth of a second later and there would have been a catastrophe, pancake motorcyclist, ripped up Yertle, stalled traffic multiple crash emergency scene in sixty mile per hour wind.

But it didn't happen, and after a couple of miserable hours, we were out of Salt Lake City and looking for a campground. Trouble was, there weren't any until the state line at Wendover . East Wendover is in Utah. West Wendover is in Nevada.

Wendover Air Base was where the pilots of the 509th Air Group trained in the Enola Gay. Then they were shipped off to fly the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. There was a little museum but we didn't go see it.

It must have been nine o'clock when the lights of West Wendover came into view. Wendover, in Utah, was black, invisible. At the state line everything lit up like Christmas in Times Square. The Nevada part of Wendover was one big casino, and the Kountry Kampground was a gravel pit squeezed between The Red Garter and the Rainbow Lodge.

We had assumed that all Kountry Kampgrounds were the same, like Burger Kings or any franchise. We were wrong. They are all different. They have the yellow shirted employees, the insistence on perkiness. They smile, they're friendly though we could hear the growl under many a perky welcome. By paying a tidy sum, they could go into the KK Guidebook and become a member of the largest campground chain in the world. Wendover's KK was dismal. The location didn 't help. It was lit twenty four hours a day by the pulsating neon of the casinos. The town was no more than an off-ramp from I-80, three miles long. Out there in the background was the desert, the old defunct air base and distant mountains.

In a campground that resembled a drive-in movie lot, there were only two RV's. That was Yertle, and one other, way over on the other side. A trailer park occupied the area behind the campground. Blasting loud rock and roll emerged all day from one particular half-wide, no doubt making the entire community miserable. TOONKA TOONKA TOONKA TOONKA, the rumbling bass figure emerged from what must have been a ceiling high stack of speakers. It never stopped. In between songs the few moments of silence allowed us to breathe in hope, but then, here it came again: TOONKA TOONKA TOONKA TOONKA.

One of the funniest cartoons I've even seen was called "Richard Wagner In Hell". The composer is shown hanging in a fetid cell with his hands manacled to the wall and a set of headphones clamped to his head. A giant speaker is mounted at each corner of the cell. Standing behind a soundproof panel of glass, a red devil with horns and a tail speaks into a microphone. "Are you ready for more rock and roll, Herr Wagner?"

This is the feeling I have when trapped near loud music. Not too many things bother me. A neighbor with that incessant fronking bass line, that hip hop heavy metal Toong a Boom aToong a Boom: it drives me insane.

We left the next morning as early as possible.

Chapter Nine: Back to Indian Country

I love maps. I mean, I LOOOVE maps. Any kind of maps. Put me down with an Atlas, and I can make hours disappear. On one of the occasions when I let Fox drive, I was absorbed by the road map of Nevada.

Forty miles north of I-80, near Reno, there is a body of water called Pyramid Lake. It jumped off the map and pasted itself to my eyes.

This lake has a mythical reputation. It is fully controlled by the Paiute Tribe. There were two battles here in the 1860s, the first a Paiute victory, the second a Paiute disaster. The tribe managed to wrestle the lake and its area back into their possession through the Indian Reorganization Act in 1936. Since then, the Paiutes have maintained a fishery and a low key tourist attraction. The lake is magnet for fishing enthusiasts who go after the Cut-throat, or Lahontan Bass. These fish are a legend. They are named after the ancient Lahontan people who occupied the area called the Lahontan Plateau. Some fish have weighed in at twenty five and thirty pounds. At the center of the lake's visitor industry there is store/restaurant/bar. There is a huge wall of photos that show anglers and their catch. These photos go back decades, many are black and white, even sepia. The record catch was made by a Paiute named Johnny Skimmerhorn, who caught a forty one pound Cutthroat in 1921.

The most striking quality of Pyramid Lake is its great and sacred antiquity. There is no development. The only amenities are regularly spaced pull-outs with porta potties. The place is refreshing in its spartan simplicity. The color of the water changes as the day's light changes. It can be blue in the morning, green in the afternoon and towards evening it takes on a deep turquoise hue. The mountains on the eastern shore turn pink and salmon colored during sunset. A four hundred foot island, shaped like a pyramid, juts from the lake near the east-center. The road follows the lake shore, all around its circumference, and each view is spectacular.

We drove about halfway up the western shore and found a cozy place to settle for the night. The moon was about three quarters full, and I used its light to take photographs of gleaming water and stars

We could have stayed for a week. We had to go.

The next morning we skirted the metropolis of Reno-Sparks with little trouble. It was odd to return to 'civilization', if that's what it is. In a short time we had crossed into California, and were cruising down I-80. The last thing we wanted was to run down the boring slide towards Sacramento and all of the settled parts of the state. We made another detour. We took Route 20 into the Sierra foothills and through small towns like Marysville and Yuba City. We had never been there, so that made it a desirable plan. We'd spend one more night somewhere in the hills and then break for home the following day. After three and a half hours of driving, I was about shot, and began looking for a campground. Nothing showed in the campground guide book, so it became a pure eyeball search. Suddenly, on my right, I saw a white sign with brown letters, "Sycamore Hills Campground". If Yertle were capable of showing a strip of brake tar on pavement, this would have been the time. RRRRrrrrrrrr I slowed and turned in one breathless maneuver, forks and spoons flying out of their drawers, and, bingo, we had found ourselves a presentable campground right on the shore of the Yuba River.

We spent a pleasant night there, and the following day started out as normally as any day, but we had a bit more craziness with which to contend before reaching the safety of our home in the hills of Marin County.

In the morning I looked at the map, trying to find a route home that would not take us through a sixty mile rush hour. There was small side road, called 175, that connected to 101. After breakfast and the usual rituals, we started the final drive of our trip across the country. We were passing Clear Lake and we spun partway up the western side, just to see how the place had fared. I had been at Clear Lake twenty years ago. After what we had seen at Pyramid Lake, the shock and disappointment of seeing rampant development was depressing. I headed for the exit. When we got to the turnoff leading to Route 175, I read a sign, in clear English: No Trucks Over 17 Feet.

Yertle was sixteen feet. Or so I thought. Later I would learn, with tape measure in hand, that Yertle was closer to nineteen feet.

I got on this road with the best of intentions. A twenty five mile shortcut to our final highway destination. About eighty miles of Highway 101 would bring us home.

175 started climbing immediately and became an ordeal of radical hairpin turns. What country were we in? Nepal? Bolivia? If I spit out the driver's side window, it would fall four hundred feet onto meadows of rhododendron. I was too busy to appreciate the beauty. The drive took everything out of me. I crawled at ten miles an hour, watching for oncoming traffic. The route was only twenty one miles, and it took more than ninety minutes to navigate. I had sweat streaming from every pore and my heart rate reached terror-induced aerobic levels. Fox clung to her door handle, ready to jump should I miscalculate. No wonder the sign said No Trucks Over Seventeen Feet. The curves on this road were so hairy that the extra three feet I didn't know I was driving were hanging over the ledge.

Then, as I was coping with this horrifying journey, a stink began to arise from Yertle's innards. Uh oh. This could only be one thing.

Picture the structural design of a small RV. Tanks for fresh water, cleaning water, and sewer water have to be slung beneath the chassis, more or less near to spinning shafts and hot exhaust pipes. Should a clog occur in, say, the sewer tank, several things can happen. Combine heat with the stirring action of a swerving truck, and a real chemical stew begins to accumulate. We were beginning to acquire a first class sewer clog. It grew worse.

Adding a stench to my driving distress only forced me to stick my head out the window as I turned back and forth, making each switchback with terrified delicacy. Now and then an inarticulate scream emerged from Fox.

"Aaagh!" she gurgled, and I knew that I had approached too close to the other side, my right front wheel had almost slid off into the deeps. Fox's head was out the passenger window, so she could look down, down and down. When I saw the road finally straighten out and level, I was soaked to the bone and I felt like Wily Coyote after just being conned by Roadrunner into sticking my finger into an electric socket (made by Acme, of course).

At last we arrived at the safety of 101. We were seventy miles from home. We had to find a place to clear the sewage pipes, pronto!

Out came the campground guide. Out came the AAA book, with leads to gas stations that included sewage dumpsites. The pickings were slim. There was a Kountry Kampground in Anderson Valley. This is an upscale area of vineyards and palatial homes. The campground would have a sewage disposal facility, water hoses at the ends of long extension wires, all the needed tools for clearing a blocked toilet line.

By the map it looked simple enough. Take Exit Y and turn left on Road Z and then go X number of miles. But it wasn't simple.

I must take a moment to say something about the state of California. I am a Californian. I've lived here forty years. I love California, a state that can be explored and enjoyed for a lifetime and never repeat itself, never get boring. Yet something happened as soon as we crossed the border from Nevada to California.

We encountered people who were not friendly or helpful. What happened? I don't know. Our entire journey to Moab and back had been punctuated by encounters of the most selfless kind. Support, aid, advice, even sacrifice had been offered to us in every moment of trouble. We never had to look; it always presented itself in the form of human beings on the spot and willing, eager to help. These were common everyday working folks, in little garages, in campgrounds, on the road, with their kids or their boats or campers, with their motorcycles and all terrain vehicles, all kinds of people going about their joys and labors. These were the people of the great American legend, "The Heartland".

This Kampground was difficult to find! Sure, we'd seen the familiar yellow highway sign at the exit. We had followed the signs until they petered out on a road lined with expensive mansions and we began to doubt the existence of any such Kampground. Several times, I stopped, looked at the map, and considered turning back. Fifteen miles, twenty miles, where the hell was this place?

At last, we saw more yellow signs. There was the Kountry Kampground, just a few more miles down the road.

It seemed such an unlikely place for a campground. Stuck back in a rich and secluded suburb, what kind of Kampground could this be?

At last we found the gates, drove up a ramp and arrived at the office.

We're having a sewage emergency, we explained, can we use the facility at the exit?

This is a routine request at any campground. Sometimes a small fee is paid, five to ten dollars. At most campgrounds it is a free amenity. What I needed to do was fill the toilet bowl several times until the tank was topped up and then let it go in a swoosh, using gravity to carry the material down the drain. If that didn't work I would use the three foot wand I had purchased in Ely to probe the plastic pipes. If the first try didn't work, I'd do it again, and again, and then rinse until the stench was gone. That was the way the drill went: rinse and flush, probe probe, rinse and flush.

I went into the office. There was a middle aged woman behind the counter. I explained our problem. She told me that in order to use the dump station, we would have to check in for the night. Price: 68 dollars. I was stunned. I have never been required by any dump station to pay for a night of camping. It seems that this elite Kountry Kampground was strictly upper class, and 1979 Yertles were not welcome.

We would have none of it. Shocked and discouraged for having spent an hour seeking out this campground, we turned and drove the miles back towards 101, heads hanging out the window.

Quickly, consult the campground book and see if anything else is available. Nada, nothing. We drove down the highway, looking for a gas station, a state park, anything. I saw the highway symbol for campground from the corner of my eye. It was a little trailer and tent symbol with an arrow. I swung off the exit and followed signs for half a mile and came upon a campground, an ordinary working class campground. It was closed for the winter, but a caretaker was there, and she allowed us the use of a site with its hoses and sewer connections to fix our problem. No charge. Half an hour later, the stink was washed away, and we left a ten dollar bill in the box outside the caretaker's house.

The rest of our journey was anti-climax. We were coming home. Late that afternoon we pulled up into our driveway.

All the cats were fine. The fish was glad to see us. The house hadn't burnt down.

We were home.

Chapter Ten: The Time of the Raven

In spite of a genocide of unthinkable proportions, the Native Americans are still here. They continue to guard and revive their languages, their cultures and traditions. A hundred and fifty years ago, they were snatched from their way of life, their children were sent to government schools and ceased being Native Americans as we knew them. Their lands were stolen, their food destroyed, their self respect slashed, their independence lost, their values derided.

During the sixties, the hippie movement created an icon of the Native American, made a romance of the tribal and nomadic life. A resurrected spirit began to seep into our so-called civilization. We had killed them off, but they returned. Their ghosts had hovered above the land, waiting for a time when they would be called.

Now, we are calling them. This is not a romantic image, a revived nostalgia for an aboriginal lifestyle. This is a desperate plea for help from a culture that has lost its moorings.

Some people, mixed and full blood Native Americans, remain aware of their culture. They are working in subtle ways to bring some redemption out of the horror of their genocide.

Indian ways are viewed with increasing respect and admiration, as the values of our own culture decline, disintegrate and leave us grasping for something that will help us re-design our lives so that they make sense.

It is a painfully barbed irony that many tribes now make considerable income soaking white people in gambling casinos. This method of making a living may be a two edged sword. It is an industry built on a foundation of vice and the creation of addictions. But consider a quick capsule history: squeezed into reservations by expanding white settlers, Native Americans were put on starvation-level welfare. What lands they possessed were confiscated whenever minerals, natural gas, or anything of value was discovered. In 1934, The Indian Reorganization Act allowed tribes to 'buy back' lands that had been confiscated. The capital to purchase these lands they once freely used came in the form of royalties on production of said natural assets. In essence, it's like a situation where someone steals your car, and then sells it back to you. After all, you needed a car, right? And this car was YOUR car, you liked it, you bought it once, you might as well buy it again instead of buying another car. We'll just let you pay for it by forking over a fifteen percent gasoline tax, or a 'transportation tax', or something that will keep your debt alive and delivering interest to the government.

It could be that gambling casinos are the last but only viable choice of a way to get a return on Indian lands. They are tax exempt. All you need is a parking lot, a building, some slot machines, electronic poker and blackjack computers, a bar, a restaurant, and you are in tax free heaven.

Lately I've gotten suspicious of Native Americans. I think they're fucking with white people's heads. It would be typical of their humor to go all Trickster on us. Let's say, hypothetically, that a white person approaches a well known shaman. White person is seeking knowledge, initiation. Shaman sternly instructs white person: go into the desert and kill a badger with a dinner knife. Eat its liver and bring the pelt back to shaman and await further instructions. White person accomplishes mission. Shaman takes pelt, puts it with inventory of other pelts and brews up peyote tea mixed with Belladonna. Whoo whoooo! White Seeker hallucinates legions of coal-black skeletons dressed in white Nazi uniforms. The shaman puts White Seeker through a year of increasingly bizarre hi-jinks. He bestows dignified Native name on White Seeker: White Seeker. The literal translation in the native tongue is Buffalo Farts.

You get the idea. I saw this in Carlos Castaneda's work. Don Juan and Don Gennaro were cackling behind their hands. Let's make Carlos believe that his car has vanished into thin air! Then let's make him believe something else. Let's make him believe that an owl is capable of stealing his soul and trading it to Mescalito for power. How long can we keep this Anglo dangling? Dangling Anglo? Hahahha! Danglo! Let's pretend that's his Yaqui name. He'll go around telling his white friends at college that his name is Danglo. Hahahaha. Pass me some of that mescal, amigo.

I know that Native Americans have been hurt by their casino bonanza. It's a crappy form of reparation. It generates a lot of cash and a lot of corruption. I am not qualified to understand the situation. It's like being paid a cash amount for your soul. Thank you, Mephistopheles, thank you very much.

Chapter Eleven: Under Its Wing

Fox and I were renting a pleasant bungalow in the Marin County hills. It was secluded, surrounded by trees, the sky was dark, our pets had space in which to roam.

There were a few critical drawbacks to this situation. The rent was astronomical. Adding to that fierce monthly draw on our bank accounts was a utilities bill that rubbed salt into the wound. We were paying up to three hundred fifty dollars a month for electric, gas and water. We couldn't understand how it was possible for two people, living in a one bedroom cottage, to consume this much energy. We NEVER used the furnace. I was an expert scrounger of firewood, and we got heat from the wood burning stoves in bedroom and living room.

Was something wrong with the meters? We begged the landlady to consider this situation, but it was made murky by the fact that we shared meters with two other adjacent renters in the same compound.

Ahaaaaa! you say.

The landlady claimed to be making fair adjustments. She would not be budged from her stance of rectitude. We were helpless.

Aren't artists supposed to be the human equivalent of canaries in a coal mine? Don't we smell the toxic gases first? Aren't we also the first to die?

The toxic forces we sensed were economic and cultural. Nothing strikes closer to home than seeing money vanish from our wallets as if by magic.

Let's tote up the list. Rent started at sixteen hundred a month and rose a hundred a year. Internet connection: a hundred and ten dollars. Two phone bills were about sixty dollars apiece. Cable TV was fifty dollars. Garbage was twenty five. Utilities, two fifty to three fifty. As for health insurance, I was trapped. I suffer a chronic condition that requires monitoring and medication. There was no public option, no state medical help available to me, because I made more than eleven hundred and fifty dollars a month. I was locked to one of the big HMO's for four hundred dollars a month. That bill steadily rose until it was getting close to six hundred. My car payment was three hundred, for a ten year old Jeep. I had financed my first car and I was taken to the cleaners by a clever salesman . I had to pay for insurance in order to drive. Ninety bucks a month. The monthly bite was HUGE! The two of us were spending more than four thousand dollars a month BEFORE FOOD GAS AND EXTRAS, and this was to live modestly.

This was economic tyrrany. There was no choice. Pay or die! Pay or suffer excruciating pain, let your arthritic joints lock up and freeze, let your fibro-tormented nerves rage through your body unchecked. Or pay pay pay.

Fox was still fighting the most bitter and prolonged divorce in the history of the universe. Her ex-husband played tricks. He "forgot"attorney conferences. He shoveled assets to overseas accounts. He hid money in numerous front enterprises. Most galling, he stole money from Fox that she didn't even know she had. A legacy was in her father's will, a special legacy that her father had made with wise foresight. The legacy was designed to help Fox escape from THIS VERY PREDICAMENT. That legacy, too, somehow wound up in the ex's hands. Fox has seen only a fraction of that money, even after six years of legal struggle. I was, and still am, angry. A lot of people are angry. I just have to let it go. This isn't an angry book.

Something had to give.

We thought about our friends Juli and K'vandis K. K'vandis, living in a cozy but spacious motor home and traveling to the most scenic places in America. It began to look like a good idea.

So much depended on finding a good motor home. As I notched up my research into all things pertaining to the RV world, I learned a lot about what could go wrong, read hundreds of horror stories about money-draining lemons that tormented their owners for years on end.

We did not need a money-draining lemon. We did not need years of more torment. We felt like we had endured enough torment and wanted to go into our fifties, sixties and beyond, living independently, living with a lower overhead.

We visited a large dealer of motor homes, walking around the lot like two innocents, a couple of hicks who knew nothing about Class A motorhomes. Thing is, we knew a LOT about motorhomes, from research, from on-line forums, window shopping and lots of correspondence with other owners.

RV salesmen are, if possible, even more sincere and solicitous than car salesmen. I've never met such sincere people as those who sell recreational vehicles. It seems the bigger the vehicle, the deeper and more profound the sincerity. Vehicle salesmen are GOOD people, GOOD people, they want your best interests served, without fail. "Think about what this vehicle can DO for you," they intone. "What will it take to get you into this coach, TODAY?"

Fox bats her eyelashes and says, "Oh, this etched glasswork is SO GORGEOUS!" She rolls her eyes at me. The glasswork and the double-wide fridge, the washer/dryer combo that holds three pounds of clothes in a load, the dark ersatz/walnut veneer woodwork all seem to want to convey that you will be living in a five star hotel on wheels. Big motor coaches are relentlessly kitschy. They insult one's intelligence. Underneath the glitzy exterior is poor workmanship. Floors sag in the middle, foreshadowing a disaster where some poor victim's legs are thrust through the collapsed interior and are running at sixty miles per hour like a cartoon figure's, blur lines indicating legs churning at super-human speed. Slide-outs, those extra rooms that smoothly expand with the flip of a switch are the measure of a coach's prestige. A one slide-out coach is for the peons. Two slideouts is getting there. Three or four slideouts turn the coach into a mobile luxury suite. Some of these RVs cost as much as a house. A really good house.

The salesman hits a button and bzzzzzz, in thirty seconds the floor space has expanded by a factor of three, the kitchen is suddenly a real kitchen, the living room booth or table looks like part of a suite at a Ramada Inn. The bedroom turns from a cubicle into a boudoir.

The salesmen team up in pairs. One reverently whispers the words, "Corian Countertops." Every housewife wants Corian countertops. RV salesmen play to the ladies; they flatter and flirt with women and unveil kitchen conveniences like magicians waving a cape. Ta-da! An ice-maker! Ooooh! Shazam! Microwave combo with convection oven.

Meanwhile the salesman with the cowboy hat has me cornered up front near the dashboard. "Backup camera in full color" he shows me, as he turns over the engine, which purrs contentedly and releases a cloud of hydrocarbons fit to choke a walrus. "Cummins Diesel engine with 550 horse power. Full cruise control. 2500 watt inverter/charger three stage combination. Come on outside, lemme show ya the generator."

Salesmen get a little cagey when we ask about warranty . A motorhome is a hodgepodge of parts and systems. The refrigerator has a warranty from its manufacturer. The generator has a warranty from its manufacturer. The engine and chassis are warranteed by their maker, and so forth. A motorhome is a collection of forty warrantees, and the coach maker itself has a warranty for a limited amount of time because it knows how many components can fail, so it loads up the sales contract with fine print. This differs from maker to maker, and some companies are very good at supporting their products, but an inverse rule applies here: the more coaches a company makes and sells, the poorer the warranty. Hence, a small company like Allegro or Newmar has reasonable customer support. On the other hand, certain giants of the industry are as difficult to pin down on warranty issues as a Times Square three-card-monte huckster. "Find the black queen, sport! Three cards, one of them's the black queen. Lay down ya money, the odds are in your favor. If your eye is quick, you'll see the black queen as I shuffle my three cards back and forth, back and forth. Why, this gentleman over here took me for five hunnid dollahs, just an hour ago!"

"Why yes I did," says the gentleman. "And yestiday I won over a thousand. I'm just waitin' for you to get throo heah, so's I can win some more mon-ay!"

Telephone call to RV manufacturer: "Sir, we were on the highway going seventy miles an hour in our Winnebuggo Patriot Lightning Ultimate Thunder Freedom Coach when the kitchen slideout disengaged and extended into the opposite lane of traffic. It's lucky we were able to stop before we were hit by the oncoming eighteen wheeler. There might have been a terrible tragedy! The weight of the slide tilted our coach so that we were on two wheels and dragging the slide on the highway, making huge sparks, and just barely avoided an explosion! All our dishes, food and silverware came flying out and landed on the couch, and the knives stuck in the bathroom door. We still haven't been able to remove the butcher knife."

Manufacturer: "Well, that would be HW Hydraulic's responsibility, let me get you their phone number. Sorry, we don't cover slide-out malfunctions. Didn't you read your contract?"

I ask a question of the salesman: "Is the slide hydraulically operated or electrical?" The salesman frowns. "Uhh, let me ask Don about that."

How about the water heater? Dual source, propane and electrical? Does it have an auto-switch? Uh, let me ask Don about that.

For the fun of it, Fox and I start talking prices. How much is the one we're in?

Four hundred eighty thousand.

We don't blink. We look bored, blasé. Let's look at another coach.

Here's one with two slides for three hundred seventy thousand.

Here's one with one slide for a hundred twenty. The dealer, Hanskell Motor Homes, can arrange low interest financing . Payments of only eight to twelve hundred a month. Compound fracture interest as low as twenty three point nine nine percent with an adjustable floating point tethered to the prime rate guaranteed to never exceed a hundred fifty percent of prime at time of purchase but adjustable terms do apply to certain qualified customers, said adjustment guaranteed to go in one direction: up..

We leave our email and phone number with the salesmen. That was a mistake.

As we continue our search for the right motor coach, we get phone calls from Hanskell. "Mr. Rosch, we've missed you, we've all been thinking about you. Just the other day in the office, Don said, 'how do you think Mr. Rosch and his lovely spouse, uh..., Fox, are doing? How have you been? We have a fine used Rexhall in our lot, we think it will be perfect for you and your uh.... Fox." Calls and emails come from the Hanskell salesmen, once or twice a week. It's always, "We've missed you. We enjoyed your company when you came to visit our facility. We thought you were such a charming couple. I believe we have the perfect coach for you."

We are looking through the vast used motorcoach market. Thousands upon thousands of coaches are for sale, by their owners, all across the country.

Between us, Fox and I have, let us say, around seventy five thousand cash to buy a safe motor home in good condition. Most of this money has been wrestled by Fox from the divorce settlement which paid her about five percent of what she was truly owed. We're going to have to be very careful, and very lucky. It will be our one and only chance to arrange alternative housing. If we blow it, we're in trouble. Living as 'starving artists' has its rewards, but wealth is not one of them. I still have my day job, sort of.....and income from photography, teaching and other things is growing. Fox has her work with animals, communicating with them, helping their "people" understand their feelings and traumas.

Aren't we the perfect artist/hippie couple? Spoiled baby boomers going long in the tooth with no idea how the real world works?

Yes. Does anyone know how the real world works?

It took about four months, and thousands of emails, a number of drives to here and there to look at coaches, and visit yet more dealers and undergo the same dealer spiel, schtick, song and dance, routine and so forth.

At length we met, via the internet, Jill and Joe Purdy. They were on the east coast of Florida, with what seemed to be the perfect Class A motorhome. They had been trying to sell it for almost a year, and their asking price had grown flexible. It's a bit like owning a whale. Or, in their case, two whales. They had their OWN motorhome, and they had this other one, which they had envisioned as an investment, but had become more like, well.... a pet whale.

How do you stash a pet whale? It's one thing to keep your first and best whale in the driveway, nicely covered up and protected. It's another thing to give this whale a little brother or sister whale and take reponsibility for it. At this point they wanted very badly to find a nice home for the second whale. It's expensive to keep whales, and they take up a lot of space, time and energy. The neighbors get edgy.

Neighbor leans over fence, as Joe hoses down two whales. "Hey Joe, you find a home for the second whale yet?" Next to these two leviathans he looks about the size of a mushroom. The neighbor keeps a safe distance, lest he get sprayed by blubber or some noxious whale substance.

"Well, Bill, we keep trying, we think we got a lead, and then it comes to nothing...."

"Uh....Joe, the wife and I, and, you know, some of the neighbors are getting a little concerned about the whales. They change the look of the neighborhood, especially as you live in a corner house and people see the whales every time they turn down the street. We're starting to get called 'Whale Street', Joe, and we'd really appreciate it if you could step it up a bit."

"Bill, I'm doing my best, really I am. Pretty soon some folks will show up and want the light brown whale, and we'll keep the grey and black one safely under wraps."

"I sure hope so, Joe. We've been neighbors for a long time, and we like you and Jill, but things could happen, you know what I'm saying? This isn't the right neighborhood for two whales, Joe. We got kids and everything, we have to keep the place up....."

There's another rule about RV's. I've lost count, it's rule number five, maybe? NEVER BUY A MOTORHOME SIGHT UNSEEN. NEVER.

We had this little problem, that is, almost four thousand miles between ourselves and this whale, er, motorhome. The good thing is that my dad lives only sixty miles from the light brown whale/ motorhome, and he and his wife could go and check it out, and meet Jill and Joe Purdy, because, when it gets right down to it, it's about PEOPLE and trust, isn't it? If Jill and Joe are flakes, then the motor coach will be a flake, too. If Jill and Joe are honest, kind, decent citizens who have taken good care of their whale/ motorhome, then we have a shot. A risky shot, but after four months of chasing around, I'm getting tired and I want to make the transition while there's anything left in our bank accounts.

Dad and his beloved second wife make the trip up there to meet Jill and Joe and to see this marvel of a light brown motorhome, class A, gasoline powered, with one big slide, thirty eight feet long. It's six years old, has a few miles on it but the condition seems to be almost pristine. Dad and wife approve. Jill and Joe email us almost a half hour of videotape, and I dispatch the coach to a mechanic in Joe's area, who goes over the vehicle.

It's time to get off the pot, so to speak. Time to wire a deposit of several thousand dollars, and now, now.....PURE TERROR!

I am paralyzed with fear. My stomach feels like an Amazonian jungle canopy at night with all the snakes crawling and all the monkeys howling and the birds screeching and a billion insects going twiiiirrrrrrr! The stakes are so huge. The risk is unbearable. If we lose, if we buy a lemon, we are screwed! What about the coach in San Jose? How about the one in Rocklin? They're only a couple hours away. Are we going to fly to Florida and purchase this coach on my dad's say-so? My dad doesn't know squat about motorhomes. I've been immersed in the stuff for the last six months. I know the lingo, I've taught myself twelve volt power systems, learned solar wiring, understand what a Multi Point Power Tracking system is in a solar controller.

I've got a PASSION for RVs, a real full-bore passion. My head turns and I give a wolf-whistle when I see a fifth wheel on the highway. It's the Class A coaches that really get me. Hell, I'm even analyzing buses for their conversion potential. A lot of converted buses are tootling around the country. I know a guy who converts diesel engines to run on vegetable oil! I've got, suddenly, a bone for big engines. I look at trucks like I'm five years old. Trucks! You never know. Someday I may need to pick up a medium duty diesel to pull a big fifth wheel. I don't really like the look of fifth wheels, they hitch up to the back of a pickup and you tow this monster behind you, and you can't see anything, talk about blind spots! And if I couldn't maneuver our little travel trailer into a camping site, how on earth am I going to master a fifth wheel? No, it's Class A all the way. Self contained full service big time motor home.

As my agony and fear made me into a wreck, Fox stepped in. "It's Jill and Joe, honey," she said. "It's Florida. I have an intuition about this one."

Fox's intuition, as I had learned, is a finely tuned instrument of discernment. She wasn't invoking The Grandmothers. She was just saying she felt right about these people and this coach. That was enough for me. I didn't stop being afraid. Of course, I seldom stop being afraid. I have my days, and I have my days. Anxiety is my first cousin, paranoia is my uncle, catastrophic fantasy is my aunt.

Fox had The Grandmothers, the sacred family of Native American spirit guides. Her family trumped mine.

Chaper 12

Flying Tubes

I hate air travel. Getting into an airplane and flying to a distant city is like getting an MRI with three hundred people. If you haven't had an MRI, then you don't know what I'm talking about. You get squeezed into a tube so tight that your nose pushes against the ceiling and your arms are squeezed to your sides. It's a plastic coffin that makes banging noises, kind of like getting buried and having monkeys play drums all around the grave. My first attempt at getting an MRI was a total failure.

Claustrophobia. Get me out of here! I lasted about twenty seconds and panicked.

Still, I needed the MRI to see what the heck was squeezing the nerves going down my leg. So, the next time I tried, I used a mask over my eyes, took three vicodin and two valium. That worked. The monkeys sounded like a great Brazilian samba crew.

Getting into an airplane is so reminiscent of the MRI tube that I expect the stewardesses to be wearing medical scrubs.

Fox and I flew to Florida. We couldn't get seats next to one another. I got the classic next-to-baby seat. The passengers were from Bangladesh. Mom had an infant so young it still couldn't hold its head right and its eyes were going round and round. To burp it, mom shifted baby so that its mouth hung over my lap, and, yes, it puked on my pants. Aaaaah! it screamed, and mom pulled a bottle from her sari and fed the poor thing, and it finally quieted down. The in-flight movie was something called "Cars Fly Off High Buildings and Explode", starring Vin Diesel and Vanilla Ice. I could see Fox, four rows ahead of me, fending off an old pony-tailed guy with a sleeveless t-shirt and tattoos all up and down his arms. She looked back towards me, sighing. Even had I wanted to, I could not have rescued her. My feet were locked under the seat in front of me, caught in some combination of my camera bag and someone else's computer. I couldn't free them and began suffering cramps in my legs and total claustrophobia. I almost started screaming, "Let me off this plane! Heelllp!" When the stewardess came down the aisle I asked her, voice shaking, if I could un-trap my feet before I had a nervous breakdown. Sweetly, she got the passenger in front of me to lift his computer, and I slipped my feet out of my shoes and felt a little better. The mother from Bangla Desh said, "Excuse baby sorry please, English not good." Then the baby puked on the stewardess.

My dad and Gina picked us up at the Fort Lauderdale airport. We were both utterly gray with fatigue and nervous stress. They took us to their condo, north of Miami. It was good to see my dad, who is over eighty and still ticking along. His wife is the greatest thing that's ever happened to him.

Our plan was simple. Have dad and Gina drive us upstate to Jill and Joe's place, inspect the motor coach, take it for a test drive, then pay them the balance of the money. Jill and Joe would be free of their extra whale, and we would now be the caretakers of a 38 foot motorhome, with a Chevy Vortec 454 eight cylinder gas engine, one slide-out, a bathroom with shower, a kitchen, a couch/bed combo, a rear bedroom, two tiny useless televisions, hydraulic leveling jacks, light walnut cabinetry made by the Amish in Tappanee, Indiana. Dad and Gina would drive back home, leaving us to drive the coach from Florida to Northern California as quickly as possible. Fox and I both had to work, so this adventure wasn't going to be a leisure cruise. It was business all the way.

Still, we were going to see a big chunk of the USA.

Jill and Joe turned out to be generous, fun-loving people with whom we had much in common.

There was a name decal on the back of the coach. It was "Itchy Feet". That's about equivalent to putting a pink flamingo on your front lawn or a plaster elf with a red pointy hat and a sign saying "Dunromin'" This coach was not going to be "Itchy Feet". This coach was going to be "Raven".

I had driven a nineteen foot Class C motor home, but I had never driven anything approaching the size of Raven. Thirty eight feet! Gulp. The only thing to do was put my hands on the wheel, with Joe in the passenger seat, and take her for a ride around the Space Coast.

Big motorhomes lack acceleration. Stepping on the gas and waiting for a hot response is never going to happen. It was indeed a house on wheels, and stepping on the gas caused Snow White's Seven Dwarfs to push the thing with all their might. Come on, Sleepy, come on, Dopey! Push! Once up to speed, she could do a respectable sixty or seventy miles per hour, but those dwarves had to work! Sneezy was lagging, and Grumpy was assigned the front of the coach, where, every time I pressed the brake pedal, he dug in his heels and heaved mightily backwards, complaining all the way.

This vehicle is so huge that it's like driving a 747 without wings. I sit way up high, looking out of a panoramic 220 degree windshield, and I can see the drivers and passengers down there on the road in their teeny Hondas and Chevys. The really expensive rigs have up to 600 horsepower diesel pusher engines, and they're still not hot rods. We had nothing near 600 horses to pull, push or throw us along the road. But that was okay. While driving Raven I am all caution. Take it slooooow, baby! Make the turns wide, and pump the brakes long before I need to stop.

I've admitted to being a nail-biter, catastrophe-fantasizer and all around paranoiac. Yet I dared to drive this monstrous wind-sail four thousand miles, and I survived to write this book. I did not run over any grandmothers, crush any Beetles or so much as scrape a gas station pump. So, anxiety may haunt me, but it doesn't stop me!

Dad and Gina said goodbye and drove south. Jill and Joe gave us some training on the coach, and we settled down to spend our first night in Raven, parked in Jill and Joe's driveway. Tomorrow, they would once again be a single whale family.

Florida is an odd state. It's really two or three states, with the Everglades and the Thousand Islands over on the 'left coast' and most of the big newly built cities on the 'right' coast. We were on the beach of the Atlantic Ocean, and that part of Florida is one big sponge with added astro-turf underfoot. One can hear 'squish squish' as one walks in south east Florida. It's a sad landscape, a gigantic wetland that's been paved over, and I can almost hear the land weeping. And, of course, the belch of the alligators, who have adapted very well to the network of golf course creeks. The best things in Florida are the sunsets. The clouds are towering confections of unstable moisture, moving across the heavens like armadas of burning ships that could explode at any moment. Florida skies are a continual display of nature's inventiveness.

We left Jill and Joe's place with a brief ceremony. Fox lit some dried Sage, and walked around the coach, blessing it. She played her native drum, and I muttered some Buddhist incantations. We were aware of the enormity of our undertaking. Every part of the process, from the research to the bargaining and shopping, had been arduous. We were only a fraction through the process. We still had to drive Raven safely to California. Then we had to pack, store or throw away everything in a 1500 square foot house, and somehow squeeze our lives and personalities into a space one fifth that size.

We got away from the coastal route I-95, and headed up the middle of Florida. We still had some registration paperwork to do, and we decided to stop at a small town called Monticello, which was twenty five miles from Tallahassee. The drive upstate Florida is a blur. We had flown across the country and, in quick-march step, had then driven another few hours here and there until we ended up sleeping in Raven in Jill and Joe's driveway.

The coach was a thrill. As I've said, all motorhomes have a kitschy style, they're full of mirrors to enhance the feeling of space, the bathrooms are faux Motel Six, which is of course already faux Suburban Housing Development. Raven, however, eluded the more gratuitous elements of this styling. She was warm and light, even if the upholstery looked like casket lining for a coffin. The slide-out transformed it from a bus to a house. When we pushed the button to activate the slide-out a female computerized voice said "Lock arms must be disengaged, Lock arms must be disengaged!" We called this voice "Perky Patty", and she was only warning us that we'd make a ruination of our slide's hydraulics if we did not disengage the safety bars that held it in place. This slide was not going to be dragging in the next lane of the highway.

I was doing all the driving. From the moment I turned Raven out of Jill and Joe's driveway, I was a vibrating ball of frightened concentration. By the end of the first day, I had gotten a feel for driving our big girl, and though the fear never dissipated, I could relax my vigilance slightly and enjoy myself.

I seemed to come out of my blur at Monticello. Here was the Motor Vehicle registration office, and we spent several hours in the town. The landscape changes in the Florida Panhandle. It's solid ground, and, more tellingly, it is The South.

This was my first experience with the legendary southern hospitality. It's not a myth, it is a very real thing. An old town of about five thousand, Monticello has a beautiful antique court house and about seventy five churches, one for each corner. There was no place to park anything as gigantic as Raven, so I put her in a vacant lot.

Park anything in a vacant lot at any random location in the United States and it will attract a ticket or legal attention faster than a bee gets to pollen. A thirty eight foot motorhome? It would inspire fits in the official attitude, which is comprised of NO PARKING signs; signs forbidding this, signs forbidding that, signs just....forbidding.

In Monticello, however, I asked the local policeman if it was okay to park Raven in that spot, and he said, "No problem, just lock your doors, sir." He was respectful. Everyone in that town was respectful and friendly. If we needed help, directions, a passing stranger was quick to volunteer.

With the registration done, we had passed a milestone, we were official owners of Raven. It felt good.

The next step in our voyage was a four thousand mile trek across the utmost southern tier of the United States, on I-10.

This was only some weeks after Hurricane Katrina's disaster, and we were about to drive into and through the zone of devastation.

Chapter Twelve: Katrina's Wrath

There is something about travel that haunts me. It is the feeling that I will never get back home. Even a short trip, sixty miles, a hundred miles, gives me this little flutter in the stomach: I'll never see home again. For me, home is Control, it's Safety. The outside world is frighteningly chaotic, and there is something in me that wants to crawl back into the womb.

Going through the twilit wasteland of Katrina's wrath lit up my warning lights, played on my instinctual fear of going away, away, far away from a safe and comfortable place. Yet there was something different. We were traveling in our future turtle-shell, our Ultra-Yertle, our Raven that was to be our home for many years to come. That was our hope. The landscape around us was alien. But the landscape inside us, that is our relationship, was HOME, and this project we were working on, this giant life change, bonded us more strongly than ever.

The only thing missing, the pieces of our family back in California, were five cats and a fish.

I drove too long on our second day. It was dark and we had reached Pensacola. A Kountry Kampground was fifty yards off I-10, and we turned into it, hoping there would be a spot available. The place was jammed with every sort of RV, and there were rollicking sounds, and a few inebriated people lurching about. There was one site available. We rolled around to it, parked, hooked up our utilities and settled in for the night. There was a rowdy party next door, in a small travel trailer. Music, beer. It didn't matter. We were exhausted. After reading for a few minutes, we were asleep.

Next morning, we did our laundry. The place was jam packed. Groggy looking people stumbled everywhere, with kids underfoot, pets fighting and playing, clothes hanging from lines. Here were some of the more fortunate of Katrina's displaced humanity. They could get in the RV, turn over the engine and flee to campgrounds in four states.

Since I had no bicycle with me, I rented an adult tricycle. I could only ride around in circle after circle, up one row of RVs, down another. I saw every kind of RV from a million dollar bus conversion to a battered old Volkswagon popper, the kind that looks like a shoebox with a bellows attached to the top. Most of the RV equipment was from Biloxi and the surrounding ruins. We were entering the refugee zone, and there was a flattened look to everything. Trees, buildings, all looked as if a giant foot had stomped down and crushed everything.

Kountry Kampground had relaxed some of its rules and allowed laundry to dry on lines and let tables, chairs and swing sets to expand around the sites. Everyone was going to be there for a while. The price for a monthly slot had gone UP, due to high demand. We were lucky to have found the one site. It had become available ten minutes before our arrival, when an elderly gentleman had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital with his wife following in the Class C Jamboree.

Before starting our trip, I had gotten a triptych from AAA, a detailed plan with mileages, destinations, routes, everything worked out ahead of time. Triple A assured us that I-10 was safe to drive with the exception of about a hundred fifty miles of Louisiana. They strongly suggested we take a strategic loop and bypass New Orleans, then drive north to Shreveport, where we could connect to I-20, which went straight across the middle of Texas and hooked up to I-10 east of El Paso. We had intended to stay at Wal-Mart parking lots. All RV people know that Wal-Mart and some K-Marts allow overnighting in the farthest corners of their lots. Every Wal-Mart in the area was jammed with RVs, every K-Mart, Flying J, every available space was filled and hotly contested. Signs had to be erected, security personnel employed to prevent long-term camping, to arrest the tendency of big lots turning into permanent RV jungles. State Police and private guards patrolled off-ramps and highway rest stops.

Thousands of signs were planted on every public inch of paved space: NO OVERNIGHT CAMPING VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

I-10 took us through Alabama's boot heel, and we were caught in a corridor of broken trees for hundreds of miles. The highway was fenced off in places, and behind those fences were thousands of white trailers, refugee camps. The way they were hidden conveyed something sinister, an aura of shame. Rent-a-cops guarded the highway rest stops. All these places were planted with ubiquitous NO CAMPING signs. The states of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana didn't want these stops to become campgrounds. Billboards were blown down, power lines ripped apart. As we passed along this aisle of despair, we felt it in our bones. White trailers, by the thousands, hidden behind chain link fences, stretched for miles on both sides of the highway. To see into these camps I had to get out of the coach and peek through the slats that had been erected. White plywood planks had been fastened to high chain link fences. These camps were designed to be invisible. The government did not want them to be seen from the interstate. Hand-painted signs with arrows, saying "FEMA", directed unspecified traffic towards mysterious destinations.

I wanted to see inside one of these places. About five o'clock in the afternoon I saw a conveniently flat shoulder and pulled our coach to a gentle stop. I had a feeling I was doing something illicit. I didn't see any security, there was no sign saying "Keep Out" or "No Peeking". I stepped across three big mud puddles and reached the fence. Fox stayed in the coach. She didn't want anything to do with seeing one of these places.

The white slat fence was behind a chain link barrier that ran for hundreds of yards. The slats were a couple of inches apart in places. I found a gap and looked through. I saw many hundreds of white trailers, all identical. They were basic RV travel trailers. Two cannisters of propane were lashed at one end, just above the hitch. The growl of generators rose from somewhere in the landscape. Electrical cords ran across the lanes and crawled up the sides of the trailers where they ended in plugs that were attached to sockets at the backs of the trailers. I could see television sets in windows. The place stank, it held a miasma of sewage that lay in the air like a cloud. In my near field of vision all the trailers were empty. About twenty yards to my right there was a white shack, the kind that is used as an office at construction sites. The ground was one giant field of mud. Farther back and to my left were endless rows of occupied trailers. People moved about. Women hung laundry from lines and these lines bounced in the wind. They made their own labyrinth, they were run from one trailer to another so that the vast area of trailers looked like a giant spider web had drifted down from the sky to cover the place. People mucked across the rows going from one trailer to another. Women were hanging laundry, children were screaming and throwing things at one another. I didn't see any animals.

The men were sitting in plastic lawn chairs. They were smoking and holding paper bags that outlined the shape of beer bottles.

There was an open gate about fifty yards down the highway and a ten year old black Ford Taurus emerged from it and came down the shoulder towards where I stood. I turned outward and faced our coach. The car bounced through deep troughs of mud, sending up geysers of brown water to either side. As it approached I saw two men dressed as private security guards. They had grey shirts and black pants. A badge adorned the shirts and a billed policeman's hat topped off the costume. As they got closer I could see they were old men, in their late sixties or early seventies. One of them was tall and wore a moustache. The other had sideburns and looked like a retired rodeo clown.

"Can I help you?" the driver asked as he pulled abreast of where I stood. His accent was pure Alabama. Kin ah hep yew?

"Just stretching my legs, sir." I pointed towards the coach. Fox was in the passenger seat looking fearful. This area was hard on her.

"I've been driving for hours and just had to stop and get some air," I finished.

The driver, the one with the moustache said, "You oughtn't to stop 'long these areas. They ain't safe and you might make someone real unhappy. And that would be a shame."

"I was just on my way," I said, and walked back towards the coach. The men in the Ford stayed where they had stopped. Both lit cigarettes and smoked while I hoisted myself back into Raven.

"It's okay," I told Fox. "They just don't want us to see these awful places."

Alabama, Mississiippi, Louisiana. From I-10 they all looked the same, a corridor of split trees on both sides of the highway. The blown-down treetops all pointed north. Billboards were shredded, piles of metal lay around, a lot of asphalt chunks blown up against fences.

We crossed the coastal Deep South in one extended drive, and got into Louisiana after dark. With time pressure on us, I kept driving, and passed north of New Orleans. I remember the merging traffic of Baton Rouge as a chaos of neon light. I don't remember crossing the Mississippi River, which is sad.

Then we were driving through the Atchafalaya Swamp, nine o'clock at night and I was suffering "four hundred mile nerves", the stress of driving our beautiful whale/turtle/raven/motorhome tolling in my caffeine-addled brain in the form of pink phosphene hallucinations. We had better find a place to stop, pretty damn soon. Yes, there's a Kountry Kampground in a place called Lafayette, where I-49 hooks up with I-10. On the morrow, we should head north on our bad-road detour. Only thing important right now was to pray that the Kountry Kampground had a space for us.

The reservations office was closed. The way the system works, an RV pulls in for a night, looks at a site map, finds a site that hasn't been crossed off, if there is one, and that site is available. In the morning, things get paid up.

So, we found the KK in Lafayette, pulled onto the dirt road leading to the campground, stopped at the check-in line and walked over to the office. Reading the map by dim orange light, we found two vacant spots in this huge campground of nearly three hundred sites. After getting lost a couple of times, we managed to locate our slot number, and oh god, it was tiny! Some slots are built for Class A motorhomes, and some slots are built for smaller vehicles, and the only slots left were the little ones.

This place was packed! The sites were very close together, and people were mostly in bed or inside their blacked-out RVs. They have day/night shades. You can hole up inside an RV with these shades down and it looks like no one is home, not a peep of light escapes. Which is very cool, but also a little eerie when you look at a crowded campground loaded with every sort of RV and they all look deserted.

A sodium vapor lamp provided lighting about every fifty yards. Otherwise the place was utterly black. Only the occasional waving flashlight sliced through the gloom.

I was trying to figure out how to approach our site. On the left was a little pop up trailer, and a young couple was coming and going, unpacking their pickup truck. On the right was a darkened class C Winnebuggo. A power pole sat at the rear corner of the site, and when I got out to inspect the footage, I found that we were approaching a concrete pad with a two foot drop-off into mud at the front left.

I had to get this right. Gingerly, I began edging my way into the site. I was eyeballing our backup camera (which shows a black and white view of everything rear-ward through a highly distorted fish-eye lens on a 5 inch TV monitor), and the distances seemed to be okay. I didn't like the possibility of going off the front left so as I slipped into the spot I felt like I should try turning a little wider. I began to back out for another try when I heard a shout, an urgent "Whoa whoa whoa!!!" I hit the brakes. A gentleman came up to the driver's side window and shouted up at me, "You're an inch from the power pole, better ease 'er back out and cut to your left a little more. I'll go round front and watch that hole, and Ed here will watch the pole, okay?"

"Thanks," I exhaled. "Let me get out and see what's happening."

There was, literally, about two inches of clearance before I would have hit the power line and sent it toppling in a shower of sparks and grim consequences.

With the help of our friendly neighbors, we got Raven parked after a little careful maneuvering. I never met our benefactors, they simply disappeared back into their campers once I was parked. There are angels everywhere.

The water was bad in Lafayette. It tasted raunchy, and we hadn't bought a filter, nor had we filled our on-board fifty gallon tank back in Pensacola. Two days later Fox suffered Lafayette's Revenge. I fought it off, and kept on driving. Next stop, Texas!

We were planning on taking the detour up I-49, to avoid the storm-blasted section of Ten. This detour rankled me; we had momentum, and taking a several hundred mile roundabout, just to get back on I-10 near El Paso bothered me. As we gassed up Raven's thirsty tanks I inquired from the locals about the stretch of road ahead of us. The gas station attendant said, "Not a problem, the road's in good shape." A trucker who had just come east said the same thing. So, without further reflection, I passed the 49 turnoff and continued on I-10.

In retrospect, I think these people were participating in a conspiracy of joking malice. Ha ha, let's screw the rubberneckers and refugees.

The first twenty miles were fine. Then a vibration started under our wheels and we drove in teeth shattering agony for thirty miles. Just when we thought we would go insane, it stopped. Aaah, we sighed, that's done. The reprieve lasted but a few miles before the corrugated road effect set in once more, and we tankle-tinkle-clonked our way another forty miles. It was a nightmare! Once in a while we'd hit a smooth stretch but for a hundred fifty miles, almost all of it was unrepaired from Katrina's ravages. The highway had blown away and an emergency surface was in place but that was all we had. We passed dozens of orange caterpillar tractors and backhoes, all working at a lackadaisical pace, repairing the road as if their drivers hadn't been paid in months and didn't expect to get paid in yet more months. Where was this? Uzbekistan? The incompetence of everything connected with Katrina was so manifest that I began to see the United States as a third world country pretending to be a first world country.

Raven has a soft ride. On a good road, she gobbles the miles comfortably. On a bad road, she can behave like an aged bronco, a jaded old nasty horse that can still shake a rider when she's in the mood. As I drove, my hands grew numb from the vibration. When a vehicle the size of Raven sways, she does so with a heart-stopping suspense, ripples flow down her framework as if she were a snake crossing a hot sand dune. When we hit an undulant stretch of road, our kitchen drawers flew open, dropping pieces of dinnerware onto the floor. Overhead cabinets popped out and the entire chassis went 'squeak squeak groan', as we waited for her to right herself. She always did. She could list like a tramp steamer in a high sea, but she always came back up.

I wish we had taken the time to see Central Louisiana and gone through Dallas. The road finally smoothed out as we got into Texas.

Chapter Thirteen: Texas Rangers

At eight hundred seventy five miles from the eastern border to the out-ramp at El Paso, Interstate Ten's route through Texas deserves a chapter for herself.

We got onto the Houston Expressway at about three thirty. There was road work, there were detours, signs pointed this way, that way, making no sense. Navigating Houston was, for me, a work of sheer bravado. I made all the right decisions, never got lost, but I felt like an owl with my head turning round in circles, eyeballs huge and fixated. The traffic was vicious, merging drivers honked and shared their rage at our cumbersome vehicle. Truckers cut me off, I slowed, accelerated, watched for my crucial moment, made it through safely, and then did it again, and again, and again. If I say so myself, it was a tour-de-force, an inspired driving performance. Our destination was a Kountry Kampground just the far side of Houston. We got there about five thirty, with light enough to see where we were parking.

As I spoke with the staff and with people at the campground, I learned one thing quickly: Houston was very angry with the refugees from Katrina.

"Those Ward Nine people are screwing everything up," was the expression I kept hearing. "Ward Nine" was a racial euphemism, and it gave me a bad taste at the back of my throat. Houston's resentment was in the newspapers, on the radio, it was everywhere. Houston was less than thrilled to receive several tens of thousands of impoverished folk from New Orleans. I'm sure 'those ward nine people' were not too thrilled to be there.

This tension was human, not Texan. It was more about economic chauvinism than racism. I'm sure New Yorkers would be pretty salty if they were forced to accept fifty thousand refugees from a flooded Philadelphia.

The next day we left Houston and began our epic crossing of the state of Texas. The south-eastern part of the state is prosperous. There are big ranches amid rolling hills. There are RV dealerships every mile. The rest stops were no longer guarded.

The good thing about Texas was that we could see again, we weren't confined to the corridor of broken trees, white trailers and little else. The bad thing about Texas was that we could see again. Miles and miles of not much. Ranches, more ranches, and as we headed west the change gradually came upon the landscape. It dried up.

There is a place called Fort Davis that hosts one of the great annual star parties. The McDonald observatory is sited on a mountain top outside Fort Davis. Every September about five hundred people drive from all over the country to enjoy the isolation, the pitch black skies, and one another. All I could do was gaze wistfully at the sign pointing to the Fort Davis turnoff. We hadn't the time. We had to drive. From early in the morning to late at night. I drove the longest single drive of our trip: four hundred seventy five miles. Oh, poor baby, you say to yourself. Let me remind you, these are 'big motorhome' miles, not your average car miles. Such a distance is well over twice the recommended limit for anything but professional truckers. And, speaking of truckers, now that I have driven a large vehicle for some miles, I feel both awe and terror at truckers. How can they do it? How can they possibly do their jobs without becoming a menace to humanity? When I see a truck, I am terrified! What caffeine-crazed grouchy bug-eyed wreck is driving this sixty ton eighteen wheeler that's coming up behind us, sandwiching us between the one behind and the one in front? Let them pass! Pass, pass! Go ahead buddy the road is all yours! Take it! My pleasure! Here, let me get over, I'll slow down for you, I'll pull off at the first turnout, I'll stop at a gas station, I'll do anything except try to get onto the shoulder because that way lies disaster. You don't shoulder a Class A motorhome unless you are absolutely desperate.

That day I drove, and I drove. And with little warning but a few road flares, I came to a stopped line of cars and trucks just east of a little mountain pass, where the highway had narrowed to two lanes. I could see some thirty or forty vehicles ahead. Then, just over the hump of the pass, a cloud of smoke. Emergency vehicles were shuttling back and forth, highway patrol cars lazed around or scooted through the parked trucks and cars on the shoulder. Behind us, yet another thirty, forty vehicles backed up, then a hundred, then I couldn't count any more.

I stopped Raven and got out, schmoozed with the others who were stuck there. What happened? A big rig tipped over and burned, just up ahead. Driver got out, but his load was completely destroyed. Estimated time of blockage: nobody knows. Here the great advantage of having your home over your head comes into play. Let's eat lunch. Let's sit on the step and watch everybody. Let's turn on some fans, read a book, watch a video.

Ninety minutes later, cars started moving again. We drove over the pass and saw the heat-ravaged frame of the big rig's trailer. There was nothing left but ashes. It had apparently separated from the truck, flipped three times and blown up. Lucky driver, he watched it happen without getting hurt. His cargo was gone, his insurance rates skyrocketed but he and his rig were intact.

Well after dark, we saw a Kountry Kampground at a place called Fort Stockton. We wanted OUT of Texas, OUT! There's nothing wrong with Texas, it's just so huge, so monotonous to drive, the scenery changes so slowly that it induces a fatigue and boredom so overwhelming as to stun the senses and slow the thought processes like a frozen waterfall.

Every Kountry Kampground is different. The one island of similarity is the store, where one can purchase camping supplies, souvenirs, and sometimes art works from regional artists.

In the morning, we decided to stay an extra day to rest at the Fort Stockton campground. I was burned out, I could not drive that day. I needed some time to let my nerves return to their accustomed state of ordinary paranoia.

As is always the case, every feral cat in the campground came nosing around Fox. "They're starving," she said, "I'm going up to the store to get some food for them."

Earlier that morning, I had gotten some milk from the lady at the reservations counter. She had a sour face and wore a hairdo that looked as if it must be built upon a scaffolding of popsicle sticks.

It seems to be a company policy at Kountry Kampgrounds that the staff do their utmost to be perky, friendly, cloyingly accomodating. This Texas mama was an exception. She slammed my change down. She merely pointed when I asked where the coffee was to be found.

Okay, okay, I thought. Everybody has a bad day now and then. While I puttered around Raven, Fox went up to the office to find something for the cats. Unfortunately, there was no cat food. "I need something to feed the cats out here," Fox informed the lady, all innocence. "They look so hungry."

"Those disgusting creatures!" the lady snarled. "I wish someone would feed them rat poison. Always getting into our dumpsters, fouling the grounds... hideous little monsters! God shouldn't allow the vermin to live."

Uh oh.

Uh oh.

There's a button in Fox's psyche; it is twenty miles in radius and a hundred miles in circumference. Let's just say it's a big button. When this button is pressed, Fox goes into a voodoo-crazed mode of retaliation.

"Those animals have just as much right to live as you or I," she said icily. Then she stormed out of the office and walked down the road, where she found a convenience store with the items needed.

When she returned to Raven, she was crying. I could see these were rage tears, anger and hurt all lumped together, injustice fueling frustration.

"What happened?" I asked. She explained to me. She was seething. "I'll teach that bitch a lesson," she threatened. She was going through the drawers but there was little in Raven besides our immediate possessions.

"What are you looking for?"

"A doll, a human figurine, anything to work some magic on that horrible woman!"

When Fox perceives an injustice, she is implacable. When she makes an enemy, when she is angry, rationality deserts her, and the Apache warrior emerges. She is perfectly capable of working bad medicine, but her integrity always prevents that from happening.

I have seen this many times. Sooner or later balance would be restored. I was concerned, lest Fox do something to embarrass me. I'm ashamed to admit this. Nothing my beloved can do should ever be embarrassing to me; but she is a very extreme person, who has extreme reactions. Her thinking process short circuits, and her feelings march blithely around the normal censoring mechanisms to become outrageous demonstrations. Fox can fly off the handle so thoroughly that she can act out; she can launch a wild verbal confrontation, or she can dance a circle around a place, beating a drum and chanting incantations. But there is a moral limit to what she will do. After frutilessly searching for some means of producing a curse-doll, she deflated.

"The grandmothers have told me not to use my power this way." She sobbed in a way that is particularly heartbreaking to me. "That horrible woman, I know she's killing cats. I have to stop her, but I don't know how."

"Honey," I observed, "it's enough that you're angry at this woman. Now she's really in trouble. Have you noticed how when someone angers you, they meet misfortune? Remember when you got so mad at me, you wouldn't speak to me for days? And then my shirt caught fire at that restaurant? Or the time our landlady made us give up the dog? Her car got four flat tires. And the spare was flat, too!"

"This is true," Fox admitted, a wan smile lighting through her tears. "It will be better if I cast a spell of protection for the cats rather than cursing that miserable bitch up at the office. I have to always remember that people without love are in hell. It's simple: love or be in hell."

She went out to walk in the desert, gatherng herbs and cacti. When she returned she made a small fire and chanted quietly as the sun set. Four kittens came for food. She fed them, and made a little bed from a box filled with towels under the shelter of our coach. The night was freezing. The kittens climbed into the box and settled into their bedding. That is Fox in a single image: making beds for feral creatures. How can I not love her?

The next morning, I went to the office and discovered the vile clerk wearing an arm brace and sporting several bruises to her face. "I ran my car off the road," she explained without my asking. "Was I awfully rude to your wife? I had a terrible day yesterday. I'd like to apologize to her."

I walked back across the big gravel lot, admiring the motorhomes, peering inside whenever I could, to get a glimpse of the layout.

I explained to Fox that her nemesis had met with misfortune. She had an expression of shame and self-accusation. "Oh god, I was so angry with her.....do you think I did something?"

"Honey, I never know whether or not you 'do something' with your mental energies, but I know I never want you to be mad at me, not now, not ever. You should go talk to the lady, she seems genuinely remorseful."

Fox took her traveling case, filled with herbs, essences and tinctures, and walked towards the office. Half an hour later, she returned, walking hunched over, like an old woman.

"You took her pain, didn't you?" I struggled to be patient, and to keep the irritation out of my voice.

"The poor woman: she's in the middle of a harrowing divorce, she has chronic back pain, her oldest son has leukemia. She just cried and cried."

Fox looked up at me from her agonized slouch. "But now she feels much better! She's not a bad person; she's just going through a lot of stuff."

"Now I'll take it out of you," I said. "Come on."

For twenty minutes I massaged her back, using my mind to form images of healing energy penetrating her body. It doesn't work on everyone, but it works on Fox. Soon she was able to stand upright again.

"She promised to feed the kittens," Fox informed me when I was finished.

So it works, it seems: Fox absorbs pain from others, she's an empathic antenna. And my job is to look after Fox when this happens. I have a facility for making and holding images in my mind. This is a very difficult practice. I've been working at it for forty years, and if I can hold an image for thirty seconds, I'm having a good day. Try it; you'll see what I mean.

The next morning when we checked out, Fox's enemy-turned-client beamed as we entered the office. "I drank the tea you gave me, and I feel SO much better. I don't know what you did to me, but it sure worked!"

"Just take care of those kitties," Fox admonished. "Be sure they get good homes and tell their people to get the females spayed, or this campground will have a thousand cats and not just half dozen."

Adele, as was her name, agreed fulsomely, but we'll never know if she kept her promise.

Several hundred more parched Texas miles rolled beneath Raven's wheels. The landscape was all brown dust, with occasional spiny plants growing behind long wire fences. I wanted it to be over; Texas. I wanted it to be over. Then, suddenly, at the end of a long day, we were in El Paso, at about four in the afternoon. I have never driven a more harrowing forty minutes than the flight through El Paso. The traffic was moving, there were no slowdowns or gridlocks. But the pace was frantic, as if everyone was thinking one thought: in another half hour, this place will be sheer HELL and I better get outta here right now. So we skedaddled, our momentum provided by the thought that a mere dozen miles away was New Mexico, and the only thing we knew about New Mexico was that it was not Texas. That was good enough.

I don't want to offend Texans. I love the myths and legends of the Lone Star State. Pick ten people out of a crowd and ask them if they know about the Battle of San Jacinto. I do. I wouldn't be reading Texas history if I didn't care about Texas. It is just a brutal state through which to drive. It's huge, hot, dry, windy, merciless. The ghosts of Comanches laugh sadistically at modern wheeled vehicles attempting to get across the vast plains and deserts. I watched the mile markers tick down, one after another and then, bing, we had crossed the border.

Sometimes state borders are as dramatic as the borders of whole sovereign nations, and this was one of those. The change was powerful and immediate. The look of the land changed, the architecture changed, the clouds changed, the air itself changed. They call it The Land of Enchantment. For us it was the Haven for Exhausted Drivers. We got thirty miles into the state and hunkered down for the night at a Kountry Kampground in Las Cruces.

The next few days are a blur, as we crossed the state, and then into Arizona. Any four thousand mile trip is bound to have blurs. All I remember is scrubby desert and big billboards that said "Paradise Acres: Nine Hundred New Homes and Condos in Bisby---12 miles. $85,000 to $290,000." There is something happening in the southwest corner of the USA, a demographic expansion to this inhospitable region where the Comanche, Kiowa and Apache once lived on prairie dogs, ground nuts and possum. Now, people over the age of fifty are moving to the border regions to take advantage of the low cost of health care in Mexico.

Ten miles from Yuma is the town of Los Algodones. It is a beehive of dentists, doctors, cosmetic surgeons, pharmacists, physical therapists, massage therapists, every imaginable medical service from conventional to holistic. If you think I exaggerate, just google the website for Los Algodones, Baja, Mexico. The home page is a blinking billboard of medical providers. This is but one of a bunch of Mexican boom towns awakened by the insanity of US health care policies. Need a set of dentures? US cost: three to eight thousand dollars. Los Algodones cost: Three to eight hundred dollars. This is not shabby care. This is first rate service by highly qualified practitioners. I have a friend who priced dental implants on the Mexican side of the border. Needless to say, the procedure was a bargain. My friend was hesitant, worried about the quality of Mexican dental surgeons. So she made an appointment at a Yuma dental lab, willing to shoulder the staggering bill for the security of having an American surgeon. She found that she was interviewing the same surgeon. He worked on both sides of the border! She decided to book her implants in Los Algodones.

Got a chronic medical condition? Move to Yuma with a hefty air conditioner. It's one of the hottest cities in the country, with July average tipping the thermometer at one hundred seven degrees.

We stopped at a Kountry Kampground at a place called Benson, Arizona. It was operated by an Asian couple whose nationality we could not discern. Their language was not Chinese, Japanese or Korean. They were not Malay or Philipino. Finally my curiosity drove me to ask,"Where are you from?" The wife spoke fair English. "We are from Mongolia," she answered.

I thanked her and swallowed an entire elephant of questions. Being eternally curious, this elephant did not digest easily. How do Mongolians wind up in the south Arizona desert? Is there a Mongolian community here? Do you hang out at the Mongolian Cultural Center to do throat singing, wrestling and astounding feats of horsemanship? Do you keep a yurt as a spare bedroom in your backyard? Do you have a picture of Genghis Khan on your mantelpiece? Aside from a few ranch houses and shacks, and Highway Ten, there was nothing here, absolutely nothing. I wanted to know their story!

As I poked through the local newspaper, I learned that Walmart was building a superstore, and a developer was building twelve hundred affordable homes. Whoever had bought this Kountry Kampground had made a timely investment.

The smell of home was on us and we wanted to get there. The next step in our transformation was to be a huge move. We were going to whittle ourselves down from living in a cute little wooded bungalow to living in a place apparently designed for hobbits. It wasn't going to be easy. First, however, we encountered the remarkable town of Quartszite, Arizona.

The simplest way to describe Quartszite is to call it the Mecca for Motorhomes. By some fluke of location and lack of regulation, the entire valley floor in which Quartszite is located has become a magnet for 'boondocking' RV's. The town itself is but a few blocks. Some gas stations, a grocery store, a pastiche of souvenir rock shops, a bunch of full service campgrounds and dozens of RV-related businesses. There are more big motorhomes, little motorhomes, eccentric motorhomes, converted buses and just plain odd lifestye inventions in Quartszite than any spot on the globe. At times, there are ten thousand RV's in Quartszite, and it becomes a wild west show of the twenty first century, sort of a "Burning Man" for mid-lifers. As we approached the town, we began to see motorhomes on both sides of the highway. A few, here and there.

"Look at that, honey. They just find a spot and park." It was difficult to drive and rubberneck at the same time, but this was something I had never seen before. We like to think of America as a free country, but the fact is that every square inch of this country is regulated by zoning laws, police laws, government regulations. If one tries to live in an RV without paying a nightly fee, just hanging loose and moving as the mood takes you, someone is always present to throw you out of that spot. A cop, city, county or state. An owner, a manager, a private cop, a park ranger, a BLM agent. Someone owns or manages the land, and that someone doesn't want you parking your big whale in their space. So, as we approached Quartszite, it became more and more of a revelation to see increasing numbers of RVs just hanging out on the valley floor.

The big months are January and February. The annual Car and RV show is held in late January, and that's when twenty thousand motorhomes descend on this one-street town and turn it into a boondocker's paradise. Street signs are put up in the desert, grids are laid out, sewage stations installed.. Solar power is the lodestone of energy sources here. Solar businesses are everywhere; new and used panels, regulators, inverters, generators, all kinds of stuff can be purchased in the shops and sheds around Quartszite.

It was the gem show enthusiasts who started the Quartszite phenomenon. In 1967, the first Gem and Mineral show was held there, and droves of people arrived in their RVs. Soon, people were coming in RVs who had nothing to do with gems, and gradually the gem business moved over to make room for the RV folk. So, it evolved into a dual-attraction town: gems and minerals, RVs and everything to do with motorhomes and alternative mobile lifestyles.

We spent a night in a commercial campground, and prepared to depart from Highway Ten on the morrow. Our course now turned north. A two lane desert road, State 95, went north towards I-40, and this was how we would enter California.

95 is an isolated road that crosses the Colorado River as it borders California and Arizona. How many times had we crossed the Colorado on this trip? Impossible to count. The river runs to the east of 95 and then the road swings across it as we enter California, at the town of Needles.

A crossroads town, Needles sits at the Cal/AZ border on I-40, one of the longest roads in the United States. It's a small desert town, with the old Route 66 trundling through in its pits and holes, going nowhere. After spending the night at the Needles Kountry Kampground, I asked the clerk if Route 66 was worth driving.

"You know that road you came in on?" he asked. We had made a left and driven two miles up one of the worst roads in the universe. "That's 66. I wouldn't recommend it."

He explained that the famous old Route 66 had become an orphan. No government agency wanted to claim it, or maintain it, so it had degenerated to a condition of near-impassibility. We took the conventional route, I-40 and came into the realm of the Mojave Desert, passing on the southern fringe of the Mojave Desert National Preserve.

The Mojave is a big place; there are miles and miles of sagebrush and flattened roads of profound monotony. We were driving through a majestic part of the desert. In this season, the land was green with small tufts of sage grass and cactus, and the land rolled in huge waves, off to a very distant horizon. The immensity of the desert was humbling. Distant mountains bound it, and then became part of it as we passed ranges with names like The Old Woman Mountains and the Providence Mountains.

It was difficult to believe we were in Califonia. Three thousand miles were behind us. We had come from the Atlantic Ocean in Florida, and traversed the entire breadth of the United States. We were safe. So far, Raven had behaved beautifully.

Chapter Fourteen: Disneyland As Hell

It's easy to make friends when traveling in an RV. It's considered polite to chat with fellow RV'rs at pit stops. "How do you like your Fleetwood? Where you comin' from? Where you headed? Really? We're going that way too". Sometimes a bond develops and two or more RVs form a caravan. It's a comfort, knowing someone is on the same road, ready to lend support in an emergency. And sometimes you just hit it off, you have an affinity or a common interest, and you wind up traveling thousands of miles with new friends.

This can be a very good thing. This can also get you into trouble.

Fox and I were still in the shakedown phases of our cross-country trip when we met the Jardine family just past Pensacola. We had finished gassing up at a Super Kmart on I-10. I pulled our coach into one of the extra long parking slots and turned off the engine. I was still pretty nervous about driving a 38 foot motor coach. Every time I turned the motor off I worried that it wouldn't start again. I was nervous about everything. Fox and I had just invested a huge chunk of cash in this big brute. I hadn't learned to trust it.

We were emerging from the rig to get our cups of chocolate mixed with coffee: chocolofee. We were suddenly engulfed in the shadow of another A-class motor coach. The driver politely left an empty space between our rigs, so that as his air brake hissed I was able to look right up into his window and wave hello. He slid his window back and leaned out.

"Good morning," he said, with an accent that sounded slightly German. His wife put her head on his shoulder and smiled. "You going West?" I saw a little boy's face appear near her waist, chin leaning against the window sill so that all that was missing was a Cocker Spaniel puppy to make this a picturesque family with a slightly Euro-hip aroma.

"All the way to California," I replied. "We bought this thing near Fort Lauderdale and this is our first day of driving on 'Ten'."

Why did I just blurt out that I would be on I-10 for thirty five hundred miles? It was a rookie mistake, a tactical error, and I knew it as soon as I made it. Still, they were attractive looking people. They were in their late thirties or early forties. They were driving half million dollars worth of motor coach, a Tiffin Phaeton that looked like forty feet and boasted four slides.

"Would you like to join us for some coffee before you get back on the road?" asked the daddy. "We're going west too, all the way to Disneyland." He rolled his eyes. "We promised our son. But to tell you the truth, I'm a bit of a Disney fanatic myself."

That is how we met the Jardine family. They were from Montreal. Their first language was French, which somehow explained the German accent. I'll never figure out why Francophone Canadians sound German when they speak English but I've met quite a few in the world of RVs and they sound like they're from Munich rather than Montreal.

We found ourselves sharing a big round table with our new acquaintances. Jacques Jardine, otherwise known as "JJ" or, as they would pronounce it, "Zhay Zhay" and his wife Marlene, (pronounced "mar-lenn) were traveling with their son, Charles (yes, SHARL) on a forty two day excursion across and through the United States. Charles was four years old. He was adorable. Not only was the little boy handsome but he was curious, self-possessed and proudly owned an amazing memory.

Jacques was jingling with cameras and lenses as he got down from the driver's seat. Aha! A fellow photographer. This was the basis for an instant bond. Jacques' equipment was very grand. He had Canon's flagship digital camera, a stunning six thousand dollars worth of shutter bling.

We were not planning on going to Disneyland. At the moment, however, the idea of having another motor coach family in caravan was appealing. I was flat out scared. I had made the thousand-mile drives, I had made the fifteen hundred mile drives up and down mountains and through the valley of the shadow of RV breakdown. But I figured our grand total mileage on this trip would be close to four thousand miles. From the Space Coast of Florida to the egg factories of Petaluma in Northern California: it would be quite a drive. How much more secure I would feel if there was someone within a thirty mile radius, all the way down that lonesome highway. It was only a few weeks since Hurricane Katrina had flipped the concrete plates of I-10 on their backsides and thrown them against the chain link fences that bordered the road from Biloxi to Houston.

As I studied the map I saw that we could take the same route all the way to where Hiway 5 met Hiway 99 outside of Bakersfield. The Jardine family could continue to Anaheim and we could avoid the big rigs by ascending 99 and then swinging over to 101, driving north to our final destination.

At the moment it may as well have been the moon. Our homeland, our Northern California, seemed impossibly distant.

That's just about what happened. We exchanged cell phone numbers and enjoyed a dozen pit stops between Pensacola and El Paso. We made a visit to Fox's daughter who was at school in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The Jardine family pulled ahead of us by a couple of days and I thought we'd not likely see them again. But their half million dollar Allegro Phaeton broke down in a place just south of Phoenix called Eloy. They had to wait five days to receive a part from the Allegro factory in Red Bay, Alabama.

My cell phone beeped that evening around dinner time.

I heard JJ's voice. "Vee are bwoken down in zome plaze near Pheenix and ve're stuck here for a few days. Are you kuys still in Las Gruces?"

"Yes," I mocked, "vee are still in Las Gruces. Vee had plant on leafing tomorrow."

"I have an idea," said JJ. 'How vould you kuys lige to go to Dizneylant? On me. I pay for everything. I efen pay for your extra gas. Ve don't vant to go to Dizneyland by ourselffs now, do we? It would be a kreat plazhure to take you ass our kests. I insist!"

How do I put this? Hooorayy? Disneyland?

I will re-phrase the old joke about winning a trip to Philadelphia. First prize is a week in Disneyland. Second prize is two weeks in Disneyland.

I don't mean to disrespect one of America's institutions of entertainment and pop culture. I wanted to see it, have the experience at least once. I liked the Jardine family. I was "on" to JJ. He was a major Disney-holic. The interior of his motor coach was lined with classic Disney toys. The ones in their original boxes were worth thousands of dollars. JJ had the passion of the true collector. As for the most excellent Mister Charles, he could give a rat's ass about Disney. He was interested in the whole wide world! He thought his dad was a bit of a juvenile. He liked educational toys of Transformer things that he could take apart and reconstruct a thousand different ways. He bought a souvenir alarm clock at Kmart and a couple days later I saw him attempting to put its pieces back together. It wasn't working out, but he seemed satisfied just to see the insides of the gizmo. His ability to handle screwdrivers was impressive. The kid has an amazing future.

As the trip west unfolded we had gotten to know the Jardines. Their human side had manifested early on. By "their human side" I mean the warts, the flaws, the unconscious mannerisms that gave away more than they concealed.

JJ was obsessive-compulsive to a degree that was almost debilitating. He wanted everyone to have a good time but he didn't understand that people defined "a good time" in very different ways. His surface persona was affable, cheerful, accommodating. Beneath that was a controlling beast, an angry child who showed his face only when things went seriously awry from the way he had planned them. It would take me a while to discover this. Most of his dark side emerged when we got to California.

The major problem was this: JJ and Marlene are the type of people who will kill themselves to make other people happy. Fox also happens to answer this description. What could I do? I had joined myself to a family of martyrs.

Fox insisted that I must pretend to enjoy myself because JJ's self esteem was heavily invested in this trip. He had planned every detail. He had reserved fine hotel rooms. He was passionately committed to sharing with us HIS love of Disneyland. I understand this phenomenon. When I was young, I foisted John Coltrane records on everyone I knew. Not just any Coltrane records: I mean the late-period Coltrane, with the fiery screams and hoarse incantations. I loved Coltrane, ergo, everyone must love Coltrane. I became an unwelcome guest at parties where The Supremes ruled the turntable. I didn't understand that Coltrane's cosmic screams were not ideal party music. JJ doesn't understand that everyone may not love Disneyland.

JJ had come up with a very practical idea. We would leave our respective motor coaches at a campground in San Bernardino and rent an SUV to drive to Anaheim. Rather than struggle with two behemoth RVs in the Greater Los Angeles Traffickzilla, it would be a lot simpler to drive to Disneyland and then drive back. San Bernardino was a central location for both of our next destinations. The Jardines were headed to Yosemite and we were headed to the San Francisco North Bay.

For the first time in our entire epic journey we were spending serious social time in the company of new friends. It would be a test.

Things broke down from the start. Our hotel reservations were botched. Instead of being across the street from the park's entrance, we had been mistakenly booked into another hotel a mile and a half down the road. Given the difficulty of parking at Disneyland, and the fact that JJ had rented an electric scooter to save my chronically painful feet, this caused problems.

The turbulence began about thirty miles outside Anaheim. We were nicely tucked into JJ's too-expensive rental SUV. He used his speaker phone to check with the Traveler's Inn across from the Disneyland gate.

"Traveler's Inn Vista, this is Jared speaking, how may I help you?"

JJ gave the details of our reservation.

"What's that name again?" the desk clerk asked. JJ patiently spelled his last name.

"I'm sorry, sir, but we don't have a reservation under that name."

JJ explained that he had a confirmed print-out of his reservation with Travelocity dot com. The clerk reiterated that no such reservation had been made at that particular Traveler's Inn.

JJ had so much riding on the perfection of every detail of this adventure. He went back and forth with the clerk for a while.

"We were booked to check in at three o'clock. There should be an electric scooter waiting for my friend." His voice was rising. Poor JJ. He was a born-again Christian with a deeply repressed temper. When it rose to the surface, it radiated three hundred sixty degrees.

During our travels, JJ had told me stories of his abusive father. I had a sense that JJ was, right then, behaving in the same way that his father had behaved. All of us, without exception, have the same worst traits our parents possessed. We go in blissful denial of this fact. How often do I hear things like, "Oh, I'm nothing like my mother. Just the opposite. I would never be like my mother, she was a horrible manipulative bitch." Or, "I learned what NOT to be from my dad. I will never rage and sulk that way!" All of us make these disclaimers, while our limbs twitch in exact replication of a parent's body language. Turns of speech, key phrases emerge as passed down the generations. It's true, we transform these behaviors, modify them to better fit our own moral compass, but still they exist and live like independent creatures within our psyches. Under stress, they pop out of us like bottle rockets. We could help ourselves by being more alert. We should know that we never escape the template laid down in our earliest years. Our parents were young and we were toddlers, soaking up behaviors that would mold our lives. This transformation is the substance of the inner work we do: recognize the shadow within ourselves, bring it to the light. IF, that is, we chose to do this inner work.

JJ was seething, and trying desperately not to show the seethe, chuckling lamely, then turning into the cell phone with brutal sarcasm. He rifled through his leather valise of papers, taking his eyes from the road, as cars whizzed by on all sides, We sat in our seats trying to avoid JJ's anger. That was impossible. The car was filling with it like water from a vehicle plunged off a bridge. The line was rising around our necks, up to our nostrils.

"I have it right here....Jared," JJ sneered, making the clerk's name into a mocking faggoty sound, rattling the papers as if Jared could see him. "Traveler's Inn Vista at such and Harbor Drive Boulevard. Three O'clock."

"Let me check the other Traveler's Inns", Jared said coldly, "please hold."

We were closing the miles to the Harbor Drive exit. Twenty miles and change. Now we didn't even know where we were booked. We listened to muzak from the phone speakers, a hideous treacly version of "You Light Up My Life." After about three minutes, Jared returned to the line. "I see the problem now, sir. You are booked at Traveler's Inn Brookmont, that's only a few blocks from our facility."

JJ's hand flew into the air, a scimitar of frustration, cutting back and forth. Temper shredded, he spoke into the little headset, "Vista, Vista, Traveler's Inn Vista, asshole! I've had it booked for six weeks in advance, we have handicapped people and a baby walker, we MUST be across from the entrance to Disney..."

"Sir, the rooms at Brookmont are every bit as comfortable, the service....."

"That's not the POINT!" JJ near-yelled, throttling his voice at the last syllable so that instead of surging upward into pure fury, it squeaked with thwarted passion.

When JJ's voice pitched upward, little Charles awoke from a tranquil nap in his car seat, smiled ecstatically and emitted a sound like the one his daddy had just made. "Naaah th' pooont!" He said. It was a happy keening, an experiment in vocalizing that had, apparently, succeeded, because Charles did it again. "Naaah th'pooont!"

Fox and I exchanged a glance. Thank god for the child, we thought. Charles could change anger to joy in a heartbeat. Everyone laughed. Charles held his hands in the air for a 'high five' from Fox.

"Gamma," he said. "Gamma," meaning, of course, Grandma. Wow! Fox had gotten a major promotion! She felt so honored!

Fox gave him the high five and Charles was replete with his new mastery.

Chapter Fifteen: No Room At The Inn

The Vista was fully booked unto eternity and the Brookmont was our only alternative. It took another few calls to re-route the electric scooter to meet us at our destination, and by this time we were pulling right into the drive of the motel. It was a downscale version of the Vista, a little bit dowdy, not quite so convenient, and as JJ checked us in, we saw his face darken again. He returned to the car wearing a silence like a cape around his psyche. It spoke with passionate eloquence. Don't touch me, it said... don't talk to me... don't help me... don't mock me... don 't support me... don't love me... don't do anything except enjoy this trip or I'll kill myself.

JJ's wife is a sweet natured blonde, a girl-next-door type, all pink skinned and smiling. I could see in the muscular conflicts of Marlene's face that she was recoiling inwardly from a quality she was just getting to know in her husband. She bravely marched forward, keeping her façade firmly in place: pleasant, perky, nice.

We unloaded our stuff in the ground-floor rooms. We could see that JJ felt everything was already spoiled. The bare fact was that in order to get to Disneyland as a group, we would have to walk sixteen blocks each way. We had an electric scooter and a stroller that seemed to have more luggage capacity than a Greyhound bus.

As we were finishing putting our stuff in the rooms, the scooter was delivered. I went up to the office, the delivery guy gave me the quick lesson, and I drove it right out the door and around the giant rectangle of the parking lot, testing it for speed. It was held together with duct tape, the handle bars drooped and yawed, the basket was hanging from a single screw. But it rolled at a reasonable clip.

At this point, the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder lurking in JJ's soul clicked on, full bore, and we were obliged to go NOW to Disneyland. It was four o'clock and there was plenty of time to show us his favorite things, the best rides, the parade, maybe take the little choo choo train around the park.

Fox and I wanted nothing more than to take a nap. Disneyland could wait until tomorrow.

It was not to be. JJ wanted to make us happy by sharing the things that made him happy. So, a quick change of clothes, and off we go: JJ, Marlene, Charles, Fox, myself, and Katherine, Marlene's sister, who had driven up from San Diego. Six people, young ones, old ones, in between ones. I was pleased to be in this new human community. They are all crazy, but that's okay. You tell me this: how do you fashion a rational response to an irrational world?

If you aren't crazy there must be something wrong with you.

I might have felt like an old man, riding that stupid scooter, but it didn't bother me. My feet are flat and narrow as ice skate blades and they've been hurting for twenty years. I thought the scooter was a great toy. I rode it side saddle, I rode it with my feet up on the bars, I rode it holding hands with Fox, I rode it down the corner ramps, almost tipping it over, I beep-beeped around Chinese families, Iranian families, Hispanic families, wearing my beret and sunglasses, striking poses. I was going faster than the rest of my family, and I back-tracked, slowed down and rejoined the clan.

The walk was a little longer than anticipated. Sixteen blocks, a mile and a half. Charles's stroller was loaded with enough supplies to survive a nuclear attack. JJ's mania was blowing steam out his ears. His eyes were glassy with need, craving to get to Disneyland. His stride was like a speedboat throwing shawls of water across its bow, he parted air as if it were liquid impediment, holding him back from his El Dorado.

We got to the outer esplanade, where shuttles, buses and tramcars loaded and unloaded. I was instantly aware of the loudspeakers. They were pumping Disney Muzak, up-beat movie themes, instrumental paeans to the Magical Kingdom, The Happiest Place On Earth. It s an old trick, music to hurry people, because the faster they move the more they spend and the quicker they tire out and they make room for more people, more turnover in a day's receipts. From the moment we entered the esplanade to the moment we left the park, there was no remission from the loud music, the constant blast of happy inspiring kitschy songs of love, hope, drama, jeopardy overcome, disaster averted, triumph of the human spirit as inspired by Disney. I hated this music more than anything. I longed for peace, I ached for just a minute's respite.

It was not to be. We passed through the two security gates, our packs and bags were inspected, then we moved into the turnstiles that gave onto Disneyland itself, the little town with the Main Street at the end of whose length shone the soaring castle of Fantasyland.

We grew up thinking Disneyland to be vast. On TV it exuded scale, distance, grandeur. In reality it's a big chunk of acreage filled with cheesy little junk. It's crammed from end to end with shops, booths, rides, stands, restaurants, a lake. Crowds meander and clog together so that one can't move freely, and it's easy to get separated from companions.

Summer was long gone, and still the crowd was formidable. My scooter was a problem. I had to go carefully or ride down some poor housewife from Minneapolis who was looking for her children, her face pasty with fatigue. Generally, people made room for me but the din was so great they often didn't hear me coming.

"Whoops, excuse me, sorry, watchit, hello? hello? beep beep, excuse me, uh oh, sorry, sorry....."

We were barely inside the gate! We stopped to confer. What was on JJ's program? How about taking the train around the park, so we can see everything? Okay, sounds good. I pressed the lever on my scooter and it refused to go. I pressed again and it went a few feet and stopped. A few more tries confirmed that it was not in working order.

We had to call the scooter rental company and have them deliver a replacement. They wanted me to meet their courier outside the front gate, on the esplanade before the first security booth. Why couldn't they come inside, I wondered. The man was evasive about that. Okay. How long? "Give it at least an hour," the grumpy man on the phone said, "We're pretty busy right now."

"Yeah, and I've got crippled feet and a family impatient to see Disneyland, and we paid decent money for this machine. Please bring a better scooter or my lawyer will call you." There was a whole platoon of gleaming Disneyland scooters a few yards away. JJ spied these and marched with grand purpose over to the rental stand. With each step he took, one scooter vanished. He took ten steps and ten scooters vanished. It was eerie. By the time he got to the booth, there were no scooters.

No gleaming new Disneyland handicapped scooters.

I watched JJ expostulate in his weirdly Quebecois/Gallic way. His hands flew in the air. His finger shook accusingly. He pointed back at our group. I could almost hear him say in his Munich/Paris accent. "Look! That noble man has feet that pain him most immoderately. This is because he has sacrificed his body on the altar of ART! How can you deny him but one scooter?"

As he stood talking, two scooters were turned in by renters, and those two scooters vanished immediately, turned over to other renters who had reserved them in 1988, or possibly some time in the Sixties.

Plan B: Fox would take Charles and they would go on the toddler rides and features. JJ and Marlene headed for the adult rides, the ones that scooped out your brains and put them back as tossed salad. JJ made a show of wanting to stay with me but the way his eyes were wandering in all directions moved me to let him off the hook. "Go ahead, JJ, there's no point you sitting here with me. There's plenty to amuse me just watching people. Fox can meet me at the front gate in about an hour".

There was no holding JJ back. He was here, he was going to worship his gods. He was going to whirl upside down at four Gs with his hands free in the wind!

I found myself pushing a dead scooter through the crowds. My feet hurt. The scooter's brake was somehow locked and it took real force to get it to move. It took me twenty minutes to travel a hundred yards. I took up station on a bench where I could spot my replacement scooter. I put my legs over the handle bars and tried to relax. The music, relentless, loud, ubiquitous, was driving me crazy. "Theme From The Little Mermaid". "Seventy Six Trombones". Sousa marches. Another Disney movie theme, I think it was from "101 Dalmations Meet Aladdin In the Carribean". Celine Dion. I wanted to scream. When I'm ninety, after I've lost my mind, I'll be stalking Celine Dion, or maybe pissing on her monument.

An hour and a half later, Fox and Charles found me. There was no scooter. Charles was sound asleep, slumped under the stroller's sun shade, wearing a pale blue cap. Plan C. Fox would go back, connect with JJ and Marlene, and when the scooter arrived, I would meet them at the Pancake Restaurant. Where's that? Oh, it's, uhm....it's to the right, just before Fantasyland. Okay, I'll find it. Forty five minutes later, I was punching the scooter rental place on my cell phone. A man answered, this time a different voice.

"Hi, I'm waiting at Disneyland for a scooter replacement." At that moment, I saw a young man in shorts riding a green scooter, holding a cell phone to his ear. He was past me, moving towards the first screening booth.

"Are you on a green scooter?"

"Yes I am."

"Turn around, you just passed me, I'm wearing a blue beret."  
I saw the guy make a one eighty, look right, look left, look right again to find me waving at him. He scooted over.

He handed me a paper to sign. "Here you go, sir, this one will work. Sorry about that."

He bent and looked at the dead scooter. He turned it on, pressed the lever. It scooted two feet and stopped.

"Yep, dead scooter, that's for sure. Have a good time."

He left the dead scooter and walked away.

I got on the new scooter and returned to the Magic Kingdom. I scooted around for fifteen minutes trying to find the Pancake Restaurant, then asked a perky Disney attendant. He directed me towards the Pancake Restaurant. I scooted over to it, only to find it closed. New equipment was being installed. This was apparently the only day in forty years that the pancake restaurant had shut down during business hours.

The crowd gaped around me, opening to avoid me and my scooter, forming up on the other side. Families walked around looking dead. Every second person was waving a digital camera, firing its flash, then, cupping a palm to make the screen visible, checking the LCD to see how the picture had turned out. This is a procedure that pro photographers call "chimping".

I was beginning to recognize Disneyland Syndrome: kids amped up on sugar and adrenaline, dragging dazed corpse-like grownups from one attraction to another. The grownups would occasionally lash out in fury.

"Don't touch me!" a woman screamed at her ten-year-old daughter. "I'm sick of you touching me!" The daughter rolled her eyes, as if it was her mother who was ten years old.

The music went on and on. Theme from Mickey Mouse Club. Theme from Pirates Of The Caribbean. When the Saints Go Marching In. An announcer interrupted the music and promised mind-blowing special effects at tonight's "Dreams Are Real" extravaganza, starting at nine o'clock followed by the most spectacular fireworks show on earth. Theme from Beauty and The Beast.

Try the cell phone. I fingernailed my way through the plastic sheathe, entering Fox's number. I got her voice mail. I left a message about my whereabouts. It would turn out that Fox had left her phone at the motel. I didn't know JJ's number, nor Marlene's number. I wondered if baby Charles had a cell phone yet, or if he'd set up his Facebook page and gotten a Twitter account.

The scooter was raring to go, its power rumbling beneath my butt, all 12 volts and 320 mili-amp-hours. I turned it randomly and levered the speed up and plowed through the crowds, keeping my eyes peeled for Fox's wild silver mane.

If I closed my eyes, I could see a neon marquee, all lit up with blinking lights. It said, in a robotic voice, "K'ching! Marketing! Buy This Buy This! K'ching! Marketing! Buy This Buy This!"

Is there something that Disneyland is supposed to teach me about the soul of America? Is there some profound message other than cliches about the materialistic culture, the stimulus overload, the stupefyingly bad taste? Should I be appalled by the sheep-like lockstep conformity, the urge to live beyond one's means? Am I shocked by the manipulation of adults by children who are in turn being manipulated by marketers who know how little patience adults today have, how they'd rather give in than take the trouble to confront their kids about the ridiculous gadgets that they think they are entitled to? Other than that? These things were foreseen by Charles de Tocqueville in 1827. Don't misunderstand me: I love America. I think we live on the most awesome continent on the planet. I believe that our social experiment is a good idea for governing a society. It's far from perfect. It left a few loopholes for human nature to exploit, for greedy uncaring people to elbow their way through the well-conceived constitution of Jefferson, Madison, Adams. Something has gone very wrong in this country, one giant mistake has pitched people of ordinary means into quicksand. This is the simple failure to finance political campaigns with public money.

Even with that palliative, I imagine the Greedies would have found some other loophole to rob us blind.

I have become embarrassed for my country in front of the rest of the world. I feel as though the USA has just driven past all the other nations while exposing its butt cheeks out the window of a '78 Buick Riviera. Yet the world, in spite of its overheated hate-America rhetoric, is all here. Half the people in this park are from another country. They flock here from Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Iran, Jordan, Uzbekistan. Every culture, every faith, they're all here at Disneyland, they're all staying at Day's Inn, eating at McDonald's, partaking of American bounty. We are a country descending into infantile fantasies, governed with very few exceptions by infantile politicians. Why are these other cultures and nations so eager to follow us, to be like us?

The kids are as if drugged on meth, dragging parents who are becoming more and more rubberized as the hours pass. With all this stimulation, this music, this color, this screaming sound, hawking shopkeepers and animatronic human Disney workers, drugs aren't necessary, booze is superfluous. The place generates its own brainwave, the oxygen here isn't normal.

But wait! The parade is about to start! Oh, god, the crowds reverse direction and trample the rubber bumpers of my senior go-cart, trying to get to the Town Square, to take up positions to see the giant floats, maybe to wave at or even touch a poor sweating twenty two year old inside a humongous Disney character suit. Cute girl dancers in pancake makeup appear, and the music begins, the music, the music!

The actors do a little dance, it's a step a twirl another step a twirl in the opposite direction, and this simple dance is sooo cool, like, it's synchronized to the music, the Disney theme songs. Bellowing from the ubiquitous loudspeakers, an avuncular narrator pushes the 'Dreams Are Real' concept. The floats come gliding down the little street, around the town square's circular turnabout, and, by god, I am actually seized by the magic! Oh yes, there's something exquisitely thrilling running down my spine, it's supernatural, it's my American Childhood returning to me with all its spineless escapism, as if World War Two and the Depression had never happened and the world has reverted to some insular fifties amusement park where the most dangerous thing is Captain Hook! Tick tock tick tock, tick....tock.

Then the last float has rounded the curve, and the magical characters vanish into some mystery cave. They have retired to dressing rooms to bitch about how hot it is today. Wiping off their makeup, they sneak cigarettes before having them stomped out by the jerks on the security staff.

Across the ocean of humanity, I see Fox's wonderful glinting hair, the sheen of silver, blonde, streaks of other nameless colors, sweeping down her shoulders. It's just like the time we got separated in the giant K-Mart at Bishop, I'm screaming "Boooobooooo" like a moron, and she can't hear me, she's walking the other way and I get caught behind a large clan of Koreans who smile stiffly as I crunch their loafers with my wheels, and my basket falls off for the fifth time. Fox recedes into the infinite mass, the Cosmos is expanding away from me, drawing her in its gravitational wake. Booooobooooo! Damn it!

Then there's a tap at my shoulder and I turn to see Marlene's sweet innocent face as she wheels Lord Charles in the toddler equivalent of a limousine. Charles beams and rolls his shoulders, clenches his chubby fists in front of his face as he recognizes his grampa Art.

"Ott!", he says, for the very first time. I am so honored I can almost expire.

"Sharl," I respond, giving him the high five. "My man!"

"Ott!" the child repeats. He knows my name! He points to me and looks up at his mommie, as if to instruct her. "Ott, Poppa Ott", he proclaims.

This child is a god and I am now on intimate terms with Him.

"Hi," Marlene says brightly. She's always smiling, especially when she's frustrated or scared. It's a pretty good act, one that she doesn't know she's producing. It's her way of coping with the stresses of life. "We've been looking all over for you."

I gestured at the scooter. "It took them a while."

"Well, just follow us, we're meeting at the Swirling Teacups and then going on the Flying Zambo" I don't remember what ride it was, so I might as well call it the Flying Zambo. The whole place was one big Flying Zambo and I wanted to go have a cigarette, then go to the motel and sleep. I wasn't going to have either until we'd flown on the damn thing and done some other damn things and I felt worse for Fox because I knew her back was killing her. All this stress had puffed her Fibromyalgia into a monster with big teeth, and she was laboring forward in the name of motherly duty, as she has always done. These weren't her children but they may as well have been. We had about twenty years on them, so what the hell....add in an adorable toddler and the adoption was complete, if fleeting.

JJ, when we caught up to him, was glassy eyed. "You guys have to go on the Whizzing Boingboing," he said, "it's so cool you won't believe it." Keeping an eye on one another, we made our way to the Whizzing Boingboing. That's what I called it because the names of the rides had become a mental soup in my head. As we walked, JJ rattled off a lesson regarding the history of Disneyland, citing obscure facts about its construction, pointing to the famous suite where Walt Himself used to stay in order to be close to the action. Unfortunately, the line for the Whizzing Boingboing stretched for blocks. It was getting late. We wouldn't have time, not today, for a whiz and a boing.

JJ looked so disappointed, not for himself, but for US. We HAD to ride the Whizzing Boingboing before our visit was over. Tomorrow we would get here early and be first in line to take this most spectacular ride. Right! We'll get up at five so we can beat the crowd!

JJ acknowledged that we needed a rest before returning for the evening extravaganza, the "Dreams Are Real" show followed by the World's Greatest Fireworks Display. He wanted us FRESH for this, our nervous systems must be purged and purified before being bathed in the Holy Fire of a hi-tech Disney production.

At last, we were able to return to our rooms. There was a sixteen block journey to make. Everyone was grumpy about this fact. Charles, who is usually so equable, went on a crying jag that couldn't be allayed by having his mom shake his favorite toy in his face or put a bottle to his lips. We walked hugging our individual grievances to our chests, while only Charles was allowed to express his true feelings. I felt so badly for Fox that I let her ride the scooter, while I walked, but she wouldn't go far, she felt so badly for me. We almost fought over who would ride the scooter, and we split the difference.

Our day had started at five in the morning, four hundred miles north. The emotional pitch had been extreme, right from the outset, and it had risen in intensity as the day passed. How much of this could we take? JJ's maniacal drive to make us happy was making us wretched, yet we could not express our wretchedness. I didn't think a little truth would hurt in this situation, but Fox's warning glance caused me to hold my tongue. She has a certain judgment about what people can handle. I must defer to her amazing intuition. She bats about .733 compared to my lousy .212 whenever someone winds up to throw a Truth Pitch. Her timing can't be beat. I pasted a smile on my face that I didn't believe would convince anyone, and I said, "Gee JJ, that was great! Thank you so much; can't wait to go back tonight for the show."

JJ extolled the brilliance of the Disney epic productions. "Dude," he said, which made me smile secretly because his "dude" sounded like "doot". I may have had about seven "doots" left in me before I openly cracked up. Anyway, "Doot", he said, "You'll be so blown away by what you see tonight. You won't beleaff it."

Then, at last, the kids retired to their room, leaving me and Fox to collapse on the bed in ours. It was five thirty. We had to be ready to go at seven thirty. The show starts at nine but we must give ourselves time for the walk plus time to take up good positions at the lake before the crowds get hold of every square inch of viewing space. There was no negotiating with JJ's compulsion.

We had about an hour to rest. I resolved to sleep but as I closed my eyes I was regaled with a montage of Disney faces, Mickey and Goofy and Donald and Mermaid and Beauty and Witch and Dragon, all of them pulsating to a backdrop of endless music and crowds on a revolving beltway so that they could loop before my closed eyes, the same faces, the hostile Korean family I'd almost annihilated with my scooter, the pale mother of six from Wichita at the end of her tether, the squat mustached Hispanic papa who had smuggled in a flask of tequila and was having a wonderful time denying his kids everything.

I drifted off to sleep for about half an hour. Fox had lain awake, worrying, making lists of things she had to do to keep everyone else happy. That's what Fox does, she makes lists, and when she can't do everything on her list, she slumps into guilt. I have to remember her long and terrifying marriage. The fruitless attempts to placate her husband, the constant effort to shield her kids, the impossible task of pleasing "The Prince" and the shouts, threats, insults that followed when she wasn't perfect. And she was never perfect.

Yusef occasionally kicked her or pulled her hair. He didn't have to. His abuse was as complete as the most ruthless beating; witness the after-effects, the chronic pain in her back and joints, the sleeping with one foot out of the blanket in order to be ready to respond to crisis.

At seven thirty we dragged ourselves over to the Canadians' room and waited while Charles was put into his stroller and his supplies packed in that rolling baggage hauler. Since coming home from Disneyland I have learned that there are many parking options that could have been available to us. I suspect they were somewhat pricey, and that JJ had pushed his resources to the limit just getting us where we were. In any case, we were covering about five to seven miles a day, afoot. Or, in my case, a-scoot.

It would be unfair of me to suggest that this entire trip was an unremitting nightmare. It wasn't. There were lovely moments, especially when Fox and I baby-sat Charles. This little boy had become a person, he was able to react, laugh, clown, be affectionate to "Gamma"and "Poppa Ott". Fox and I want to preserve as much of this unalloyed joy as we possibly can. It will pain us to see the world destroy the child's innocence, as it inevitably will. We will enjoy it with him while it lasts.

By the time we got back to Disneyland, the crowd had thickened in anticipation of the show and the fireworks to follow. There is a body of water athwart the center of the park, a dogleg-shaped lake with an island at its center. The show, called "Dreams Are Real", would take place on this water, and people were pressed up against the fence by which it is surrounded.

We were able to get well situated for a view of the action. We were about forty five minutes early. There were little areas for wheelchairs and scooters, roped off and tended by perky personnel of Disney. I was able to sit with Fox right up against the fence looking out over "Lake Walt", or "The Disney River", or whatever it's called. Oh, I just looked it up on the internet. It's Lake Tom Sawyer. I think.

About ten minutes before showtime, as it had gotten completely dark, I was seized with an unbearable urge to pee. I was now immured by the crowd, sealed into my personal square foot of space. In front of me was a wrought iron fence. On my right side were people in wheelchairs or on scooters. The blue rope that defined the handicapped zone was just brushing my neck. Outside the blue rope were JJ, Marlene, Charles and Katherine. Behind all of us was a crowd twenty feet deep.

"JJ," I asked, "How long does one of these shows typically last?"

"About half hour for the show, and then twenty minutes of fireworks afterward."

"Um, is there a restroom nearby?"

He wasn't truly registering my problem. He was peering out over Lake Tom for some sign to manifest.

"Where would that restroom be, JJ?"

He looked down at me in surprise. "You have to go....now?" His tone was like, "The Pope is about to appear, The Dalai Lama is going to float down from the sky. Joe Montana and Roger Clemens are going to magically transfer their prowess into your body, and you have to take a piss?"

Assessing the condition of my bladder, I realized that the procedure for emptying it was going take some serious determination.

JJ looked at his watch. His voice had risen two octaves. "The show starts in eight minutes!" he shrilled querulously. He looked genuinely hurt.

"I can make it back in time, just...like..where is it, man?"

I had begun turning my scooter, backing into the scooter behind me, forcing that woman to edge somewhat astern, which created a tiny chain reaction, causing about ten scooters and five wheelchairs to shift a few inches.

"Just go left at New Orleans Square, down the arcade, you'll see some signs. Please hurry, you'll miss the beginning!"

"Excuse me excuse me," I said firmly to my immediate neighbors, who scowled at me as if they had Bladders of Steel, which I knew not to be the case. Maybe they were equipped with Depends, I don't know but I am not ready yet for Depends, I don't care what kind of crowd I'm in, I'll just get a coffee cup and put my coat over myself if it comes to that. Only problem is, well, I'm a slow pee when the pressure's on. If anyone is waitng for me, if there's a line outside the door, if there's a man leering at me with a snaggle-toothed grin at the next urinal, I just slow up even more. The idea of peeing next to a total stranger, or, worse, between two total strangers, is like a having The Incredible Hulk clamping down on my "OFF" spigot.

"Please, I need to get out of here," I said at some volume, "I'm agoraphobic and am about to projectile vomit if I don't get some air." This got people moving a little faster. One little old lady with dyed red hair was looking at me sympathetically, a sweet gaze of compassion softening her eyes. It was either compassion or she was just then letting go into her senior diaper, I don't know which.

The domino effect I had begun was now an eighty-person ripple. All around me the people who had so patiently sandwiched themselves into the show area were muttering and saying "What's going on, is someone sick?"

I told Fox to stay put, save our space, I could handle it. Jigging and janking, I made that scooter into a battering ram and fought my way free of the crowd. I went to the left, looking for New Orleans Square, and found an area of al fresco restaurants and an arcade whose period décor was indecipherable. It was an enigmatic mix of Parisian bistro and Hacienda la Fresca.

If there had been no crowd, the restrooms were just a twenty seconds walk from Lake Goofy. I found the men's room, parked my scooter outside, and found a vacant stall. Amazing. And then, of course, I got the Slow Pee. I sat there, willing for it to roll down the chute and out the barrel, but it sat way back up in there like a frightened little rabbit. Oh no, I'm not coming out, said my pee.

Goddammit, come out here!

"No, not me"!

Oh hell, pee, just make it, will you?

"I'm afraid".

What are you afraid of?

"I'm afraid of the ocean."

What?!!

" I know that once you flush, I will be merged with ever larger bodies of water, until I am swallowed up by the infinity of water that is the ocean, and then who will know that I was once your pee"?

I thought briefly of lending my pee a copy of the Tibetan Book of The Dead, but I knew I was getting a little strange, so I took a harder line.

I don't give a shit about your fear of death, mister pee, just come on out here and let me finish!

But the pee wasn't going to make things easy for me. All around came the sounds of race horses letting go fire hoses of piss. Aaah, a man would sigh, zipping up his fly. Aaah, yet another, finishing off, shaking his wee wee clean of lingering drops. And I was sitting in this damn stall waiting for my pee to begin. I looked at my watch. I had three minutes to get back to my spot. I summoned up a yoga technique that I use in such situations. I call it the Drop Breath. I let the air leave my lungs as if it's a load of groceries being spilled from a torn paper bag. Whooosh! Then I let the breathing resume at a very shallow level, while sending my mind into vast space, floating past stars and galaxies. Meanwhile, way back on earth, my body is supposed to let go of its anxieties and realize the colossal scale of the universe, and become so relaxed that a stream of urine will begin to emerge from the bladder.

I waited. I passed the Andromeda Galaxy, and then the the Sombrero Galaxy. Just as I was beginning, with my remote earth- bound body, to sense that some urine might indeed emerge from my screaming bladder, a guy in the next stall let a fart that lasted thirty seconds. It had a beginning, a middle and an end, just like a good story. At the beginning it was somewhat tentative, as it groped for character development and plot structure. Then it found its voice and proceeded confidently. At the end, however, the man had farted himself into a literary corner, and took to whining improvisation and produced an arbitrary denouement, even descending so low as to invoke a Deus Ex Machina. Though his main character had probably been killed off, he had left room for a sequel.

"Goddam," he said, astonished at the volume and intricacy of his own fart. Then there came a sound like a bag of cement being dropped into a horse trough.

"Goddam" he said again, with contentment. A stench wafted through the stall partitions. That's it, I thought, I'm going to pee if I have to unscrew my johnson and siphon it out with a straw. My bladder seemed to understand my sense of ultimatum for it unclenched and a long satisfying stream of my own ammoniated waste product went burbling into the pool of water below.

Just as I was getting back on the scooter, the park's giant PA system came to life and the avuncular game-show host voice boomed out, "Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, Welcome to Disneyland, The Happiest Place On Earth. Tonight's show, 'Dreams Are Real', begins in fifteen minutes. At the completion of the show, please stay to enjoy the fireworks extravaganza, called 'Becoming The Dream'.

Fifteen minutes! I checked my watch. My exertions getting to and executing the mission in the men's room had taken up twelve minutes. The show was starting at nine thirty, not nine as JJ had presumed. I had time to spare.

When I emerged from the restroom arcade, I collided with a sea of bodies, all facing away from me and towards Lake Tom Sawyer. I had to get through this pile of breathing, sweating people to rejoin my family. It would take some real audacity! I went to work without hesitation.

"Beep beep", I said, "Emergency. Beep beep." A few people got out of my way, but they didn't have much room to move. "Emergency," I repeated, "coming through. Heart attack victim. Beep beep, make way please. Woman in labor. Please move aside. Beep Beep. Man having stroke, please step to your right. Beep beep, excuse me, hello, please, shortness of breath, beep beep, panic attack, beep beep, narcolepsy, beep beep excuse me, epileptic seizure, please move, thank you very much, you're very kind, emergency supply service, beep beep, adult diaper delivery, hello hello, please move aside, hello hello, man electrocuted, beep beep."

I made my way into the crowd until I was utterly encased in humanity which had either come to a rigid state of suspended animation or had collectively died standing up. But no, they were alive. They moved just a little bit, some of them tried to hit me and kids kicked the scooter, not a few cursed, called me asshole and motherfucker, and then, and then...somehow a perky personality from the Disney security staff was at my side, and I thought uh oh I'm busted he's gonna throw me out of the park.

"Sir, may I help you?" He was waving a flashlight with a long red snout and had been directing traffic so that converging streams of people did not start a riot while competing for the best spots in the place.

"I, uh, had an emergency and now I'm separated from my people, who are up there." I pointed towards the fence, which was only four hundred people distant.

Then the PA system came on again and the announcer said, "Welcome to Disneyland Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls. Welcome to the Happiest Place On Earth. Tonight's show, 'Dreams Are Real', begins in five minutes. At the completion of the show, please stay to enjoy the fireworks extravaganza, 'Becoming The Dream'."

Let me tell you, sometimes having the accoutrements of disability can be a blessing. The perky security guy raised a blue rope and led me through the special security walkway and in thirty seconds I had rejoined Fox and my little family of Disney-holics. I had a brief image in my head of JJ and Marlene having sex dressed as Mickey and Minnie Mouse, but I tried to stamp it out immediately.

The loudspeakers had continued, of course, to play music relentlessly, but for the first and only time while I was in the park, someone had put on an entire album of some excellent New Orleans jazz. Where did this come from? In the remote fastness of Eye-and- Ear-Control Central a rogue Disney employee had gone cuckoo from the endless Disneytune tape loop and thrown a ringer into the mix. It was good music. It was lively without being frenetic. It was inventive and beautifully played. It would have made perfect "hurry up" music for any venue without resorting to the over-produced bathos, the pyrotechnics of Celine Dion or any of the jingle jangle bling bling that passed as music in the Disney Empire.

JJ was deeply relieved that I wouldn't miss the start of the show. He apologized for being wrong about the time and I joked with him, "Doot," I said, "You should have told me you were wrong about the time an hour ago, it would have saved me a lot of anxiety."

He almost said, "An hour ago I didn't know about the...." but he didn't. I saw him think it. I mean, something had gone fritz in JJ's brain when he got within smelling distance of Disneyland, he had reversed the flow of time and taken twenty years off his age and plunked himself back in the era when he was being terrorized by his father, shielded by his mother and captivated by pirate hats. People are awfully complicated. I felt so bad for this young man, suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, organizing everything so tightly that the life was squeezed out of it. Trying so hard to be Good, born-again, kind and saintly and conscientious, and not knowing a hell of a lot about his own drives and motivations. Neither Fox nor I could tell him anything. We could only be there and behave with the minimum load of irrationality. If such a thing is possible. I doubt that our psychological health is any better than that of our kids' generation. It's probably worse. We have more perspective, that's all.

Then, at last, the show began.

The Disney people utilized a technology that shot a wall of water vapor into the air at the center of the lake, and it was so dense that images from hidden projectors could be shown upon it, and these images were huge and colorful and changed from moment to moment, creating a startling effect of dreamlike animation. The mist, squirting from countless nozzles in the water, was shape-shifting yet stable enough to take Disney animations like a 3-D movie screen, and upon this screen a story unfolded. I can't repeat the story, because I didn't understand a single word that was said. It just didn't make sense to me. It was a giant "huh?" that accompanied pictures of Mickey Mouse as the Sorceror's Apprentice and the witch from Snow White and the Dragon from something or other, and all the characters were part of a story of heroism and dread, of overcoming terror to rescue something from somebody and whatever. You know, a mouse wearing black shorts and white gloves saves the planet from annihilation.

At one point a boat came around the bend in the Loony Tunes River and it was carrying a girl dressed as a mermaid who waggled her tail and waved at everyone and all the people clapped, and then there were some explosions, and colored fountains erupted from the water, and then a paddlewheel steamer called The Mark Twain came around the bend of Bambi Creek and all kinds of people in costumes were either frolicking on board pretending to gamble and play music hall or they were killing each other in real time from the ennui of having to play these characters night after night. After that, a pirate ship came sloshing up Old Yeller Slough, a real big pirate ship by god and Peter Pan was on the thing, sliding down a long rope and I think Captain Hook was pissing off the other side of the ship away from the audience because his fly was undone when he came chasing after Peter Pan and then, and then, BOOM! A cannon fired, skeering the bejuices out of everybody who went "OH!" and I wondered if the next ship was going to be the missing submarine Thresher or the ghosts of the Soviet sailors onboard the Kursk would show up and swordfight with Yosemite Sam. You know, I couldn't make sense of the thing, but everybody loved it. I have pictures to prove all this. Really. About fifty pictures of Mickey Mouse on a sheet of mist and Peter Pan sliding down a rope and getting rope burns because he left her gloves in the dressing room.

The crowd dispersed in an ecstasy of exhaustion and spread out along the main walkway, in front of the big blue and purple castle. Then the announcer came on the PA again and told everyone that if they wished very hard all their dreams would come true. I don't think the announcer really meant this, he was just reading a script, because if it was true he wouldn't be there announcing and I wouldn't be there trying to look thrilled for JJ's benefit.

But I was holding Fox's hand, and that's a dream come true, isn't it? Just because it was a dream I'd never had the sense to dream didn't make it any less of a miracle. So who am I to be cynical and say what's true or not true? It always helps, when you have a dream, to make damn sure you have the right dream.

What followed was indeed the greatest fireworks show this side of North Korea, and maybe in the whole world. It was amazing. No expense was spared, bombs and rockets and floral shells whizzed high above the chartreuse castle and reflected in Lake Bugs Bunny (wait a minute, that's Warner Brothers, isnt it?) and I think I saw Wily Coyote chasing the road runner between some fat woman's legs.

This, my friends, is but the story of a single day. There is more, but I shall condense it mercifully into a reel of highlights. The next day we spent a great deal of time caring for baby Charles while the adult kids sped away to enjoy hair raising and nausea-inducing rides. Fox and I were confined to the toddler-friendly voyages, like the boat ride through the Pirates Treasure Cave, where the skeletal characters from Disney's latest sequel-saturated special effects movie lept out from trunks full of costume jewelry and a simulacrum of drag queen pirate Jack Swallow, played by Johnny Depthcharge, giggled archly and discharged a flintlock pistol eight times per minute.

For a minute or two, the parents took Charles somewhere, leaving Fox and me to our own devices. Don't ask me why, but we decided to go on one of the really old kiddie rides, the open-cockpit rocket ship, the one where the rocket cars go up and down and round and round.

The ride's operator shouldn't have let us do it. The ride isn't designed to accommodate two adults, it's made for kids or maybe a kid and parent combo, but certainly not large enough to hold two grown up middle aged people.

Fox got in, squeezing herself down into the coffin-shaped opening. She extended her legs until they hit the front of the little space car's interior. Then I squeezed myself behind her. The attendant looked dubious but muttered, Okay, why not, guess it'll work, and he attached what minimal harness was there to keep us inside. In my case, that was nothing at all, I was too big and my knees were up against my chest, so there wasn't anything to keep me from flying away. Abruptly the ride started and our little rocket merry go round was merrily going round and round, and up and down.

I was amazed at the powerful G-forces unleashed upon my body. I was a grown man being pushed out of a toy rocket car by a fun-fair centrifuge. With my left hand I grabbed the side of the circling projectile, with my right I clutched Fox around the neck. She was nearly choking and I was half out of the device, and then it went uuupppp! and dowwwwnnnn!, making matters even worse, throwing a two-vector lateral force at me so that my grip seemed not quite equal to the task of staying inside the car. I thought of what I might look like, hanging off the gondola of this toy and then being launched like a stone from a catapult, all the way across Futureland and possibly ending up in a dumpster with my neck broken.

Poor Fox could hardly draw air, so tightly was I clutching her throat. I managed to lower my right arm around her breasts and inappropriately squeezed her fair titties to save my life!

Then, for both of us simultaneously, the sheer absurdity of the whole experience struck with a bomb of hilarity and we started laughing with an anti-gravity hysteria that took us right out of our bodies. We shrieked with laughter and somehow I got my grip focused, I squeezed Fox's boobs with maniacal intensity and roared with laughter. She roared with me and there we were going around in a little bitty circle, going up and down in a little bitty rocket car, spitting with mirth, flirting with pants-peeing terminal fun.

The spin began to slow, the up-down started to just be down and the rocket car scudded to a halt. I removed my hands from around Fox's mammaries, aware that little kids were watching, their parents were watching two middle-aged fools shoehorn themselves out of the kiddie ride and stagger towards the exit.

There was only one more day of this to endure, followed by the ride home. Fox and I would have to make the best of it. We did all the family-on-a-trip stuff, we ate at Denny's, we ate at IHOP, we ate at Katy's Kwagmire and Barney's Bestiary, we guzzled cotton candy towards diabetic coma, squeezed burritos into our gullets and drank caffeine-loaded soft drinks full of bubbles. Charles was our lighthouse, our lamp in the dark, our pillar of fire, our sign from Heaven.

The smile on my face was getting stuck. I feared I might need surgery when we got home lest I continue expressing this ghastly fake enjoyment.

And the music went on, and on, and on. And on. I heard Alladin's Theme a hundred and forty seven times before I lost count.

On day three we got over to the adjacent new theme park called California, and we went on the ride that simulates flying naked over the state of California without a parachute or even a puke bucket. Adapted from flight simulators to induce the feeling of authenticity, the device placed us with our legs dangling in rows of padded chairs. I was so scared for the first ten seconds that I almost jumped out of my seat and fell all the way to Big Sur, but this time I was securely fastened and there was no jumping allowed. Once I got used to the sensation of flying seven hundred miles per hour in an open air bucket seat, the ride was fine, in fact, it was too short, I wanted to keep going beyond the border and fly back to Arches National Park and I was severely disappointed when the ride was done.

JJ, convinced that he had failed at everything, was short-tempered on the drive back to our RV rendezvous. Talk about putting pressure on yourself! We are always our own worst enemies, that's a given. But Fox and I can luxuriate in our middle aged state, we don't have the responsibilities any more, we're grandparents, we live on the cheap, we don't have to slave at full time jobs. We're done slavin'. We had enough, decades of slavin'.

JJ and Marlene are young parents yoked to a consumer-gilded lifestyle, a credit card crush, a bubbling bonanza of buying bullshit from which they don't know how to escape. It's a nasty creature, our new North American culture, a Jabba-The-Hutt heavyweight ball and chain that gargles out of media orifices that we never dreamed existed even twenty years ago.

It breathes its toxic vapors out of your cell phone. You carry it in your pocket! It's in your purse, your briefcase, it's there every time you look up, every time you turn on a radio or TV, every time you rent a DVD, it's there even when you take a piss and fill your car with gasoline. Gas pumps and airport urinals now run commercials! It knows who we are in our most infantile selves, its filled with hidden psychological temptations and subliminal intrusions that work on our most primitive drives for approval, sex, power and love.

It's little Charles that brings the magic healing button that we can push to save our souls. JJ drops all his fears and sorrows when he bends to play with his son. His face clears, his smile loses its anxious weariness. The baby has strengths we can't imagine, has powers of perception and consciousness that make us look like evolutionary cul-de-sacs.

He will need them.

The Familiar Scent

We were now crossing California towards home. We came into the most ferocious winds as we began ascending a series of mountains east of Bakersfield. Raven could barely make twenty five miles an hour, as the wind met her sail-like bulk and held her almost in place. It was a struggle, I could feel the gusts pushing against her. The engine stayed cool. We reached the top of the range and descended into the dry valley of Bakersfield and the place where Highway Five and Highway Ninety Nine meet. Both go north, and experience had taught us that Ninety Nine was the lesser of two evils.

We stopped for the night at a seedy Kountry Kamground in a small town called Shafter. We had been here before, drivng Yertle.

By four o'clock the next day, we were driving down the entrance to the Kountry Kampground in Sonoma County. We had reserved a site for six months. We could live there on a more or less permanent basis, with the one proviso: that we vacate our site for one week, leave the campground, then return to another site, to stay for another six months.

Our new home has some unusual features. There's a petting zoo and an interesting menagerie of animals: four burros, a couple dozen goats and sheep. There is a wild flock of birds who hop in and out of the pasture to take advantage of the free food. There are chickens and roosters, wild and domestic turkey, several peacocks, peahens and some comic guinea fowl. There is a small herd of cows, who munch placidly at the tall grass. A flock of geese uses the meadows around the campground as their stopping place. All these creatures live in proximity to one another in total harmony. One can wake up and have a peacock strutting down the lanes among the coach sites, or hear the geese taking off and landing.

WAKAWAKA WAKAWAKA, several times a day the geese pass overhead. The formations range in size from half dozen birds to forty or fifty. When the fifty flight rises from the wetland down the road, it sounds like a riot has broken out or that the geese have begun enjoying the spectator sport of boxing and have set up an open air ring in which to enjoy the sight of big brawny geese whacking the hell out of one another.

The Flying V passes right over our site, about forty feet up, and we stop talking because we could't hear one another if we tried. It's such a pleasure listening to this cacophany that we wouldn't want to talk anyway. The geese gapple all night at their soggy field, but they're just far enough away that the sound is not a nuisance. Just like the amenities in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, our goose noise is not too loud, not too soft....it's juuuuust right.

Chapter Sixteen: Doing The Limbo

Now that the epic ride was over, we entered an interim period. We were living in two places. We were confronting the magnitude of switching into a wholly new mode of life, a life in a small space, a life where every object must be in its place. If there was no place for a particular substance or object, then it must either be tossed out or stored.

This was where the madness began. This was the trial of my relationship with Fox. at its most intense. This was the time where the difference in our tastes, the variations in our personal hygiene, the needs of a man versus the needs of a woman had to be negotiated with utmost patience.

Fox has a total inability to throw things away.Through the trials and horrors of her marriage, Fox held on to her family's legacy. Fox keeps everything! She has her daughter's first school essay. And the third, fifth, twenty fifth, sixty fifth. She has the most minute school document generated by two children from kindergarten to the graduation of college. She feels that all of this is precious history and must be restored to her children when they've married, had families and moved into their own homes. Meanwhile she will carry this titanic cargo container of luggage wherever she might go.

She has the trunk that her grandma brought from the old country. It is filled with mothball smelling sheets, pillowcases, linens of esoteric Swedish origin and serving trays of engraved silver.

In order to prevent her husband from stealing the silver, she had it stored for sixteen years in a secret locker at a Pay-n-Stor in Oakland.

Fox has twenty eight albums of family pictures. She has fourteen white buckets, ten gallons a bucket, of rocks and seashells.

This is to say nothing of clothes. Fox has clothes: a collection of marvels, of shawls and swirling skirts, of gypsy vests sewn with coins, of blouses from Lebanon, sweaters from Morocco, hats from Afghanistan, baggy trousers from Bosnia, scarves from Samarkand. When we had made our decision to move into a motorhome, we were renting a cozy cottage in the woods. We gave our landlord ninety days notice. Then we procrastinated for the next two months, not knowing where we might end up, which motorhome we might purchase. When the coach was found in Florida, we had twenty five days to go. When we reached Petaluma in the coach and parked it at the Kountry Kampground, we were down to eleven days.

In eleven days, we had to move out of the house. We had to store or dispose of all our stuff. Fox's stuff and my stuff.

They were different kinds of stuff. In all fairness, it is acknowledged between Fox and myself that she has more stuff. But I have stuff too.

I have a Yamaha electronic piano with a synthesizer module. I have power amps, tuners, tape recorders, microphones. I have cameras, lenses, flash attachments, and attachments for the flash attachments. I have computers and computer hardware. I have telescopes! I have eyepieces, adaptors, binoculars, equatorial mounts. I have a bicycle, spare tires, pumps, inner tubes, cables, chains. I have big flashlights and small flashlights. I have the flashlights to find the flashlights that I've lost in the dark. I have red LED flashlights for astronomy. I have hat- mounted miner's lamps, just in case I go into a mine. I just have a thing for flashlights. I love 'em! I also love cigarette lighters. Even when I quit smoking, I love cigarette lighters. Oh, yes, I have books. I have star charts. I have maps, atlases, thesaurus, the obscure novels of Charles Williams, all the science fiction of Jack Vance and Philip K. Dick. Though I may have less than Fox, I DO have stuff. Major stuff. Never mind Fox's face creams, emollients, hair conditioners, powders, brushes, combs, scissors, electric trimmers.

I almost forgot the pet stuff. How could I forget the pet stuff?

Here, Fox has a near-pathological weakness. I may have mentioned that Fox is a gift-giver. Fox has a list of gifts that must be given to friends and family members for the next ten years. She finds a bargain for cousin so and so that will be perfect for her fifteenth wedding anniversary in the year 2016. She buys it because it's a bargain. She cannot resist a bargain. She stores the gift away in a box and then is unable to find it when the occasion for the gift arises.

As for our pets, no toy, health aide or grooming implement is too trivial. So long as it's a bargain. She buys chewies and catnip toys and braided leather jerky treats. She buys cat castles, self-cleaning litter boxes that never work, pet beds for the window sills. She buys plastic mice and scratchy poles and replaceable cardboard scratchy boards and a wonderful round thing that has a pingpong ball in a circular track that surrounds a scratchy pad in the middle. The cats love that one.

One day as I was about to sell the sofa, I moved it and found forty nine cat toys and thirty four missing catnip mice.

Eleven days! Eleven days! Do you understand, now, why we drove across the country in such a frantic hurry? Why we didn't stop at the Grand Canyon and spit over the rim?

Something happens when it becomes a fact: that we are moving from a house of normal dimensions into a motorhome about the size of the very first submarine, the one designed by John Ericson during the Civil War, the one powered by two guys pedaling a chain-driven propeller. The one where they drowned on the first trial in Chesapeake Bay. We're going to attempt to separate the necessary from the desirable and make distinctions that will enable to us to live well in a wheeled boxcar with awnings.

In that eleven days we drove ourselves on caffeine and anxiety, shuttling from the woodsy cabin to the campground and back. Some nights we stayed in the coach. Some nights we stayed in the house. Gradually, our bedding disappeared from the house, our coffee pots, our silverware.

Fox is a wonderful artist and craftswoman. She creates things out of all kinds of materials. She has leather strips, boxes of beads, bags of feathers, nameless baubles. She has healing work materials: long sheathes of sage, bags of herbs, bottles of essences, oils, salves. Everything must be stored or brought into the coach.

All of our many friends suddenly found that they had pressing engagements elsewhere. Fox and I were on our own: a woman with fibromyalgia and a bad back. A man with feet so sore they feel like they've been inside bowling shoes four sizes too tight.

I refuse to let Fox lift heavy objects. When I am away somewhere, she'll sneak a lift on me. I'll come home and find the forty pound bag of kitty litter has shifted from the steps to the storage bay. Then I sound like Ricky Ricardo. "Honey? You got some 'splainin' to do."

Busted! Fox says sheepishly, "I thought I could lift it." Her elbow is bent so that her left palm can press against her lower back, just beside the hip joint. She's slightly hunched over.

She does this because her lazy ex-husband always screamed at her for being lazy. He was a liar, so he lacerated her with accusations of falsehood. He was a cheat, so he perpetually interrogated her about hatching schemes. He was unfaithful, so he called Fox a whore. He was a thief so he accused her of stealing. He was a terrible loveless father, so he called Fox a useless mother. This went on for decades, and Fox is still overcompensating. Lifting heavy boxes. Working like a mule. Gradually the message sinks in: I won't yell, I won't insult, I won't accuse, I won't suspect, I won't philander, and I WILL love as consistently as I can love. I am White Buffalo.

Our move brought out all this buried material and put our relationship through a powerful test. I was irritated. I wanted to say things. I didn't say those things. Instead, I realized that all this stuff is as important to Fox as are my computers, cameras and instruments. They are integral to her self –expression. She is a mother. She is a woman. She is an artist and a healer. Who am I to tell her that she has too much stuff? If it's too much, she will discover that on her own.

We rented two storage units at a local facility. This place is a collection of old cargo containers painted beige, plopped down on a piece of property next to the Petaluma River and locked behind a security gate. For a hundred seventy dollars a month we squeezed all the excess into these two containers.

Our daily itinerary became a triangular ping pong game of house-storage-motorhome house-storage-motorhome. I had old papers in the basement, manuscripts I'd written thirty years ago. I had notebooks of poetry that I couldn't throw away. They were juvenile, they were terrible, but I couldn't toss 'em.

As I carried all those fifty pound buckets of rocks, I wanted to scream.

I kept my mouth shut. I don't know how I did it, but I'm glad I did. I wanted to remonstrate, "Honey we will never need these buckets of rocks, these barrels of seashells! Why are we going to pay money to store them? Why, honey, why?"

I kept my mouth shut. It was one of the most profound acts of restraint I have ever achieved. I watched Fox keep all this stuff without uttering a peep. Some day, maybe a year from now, maybe five years from now, she'll look at this and say, "what the hell am I doing, storing all this junk?" Not yet. Not today. I have to carry the stuff, all boxed up and wrapped in newspaper, load it into the car, take it to the storage place, pile it high, build towers of useless junk, not saying a word.

I am ready to explode.

A month ago the Petaluma River jumped its banks during a mighty storm and rushed into our biggest storage container, wiping out half its contents. After a few tears, Fox bravely threw out the ruined clothes, the soaked papers, the filthy supplies, the laid up gifts for unspecified cousins. I lost some things, too, but I was lucky. The electronic piano, standing upright, was half underwater. After drying, it still plays. Unbelievable, but it still plays.

Chapter Seventeen: Conversing with Animals. The Ferals

Living in a campground can be like living in an alternate universe, a friendly place where, by common agreement, no one talks about politics or religion. It isn't ALWAYS friendly. These are human beings, after all. Disputes break out, cliques form to exclude certain people, gossip of the nastiest sort circulates like a cloud of flies.

The summer months change everything. June through September is family time, and the place is packed with kids who love to make noise. If kids don't make noise, I worry. Peace and quiet are good, but peace and quiet are not everything.

Then there are the feral cats.

Our home campground has two hundred sites, and covers sixty acres. At any given moment eighteen to twenty five feral cats make their living from the campground, and from suckers like Fox and myself. When the feral cats started coming around, we had to make some decisions. Like, do we feed them;, should we get involved? Well, that's not really a question. When Fox or I see an animal, especially one that's supposed to be domesticated but has somehow wound up fending for itself, there's no decision. Fox gets a spare pie pan from the kitchen, puts some dry cat food in it, and bingo! we have ferals marking our tires and our steps, crawling into the undercarriage, fighting around the water dish.

The ferals split into teams and operate like small packs. One of them guards the food dish while the others eat. Each cat has its function in the hierarchy. If cats from another pack approach, the guard goes out to hiss, growl, whatever it takes to protect the dish.

The way they care for one another is touching. There is such a thing as feral tenderness. Wild things form deep attachments to one another, as deep as anything in the human world. Why does anyone entertain the question: do animals have feelings?

Judging from their behavior, I wonder if people have feelings.

Chapter Eighteen: Meetings With Remarkable People

Living in a campground is an odd but enjoyable experience. Neither Fox nor I have a taste for alcohol, so we are immune to the siren song of the Napa Vineyards, only fifteen miles from our location. The vineyards, however, are a prime lure for a vast number of RV vacationers, and THIS campground is THE campground in which to stay for a visit to the wineries.

By the time the sun goes down and the campfires are lit, there is a tone of riotous conviviality. Laughter rings up and down the groves of trees, some of it loud and long. Inevitably, there is one laugh that emerges from all the rest. It's a crazed, prolonged cackle that rises in pitch and volume and goes on for ten, fifteen seconds before ending in a hacking cough. Who is this mysterious ubiquitous laugher? She is at every standup comic's show. She is at every jazz, blues and folk festival. She is at conventions, bar mitzvahs, quincanearas, confirmations, birthday parties, fiftieth anniversaries. She attends thousands of television broadcasts. She finds her way into canned laughter tapes for sitcoms. I hope she is getting paid for this zestfullly demented croak. She will perhaps remain always a mystery; or, perhaps, hers is a hereditary position. The laugh is handed down from mother to daughter. A prolonged course is required, of drinking and smoking, of finding the least appropriate moment to laugh. There is, perhaps, a Laugher's Guild, and this particular laugh is replicated amongst the guild members, as they fan out to infiltrate all the parties, concerts and shows on earth. She is the comedians' best friend. Every comic has a witty riposte for the Laugh. The Laugh evokes more laughter, everywhere it is heard. One cannot hear the laugh and not laugh.

This laugher is here throughout the summer months, every Friday and Saturday night.

In the campground, conversation waxes into a background roar, couples stroll up and down the little streets hanging on to one another for support. In other words, our campground is full of drunks. I can't put it any more politely.

Fox and I are mildly reclusive. She is the only person I can tolerate being with for more than an hour. She feels the same way about me. Occasionally, we meet remarkable people, interesting people who capture our hearts.

One such person was David. He had come into the campground driving a big Flootweed diesel coach, and parked in the site just opposite to ours. I saw him cleaning his rig, and walking his very old hound dog. He was tall, fifty-ish, with a moon-round face, a balding pate of black hair, well built with a bit of spread around the waistline. He was, from a distance of ten yards, a perfectly ordinary looking camper.

On his first night, we heard screaming coming from his coach.

Okay, none of our business.

The next day I uttered some banal question: "How do you like your Flootweed?" David came walking across the lane as if reeled on a fishing line. He wanted to talk.

His story unfolded simply enough. He was traveling with his eighty seven year old mother. She was suffering advanced Alzheimer's Disease. David's solution to a quagmire of problems regarding her care was to buy a big motor coach and tour with his mother for as long as possible. The alternative was to place her in a special care facility, at a cost of some six to eight thousand dollars a month.

David had worked as a software designer for many years but was not rich, nor was his mother's estate vast. With the sale of her house, she might be worth a few hundred thousand dollars. She was strong as a horse and showed few signs of slowing down. Her mind was gone. She had seen her last lucid moment

David was caught between a number of conflicting impulses.

He wore his heart close to the surface, tears came easily to him.

He did not want to abandon his mother to the anonymous care of a nursing home. Nor did he want to eat up his legacy paying for it. Decent care for his mother would have run through her estate in a couple of years. I understood this normal desire to have some money left for his own retirement. As I read it, David was acting from both affection and personal need. He had been very close to his mother, and now she required round the clock care. Her disease was deeply progressed. She needed constant watching because she was capable of literally anything. She could run out of the coach naked and take a poop. She was becoming more and more dangerous as a passenger in the coach. She had only recently pulled down the DVD player and other television accessories onto David's head as he was driving sixty miles an hour. He had learned to travel with many rolls of duct tape. When his mother seemed agitated, he augmented the seat belts with several wrappings of tape.

I suppose, if one considers the whole picture, David was completely insane, and this scenario may have a taint of elder abuse. It's so difficult to winkle out the true moral ground in this situation. Having witnessed David's efforts, I can dismiss the issue of abuse. His job was unimaginably difficult, especially as he had no help.

We liked him! He was kind to us. He was funny, a great story teller, a wit of improbable proportions. He had the sort of face that would have been great on TV commercials, the silly-perky salesman of cookies or laundry soap, with his pop eyes and his huge grin. He was a Character, Capital "C".

His basset hound was named Dawg. It is impossible to conceive a more ancient animal that could still be alive and walking on four feet. Dawg's droopy features had descended into a satiric cartoon-basset mournfulness, his lips always full of bubbling spit, his gait a rolling, slow topple that somehow functioned to get him to where he needed to unload his daily crap. In that respect he was in better shape than David's poor mom, who crapped like a four month old baby.

This was a sadly compelling situation.

David hired me to take a portrait session of himself and his mother. I brought my backdrops and camera gear to his coach. Amanda (his mother) was completely disconnected from reality; her expression was a glare of annoyance aimed at nothing. No eye contact, no words that registered as pertaining to the situation. She might cry out, "Gotcha! Hey!" or "Where's Bess Truman?"

In order to keep an eye on his mother, David spent most nights with her sleeping in the same bed. I couldn't help but think: this is pretty weird, a grown man sleeping in the same bed with his mother. But the whole situation was unique and it was better not to judge, not to presume. Amanda was at the stage of deterioration where she could jump up in the middle of the night and take off running.

David existed in a state of exhaustion and sleep deprivation. His only respite came when his mother slept two or three hours, taking these naps without any pattern. David could only sleep when Amanda was asleep; and then it wasn't a deep sleep. He had taken an immense task!

Sometimes he emerged from the coach, face streaked with tears of stress. He had gone through yet another wrestling match with his irascible mother. "I don't know how long I can take this," he said. Yet his attention was riveted to every sound from the coach. We visited at the picnic table: he always stood, said he preferred it. He'd stand there, six foot three, while Fox and I sat, and we'd talk, but David's eyes were always swinging around to his long, striped RV. He was in a state of hyper-vigilance.

I was never quite sure whether to admire or pity him, whether to regard him as a hero or a lunatic. I still don't completely fathom his motivation. I DO know that, a year from the last time we saw him, he is still driving around the Western United States, his mother duct taped to the passenger seat while he describes the view to her, keeping up a banter that seems to soothe her. Is he as demented as his mother or is he a knight of filial devotion? Is he hopelessly greedy or does he simply love his mother and not want to see her rot in a nursing home?

I don't know. I don't care. The situation is more complex than any of these easy polarities. We stay in touch. We are friends.

An epilogue. David's mother passed away in June of last year. David went back to Southern California to handle the estate. He then returned to his Class A motorcoach and has been in contact with us as he wanders the western states,

recovering from his ordeal.

Jeff

One day I hung my photography business card from the campground bulletin board. I got a phone call from a man who needed my services immediately.

"Can you work today, in the next hour or so?"

I said sure, what's the gig?

"I want you to take pictures of my horses", he told me. "I have two Vaulting Horses up in a stable just a minute from here."

He was in the campground inside his Hurricane motorhome. He was calling me from across the curve in the lane, from Site 32. I could see him sitting in the driver's seat, or The Captain's Chair, as it's called, speaking on his cell phone. I told him to look to the left to spot a brown and cream colored coach. He did so. We waved at one another.

Okay, I said, give me fifteen minutes.

He came along, walking. He had a Belgian Bulldog on a leash, a stubby black thing that looked like a swollen Pug.

Jeff was a presentable man of average physique. Blond hair, blue eyes, glasses, beard. There was something tweaky about his eyes, something that I couldn't pin down.

We sat across from one another at the picnic table outside my coach. He was pleasant, a little loose, a little naughty; no stuffed shirt. We kicked off our relationship with some light goofy banter. He smoked. I smoked. A shared vice is always a bond.

He had only the motorhome for transport, so we used my car. Our destination was a nearby stable. He took me into the middle of a big meadow to introduce me to Shadow and Cheri. These are called Vaulting Horses because they are part of a particular sport in the horse world that involves gymnastic and dance, movement on the backs of the horses. It's an "up and coming sport", and I use the quotation marks because nothing could be more ancient and venerable than the practice of working in harmony with a horse, standing, sitting, sliding, upside down, sideways.

Jeff's horses were huge. Shadow was solid black with dark brown fringes near his hooves. Cheri was mostly white, with a long brown tail that fluffed in the wind she made as she galloped. The horses had bushel basket sized hooves and broad strong backs. They were gorgeous! At first I was a little frightened of them. I soon realized that they were sweet friendly horses, easy going and a pleasure to photograph.

I made an instant assumption that Jeff was a man with a lot of money. He owned two exotic horses. He paid for their stabling and upkeep. He drove a hundred thousand dollar motor home. He liked gourmet food and wine.

He paid me that day in several rolls of dollar coins. This was unusual. It's the kind of legal tender common in gambling casinos.

After spending a couple hours with him I felt somewhat out of my center, un-grounded. I felt spacey and slightly unreal.

I have a way of analyzing people by the feelings that are evoked in my own psyche. Something was off kilter. These signals made me cautious. Jeff had come along at a miraculous moment with regard to my finances. Here I was, broke. Here comes Jeff, throwing me a lot of work.

In the next week, I took photos of Jeff with one horse, then Jeff with the other horse, Jeff with his dog, Jeff's dog, Jeff's dog with the horses, both of Jeff's horses, and just plain Jeff.

He revealed that he was a gourmet chef, and showed me a book he was writing about cooking with wine. He needed photographs for the book cover. I got my portrait gear while he donned a full chef's outfit.

Workwise, this was great. There was a minor problem. Every time I spent a few hours with Jeff, I felt off kilter, like I had gone up in a theme park ride, one of those "Cyclone" things that whirls people around, upside down, twisting through figure eights. I felt dizzy and off balance without benefit of the ride.

There was another problem. Jeff had written me two checks for a total of five hundred dollars. Both checks bounced. Jeff apologized, explaining that one of his trust fund checks had failed to arrive. I wasn't worried about getting the money. A week later Jeff gave me cash for the full amount, plus payment for the fee I had incurred by bouncing a check of my own.

I understood by now that Jeff was a little crackers. He talked constantly of a hundred different projects he was doing. He had his horses, his gourmet cookery, his favorite wines. He was planning to publish a book on firehouses. Just firehouses. He needed me to take pictures of firehouses.

Great!

Every few days, Jeff drove his Hurricane coach out of the campground and vanished. A few days later he returned. He always had a guest in his coach. First, there was his friend Rick. This ordinary looking man in suit and tie was in some circumstance that rendered him temporarily homeless.

Jeff liked helping friends through crises. Rick was having a crisis. Jeff drove away for another few days, and returned with Ben. Rick was gone, now Ben was hanging in Jeff's coach for a while as he worked out matters with his wife.

I asked several times what Jeff did for a living, but his answers were confusing. I learned, after considerable effort, that Jeff worked for the state of California as an inspector of geriatric care facilities. It was a job that had him traveling from place to place all over the state, holding a clipboard, visiting elder care hospitals.

There were problems. Jeff was always in trouble with his superiors. He had difficulty getting paid. He had four different addresses. He had an office in Cotati. He had a mailbox in Menlo Park. He collected mileage compensation, per diem expenses. There was a complex formula for hours spent at work. He had to produce receipts, invoices, a lot of paperwork. He had six different cards describing him in six different kinds of business, each with vague terms like "Specialist," "Tech Writer", "Acquisitions Consultant", "Certification Monitor". Letters followed these terms, like "EH&S", "MGL", "T-Short Term Y and L".

I didn't understand it. His explanations made no sense.

Sometimes Jeff would return to the campground plastered on Napa wine. He rescued three homeless Mexicans, and for a while his coach looked like a bodega without neon signs. The campground management gave him some flack about this behavior. He couldn't bring multiple guests into the campground without paying for them. He could not become a homeless shelter.

Who the hell is this guy? One day he tells me he's going off to buy a hot air balloon. Then he went off to price a sailboat.

I'm baffled. He's got to be rich, I thought. Unless ..unless the rolls of dollar coins indicated a secret life spent in gambling casinos. He might be a compulsive gambler whose fortunes fluctuated wildly. That scenario made some sense.

Every time Jeff returned to the campground, his Hurricane Motorcoach had another dent, another busted tail light, another smashed rear view mirror. His coach was the RV equivalent of Kid Sheleen, Lee Marvin's gunfighter character in the film Cat Ballou. . He lost bits of his body, one gunfight at a time.

Jeff's motor coach was Kid Sheleen. The rear fender was held together by fiberglass tape. The tail light lenses were covered with red gel paper purchased in a photography store.

What happened to the horses? I had to ask Jeff one day, what about Shadow and Cheri?

"Oh," he explained, "I had to move them to another stable. The lady at the last stable has friends in Oregon."

What?

Jeff vanished for several weeks, and I thought that episode of my life was over. He turned up again at the campground. This time he wanted me to accompany him to photograph firehouses in a circuit going from San Jose to Guerneville. It would be three hundred miles in a day. I was to drive to Menlo Park, meet him at a particular address and go with him in his coach as we scoped out firehouses and I took pictures.

I arrived to find the given address was a neighborhood convenience store, the kind with a deli, cigarettes, liquor, lotto tickets. The motorcoach was parked around the corner from the store. When I knocked on the door of the coach, Jeff let me in. Three Latino men were sitting at the table. Jeff introduced me to Ramon, Esteban and Jaime. They were migrant workers who were just leaving to pick lettuce in Watsonville.

Jeff walked through the store, front to back, went behind the deli counter as if he owned the place, took some piroshki out of the freezer case and threw them into a microwave. The woman at the deli allowed him to do this. The store's owner had no problem. Jeff was an old friend. He used the store as his headquarters. He introduced me all around as "an incredible guy".

The Belgian Bulldog, Toby, was the stupidest dog I've ever met. Jeff doted on the creature. The dog was about five months old. He didn't do much; just sat there and slobbered. Jeff planned to stud him out; he was a pricey and newly popular breed. I learned something about Belgian Bulldogs. The bitches have to be artificially inseminated. The breed is anatomically incapable of doing the act of copulation. They smother to death, or their genitals invert, or something.

We were sitting at the coach's little booth-table when Jeff said, "Uh oh, here comes my ex-wife." I looked out the window and saw a woman across the street, walking a pair of Belgian Bulldogs. She was thin, forty-ish, mildly attractive but sour of demeanor. Jeff ran outside to intercept her. There was yelling. I heard only phrases. She was saying "I can't be taking this......without.....you always do this, goddammit....what about the .....Where's the money you owe me?......Walt wants to get paid too....you son of a....."

After a while, Jeff returned sheepishly. He took a medicine bottle from his dresser and swallowed two pills. His face was red and his hands were shaking.

Jeff always smiled. He was still smiling.

I learned that the house adjacent to the store in Menlo Park had been Jeff's home during his seventeen years of marriage to Marlene. The store owners tolerated Jeff as a kindly eccentric. I don't know why they allowed him to behave that way in their store, but they did.

Jeff had a kind heart and wanted to help everyone. He promised to be here, there, everywhere, so many places and promises that he couldn't keep a fraction of them. His life was chaos.

He was writing another book, about his travels through Northern California with his Belgian Bulldog. It was called "Toby And Me." He sent me an email copy of the manuscript. It was a sort of diary of mishaps, run-ins with policemen, nights spent in store parking lots. He attended church services at eight different denominations. He fought with his work superiors, misplaced pay checks or received them late and at the wrong address. There was no mention of casinos. Just a picture of an odd man sustaining an odd lifestyle by odd means. He was broke; he was rich. He took care of people in trouble. He was in trouble.

We drove around that day in the South Bay, going to firehouses. They all looked the same. Driving that coach through traffic in Palo Alto and San Jose was a Keystone Cops routine. If Jeff wanted to stop somewhere to do something, to buy a Scrapple, to have me photograph a firehouse, he just parked the motorcoach wherever it happened to be. In the middle of a street; at an intersection, in a handicapped zone. He was oblivious of drivers who were blocked, trapped, screaming at him. They didn't exist. His attention was on an entirely different plane. He drove the coach, used the phone, talked to me, commented on pretty women. All at the same time. He clipped trees, knocked down stop signs, blithely rolled over hedges and flower plots.

The police never bothered us that day. It was a miracle. Or fool's luck.

When it came time to pay me, he got out his checkbook.

"Uh, Jeff...I've already had one bad experience with your checks."

"This one is good, don't worry. I just made the deposit today. I'd pay you cash, but I've only got a hundred dollars on me."

He didn't leave me much choice. I took the check, and later deposited it with a prayer. A week later it returned marked "insufficient funds."

I emailed Jeff again. And again, in a week, he paid up. I knew by this time that he wasn't rich, that he was possibly a gambler, that his income had peaks and valleys. I was beginning to feel sorry for the guy. I offered to accept half the amount of my billing. I felt a little guilty about having photographed such boring subjects as firehouses. I knew Jeff was in trouble.

He insisted that I get paid the full fee. He told me that I had earned it, I had worked for it, and that I deserved to be paid regardless of his problems.

I took the money. I will never accept another check from Jeff. I'm compassionate, but not stupid.

Jeff vanished again for several weeks. Then he turned up, parked his coach out beyond the campground gate. It sat there all day. I didn't hear from him, just saw the coach, with all its wounds, scratches and ad lib repairs. A few hours later it was gone.

It happened again a week later. There was the coach, in ever worse condition.

I got a call from Jeff. He needed some advice. Should he take a loan on the motorcoach? He could get twenty thousand by using it as collateral.

I understood by now that Jeff had no other real estate, no place to live besides the banged up RV. "Don't be a fool," I said, "that's your home. Taking a loan on it will only end in disaster."

He ignored me. He showed up with more money, hired me to go driving to more firehouses. I tried to dissuade him. "Jeff" I argued, "who's going to buy a picture book about firehouses? Maybe OLD firehouses, historic firehouses, but not these made-in-the-eighties cut outs. They're boring, Jeff. Boring!"

He insisted that I work; after all, I needed money, didn't I?

I pointed out that he needed money too.

"No, I have money coming in," he informed me. "I have an inheritance that just came through." He had inheritances every two or three weeks. In spite of my suspicions, I never found any evidence putting him in gambling casinos.

I think he just had a skill at badgering and annoying people until they gave him money so he'd go away.

Then he lost his job with the state. That was supposedly a 'fireproof' job. State workers don't get fired unless they murder their supervisor or burn down the capitol building. Jeff evidently crossed the line with his shenanigans. He postponed facility inspections so he could help homeless acquaintances. He missed appointments in Sacramento for re-certification. He fouled up, totally.

I never lost the sense of dislocation when I spent time with Jeff. I did, however, learn to respect him. I found out that he had been through forty versions of hell in his life; that he had been institutionalized for schizophrenia. That he had weighed four hundred eighty pounds, had gastric bypass surgery and now weighed a hundred and eighty. He was nuts but that didn't mean he was without courage or dignity. At the center of his soul he was a man with compassion and a deep lonely sadness.

Every day was, for Jeff, a life and death struggle to keep himself afloat. His frenetic activity was a survival mechanism. He needed to do all these things, to keep himself from plunging deep down into his psychosis.

I have no clue what happened to the horses, or whether those WERE his horses.

Though I haven't seen him for months, I'm pretty certain I'll see Jeff again.

A postscript. Jeff sends out emails to his friends. They're mass mailings to about twenty people. None have been addressed to me. They are fragments of conversations Jeff is having with two or three other people. I don't know why I'm privy to these communications. I can only speculate it's a form of exhibitionism on the part of Jeff. I am an involuntary but fascinated spectator to events in Jeff's life. There was a string of emails regarding the establishment of a book store called "Uncle Toby's Book Nook". It was a specialty book store , carrying books on dogs, horses, wines, gourmet cooking and children's storybooks. Jeff went so far as to buy business equipment and make a down payment on a space for the business. He envisioned a chain of Uncle Toby's Book Nooks, one in every large city in the country. He saw the Uncle Toby brand name spreading across the world. The logo for this flourishing business empire would be one of the photos I took of Jeff with Toby.

For five weeks the emails kept coming. They built up to a high of excitement before things began to fall apart. Jeff had hired a book keeper and a store manager for the local branch. The first store was scheduled to open and the clock was ticking. Emails came in conveying decisions to buy cash registers and book inventory. Orders were made. I don't know how Jeff got the credit but cases of books began to arrive at the store location. Bills came due. They were not paid. Payroll had to be met. Jeff's employees were given bad checks.

Jeff promised to make good on the checks. The email stream multiplied and outrage was voiced. Jeff's employees were shocked and angry. The email conversation spread like a plague as more and more people were drawn into disputes involving things in Jeff's past of which I had no knowledge.

I sat at my computer screaming in my head, "Don't work for this guy, he's a nut case!" I thought about emailing Jeff's "staff". Then I thought better of it.

This had a heartbreaking and familiar ring to it. I was witnessing a strangely charismatic schizophrenic wreak havoc upon a small group of people. I had been lucky. I got paid. I got on the "Jeff Train" at a time when there was still money in the train's coffers.

I don't know how Jeff got his income. Did he play the horses? The stock market?

I haven't a clue.

Chapter Nineteen: Coach Watching

Some newer motor coaches have a sinister look. Most sinister are the recent year models, the bus-sized, diesel-fed luxury machines with multiple slide-out rooms. Especially striking are the coaches painted in black with dazzle-camouflage type pin stripes swooping upward from front to back along the sleek waxy facades. They're box-shaped, and their engines gurgle efficiently as they enter a campground, nosing in like a shark amongst prey-fish. They have a look as if devised by some totalitarian state as an instrument of crowd control. Add some razor hubcaps and wire the windows against Molotov cocktails, and you have the ideal war-wagon, a "kampfmobil", suited perfectly for putting down riots in Johannesburg or Miami Beach.

Ah, but these are Recreational Vehicles! Let's not forget this fact! Half a million bucks a pop, they're made to tote all the comforts of home into a full service campground with electric hookup, plumbing, internet, full reception television and clean water. Their owners are usually too proud to take them 'boondocking', off the grid..

I was in front of our coach looking for something in my car, when one of these elephants rolled towards the empty space just opposite our site. It was a rear engine diesel "pusher", it had a black leather apron across its face to protect it from bugs and road grime. Holes were cut for head and signal lights, and the huge tinted windows prevented any view to its interior. Coming behind, attached by a tow bar, was a canary-yellow HumVee. The coach turned sleekly into the opposite site, but the turn wasn't wide enough: it almost knocked out the three foot high electrical pole for its site service, and the rear wheel bumped over the sewer hole. It got partway into the slot, wheezed and backed out, trying again.

In the first place, he should have detached his Humvee before attempting to park the coach. He didn't. He just kept rolling through.

I went inside to summon Fox, as I anticipated a great people-watching opportunity. Campground life is all about this: meeting, watching, schmoozing, gossiping, endless hanging-out during the busy summer months before Labor Day siphons out the multitude of soft-core kampers from their more dedicated brethren.

I watched from behind our awning. I could almost hear Star Wars' Darth Vader theme music as this behemoth maneuvered for the right angle. Duh-dut du-duh dut ta duh! After three initial attempts and two more go-around-the-blocks, it finally settled with a wheeze, Psssshhhhh!, of its air brakes and the engine cut out.

The coach had a drivers' side door and it opened with a hum as its electronic steps accordianed outward.

Breathing somewhat heavily, a man in his mid sixties dropped to the ground. He weighed about three hundred, and wore gangsta shorts that showed his butt crack. He had no shirt, and his breasts went all the way around to his back, so that beneath his shoulder blades his wattles descended into a thicket of back hair. He was bald except for a grey stubble that uniformly coated his ovoid head like shaven porcupine quills. From his lips dangled a cigarette.

Fox and I were thrilled at the spectacle. "His name is Earl", I breathed to my partner, and she nodded with a giggle. "Perfect," she agreed. "Earl."

The license on Earl's black monster-coach was from Texas.

He was, apparently, alone. He sidled from place to place around his coach, pulling out an electrical connector wire the size of his fore-arm. He took the cigarette from his lips and flicked it into the dust with some irritation. He seemed aware that he was being watched. I say this because his entire posture and presentation was one made for show: I am bad-ass Earl from Texas, I own a million dollar diesel motor coach, a screaming yellow Humvee, and I can buy any coach in this campground and toss it aside for a new one next month.

Earl didn't like his site. He stomped here, stomped there, sniffed, lit another cigarette, squinted, scratched his big belly, went up the steps, came down the steps again, then picked up his cell phone.

Two minutes later, the yellow-shirts arrived, the ever-perky employees of Kampground Kountry. Yellow Shirts are frequently camping their way around the country, paying their way by indenturing themselves for a period to the big KK. Many are middle aged 'escapees' who have opted out of the race to live full time in their motor homes.

The Yellow Shirts listened to Earl's beefs, and one of them whooshed off on the almost-silent golf cart to obtain some tools. A minute later he was back with the box, and the two of them did something to the electrical hookup, modifying the TV box and god knows what else.

Finally satisfied with his site, Earl proceeded to attach his sewage hose, his water, TV cable. He unfastened his yellow Humvee and drove it around the block to park it at the front of his coach. He owned a Prevost Marathon three-axle diesel with four slide outs, which is about as far as a motor coach can be taken. It's the kind of vehicle used by politicians and country music singers. It had a satellite dish on top that unfurled automatically from its 'down' position and sniffed at the sky until it locked onto its signal.

We didn't see much of Earl after his entrance. He drove off in his yellow humvee and we forgot all about him until, one morning three or four days later, I awoke and the giant Prevost diesel pusher was gone.

That, however, is a fairly typical scene of campground life in high summer. At this moment, I'm typing but I'm also looking out the panoramic front windshield, from which I can see two motorcoaches, two travel trailers and a 'fifth wheel'. The latter type of RV, which is extremely popular, is a huge trailer that gets attached to a special cleat in a hefty pickup truck. I can see a brown-white Winnebuggo, a silver-coffin Airstream, a Newmar Dutch Star, a Fleetwood Prowler and a Montana fifth wheel. It's early evening, some campfires are lit, five or six people are sitting aside each of these RVs, smoking, drinking beer and wine, and having a fine old time. The dogs in campgrounds are extremely well behaved, they get their walkies twice a day and are happy to be part of the proceedings. Later tonight (it's Saturday!), as people get more intoxicated, the volume of their laughter will increase, their conversations will be louder, but nothing really objectionable will occur. It's all good natured. I've only seen real conflict twice in our campground life, once was the blow-up with the German family, and there were the furtive doings of "The Fugitives".

The German family arrived in three rented Class C rigs. There was mama, papa, oldest son and his wife, middle daughter and her husband, and youngest son and his wife. The sons looked like engineers without their lab coats. They had the look of those guys in BMW commercials who watch cars filled with dummies crash into pylons, then make check marks on their clipboards.

They parked in three adjacent sites. When they were satisfied with their parking positions they spilled from the RVs shouting instructions at one another, disagreeing on the order of the chores to be done. The eldest son, named Kurt, pronounced Koort, intended to dominate things and pointed his arm with his index finger extended. The hand drooped slightly, as if the index finger were too heavy. This mannerism was intended to convey commanding competence but only seemed effeminate.

Our campground receives a lot of Germans. They are generally pleasant and arrive with small children who play cheerfully in the pool and take swimming lessons from Papa. They are refreshing and their children have manners that put American parents in something of a bad light.

This group of Germans was not pleasant. Once they had gotten their hoses and plugs squared away, they vanished in a rental car for the evening.

The next morning, as I was having coffee out under the awning, I saw the side doors from three RVs fly open simultaneously, and the entire family of eight was running up and down the lanes, cursing one another in the most vigorous Bavarian accents. Koort got hold of Dieter and gave him an open handed smack, then mama got hold of her daughter-in-law, Sabine, and tore the collar off her jacket.

It was a rum melee! It looked like the aftermath of an English soccer tournament where the home team had lost by six points. It was mid-July and the campground was packed. Everyone jumped from their coaches, trailers, fifth wheels, popups and tents to see what was happening. We enjoyed about ten minutes of cursing, chasing, gender-indifferent brutality. Husband punched brother's wife, Papa put Sabine in a headlock, Mama kicked Dieter, then Koort, then the two daughters-in-law formed a tag team and ganged up on Mama. The women were hefty Germanic types, powerful goddesses from out of the flaming clouds of Valhalla and they tore the men and each other apart.

The fight had fully developed before the campground security arrived in their golf carts. These two yellow-shirts were nonplussed, they had no idea how to stop the fight, and they didn't speak German. They merely got sucked into the maelstrom and the ruckus continued until it simply wore itself out.

Woodson, the owner, had arrived and I thought he was going to eject them, but he didn't. Rent on three sites for a week is rent on three sites for a week. He told Papa, in English, that if anything like this happened again, they would be gone before their campfires could be doused. Koort sat at the picnic table smoking a cigarette with shaking hands. The others returned to their RVs and slammed the doors shut behind them.

There was no more trouble from the German family.

Chapter Twenty: The Fugitives

When we first drove down the long entranceway to the campground, I felt clouded with doubts. Can I adjust to living like this? Won't it be like being on display, every time we want to go outside and sit in our chairs?

We've learned that each motor home or RV has an inviolable aura around it. You don't casually knock on someone's door. In fact, hearing a knock is so rare that it scares us. What's happened? Is there an emergency?

It's so different from living inside houses. The feeling of isolation is much diminished. It's the best of several worlds. There's company and support if needed. There's solitude when that's what we want, just to be left alone.

Most full timers are people with a variety of experiences. They're mature, seasoned, they've been through life. Each of them has a story. They may be eccentric but they are not stupid. A common thread seems to run through the campground, a social fabric that unites the drop-out baby boomers.

Chronic pain is one thread of that fabric. There are bad backs, bum knees, ruptured discs, cataracts, tinnitus, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, plantar fascitis, vascular degeneration, enlarged hearts, spleens, livers, kidneys and compromised lungs. It makes me think that we, as a generation, have lived pretty hard. We have experimented on ourselves, and we have BEEN experimented upon by a stress-laden civilization moving at insane speed, kept aloft on caffeine and prescription drugs. We are the first experimental generation and the results have been mixed.

I don't think a campground attracts these conditions: they're out there a-plenty in the conventional world. The difference is that we KNOW about our neighbors' afflictions. It's a necessity. There are common tasks that require lifting, seeing, hearing, in other words, we need one another's support, hence, the background groans of pain take their place amid the ordinary sounds of revelry.

It's convenient that so many nurses live here. There's always a de-fibrillator when one is needed.

I know I'm drawing a picture of wheezing cripples living in trailers. It isn't like that. The trailers are often half million dollar luxury motor coaches, and the cripples are retired engineers, architects, lawyers, dentists, people who had the sense to get rid of their homes before property values crashed through the rotten timbers of the economy.

Every campground has its own personality. Ours is family –oriented, safe. The owners make their bread and butter during the summer months when mom, dad and the kids get into their RVs and go to some place that isn't very strenuous. Adults are too tired these days to do heavy duty camping with their kids. Kountry Kampground Northbay provides the perfect "out" for exhausted parents. It's also a favorite destination of Canadian and European tourists who want to see San Francisco and the vineyards from a single home base.

Now and then, however, a few creepy people sneak under the home-grown radar.

When we arrived in March of 2005 we knew nothing about how to conduct our lives in a campground. We took a site that was at the center of the northern campground. We had people coming and going on both sides, as well as fore and aft. We had a continual round of new neighbors.

At first this was somewhat unnerving. Soon enough we discovered that if we wanted to schmooze, we could say hello, and if we didn't, we could keep to ourselves and be left alone.

The only problem that wouldn't go away was the strange couple who lived in a teeny weeny trailer in the row immediately behind us.

When I say teeny weeny, I'm talking about an RV model called "The Casita" or "little house". It is nothing more than a sleeping bag with walls. It's interior is about the size of a Japanese capsule hotel room. A person can just about sit upright without banging the head. It has a little sink, a propane burner and a tiny porta-potty that must be emptied frequently.

It's difficult to imagine two people and a Dalmatian dog living full time in one of these wheeled packing crates. Yet they were there, coming and going. Unfortunately, the dog didn't get to come and go. He stayed locked in this dreadfully tiny space. He howled his loneliness and claustrophobic misery in a way that turned our lives into hell. This was our first month at the campground, and this is what we had for neighbors.

Fox and I we went helplessly berserk over this dog. We tried to hatch schemes to liberate him from his plight.

There was something dreadfully "off" about the couple who owned the dog. If I make the statement, "I couldn't look at them", I want you to take me literally.

I...could...not....look...at.....them.

Every time I tried, my eyes seemed to meet a force field that deflected vision. My sight could get to within a foot or so of Ms.X or Mr. Y and then my eyeballs would physically bounce a few feet farther along, repelled by a barrier occupying the space at which I was attempting to look. This was one of the strangest things I have ever experienced.

I asked one of my neighbors to look at the couple next time the opportunity arose. I asked for a brief description of the people who were living within eight yards of our coach. The dog was no problem. I could see the dog when he was let out on a chain. I couldn't see the people. I could hear them, I could make out their voices if not their words, I knew when their pickup truck pulled into and out of the parking space. Fox and I said hello a few times and were completely ignored. That's weird, to greet a person who responds by behaving as if you don't exist.

The next day my other neighbor came over and said, "I'll be damned if I can figure out what they look like. I can't really see them. Maybe they just move so fast I can't draw a bead."

The human eye moves extremely quickly. It wanders, far more than we consciously know. Eye movement is the fastest muscular action in the human body. These lightning quick movements are called saccades. I read a science fiction novel recently in which alien creatures knew how to scan human eye saccades and move only during those micro-seconds when human beings were looking away. This created a 'just-at-the- edge-of- -vision' effect, and gave the aliens a tactical advantage in outmaneuvering their enemies.

Whatever the cause, I could not look at, I could not see these people. They must have wanted so badly to be invisible that they had created a psychological force field. This mysterious couple evaded eye contact, they moved in such a manner as to attract minimum attention. They did not engage in conversation. They had taken the adjective "furtive" to a new level. Somehow, they had established an invisibility matrix, they had tuned in to the collective saccade. Fox couldn't see them. My neighbors saw them more than we did, but not much. My neighbors could detect a few details of clothing or hair color but their faces were enigmas.

Only the dog provided a common ground of agreement that they were there at all. Otherwise, they would have been "the people who weren't there."

When they were home, the dog came out on a chain. He looked at us sadly, wagged his tail and sat quietly, licking his paws. If one of us said, "Hi buddy," he would come to the limit of his chain, hoping for friendly contact.

When the Xys left for the day, which was most days, the dog got stuck inside the little house on wheels. He keened piteously. We were going insane.

Other neighbors began to feel the hurt that lived so tragically in our midst. There was no question that this was animal abuse. Solving the problem was not simple. We could call the Humane Society, but that was tantamount to a death sentence for the dog. We didn't know what the dog's owners would do. If they were criminals, we could find ourselves the targets of retaliation. It wasn't our style to call the authorities. Other and more imaginative solutions had to be found.

The first thing, the simplest thing, was to leave a note.

"Hi neighbors," the note said, "if you would like help with your dog, we would be glad to take him for a walk. Just leave a note on our car if this sounds like a good idea. signed, your neighbors in site 45."

We didn't want them knocking at our door. We didn't want to be involved with the invisible couple. We just wanted access to the dog.

I crossed the lane and taped this note to the door.

The next day there was a response, in the form of another note, on bright yellow paper, attached to THEIR door. It seemed reasonable to assume that this paper was their response to our request.

I went across the lane.

The note was terse. "Buster's fine," it said. "He gets exercise."

Buster wasn't fine. His howls changed to a continuous scratching sound. He was tearing up the inside of the tiny RV. We began hearing a low haunting wail, followed by frantic scraping sounds.

One day the Xys came home, and I heard the woman shouting at Buster. Thwop Thwop Thwop!, she was beating him with a magazine.

We couldn't stand much more of Buster's agony.

Help came in the form of Roscoe and Lulu Martin. They came to the campground in their Winnebago three or four weekends a month, with their dog Barkley. Roscoe was an Aussie merchant seaman with arms full of crude tattoos. He looked the part of the classic rough n' tumble Australian. He was tall and fair, windburned. Lulu was a petite Jewish woman from Long Island, with a great cascade of red-brown hair. She had endured twenty years of an ugly marriage, then more years of frustrating single-ness. Then she met and fell in love with Roscoe.

They spent their weekends around the campfire, drinking beer and laughing at Barkley. Roscoe played wonderfully delicate songs on his guitar. Lulu sighed with adoration. They were an eccentric couple, a love story of two people from opposite ends of the earth who might not meet in a million years. Yet they met, clicked and had been married more than a decade.

Lulu was always bursting with pride for her big Aussie sailor. She was so crazy about Roscoe it oozed from every pore.

Barkley was a Retriever-sized mutt who was obsessed with the hammock. He would jump into the hammock as Roscoe snoozed with a half empty can of Foster's perched on his belly. Together they would tumble to the ground in a tangle of arms, legs and tail. Lulu would emerge from the Winnie to untangle them, and the process would start again. No one begrudged Barkley his love of the hammock. He just didn't understand the concept of sharing.

"He needs a playmate", Lulu said. "We're looking for another dog."

We knew about a dog that needed another family. All that was required was for the Xys to relinquish Buster.

We described Buster's plight to the Martins. "Alrighty," Roscoe said, "on the morrow we shall pay a visit to these blokes and straighten things out. Eh Barkley? You want a friend?" Barkley jumped up into the now-empty hammock, his tongue hanging out, his eyes saying "I love everything about you and everything you do."

The Xys seemed to spend most of the afternoon and evening away from the campground. They left at about eleven, returning at nine or ten o'clock.

Roscoe was going to be the point man. He would knock on the door of the tiny trailer. He would make his offer: we'll take your dog off your hands and give him a good home.

Roscoe had balls of brass and could talk anyone into anything.

At about ten in the morning, Lulu, Fox and I took up positions at our picnic table. Roscoe, leading Barkley on a leash, went across the way and knocked firmly at the door of the tiny RV.

We knew the Xys were home. Their pickup was parked in front. When Roscoe knocked, Buster began shrill barking from inside the RV. The door did not open. Roscoe knocked again. Barkley sat back on his haunches and uttered a low "Ooooo" in response to the frenzied hacks of Buster.

The Xys did't open the door. I saw the curtain move at the tiny window. A frightened eye briefly peered out, then vanished. Buster's shrill alarms must have been deafening from inside the tiny trailer. The Xys couldn't hold out very long.

Roscoe circled the little vehicle, stepping over the hitch, going to the other side and around, back to the door. He knocked hard. "Come on, mates, you're in there," he shouted over the sound of barking dogs. "I don't mean ya harm. I just want to make you an offer."

Four or five minutes passed. It really seemed as if the Xys intended to just wait us out. We were prepared to wait longer.

At last the door opened, the little screen flew against the trailer's flank and Ms. X came outside.

Roscoe stepped backward in sudden revulsion. Even where we sat, the stench was palpable. "Bloody hell," he muttered. Ms. X carefully closed the screen door behind her. I tried to look at her. I could see lanky brown hair, long and dirty. That's all my eyes were permitted to register.

"What do you want?" she asked, flatly.

"This heah's Bahhkley", Roscoe said in his rounded Aussie vowels. "He's lonesome and we heah you have a dog that might want a friend that....."

"Fuck off," Ms X interrupted Roscoe. "I love Buster. He's my dog."

She did a one eighty and went back inside the tiny rig, closing the door. The stink filled the air. How could people live inside that cloud of dog shit smell?

"Fuck off to you too," finished Roscoe. He stood there for a moment. Barkley rubbed his face against Roscoe's leg. Together they walked across the roadway.

"Unbelievable," exclaimed Roscoe. "You would not believe what that place looks like inside. There's stuff everywhere, and most of it's stuck together with dog shit. Ucccchh!"

Thwop thwop thwop, we heard Buster yelp as he was hit with Ms. X's instrument of discipline. The poor animal stopped barking.

"I think, " I said, loudly enough to be heard all up and down the row, "that we need to talk to the management about these people."

Quietly, Roscoe said, "they're up to here with the dog. I sort of saw the guy, or at least I saw something like a man, well, I saw a baseball cap, that's all I saw. Bloody 'ell, they're hard to see, those people. Anyway, he was saying, Let em have the fuckin dog.' He imitated a redneck American accent perfectly. It was funny but our hearts were breaking. "I think something will come loose in the next little bit. No worries, we'll get poor Buster."

I wish I'd had his confidence. We could report the Xys, we could get them thrown out of the campground, but that wouldn't help Buster.

We went down to Roscoe and Lulu's campsite. It was Saturday and the campground was full. The weekly mediocre blues band was warming up on the slab surrounding the pool. Soon they would be belting out "Mustang Sally", and we would go inside, close the windows and read until evening fell.

Barkley jumped into the hammock. Lulu spoke firmly. "Get down, Barkley, down!" Reluctantly, the dog vacated the swinging net. Roscoe popped a Foster's and lay down in the hammock with a sigh. Barkley pushed off with his rear legs and landed atop Roscoe, and the two of them fell to the ground, foam lager slopping from the can and wetting man and dog.

"You bugger, Bahkley," Roscoe laughed. "Got to put him on his lead or he'll never quit." He took the dog and fastened him to twenty five feet of nylon. It put the dog just out of range of the hammock. Barkley lay with his head on his paws. Roscoe picked up the Foster's, brushed some leaves away and returned to the hammock.

"We'll see mates, something will come up. Old Buster's a nice looking dog. He doesn't deserve that treatment." Roscoe took a sip, closed his eyes and drifted with the breeze. Lulu was inside the camper preparing bangers and English muffins.

As night fell, fires were lit, beer and wine were consumed, kids raced around on skateboards, people laughed. The Crazed Laugher cackled her resonant campground-filling laugh, which made everyone within hearing laugh all the harder.

We returned to our coach. Across the way, silence emanated from the tiny trailer. It was hard to keep despair from our hearts.

I experience more pain when I see animals abused than when I see pain inflicted on human beings. Maybe that makes me weird, I don't know. It's just the way it is. Animals can't effectively defend themselves when humans are bent on causing them pain. They're caged, restrained, otherwise helpless. They have no words to express their grief. They have only cries, yelps, whines, screams. They probably don't understand why they're being hurt, why a man or woman is beating or tormenting them. I get very upset when I see an animal treated badly. Buster's plight was like an ice pick in my heart.

Fox was beyond words. Her inchoate stifling made me burn with helpless anger. She could see Buster's thoughts, read his images. It was terrible.

We went to bed that night without hope. It seemed as though we must report the doings of the Xys to Woodson, the campground owner. He would put up with a lot from people to keep the family business operating. But Woodson set a standard, and when his customers violated his rules, they were out of the campground with no warning and no second chance.

We had trouble getting to sleep that night. Buster's pain and the ugliness of the Xys were making our first month of campground life a misery. What if it was always this way? What if there was always some horrible person to make life an ugly ordeal in campgrounds?

About one thirty, we drifted off to sleep. Both of us had bad dreams. My nocturnal visions were a chaos, a commotion of dogs howling, hands beating, pickup trucks spewing pebbles.

I always wake before Fox. I start a pot of coffee, check my email. When the coffee's ready I take a book and go outside, to sit in one of our folding chairs.

I did the usual things. There was something odd about the world, but I couldn't figure out what it was. Something out of place, something missing. For thirty seconds I looked around. I was half asleep, not really connecting the dots. Then I realized that the tiny Casita trailer was gone. The Xys had hooked the thing to their ratty old F-150 and vanished in the night. What they had left behind was Buster, chained to the tree. When I looked at him, he sat up and started wagging his tail.

I crossed the lane, squatted in front of Buster and said hello, giving him a sniff of my hand. He was sweet and friendly, delighted to see me. I unhooked his chain and walked with my hand through his collar over to our coach. I dragged the chain behind, and hooked Buster up to a D-ring on our awning. Then I went inside and woke Fox.

Chapter Twenty One: Bankruptcy Blues

I made the move with Fox into the RV at a moment of crisis in my life. I was beginning to be consumed by debt. It was sustainable, but in a few years it might overwhelm me if I didn't take action.

One morning I woke up, did some simple addition and concluded that I was thirty seven thousand dollars in credit card debt. I still had six thousand to go on my car loan, so that made a debt load of forty three thousand dollars. How could this happen? I'm legally single and without dependents. I own no stocks, bonds, properties or other convertible assets. I am a man utterly without collateral. So, my question "how did this happen?" is a rhetorical utterance, because I know how it happened. I spent more than I earned. It's that simple. If we see this happening on a larger scale, as an entire society goes bankrupt, the same basic laws apply. The only difference between me as an individual and our society is that society, represented by The Government, can print money. The newly printed money is really toy money, but it buys a smidgen of time because it's backed up by history, prestige, momentum and the memory of immense wealth. It may be a few years before anyone notices that United States dollars look like little orange, blue and yellow pieces of paper about three inches long and two inches wide.

I got my first credit card when I was forty-five years old. I had managed to live outside the consumer cycle for all that time, by being either a hippie or a bum. I was a hippie bum when that envelope arrived in the mail, the one that said, "You have already been approved." I thought it was a joke, I laughed. Who would give me a credit card?

I like being approved. I thrive on approval. This Visa Card provided me with a credit limit of two hundred dollars, at an interest rate of twenty three point nine nine percent. Of course, a credit card is not really about its interest rate. Credit cards are a barge full of tricky charges, most of which are confined to the small print. The two most lethal words in the English language, "Adjustable Rate," are stated or implied somewhere in that print. There are annual fees, late fees, cash advance fees, all around Desperate Ignorance fees. You're dumb, and you're desperate, so we'll charge you a fee.

I didn't know any of this at the time. I was living in an in-law unit behind a house in San Geronimo Valley. The area is an enclave of hippies, new age healers, artists, crafts-people and bums hiding out.

I was excited about having two hundred dollars credit. My therapist approved. Having a credit card was a mark of responsibility; it meant I was turning into a mature adult, integrating myself into mainstream society. Provided, of course, that I kept up my payments. How much trouble could I get into, with a two hundred dollar limit?

I didn't know, at the time, that paying minimum on a credit card means that any amount, no matter how trivial, will take your next ten incarnations to pay off, or about six hundred years. Fortunately, credit companies don't track future incarnations. Instead, they sue debtor's spouses or any relative available for the unpaid sum. Eventually, our corporate-controlled government will pass laws allowing credit banks to force you to work off your debt. You will pass your days working in a cubicle in South Dakota, making collection calls for the bank and living in dorms with twenty-four beds to a room. Lunch will be a choice between bologna or peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Spam or Macaroni and cheese are the menu for dinner. There WILL be movies every night, hell, we got plenty of movies. Disney will have the exclusive contract to provide Credit Default Camps with DVDs.

I racked up my two hundred dollar debt in one day. I bought a car. That was the kind of car I got in those days. I used a courtesy check from the card company (special interest rate of 29.9 percent) and bought an'82 Honda Civic. It turned out to be a good car. The starter was broken, so the car had to be hot-wired every time I wanted to drive. The gas tank had a crack halfway down its side. Anything over six gallons sent a flammable trickle of gasoline through this crack. I could never put more than five gallons in the tank. I had to be very careful about that. I got full disclosure from the seller about the vehicle's problems. "Watch out how much gas you put in," he told me. "Five gallons tops and keep track of what you got left in the tank when you fill. Best thing is to just get three and half. I had a friend with the same problem, and he blew himself up."

I got great mileage from that little beige go-cart. Five gallons was a hundred twenty miles, easy. It was a bargain, it was a reliable vehicle.

I paid my monthly minimum on time, every month. In about six months, the card company notified me that my limit had been raised to five hundred dollars. Fantastic! I bought a set of tires for the car.

I was living as a free-lance anything: janitor, painter, carpet cleaner. I worked as a flower delivery driver. I survived by the seat of my pants.

My monthly card payments were fifteen dollars. Not a problem, I always put a check in the mail at the last possible minute. I was always on time.

The card company raised my limit to a thousand dollars. It felt good, it meant that Visa trusted me.

I wanted to become a professional photographer. I bought my first digital camera. The payments went up to about twenty eight dollars a month.

Then I got another envelope in the mail. This one was from MasterCharge. "You have already been approved!"

Nice! They were offering me twenty five hundred dollars credit at a rate of sixteen point four percent. It was a Gold Card. I wondered about these metallic cards. Gold, Silver, Platinum. I wondered if there were cards for people on different economic rungs. Cards with metals both common and uncommon. A Uranium Card for nuclear physicists, with radioactive interest rates and loan half-lives that take millions of years to pay off. An Iron Card for weight lifters. The rates just go up and down, up and down. Heavy Metal Cards, shaped like guitars, for rock and rollers. Lithium cards for manic-depressives, with rates that plunge and soar and plunge again.

I believe that credit banks operate with a fundamental yet covert philosophy. It's called the We Don't Give A Shit If You Pay Us Back Principle. By the time you have gone through the agonies of ballooning credit balances, of paying monthly minimums on seven different cards, of borrowing from one card to pay another, of paying late fees, overcharge fees, balance transfer fees and been suckered into "credit insurance" programs that protect you from being unable to pay your credit card bills, you have put so much money into the pockets of Citibank and Chase that even if you default, they've made a profit of twelve thousand percent, which more than offsets your default, when it comes.

In U.S. Dependencies like Guam, Saipan and Puerto Rico, Congress will enact loopholes in anti-usury laws, allowing Citibank to be what it really is: a loan shark. Rates of a hundred percent, payable next week or they send a goon to break your finger. What's the "vig", Louie?

Since I was unable to get credit, that is, low interest bank credit for a legitimate business loan, I used my cards to start my digital photography business. The problem was that my business took ten years to get going, and after five years I was paying almost six hundred dollars a month just to maintain the minimum payments on all those cards.

This was like taking six crisp one hundred dollar bills out of my wallet and setting a match to them. That money was gone, it would not reduce my debt, it would not purchase anything. It was gone. Wasted. At this point my repayment would take twenty six thousand years, or nine hundred future incarnations.

I was having a good spell in my business. I was enjoying some cash flow. I was always rescued by a last minute thing, a portrait session, a wedding, a house to paint, sale of a print or two. Somehow, I was able to keep up with these incredible payments. I made some large payments, bringing my balance down. That's when the next round of offers came in: "You Have Already Been Approved!"

Wow. Capital One allowed me five thousand dollars in credit at a rate of eleven point nine percent. I took it! I needed a more sophisticated camera and some portrait lights.

Pretty soon I was running five credit cards and I lost track of my total debt. I guess I lost track on purpose, so that I could live in denial.

I was the ideal customer for credit card banks. I racked up a lot of credit yet made minimum payments, on time. There is no better earner for a bank than a consumer like me. They don't want me to pay off my loan, heavens no! They want to gradually load me up on debt, drag me down into the depths of high interest compound rates and keep me there for the rest of my life.

The thrill began to wear off. For a while, I actually defined wealth as the amount of one's credit. If I had a few hundred grand in credit, I was in pretty good shape, wasn't I? Aren't we defined by our debt? I saw my world as a kind of spending party. Need a new printer? Cool, I've got credit. I'll keep making the minimum payments. I always do.

I'll admit it was fun. I had a great time. I am a compulsive person. I will always be a compulsive person. In this, I am not much different from the average American. We are all compulsive. We are made compulsive by the continual stimulus of commercial images of glamorous exciting products.

I never considered bankruptcy. I held the almighty Credit Rating in such awe that I would do nothing to besmirch it. Meanwhile, I became more and more miserable, as my anxieties focused on making the monthly minimum payments and seeing my income going into the fire. Get out the matches, dude, time to burn some more hundred-dollar bills. I began to feel as though I were carrying a mountain on my back. I knew that I would never get rid of this mountain, that the rest of my life would be spent holding up this Sisyphian mass as it grew larger and larger.

This wasn't fun any more. My outlook changed in a single week. One day, I simply looked at my situation. Within another few days I was there; I was prepared to file for bankruptcy.

What changed?

It occurred to me that the almighty Credit Rating is a hoax. People go in fear of losing points on their credit rating. People obsess on the difference between six fifty and seven hundred. The terror of losing points on one's credit rating is a ubiquitous American terror. It rides invisibly on people's shoulders like a pair of wooden stocks, like a medieval torture device. Companies thrive on milking people's obsession with their credit score. Go to freecreditreport dot com and find out your score. You'll learn that your free credit report isn't free. It's a lure to sell credit monitoring services. For a monthly fee a consumer can track his or her credit rating and get even more obsessive.

Every American can get a free credit report once a year. That's the law. You won't get it at freecreditreport dot com. You'll just get more crazy.

Radio stations are flooded with commercials for get rich quick instructional CDs, books and videos. Every time I hear the word "free" on the radio I laugh and I visualize gullible wannabe entrepreneurs panting to exploit this amazing opportunity. I've always had a maxim regarding American marketing techniques. It's simple: contempt sells. Marketers view the American consumer as a stupid, gullible and very hungry five year old child with a fist full of money that it would rather spend on toys than on necessities. This toddler justifies spending money on toys because it believes that at some point in the future it'll somehow make a lot of money, and THEN it will pay for the necessities. Meanwhile it's having too much fun. Don't worry. It'll figure out a scheme to get rich without working very hard.

Thousands of commercials promise the consumer an income of five to ten thousand dollars a month by investing in the stock market. Best of all, the CD is free! Or how about this? Make money using the internet! You don't have to buy inventory, you don't have to store inventory, all you have to do is sell stuff on Ebay that you don't even have! Let your computer do your work for you. Earn money while you sleep! And best of all, the CD explaining how to pull off this miracle is FREE! Wow, (the radio voice says) now I can quit my day job, and pretty soon I'll own two houses!

Hey, wait, what about Real Estate?! There's a book telling me how to earn a fortune buying up foreclosed properties. The introductory CD is Free! The word free should be spelled eff arr dollar sign dollar sign. FR$$.

The people making money on these programs are the people selling the book or CD. If the program worked so well, why would these entrepreneurs spawn thousands of competitors?

Let me admit that, initially, my new philosophy, my 'credit score is a hoax' pose was a bit of bravado. I was still scared. What if one of us got sick? What if I wanted a new car? What if Fox and I decide to upgrade to a better motorhome? What if what if what if?

I'll relieve you of the suspense right now. My bankruptcy was a complete success. The first thing that happened was that car dealers showered me with offers. It's the standard procedure after a bankruptcy. There are business entities whose most lucrative product is helping bankrupts re-establish their credit. Car dealers are foremost among these entities. All kinds of people wanted to help me re-establish my credit. Offers poured in. The first few months, the offers were terrible. The credit cards were loaded with sign-up fees and yearly fees, and the interest rates would shame any loan shark. I got those "You have already been approved" deals all the time. After a few months the offers settled down, became more like the offers I got before I went bankrupt. I accepted one card: no sign up fee, no yearly fee, interest at eleven percent. I keep that one credit card, and I stay below two thousand dollars in total debt. I make large monthly payments when my balance gets too high. Every offer that comes along goes into the wastebasket. I have one credit card. Two thousand dollar limit. Period.

Wait a minute, wait a minute! I have to confess something. I wrote that last paragraph before gas prices hit the roof. It's getting tougher to function and make ends meet. I sort of broke my rule. I haven't exceeded my limit. I did, however, take on another credit card. That card is sitting in my wallet like a radioactive pellet, just waiting to leak through and contaminate my world. It scares the hell out of me, while at the same time it comforts me. Its purpose is to backdrop serious emergencies. I haven't used it. I don't want to use it. I pray that nothing happens to force me to use it. I just pray and pray.

My attitudes have changed. I don't spend money just to have something I want, like a new printer. My camera gear is getting old. That's the way it will have to be. I can't afford the latest, neatest gear.

What I'm saying is that it's almost impossible to escape the world of credit cards. They keep coming back like the Terminator's metal arm.

Have I mentioned that I feel like I'm really getting screwed? Have I just come out and said it in so many words?

I feel choked with anger. I am so frustrated that I need a pitcher of margaritas or a bottle of Vicodin. (I am, of course, exaggerating dramatically for effect here. I'm not an alkie or a dope fiend, no no no.) There are a hundred rip offs dipping into my pocket every day. There are dozens of virtually undetectable drains on my income. This isn't a free country! It's a very expensive country.

In the last decade I have found myself trapped by invincible shackles. I have hit the wall of middle age. I have just enough medical and chronic pain conditions to place me at the very center of the health insurance vortex. I have no choice but to be a consumer. I am now the victim of medical blackmail. Insurance and drugs are so expensive; they dominate every aspect of my life. Why? How can one blood pressure pill cost four dollars? It costs pennies to make. We all know that. The Big Pharm companies scream "Research and Development! Marketing! How can we invent those orphan drugs that will help a few thousand people and conspicuously demonstrate our compassion? Our expenses are staggering!"

There there, Big Pharm, don't cry. Poor Pfizer, you've worked so hard to ensure that our aging males can have erections. Don't sulk in a corner, Glaxo. We know how much you love us. Your efforts have controlled our cholesterol, have saved our lives time and again! Your executives deserve those boats and planes, they've earned those vacations at hotels in Dubai that look like flying saucers and cost four thousand dollars a night. They deserve the call girls and the Bugati sports cars, the Rolex watches and the gated estates overlooking the beach at St. Moritz. They've worked hard for our benefit.

I often fantasize about what I could do if I didn't spend half my income every year on health insurance and prescription co-payments. I wouldn't be living in constant anxiety. I might be able to save enough money to have another RV journey and have some fun. I might be able to get my car fixed. I could repair that weird flub flub sound it makes in the right front wheel. I could afford my dog's dental work, the removal of those extra teeth that are going to become a nightmare in three or four years.

I'm old enough to remember a time when health care wasn't everyone's ball and chain. I remember when a factory worker could support a family and mom could stay home and pay some attention to the kids. I remember when people didn't endure sour stomachs and panic attacks thinking about their credit card debt. I remember when my dad made enough money from his small business to provide a decent middle class standard of living for his family. I'm old enough to remember the way things shifted so suddenly in the late seventies and early eighties. No one had ever heard of HMOs. Then, suddenly, they were everywhere. Our big industries, like steel and auto manufacture were under assault by the Japanese.

De-regulate everything! We have to compete with a free hand!

I'm not an economist or a political scientist, I don't understand how our society was co-opted and undermined by an inferno of greed. I only know that a corrupt and devious corporate cruelty has turned middle class people into paupers and terrified debtors.

Dammit, I'm angry!

To further amplify my vulnerability, I have taken yet another credit card. I spent up to the limit on the last one after my car broke down. I needed brakes, a catalytic converter and a new clutch.

My debt has climbed to about three thousand dollars, and I'm paying about a hundred dollars a month. I can live with that. The debt stopped climbing a year ago. I've kept pace with my payments; I occasionally pay the bill down by a few dollars. This is familiar territory me. I understand the game, and the futile squirming that I must suffer to keep afloat because I'm not much of a money person. I'm an artist-person, woe is me. I am aware that more millions of people are now living the same way. The economy has gotten bad and there are many new recruits to the kind of life I've always lived. I have a certain amount of psychological armor against this insecurity. It doesn't bother me so much. I know that a lot of people, new to poverty and crushing debt, are quaking with anxiety and dread. I'm sad about those people.

A few days ago I was getting into my car in a large parking lot. I was approached by a well dressed woman. "Excuse, me, sir," she asked with apparent reluctance. "I've had a bit of trouble and I..."

I didn't force her to end her pitch. She was begging. I held up my hand and said, "Sure, no problem, I have a couple bucks worth of change. I've been through hard times myself."

She relaxed, her shoulders came down from around her ears. She wasn't a funky street person holding a sign at a busy intersection. She looked like a soccer mom with two kids. This was my first encounter with a more upscale type of beggar. Looks can deceive. She might be the forerunner of a new type of beggar, the housewife-Oxycontin scammer. I don't care. If she needs money for drugs, let her buy drugs. I'd prefer that she find treatment but if she's willing to beg drug money in a Safeway parking lot that means she's NOT willing to be a hooker, not yet.

Some stop-light panhandlers have a dog. Some sit in wheelchairs. There are busy intersections claimed as territory by beggars. Their signs are variations of the same message. "Anything will help." If the person is able-bodied the sign might say "Will work for food." I hold no animus towards them. They stand for hours in a noisy place clogged with car fumes and endure a thousand humiliations. I could tell that the well-dressed woman in her early thirties was not used to this kind of activity. The look on her face was shattering. She was humiliated but she tried to appear as if this was just a momentary blip, like she had left her wallet at home and had run out of gas. She was going to beg just this once, it wasn't a thing she would do tomorrow and the day after that. I saw her move on to the next person and the next. They recoiled, they refused. She kept on, walking gently up to people with an "Excuse me, sir, I'm in a bit of trouble...Excuse me ma'am ". I don't care if she spent the money for booze or drugs. I never care about that. Begging is a profession that has always been with the human community. I've begged and panhandled. I lived at the bottom tier of society for years. I know how difficult is the work of begging.

Yesterday I was in another parking lot, just coming from Raley's with two plastic bags of food. It was five-ish, getting dark. A woman approached me wearing a white down jacket and slacks. Her hair was well kept, her makeup was in place.

"Excuse me, sir" she began and again I held up my hand. "No problem,"  
I said, "I have a couple bucks worth of change."

As I dug through my bag, I asked her a question.

"How many hours a day do you do this?"

"All day. I've been here since eight this morning. My feet are killing me. I'm done in an hour. Eight to six," she laughed bitterly, "it's a full time job."

"What are people like?" I wondered. "Do they help you?"

She leaned back against a car, taking the weight off her feet. The bright blue light of the mercury vapor lamps made it easy to see her face. She didn't look like an addict. She looked like a thirty five year old woman trapped in the grip of circumstances beyond her control. She's divorced. Her ex-husband's vanished, not paying child support. She's three months behind on the rent. Laid off from her job after twelve years of loyal service to the firm. Unemployment benefits are running out. Can't find a job anywhere. She's desperate and she wants her kids to have the things they've always had. Karate lessons. A music teacher. Little by little she's lost the ability to provide, and must make some hard choices.

So...panhandling in supermarket parking lots becomes an option, a desperate option that she takes with greatest reluctance.

"About one person in ten is nice." she replied. "You can't believe the abuse I get out here. 'What's the matter with you?'" she imitated a shrill pitiless voice, "'Go get a job like a decent person. Shame on you!' Women are the worst, especially the ones of a certain age, over forty five, fifty. I don't bother with the twenty-somethings. They're just overgrown high school kids, they tell me to go fuck myself. Excuse my language. And you know what? I stand up for myself. I tell them they don't know what's going on in my life, they're not qualified to judge me."

She paused as some unpleasant image washed across her mind.

"Some of the men," she said, "some of the men, are...you know...they think I'm a hooker. They say the most disgusting things. I've got a radar for that type now, it works pretty well...what would you call that, 'Jerk-dar?'"

"Maybe 'ass-illoscope'" I quipped, not sure she would get the pun, if she knew the term 'Oscilloscope'.

"Perfect!" She got the pun. "What about 'asshole-ascope'."

"Better, even better!" I affirmed. "There you go!"

Her eyes shifted. A woman carrying groceries was loading her car just down the row. She needed to get back to work.

"Thank you," she said with sincerity. "I have to make every minute count."

"Go on," I said, "Go back to work."

She had to push herself away from the car. She was bone tired. She didn't know whether her next approach would end in kindness or invective. Her eyes thanked me for treating her like a human being.

With each passing week I expect to see more of these parking lot beggars.

Begging is one of the hardest jobs in the world.

This has everything to do with the move of Fox and me from house to motor home. We were not forced to move out of the house. True, It got too expensive. We saw our resources diminishing and a future where our age was going up as our income was going down. We saw an economy edging towards bankruptcy and we wanted OUT as quickly as possible, we wanted a way to reduce our earthly footprint.

We WANTED to live in a motor home! After the trip in Yertle, the epic voyage to Arches National Park, the idea became more and more appealing. We didn't know whether or not it would work out. It was a tremendous risk.

Declaring bankruptcy was also a tremendous risk. What if "they" came and took away our motor home? It was half in my name and half in Fox's. What if "they" took my camera, my computer, my car? I didn't know they wouldn't. I asked several lawyer friends of mine, and they assured me that such things would not happen. I had no real assets. My possessions were exempt. I would be fine.

In spite of these reassurances, Fox and I spent a nervous couple of months.

In 2005 there was a major change in the laws regarding bankruptcy. These changes tended to favor the card companies. A bill was passed called The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. I love that: Consumer Protection Act. The ostensible purpose of this act was to prevent people from racking up a lot of debt with the intention of going bankrupt after spending oodles of the bank's money. How is this protecting consumers? Give me a break. How many people do you know that are exploiting credit card companies with the intention of defaulting? One, two, a hundred? How many have you heard about? Is it so common that an act of congress is required to protect us from these unscrupulous spenders? The real motive behind this Act is that the banks foresee a flood of bankruptcies looming in the near future. They want to be ready for this tsunami of debt, they want to get their rich butts to higher ground so that when the bankruptcies mount into the millions, they will be safe and capable of forcing debtors into losing the pants they wear, the shoes they walk in. I can see it now, America. People walking around in blankets.

I hired a good lawyer. She was a little hobbit of a woman who wore thick glasses and neat business suits. I had the feeling that in court she was a cyclone, that her antagonists quaked in terror when she opened her briefcase. She charged one fee, two thousand dollars, in advance. She always let me know what was happening, she communicated with me regularly, instructed me in what to do and what not to do.

One of the stipulations of the new law is that debtors must pass two courses in money management and credit awareness. To this effect, a host of companies have arisen to cater to the expanding market of bankruptcy cases. The whole shebang is done online, and it costs about three hundred dollars. The debtor must first pass a credit counseling course. The material in this course is not difficult. The test is a multiple-choice quiz with some pretty silly questions.

The questions go like this: "What is the correct way to use credit cards?"

Answer One: To buy cool things like cell phones, shoes and car accessories.

Answer Two: To finance trips to Hawaii and Disneyland.

Answer Three: To be used as an occasional aid to pay emergency expenses when cash is short.

Question: What is the best way to manage one's credit account?

Answer One: Put off paying to the last minute.

Answer Two: Build up a lot of debt and make minimum payments.

Answer Three: Pay off debt as it arises, maintaining the lowest possible balance.

These courses are designed for the average American genius. It's a case of having questions reveal more than the answers. What kind of people find these questions challenging? My god, are we in trouble, here in America? Is this what we've become? Consumer morons?

I am the American economy in microcosm. I was encouraged, no, I was seduced, into borrowing beyond my means. Who am I? I am poor! I don't feel poor, I live a great life, but on paper, I am poor. Why would banks lend me money? Yes, I am responsible for my debt. My greed is at fault. No question.

I was a frustrated man with no money being treated to the most sophisticated sales technique on the planet. Borrow this money! We're offering it to you, it's easy, just apply online and we'll have your credit approved in five minutes.

Got it almost paid off? Here, we'll lend you some more. We approve of you! You're a good person! We like you! Here's five grand. You can pay it off any time you want, just make sure you meet your minimum and we'll get along great. No one will call you, no letters will arrive. Gee, you know what? Our records show that you have five credit cards, and owe a total of twenty thousand dollars. That makes you a good credit risk! You wouldn't have all these cards and owe all this money unless banks trusted you. Here, another ten grand in credit. Fine! Pay us back when you can!

The credit counseling companies who advertise so heavily on radio and television are flourishing. They will help you pay down your debt! In fact, there are reputable companies and disreputable companies. The business is predicated on the simple fact that many credit banks are willing to let you pay off forty percent of your loan at a reduced monthly rate. This is a fact. Almost all of your card debt can be drastically reduced. The counseling agency is there to do the paperwork, run interference for you, comfort you in your distress. That's what the honest companies do. The dishonest ones will have you send your payments directly to them. They will take your money and do nothing. They will not pay your creditors. They will reassure you that all these harassing phone calls that have begun are normal. Wait a couple of months and they'll die down. Don't worry, sir, the man with the generic foreign accent on the phone says, don't worry this is the normal procedure. We have negotiated your credit to ten percent of what it was. We are paying your creditors, and in eighteen months you will be free of debt! Isn't that wonderful?

I called one of these crooks. He wanted to start the program right away. "I can sign you up right now, you can stop worrying about the letters and the phone calls."

"How does it work?" I ask.

"It's simple, " he replies, "you just make one monthly payment to our office and we'll take care of the rest."

"That sounds easy enough," I say.

"Great, then you're ready to start," responds the man.

"Don't you need my application, some paperwork?" I question.

"Oh no, that's not necessary, just give me your phone number, social security number and address and we'll get started on the paperwork right away."

"Uhhh...I think I'll wait on that." I hung up very quickly. I felt as if I had avoided a rattlesnake bite.

I never got any letters or phone calls. I made every monthly minimum payment until my lawyer filed the papers. Within three months, all my creditors had been notified, and there was no point in calling me or harassing me.

I took, and passed, the two courses, via the internet. I filled out a lot of paperwork. I waited some months while my lawyer did whatever it was that she did.

Then my hearing date was scheduled. I was going to walk into a room where it was possible that representatives of all my creditors would confront me with my irresponsible behavior, accuse me of being a crook, question me about purchases I had made three months before I filed for bankruptcy. Why did you buy this lens in August? When did you decide you were going to file for Chapter Eleven? Did you know you were going to file when you bought this lens? How many assets did you transfer in the year before you filed? What are you concealing from us?

Waiting outside the courtroom I was nervous. My lawyer toddled up, looking harmlessly fierce, like a rabbit with giant fangs. "Just answer the questions," she advised. "Don't add anything, don't talk too much. It'll be fine."

The doors opened and I entered the hearing room. Five or six other cases were on the docket, so I sat in a folding chair with my fellow bankrupts, while three trustees sat behind a semi-circular dais. A tape recorder was turned on.

The trustees didn't look like monsters. They looked kind of nice.

My case was first on the docket. The blonde trustee swore me in. Then she asked me two questions.

"Do you understand the implications of your filing Chapter Eleven?"

"Yes, I do, ma'am."

"Have you been truthful with the trustee in your documentation?"

"Yes I have, ma'am."

"Thank you very much, you will be notified of your bankruptcy within sixty days."

That was it. I walked out of the courtroom a free man. It was a very happy day in my life. I could return to my cozy motor home and tell Fox that it was over. Nobody was going to take anything away from us. Except my forty three thousand dollars in debt.

America is, after all, a wonderful country. The system needs a little tweaking, but it is a wonderful country.

Chapter Twenty Two: The Feral Cat Wars

One morning we got up for our coffee and there were five kittens and their mother under our coach. The kittens looked to be about six to eight weeks old, just about that age when kittens are cute, cuddly and adoptable. The problem was that these were feral kittens, we couldn't touch them and they were under our coach because we made a habit of leaving food out for feral cats.

We are soft, sentimental, animal-loving fools.

We named them, variously, Sirius, Chester, Bullet One, Bullet Two and Bullet Three. The very act of naming implies emotional attachment, it encourages bonding and we knew, immediately, that these kittens had to go.

The mama was always on hand, watching, protecting. The alpha cat in the campground, a monster I called Hitler, was likely the kittens' father. In the world of feral and wild cats, the father is often a kittens' biggest threat. Males will kill their offspring to encourage the mother to go into heat, to eliminate competition, or, in Hitler's case, because he was just plain crazy. Rather than see that happen, we immediately resolved to trap the cats and place them. If possible.

We knew a vet who took on feral cats. He required utter discretion, lest he be over-run by people dropping cats on his doorstep. A few people were privy to the vet's practice of vaccinating, checking and domesticating ferals, and finding homes for them. He had a procedure, which was simple: bring the cats in a cage or carrier and leave them at his rear door on Sunday night.

We had never trapped an animal before, but we knew we had to move quickly. If there was a single female kitten, we would soon have five hundred cats. The mama cat would be producing kittens, the kittens would be producing more kittens, and so forth.

A local rental place had a humane trap for six dollars a day. We got this device and went to work.

The trap was a wire mesh cage about a twelve inches wide, twelve inches high and three feet long. The door lifted up and was held in place by a latch, which was connected to a rod, which was connected to a tin plate that rose to a forty five degree angle when it was set. Bait went behind the spring plate, and when an animal stepped on the plate, the door slammed shut behind it. Simple, right?

As soon as we got the trap, we set it about ten yards behind our coach, in a place where we could see it from our bedroom window. At about five in the afternoon, I baited the trap with pieces of KFC chicken. There was plenty of summer light. I set the spring plate and went inside to watch the trap.

In minutes, one of the Bullets sniffed cautiously at the cage. He walked around it, tried to get the chicken with his paw through the mesh, but was not successful. Then he entered the trap and went towards the chicken. Calmly, he stepped over the spring plate, gobbled up the chicken and stepped over the plate on his way out.

Maybe he was lucky. I baited the trap again. Once more, a gray kitten explored the environs of the cage, sniffed here, sniffed there, and then went inside the wire tunnel to fetch the chicken. This time, he stepped on the spring plate.

Nothing happened. The kitten ate the food, walked all over the spring plate, and left the trap.

I went outside with a can of WD-40 and lubricated all the rods and springs, and made sure the spring plate was now hair-trigger ready. I adjusted it so that only a fraction of an inch of rod remained within the wire loop that kept it from dropping the door and activating the trap.

Again, one of the kittens did the whole routine, sniffing, trying for the food outside the trap and cautiously entering the device. This time the trap worked. The kitten stepped on the plate, the door slammed shut.

The poor critter went insane with terror for about ten seconds, and then sat there abjectly. It broke our hearts. Nonetheless, we proceeded with determination. The next step would be to transfer the kitten to a holding carrier. This was a zippered pet transporter that we had made comfortable with warm towels, food and water.

When I appeared, wearing my heavy gloves, and approached the cage, the kitten went ballistic and began to hurl itself against the walls of the trap with such force that I feared it would kill itself. Fox was behind me, and she held the trap door open while I attempted to reach in and grab the cat.

It was impossible. The terrified strength of this cat was so immense that it fought its way clear of my hands and ran off into the nearby storage lot.

This was not so simple as we had hoped. It was, in fact, downright depressing.

I will never forget the feeling of panic-strength running through that two pound kitten. It scared me! Here I was, a two hundred pound man, unable to remove a small animal from a cage and put it in another cage.

In re-thinking our procedures, I hit upon the idea of using a tranquilizer. A bit of research showed me that this was feasible. I consulted with our vet friend and he advised me about dosages. He provided us with a calibrated syringe and some tranquilizer.

We promptly squirted the medicine into a little bit of wet cat food, and placed it into the trap. Then we retired to our observation window and waited. And waited. And waited some more.

The question had become, just how smart are these cats? They had observed one of their own being trapped and he had got away scot free. Maybe he went back to the feral kitty lounge and put up a notice: BEWARE! TRAP IN THE AREA! As the cats lounged around the clubhouse, smoking their cigarettes, the kitten who escaped boasted to his buddies about his courage and defiance.

We changed our modus operandi. The trap's location shifted another ten feet away from the coach. Still within view, but now in some brush that could be piled up. We covered the trap with a blue tarp and laid leaves and sticks over it. We could see the door, and we could see the inside of the trap.

It was time to place more drugged bait and see if we could lure any of the kittens. Kentucky Fried Chicken was the most succulent bait. The smell wafted over the campground, calling cats from half a mile away.

The next cat that approached the trap was Hitler. We had been hoping for this. We intended to drive Hitler twenty miles and release him near a farm where he would find plenty of ways to survive. We loathed this bully. He had torn up our favorite ferals, crippled one of them three times, ripped off the tip of another's ear. Every cat was terrified of Hitler.

I was at the window when I saw the big ugly tom sniff at the cage. "Fox," I whispered urgently, "It's Hitler. At the trap!"  
She came into the bedroom and we looked out the window, holding our breath. Hitler paced warily around. He was hungry. He wanted that KFC. At last, he entered the cage and walked, step by step, towards the spring that would bring down the door. I knew he was plenty smart. I knew he could dodge the spring and take the food. But he was huge. He had to slink to get all the way into the cage. He could knock that plate down and be trapped.

And that is exactly what happened. I saw it. He stepped on the plate. The door began to fall. I did a high five with Fox, taking my eyes away from the trap for a twentieth of a second. "Yes!" we exulted. We heard the door as it whammed onto the front of the cage. A bare micro-second had passed. When we looked into the cage, expecting to see an enraged Hitler, he was not there. The door was closed, the trap had been sprung by Hitler's paw, but he had gotten out of there in the tiny fraction of a second it had taken for the door to slam shut. He had taken the chicken.

We couldn't believe it. We looked again and again. The cage was empty. I tried to visualize how that cat could turn in such a confined space and beat the door shut. I could only surmise that he had thrust some part of his body through the door before it snapped closed. A paw, or his nose, and that had been enough for him to push the door open and escape. The speed and power of that reaction was beyond comprehension.

We swallowed our disappointment and went out to re-bait the trap.

There had been no food servings to the ferals according to our usual twice-daily schedule. They were hungry. Within ten minutes, little Sirius approached the trap and sprung it. We settled down to wait for the tranquilizer to take effect. Sirius sat inside the cage and finished off the chicken.

I put on my heavy gloves, and, half an hour later, approched the cage from behind. Sirius couldn't see me yet. He was conscious. He watched Fox from the cage's interior. I was getting around the back of the thing. I reached and brushed the leaves off the tarp and slowly removed the tarp from off the trap. Sirius grew agitated, but the edge was off the panic. He was still banging himself against the cage. I wanted to move quickly. As Fox kneeled to my side, I opened the door, reached inside and took a strong grip of the kitten by the scruff of the neck.

My god, he fought! I held him and wouldn't let go. Fox had the transport at hand, and I just managed to get the writhing animal into the carrier and zipped it up. Whew! That was one. And it had been difficult!

We pressed our luck and set up the trap again, in a different spot, still visible from the coach if we sat near the door. Again, I put the tarp over it and covered it with leaves. I increased the dose of the drug.. It had seemed to help but it wasn't exactly a knockout dose.

In just a few minutes one of the kittens came for the chicken and tripped the plate. The door slammed shut and the kitten was confined. It struggled for a minute, but the tight dark interior seemed to be soothing. The cat took the chicken and gobbled it down.

We waited an hour and approached the trap. We were going to repeat the procedure, using a second cat carrier. These were collapsible affairs that went together easily. They had secure zippers that started at the top of the screened door and each zipper could be slid towards some point at the carrier's opening where they would meet. I had decided to have them zipped all the way to a point near the top corner of the opening. That would leave a hole small enough to slip the cat through and shut it quickly.

I donned my heavy gloves and, while Fox spoke gently to the kitten, I went behind and freed the cage from the leaves and the tarp.

Once the trap was in the open air, the cat went berserk. The dose was having some effect, but not enough. While Fox held open the trap's door I reached inside and got the kitten's scruff and began pulling him out of the cage. He was fighting so hard I had to focus all my attention on keeping my gloved fingers around his fur. As I got him to the door he began to slip. I was losing him! Fox, without thinking, thrust her hands towards the kitten to stop his escape. She had forgotten to put on her gloves. The cat bit her knuckle all the way to the bone on both sides. Fox let him go, screaming, but the cat actually hung from her hand for a moment by its teeth. I tried to grab it again, and it zinged off into the foliage.

This was scary. A cat bite is a serious thing. Immediately, Fox said, "tourniquet, tourniquet. And get me a box cutter, some kind of razor, quick!" I ran to fetch a packet of shoe laces. A box cutter was right on my desk. When I emerged from the coach, Fox took the box cutter and made four quick incisions, opening up each tooth mark. She began sucking blood from the wound and spitting it out. Sucking and spitting, sucking and spitting. "Tourniquet my wrist, " she instructed, and I wrapped a shoelace around her arm, restricting the flow of blood. When she was satisfied that she had sucked out all the saliva, she nodded at her bloody finger. "Wrap it," she said, and I took the tourniquet from her wrist and put it around the wounded finger and tied it tight.

I knew that Nurse Practitioner Laurie was two spots down from us. I ran to her door. I explained what happened and she grabbed her medical kit and came racing back to our coach. Fox was inside, washing her mouth out with peroxide. All these actions happened within about ninety seconds, no thought was involved, it was pure spontaneous crisis management.

The bleeding had stopped. Fox was breathing hard, pale and frightened.

"That's good," Laurie said, "you got a tourniquet. Did you suck out the blood and saliva?"

"Yes," Fox said. Her voice was shaking. I put my arm around her and she fell into my embrace, sobbing.

Laurie turned Fox's hand around, examining the entrance wounds. "Wow", she said. "Deep wounds. Probably right to the bone."

"I could feel his teeth grinding on me, it felt like he bit right through to the other side, like his teeth met", Fox said.  
"He might have gone through the cartilege here, in your knuckle."

"Should we go to the ER?" I asked. My voice, too, was shaking. The adrenaline level was enough to put the veins in my forehead into stark relief.

"The ER is going to be a bigger hassle than it's worth at this point. They'll bring out the rabies shots and the animal control squad will show up here with their nets, but they won't catch anything. They never do. Has this kitten behaved at all weirdly? Has it followed normal kitten routine?"

"As far as I know," Fox replied. "It's eyes are clear and the coat is good. He or she looks healthy."

"Okay," said Laurie. "I'm going to give you a full spectrum antibiotic, a strong one. Let's wash out this wound, thoroughly. Can you make it to my wheel?"

Fox shook affirmative, and I half carried her over to Laurie's fifth wheel. I stayed outside while our friend thoroughly cleaned the wound and wrapped it in gauze.

When the women came back outside, Laurie said, "If you hadn't used the tourniquet and sucked the blood out first thing, I would send you to the ER. But you did exactly the right thing. We'll watch you for a while and see if the wound gets infected. Otherwise, I think you should go home and get some rest. I called a friend, a doctor. He'll see you tomorrow. Give him a call." She handed us a card with the information.

I led a shaky Fox back to our coach and we went inside. I thought it best just to reassert a normal rhythm. I put on a movie, held Fox while she sobbed from residual terror and shock. It wasn't "just a kitten". It was a terrified feral animal without any health screening.

After a time, she calmed down and we watched the film.

The next day we called the doctor that Laurie had recommended. His receptionist made an appointment for us immediately, and we were in his office by noon.

Dr. Bergman was a corpulent man who looked to be in his fifties. His eyes sparkled with a peculiar sardonic wit. He was so heavy that he breathed hard when he moved. The sound of his breath was a counterpoint to everything he did, and he was aware of this fact. "I know I sound like I'm going to die at any second," he quipped, "but I'm sure I'll at least get you through this appointment. I do everything bad, everything. Smoke, drink, eat sausage."  
He gestured at his bulk like a clown pointing to some imaginary assailant. "But then again, I'm seventy eight. Really."

We were appropriately astonished.

"I'm content with being seventy eight. If I get to be seventy nine, that will be good too. Now, about this cat bite. Serious things, bites from feral cats. Tell me everything about it."

We went into great detail: the tourniquets, the cutting of the wounds and the spitting out of the cat saliva. Fox's mouthwash with peroxide drew an approving grunt from the doctor. We described nurse Laurie's ministrations and the broad spectrum antibiotic.

"Well, let me tell you," the doctor wheezed. "You did everything right. Have you taken some survival courses?"

"I work with animals," Fox offered. "I've been through a few crises. And my cat, Agate, was bitten by a rattlesnake. I managed to pull her through."

It was true about Agate. Fox had watched in horror as a rattler struck her cat as she played in the canyon below her house. Fox tore down the hill with a kitchen knife, but the snake had retreated into the rocks. She swiftly tourniqueted the bite, cut open the wound and sucked, spit, sucked, spit. Agate was in shock. So was Fox, but she got Agate to a veterinary hospital in just a few minutes, running lights and passing cars wildly. The animal hospital told her to write off Agate, she was a goner. Fox refused to accept the prognosis. She screamed, wept, badgered, until the staff took Agate into the ER, gave her the appropriate medications. The veterinary surgeon had to cut away about half the paw but Agate survived, recovered and was able to walk normally.

"I'll give you a shot of antibiotics, and I'll put you on the same broad spectrum Laurie had in her kit." Dr. Bergman delicately examined Fox's finger, which was now quite swollen.

"I know it hurts," he said, "but I don't see infection. I think the cartilege of the knuckle took most of the bite, and you won't be able to bend that finger for a few weeks. We'll just keep an eye on you. I think you'll be all right."

The final score was ferals two, Fox'n Art, three. We succeeded in trapping and transferring four cats to the carriers. One of them figured out the zipper mechanism and escaped during the night. By Sunday evening we had three carriers with a cat in each one. We put them at the vet's back door, left a note, and gave a prayer for the destinies of these wild kittens, hoping that their lives would be something other than brutal and short.

We would never again feed and nurture feral cats. After this episode, our emotional bond to these unfortunate animals quietly expired.

Chapter Twenty Three: The Psychic Speaks

Fox's cell phone tinkled its cascade of musical notes. I was at the computer and Fox was behind me on the couch.

She listened for a moment, and responded, "Yes, this is Fox D-----. Yes, I do work with animals.....". More words were spoken on the other end, and Fox interrupted. "Wait wait. All I need is the dog's name at this point. If I want other information, I'll ask. Sometimes knowing too many facts will taint my reading. Just give me a few minutes. Let me see if I can contact the dog. His name is Mikki? Okay."

Fox rested the phone on her knee, straightened her posture, and seemed to be staring at a spot about two feet in front of her eyes. Her eyes were de-focused as she loosed her imagination into a receptive mode. Her breathing grew deeper, and there was a tingle of energy in her nerves, as if she had been switched on to some current that now raced through her body.

She picked up the phone. "I see a male dog, very small. A Yorkie, maybe. No, don't answer me, just let me talk until I'm finished. There's a fire, and he's running. The area looks like San Diego, maybe the suburbs. Forest fire, trees burning near this house. His family's house. There are mom, dad, and two kids, the kids are about nine or ten. Mikki's their baby, they love Mikki. The fire comes and the parents bundle the kids into the car. They can't find Mikki. The kids are screaming where's Mikki, where's Mikki? But Mikki's hiding behind a shelf in the garage, he's so scared. The sounds of the trees burning, the crackle is very painful to his ears. The car pulls out of the garage and Mikki chases after it, gets out before the garage door closes. He runs and runs after the car, and the kids see him, they're screaming at their parents stop for Mikki, stop for Mikki, but the parents are scared, they don't stop. The fire is really close. Mikki sees the kids faces, crying as they look out the car's back window. Mikki runs until he can't keep up with the car, but he keeps following their scent until he loses it. His paws are bleeding he's run so far, but the fire is now distant, it isn't threatening any more."  
I could hear the voice of the person through Fox's little cell speaker. "Oh my god," I heard distinctly.

A sheen of sweat coats Fox's forehead. She speaks with urgency, words come out fast, a torrent of words. "Mikki can barely walk but he's so thirsty and hungry that he keeps moving. He's in a place where all the signs are in Spanish. There are a lot of people, crowds walking, and Mikki's afraid. He stops behind a restaurant or a fast food place and there's dirty water in a bucket and he drinks it. There's a dumpster with food garbage, and there are other animals, wild and scary..."

I've seen this happen before, but rarely with such elaborate detail. And what a story! It's like some Hallmark or Disney movie, but it's real!

"A man comes outside and sees Mikki" Fox continued. "He brings bowls with some hamburger and clean water and beckons Mikki to come inside a little fenced area where he can eat without being bothered. He leaves Mikki there and goes back inside. Mikki crawls under some wooden crates and goes to sleep. He wakes when his paws hurt too much. He can barely walk. He stays in this place for a while, until his paws feel a little better. Then some men come and load the crates into a truck, and Mikki hobbles out through the open gate and goes down the road. Some kids see him and one of them catches him before he can hide. He tries to bite but he's too weak to defend himself."

Fox stops here and begins to weep. A sound comes from the phone. I can hear the woman on the other end also weeping.

"It's okay," Fox reassures. "I just can't believe how these kids treated Mikki. I'm not going to tell you that. You don't need these images. They drove around in a car playing loud Spanish music and laughing. They treated Mikki like a toy. Mikki bit and fought, so they tossed him onto a busy street. He just managed to get to safety. He tried to hide behind some barrels, but a man found him and took him with a net on a pole, took him to a place with a lot of dogs barking, a lot of fear. No one hurt Mikki after that. He was moved once more to a small kennel. He was treated well and his injuries were looked after."

Fox slumped, exhausted. Her color was grey. She was breathing hard, as if she had been Mikki and had run all that distance, suffered all those trials. Tears pooled at the point of her chin.

The woman on the phone was speaking. Fox responded. "No wonder Mikki would go nuts when your cleaning lady comes. Does she speak any English? Can you get her to speak only English? Yes, that would help. Mikki's not going to like the sound of Spanish."

She listened for a moment. "Don't hold that against him. No wonder he bit you when you tried to clean his paws. His paws will always be sensitive.. Where did you find Mikki?"

Fox listened. "So the San Diego Yorkie Rescue got a call from Tijuana? Amazing. I can tell how much you love Mikki. Do you smoke? I didn't want to tell you this, but I guess it's relevant. Those kids burned him a couple times with cigarettes."

Fox listened to the answer. "It doesn't matter. Mikki can't tell the difference. It's still smoking. You'll have to smoke somewhere Mikki can't see you. Anything to do with smoking will scare him, and he'll get aggressive. Was everything done to try and contact his original family?"

Fox listened, nodded her head. "You have to do that. You have? That's good. Maybe they lost their home, who knows? You did your best. Well .now you have Mikki."

I could hear the effusions from the woman on the phone. She was weeping. Fox was weeping. Every part of the story she had gotten from Mikki could be corroborated. He had been picked up by Tijuana Animal Control, and when a rescue organization specializing in Yorkshire Terriers was patrolling the kennels, they found Mikki.

The new place was filled with people who cared for Mikki, soothed him and loved him. He had no tags, no collar. His feet were lacerated, and he had cigarette burns on his body. He was nursed back to health, and then a picture of him was posted on the internet. Three months passed with no one to claim him, then he was put up for adoption. That's when Fox's new client saw him online and drove to San Diego to bring him home to Northern California.

I can't explain how Fox achieves these readings, these transfers of information from an animal's experience into her own. Science scoffs; but I see it happen, I see her readings corroborated time and again. Science is not adequate to encompass such mysteries, so science says, "Impossible."

Everything is possible.

Sometimes, Fox can describe an animal's experiences without having met the animal. All she needs is a name or a photograph. What is going on here? This isn't a television show, this isn't a gimmick. It happens and it has real consequences. Animals are re-united with their people, pets are healed of old trauma by having a witness. All kinds of strange things happen in Fox's universe.

Chapter Twenty Four: Animal Farm

"T-Wheeeeoooo! T-wheeeeoooo!" The peaock must be half a mile away, in the meadow. All the wild birds gather next to the creek: geese, turkey, guinea fowl, peacocks and peahens, free ranging chicken. The peacock's cry is so penetrating it sounds like he's four feet away. A peacock's call sounds very feline. It sounds like a four hundred pound pussycat in heat. The peahen has a completely different sound. One of them has adopted us and we are privileged to endure her call at an intimate distance. Gwendolyn (so she's dubbed) is a formidable animal, with a beak that could gut a bison, and the claws of a raptor. It's not much of a stretch to imagine her as the evolutionary descendant of Tyrannosaurus Rex. Her neck muscles can propel her head and beak at incredible velocity. I used my camera's shutter to clock her speed. I had noticed, every time I attempted a photo of her feeding at the yard's weeds, that her body and feet were perfectly focused, but her head and neck always blurred, going faster than my shutter could catch. So I ratcheted up to 1/300 of a second, and then I began stopping the action of her whipping upper half.

That is fast!

Her call sounds as if made by a mechanical device. It's so inorganic that I expect it to be the product of a synthesizer and a loudspeaker.

It begins simply enough. "Toot." That's it. "Toot." Gwendolyn, when she has nothing important to convey, just goes "toot".

Then she ratchets up her vocal repertoire.

"HONK heeeeee! HONK heeee!" This is a message to the feral cats. "Get out of the way, I'm coming to eat from your dishes, and I'm mad! Somebody ate my chick last night. This is the third chick this year et by you bastards! I AM UPSET!".

The ferals, who had been munching at a pie tin of Purina, scatter to the perimeter of the yard. Gwendolyn appears from behind our coach, struts around to demonstrate her implacability. She passes under the coach from left to right, then comes around the front. "HONK heeeee!" She says, "goddam cat bastards. I can 't watch my chicks twenty four hours a day! HONK heeeee! I know it was you, Hitler."

She accuses the universally hated scumbag cat bully. The other cats relax. Whew! They whisper, she thinks it was Hitler.

Shhhh! You are SO stupid, Liberty chides her twin. Don't let her hear you!

Gwendolyn straddles the tin pie plate that contains the kibble. Whoosh, Her neck descends, a food pellet vanishes inside her gullet. The she dips her beak delicately into the water bowl. Blup blup, she drinks. Whoosh! another pellet disappears. After each pellet, a drink of water, blup blup. When she's eaten eight or nine pellets, she puts the fronts of both her claws on the pie tin and tips it over, scattering Purina in the gravel.

"HONK heeeeee!" she utters contemptuously, and walks away, heading down towards the creek where all the wild birds assemble. Might as well get the fixin's for another egg. If she hides it well, and watches the little chick like a, well, like a peahen, the little critter will survive long enough to grow to full size. Then it could scare the spray out of any feral cat, racoon, coyote, possum, goat or burro that dares to try anything.

Peahens are not anywhere near as dumb as peacocks. Gwendolyn has it all figured out. Where to eat, where to drink, where to sleep, who to scare. Maybe one out of six of her chicks survive to become adults, about right for the natural balance of the place.

Now the burros start screaming. "HAW HAW HAW wheeeeze!" . They're hungry. They're not wild like the other critters. They're in with the goats and the sheep and they have to wait for their food. They sound like they're being strangled. Nothing, and I mean nothing, makes as much noise as a hungry burro. You could put them down by the airport next to the jets and they would drown out the roar of a 747 at full throttle.

"Wheeeze HAW wheeeeze HAW!" It's unbelievable. If you've never heard it before, you will throw yourself and your children to the ground, you will cover the body of your youngest child, certain that something is coming out of the river, something very big and nasty that isn't supposed to appear on this warm summer day, something much like the creature who rose dripping from the Hudson River last night as you watched "Cloverfield" on your DVD player, inside your diaper- filled Winnebago Flexer, after the kids had gone to sleep. Now THAT was a scary movie, although you kinda wish they'd shown more of the monster. But this noise, this haw haw wheeze thing, this is so loud and your nerves are so twitchy from dreaming about the movie that you've thrown your kids into the tulip beds and almost crushed a brilliant blue and red rooster that had no business walking around free in a campground that should be civilized.

A tall, white haired guy wearing a yellow KK shirt says, "Ma'am that's just the burros gettin' their lunch, nothin' to worry about."

"What?" she says, over the din.

The man waves a hand and walks away. Let the idiot pee in her overstuffed pedal pushers, he thinks. Another man in a yellow shirt steps in beside him and they grin at one another and walk towards the utility shed where all the recumbent tricycles are being repaired.

Chapter Twenty Five: Now, Farewell

The price of gasoline has, for the time being, eliminated the prospect of more road trips. At almost four dollars a gallon, we must be content with living in a campground and waiting for more cash flow. We'll have to make more money to get back to Utah. I may accept Whammo Toys' offer on this book. They want to sell it at sporting goods and camping stores next to the frisbees. They might wrap a frisbee with the book, a package deal. I'm not too proud to accept a kitschy marketing scheme. If Whammo doesn't come through there's Mattel's offer. They've taken over the manufacture of plastic RV sewage hoses and the slinky things that keep them draining and they're keen on the manuscript as an inducement for RV enthusiasts to come in and browse. There will be pyramids of my books in the display windows, with the lovely cover photo of a motorhome winding its way down a green highway against a star-lit backdrop. Marketing, marketing!

Writing is a strange business. I can write something six months ago, return to it, and everything is changed! Gasoline was four bucks and a quarter in the previous paragraph. Now it's a dollar sixty five.

We can load our tank and go somewhere. In April we're going the northern route across country to Fox's childhood home in the midwest. Idaho, South Dakota, Wyoming, then turning south, towards Nebraska and beyond. Fox wants to see the places she walked as a child, the places where her mysterious Apache mother spent a few precious times with her as a little girl. All we have left of Star Of The Morning is one tiny photo, and a strange medicine object, a piece made entirely of raven's breast bones. That's right. Raven's breast bones. They are bound together with sinew, and make a weird sort of miniature gateway. Each breastbone is triangular, and they are joined facing in alternate directions. The object looks a bit like the structure of a bridge. It's both abstract and natural. This piece of art emerged from the imagination of Fox's mother. It speaks, or sings, volumes of strange incantations. It is a compelling work of art. It may be all we will ever know of Fox's Apache mother.

When Fox's Aunt Inge told her the story of her origins, she went into her bedroom and returned holding a pouch that contained this object. "This is what your mother left for you. I promised that I would tell the story of your birth and give this to you. It is your legacy from Star Of The Morning."

It is very beautiful.

Chapter Twenty Six: And So.....

There is a magical substance in the universe. It has tremendous attractive power; everyone wants it. It's like money, power, sex...it has that "thing" that makes it special, that makes it so alluring that no one can resist pursuing it to the ends of their lives and beyond.

The funny thing is, only a few people realize that this stuff even exists.

I will give it an arbitrary name, because it has no name yet it has ten thousand names. I will call it "Aha." Some call it Love but that doesn't work. It isn't love, though love forms a component of it. Aha is behind everyone's hopes and dreams. It is there when I look at the face of a stranger, look at the bewilderment, fear and desire that lands in the wrinkles and dimples of an ordinary face. I see the search for Aha.

I have always been searching for Aha. I first knew it when I was sixteen. I discovered it about the time my friend and I buried Beethoven's bust in the rose garden. When my dad confronted me I had a problem. I didn't think he would understand that I had spent the whole weekend dipping my hands into a great pile of Aha. I had found a mountain of gold coins, shangri-la, seventy two virgins, a choir of angels. It was AHA!

Could I say, "Dad, I've been exploring Aha all weekend. I know I'm very young, I know it's dangerous for someone so inexperienced to go looking for Aha." Could I say that to my dad?

I seriously underestimated my dad. He knows plenty about Aha. He may not consciously realize it but he has built up a load of Aha and it follows him around, gleaming, seductive and beautiful. When he said, "How could you be so stupid?" he was really saying, "Son, you need to cultivate discipline. You need courage, you need a clear plan. You don't go dashing off all screwball in a work with such high stakes. High stakes, son! Big risks! You could die, and die stupid, if you don't watch out. I don't want you to waste your life, to stumble over some shit pile by accident and go down the tubes. You're scaring me, you're looking like someone with a lot of promise who might just slip and go down the tubes. You're my SON, my oldest son, I don't want that to happen to you."

How could I be so stupid?

I must have found a few smidgens of Aha in a past life because I was carried down the tubes, all right, but I returned, alive and well.

Dear Fox gave me a giant load of Aha the moment she laid eyes on me. And I gave her a nice gift, too, I gave her all the Aha I could spare, and then some. That's the thing about Aha. It sort of grows itself, once you've got a nice Aha garden seeded. It will carry through the winter of the soul, and come spring, there are living buds down in the earth waiting to rise up unbidden, to fill your life with fresh new Aha you didn't even expect.

We traveled all across this great country. We rode Yertle, a bucket-of-bolts Grandmother disguised as a Recreational Vehicle. We rode in her shell to the Land Of The Giants, where Aha lies on the ground waiting to be picked up. We bought Raven and returned all the way from Florida, with so much Aha that bits of it spilled on the highway. It didn't matter. Every time we got in trouble, there were people waiting to donate Aha without being asked.

Yes, we saw the occasional blighted soul who withheld everything, Aha included. You get no help from those who don't carry Aha. I feel so sad for them. One thing we must become aware about in this country is Aha. At a time when people are screaming at each other so much you can't make out a single word, the Aha is lying untended, fallow, deep in the mines, mixed in the ocean, bonded with oxygen, everywhere. So many millions of people are not mindful of this beautiful substance. If you start screaming in anger, if you start believing that you are right about everything, Aha tends to hide itself.When Aha starts draining from your soul, you are in big trouble. Aha doesn't like anger, certainty, smugness, hypocrisy, greed, selfishness. Aha doesn't like a lot of noise unless it's celebration noise, like music, like the Fourth of July, like a great party.

Nowadays, my father breathes a huge sigh of relief. He's very old, he's not well, he's just hanging on. His wife is Aha personified. He'll be fine wherever he goes. Aha holds him up, sustains him. He isn't worried about me anymore. He's worried about my late brother's kids, my niece and nephew, who are sixteen and nineteen and walking a path even more dangerous than the one I took, when I was that age.

Dad is proud of me. He sighs with relief because he sees that I pulled myself together, and at least a bit of Aha clings to me and Fox. He read this book and he enjoyed it. He didn't quite 'get' my other books, but he got "The Road Has Eyes". He even knew which was my best chapter and which was my worst. And I agreed with him!

THAT is really cool.

Appendix: Brand Names, Leveling Jacks, Climate Control, Plumbing

We have lived in Raven for eight years. She's a 1998 Newmar Mountain Aire gasoline-powered class A motorhome. She has one big slide-out. After extensive internet and RV show research I settled on two brand names that carried a reputation for reliability.

Those brands were Newmar and Allegro. Newmar's factory is in Tappanee, Indiana. There is a large community of Amish people living around Tappanee. Almost all of Newmar's work force comes from these Amish communities. They have a reputation for great woodwork, attention to detail and diligence. These qualities show in the coaches made by Newmar.

Allegro motorhomes are made by the Tiffin Company in Red Bay, Alabama. They also have a solid reputation. The coaches are well designed and beautifully finished.

I tend to avoid the big names in motor home manufacture. They make a lot of RVs and their profit comes from cutting corners and selling at low price and high volume.

It would be easy to remove the brand names from all RVs and use them interchangeably. There would ultimately be little difference between RVs in the same price range. Some are good and work well for years. Some fall apart. The brand names don't really matter that much. It's true, we got beautiful cabinetry in our Newmar, but the other components, the generator, the refrigerator, the toilet, the propane stove, all these are made by the same two or three companies.

Dometic Inc. makes virtually all RV kitchens, bathrooms, heaters, air conditioners, furnaces and hot water heaters. Enter a Fleetwood, you'll find Dometic. Enter a Newmar, you'll find Dometic.

An RV shopper should be informed about the various chassis and transmissions. The chassis is one of the most important parts of your RV. Our Newmar came with a Chevy P-12 chassis. This unusual chassis was only made for a couple of years. It was expensive to manufacture, so it was discontinued. There's a Yahoo forum for Chevy P-12 lovers and I met my chassis teacher through this forum. He was so crazy about the P-12 that I felt encouraged and I followed his advice. It has served me well.

There must be a Yahoo forum for just about everything. Toenail clippers. Donut fryers. Pin stripe decals for Romanian motorcycles. Romanian motorcycles.

The Newmar coach we were interested in has a P-12 chassis. I found a Chevy P-12 chassis forum and it was a godsend!

The RV chassis is the automotive part of the machine. It's the engine, brakes, transmission, the steel undercarriage, the guts of a vehicle that is similar to a truck. There are five or six major manufacturers of truck chassis that will be found running motorhomes. Freightliner takes a huge proportion of RV chassis work. Motor home chassis are also made by Workhorse, Spartan, Roadmaster and Ford. The transmissions in these chassis are built almost entirely by Allison. Shopping for a used RV, the shopper will encounter four speed, five speed and six speed Allisons. Our coach, being older, has a four speed Allison tranny. It has worked fine. My only caveat about the older, simpler four speed is that there's no overdrive setting and at high speed the pitch of the engine can get annoying.

The real differences in RVs are in the material and fabrication techniques of the coach itself, the "shell". Aluminum, fiberglass, rivets, glue, welds, wiring, floor plan designs: these are the things that distinguish slipshod RVs from those that are carefully made. It isn't always a matter of price. It's a matter of company philosophy. These are very hard times for RV makers. The big RV companies have absorbed most of the small ones. Winnebago, Fleetwood and Monaco virtually dominate RV sales. An Itasca is a Winnebago. A Pace Arrow is a Fleetwood. The only way to keep track of who is really making an RV brand is to read the RV magazines and stay in touch with the RV forums.

Though this seems like a horrible time for RV makers and campground owners, there may be an unforeseen paradoxical effect. Foreclosures, toxic mortgages, plunging stock prices, all these economic ills are going to have a backlash that will help the RV world. I'm worried that campground spaces might become so precious that prices will rise with demand. So far that hasn't happened. I hope it never happens.

Are We On The Level?

A motor home must be level when it's occupied. When it's not level, water doesn't flow correctly, sewage and sludge go to one side, gauges aren't reliable. The Class C types rely mostly on external drive-on ramps. Trailers and fifth wheels have crank-style jacks installed near each corner. Class A vehicles have pushbutton hydraulic jacks.

The hydraulic jack business is virtually monopolized by the HWH Corporation. They make quality gear. A lot is riding on those jacks (pun intended), so they'd BETTER make quality gear.

Our first malfunction in Raven was with our jack system. On the last night of our cross country trek, we landed at a campground and began our settling-in routine. When I went to level the coach, the jacks failed to respond.. Four thousand trouble free miles and fifty miles from home we have a problem.

Next day we arrived at the Kountry Kampground in Sonoma County. This was to be our home base. We went into a gear called FRANTIC as we moved out of the house. Until the jacks were repaired, we couldn't move into our coach. The clock was ticking. I called the locally recommended "house call" RV mechanic. I didn't want to drive Raven another inch. There are house call RV mechanics because there's a market for them. Most of the repairs to an RV can be made on-site.

A charming young fellow came to our site, looked over our problem and told us we needed to rebuild the "hydraulic fluid head". Estimated cost: $1500. We were devastated. Our plans had called for installation of solar panels, an inverter and the acquisition of four new deep cycle batteries. With these components we would have a degree of energy independence. With the inverter, we could draw 110 Volt AC power created by the panels and store that energy in the batteries. We might have to put that plan on hold if we needed $1500 for a repair.

I had an intuition. This intuition told me that the charming young man didn't know a thing about the HWH hydraulic system. He planned to get some on-the-job training at our expense. I went for a second opinion. I drove Raven to a reputable RV garage in Santa Rosa. The owner diagnosed our problem in five seconds. The pump was kaput. An HWH pump might cost $150. I called Customer Service at HWH, and the man to whom I spoke agreed with the diagnosis. He said he recognized our problem from my description of the symptoms. He assured me that he wasn't just guessing. Thirty years working for the company gave him considerable expertise. He offered to ship me the pump for $147 plus freight.

I had the pump in two days. The RV mechanic in Santa Rosa had it installed and working for a total of $350. We gave him the rest of our business. He installed our solar panels, the inverter and four new batteries. The price of his labor was reasonable. The quality of his work was superb.

Our worst single problem came as a result of my own haste and carelessness.

We were on one of our bi-yearly vacancies from the Kountry Kampground. The rules stipulated that every six months we had to leave for a week and return to a new site.

`As we waited for our next site to become available, we went to a nearby fairground with a dozen RV utility sites. The place was somewhat rocky and uneven. There was about four inches of grass in spots, which made leveling off a little tricky.

The HWH jacks hold the weight of the motorhome on circular steel plates or feet that are about fourteen inches across. These feet can sink into soft ground. Many people use wooden pads to augment the stability of the feet. I had found several sawn pieces of lumber that made excellent pads. They were about two inches thick and two feet across. I would slide these under the hydraulic feet and lower the jacks onto our extra pads.

I was doing just this procedure after we had backed into our site. I was pressing the buttons, hearing the whirr of the pump, feeling the coach lift and tilt. The sheer power of these jacks is intimidating. I get a bit nervous when I feel a twenty four ton coach lift off the ground and tilt to the left and to the right as I watch the indicator lights to see if we're level. I have a secondary indicator. I use the bathroom door. It's well oiled and it will slide in the direction of the tilt.

I was lowering the right rear jack onto its wooden pad. The coach started to lift as always. Suddenly we dropped with a heart-stopping bang. The coach slammed into the ground with terrifying velocity.

I went outside to view the problem. My stomach twisted with despair. In setting down the wooden pad, I had not perceived the nature of the surface beneath all those inches of grass. We were leveling ourselves onto a landscape of ridged potholes that were concealed beneath the spring growth.

The jack's foot had contacted the wooden pad, then the pad had begun to tilt into one of the potholes until the whole thing gave way and our coach dropped off the pad and fell about six inches into a complete mess. The steel strut supporting the jack had bent dramatically and our rear right jack was now pointing off at a drastic angle like some football player's fractured leg.

The jack would not extend. It would not retract. We were stuck.

I had, by this time, enrolled in Good Sam's Emergency Road Service. We needed to get Raven to our mechanic.

In a couple of hours, the tow truck arrived. The driver looked over our problem.

He located the hydraulic fluid drain plug on the jack. When he released that component, a stream of red fluid came shooting out of the jack. As it drained, the jack withdrew into its housing and the coach lowered itself onto its wheels. We still had a twisted jack and a wooden pad stuck beneath its foot.

A bit of sledgehammer work freed us, and I was able to drive onto level ground.

I took Raven to our mechanic. I ordered a replacement jack from HWH and the mechanic ordered a quantity of heavy gauge steel beam. These bits arrived in a couple of days while we slept in Raven in the mechanic's parking lot.

Let's call the mechanic Justin. He's too good a mechanic to be called "mechanic". Justin has been an impeccable ally in our RV life.

It took Justin and an assistant about four hours to replace the steel strut and install the jack. Our total expense came to around seven hundred dollars. We felt as though we had been picked up by winged angels and carried across monster-infested boiling seas to a safe haven. I was expecting a bill of two to three thousand dollars.

Far less dramatic but equally important were our problems with our toilet. Dometic/Sealand toilets are simple devices that require a few inches of water in the bowl at all times. The water insulates the coach from odor and maintains a sanitary seal.

One morning I discovered that there was no water in the toilet. I ran the valve to fill the bowl. I could see the water draining away. The bowl could not maintain a water tight seal for more than fifteen minutes.

The normal procedure for this situation is to call for a mobile RV tech. We had found an excellent tech, an honest man named Raimundo. If he was presented with a problem beyond his competence, Raimundo would simply say, "I don't understand air conditioners" or whatever he didn't feel competent to repair. He had no need to go rattling through our RV in the hopes that he might figure out the solution to our problem and earn a few bucks.

I wanted to do this repair myself. I knew it was an icky job but I understood the basics. I needed to replace a seal.

The toilet was under warranty and Dometic was very helpful. I had a new seal delivered. It was actually two seals, a fat one and a thin one. The thin one was stamped with the letters "this side up". Those three words were very useful.

The toilet is held together by the type of circular metal clamp that is adjusted with either a screw driver or a socket. The adjusting bolt is made for a quarter inch socket and has universal screwdriver slots running across its face.

The clamp was almost impossible to reach with anything. Its position was in a tiny area between the wall and the shower stall. It held the toilet seat and pedestal together. I had to lay on my side with my face almost poking into the toilet bowl and my arm reaching around to the back. The screwdriver was in my hand and I had to grope for the slot at random. My left arm came around the other side to feel for the slot. I was literally hugging the toilet pedestal. Fox held a flashlight but it was no use because I could not see the adjustment bolt due to its location.

I groped. I found the slot once, got a quarter of a turn before I lost it. Groped again. Found the slot, got a turn, then lost it. By this method I was able to loosen the clamp in about forty minutes. Then I could lift the entire works off the flange, pull it apart and replace the seal.

In spite of the "this side up" logo, it was not apparent to me exactly how to position the seal. I tried it one way, put everything back together, groped the clamp tight with the screwdriver, re-attached the water hoses, went outside to turn on the water, returned to fill the bowl with water and observe the results.

The bowl drained in thirty seconds.

I tried again. The seal(s) had a peculiar U-shaped cutout. I thought this cutout was to guide my positioning of the seal into the logical place, at the back of the pedestal under the clamp's adjustment rod.

It took me two more attempts before I noticed a teeny weeeny little knob at about four o'clock on the circular top of the pedestal. It was about the size of a pimple on a teenager's face. I turned the seal(s) towards that near-invisible knob and what do you know? It fell into place! That was an AHA moment.

I had been working for hours. Fox had been helping. We were in desperate shape, our backs were screaming, I had lain on my side groping with the screwdriver, Fox had been ready with towels to clean up various liquids and solids.

I re-attached the hoses, maneuvered the porcelain bowl into place. I tightened the clamp again with the seal(s) in their new position(s). I went outside to turn the water on. I shouted up to Fox, "let some water into the bowl!". As she pulled the valve handle, I walked back into the coach and stood there, waiting for the water to drain from the toilet bowl.

It held.

If you ask me if I regret not calling Raimundo, the answer is no, I do not regret not calling Raimundo. Or something like that. I learned how to replace the seal. I needed that knowledge eight months later when the accumulation of minerals from the local hard water fouled the seals. They had to be removed, cleaned and put back into place. It took me an hour. It cost me nothing.

Climate Control

An RV parked in direct sunlight will become twenty degrees hotter than the outdoor temperature. In winter this can be nice. In summer it's sheer hell.

When we bought Raven I knew nothing about the Duotherm rooftop climate control units installed on virtually every RV. They are made by Dometic but often sold under other labels. The "Duo" in Duotherm refers to the double duty performed by these units. They both heat and cool. They are versatile and generally reliable. Some units, when in the air conditioning mode, can be so noisy they are unbearable. The newer models have improved. Our ten year old Duotherms have had a few problems.

The Duotherms can only be run with 110 AC power. Don't get caught somewhere like Yuma, Arizona in August, without power. Use your generator when all else fails.

For boondocking heat there's the propane furnace. When you're on the road and have no choice, the furnace is a good option. Its motor runs on the twelve volt "house"batteries in the coach. The automotive battery is fully separate from the house batteries.

The last couple of years we've done very little traveling, so our concerns

have been around appliances that run on Shore Power. The RV world has borrowed this term from the nautical world. The equipment is mostly the same from boat to RV.

In August of 2009 we changed campgrounds. We had lived since March of 2005 at the Kountry Kampground Vineyard Country (name changed to prevent lawsuit). We had gotten a bit fed up with KK, its expense, its heavy handed policies.

After we settled in and solved "The Fugitive" problem, we loved the place. The first couple of years were sweet. Then the shine began to wear off. This campground is a family business that has operated for forty years. It has changed with the times, albeit sluggishly.

The kick in the guts, the dealbreaker is this: the price of a site during June, July and August almost doubles.

We finally had to pick up stakes and move to another campground. We had simply taken everyone's word that there were no comparable campgrounds in the area. There aren't. There's no campground with a swimming pool where the sites are under trees and surrounded by grass.

There are, however, tolerable campgrounds nearby. We found a decent and much smaller campground only eight miles away. The wi-fi is consistent. The utilities are included. There are only a few trees and the place is almost all gravel and asphalt. The manager is a human being. The owner of KKVC thought he was a movie star and always spoke to some spot over my head.

We moved here in August and without the trees, we found out how vital it is to have functioning air conditioners.

I tell this story to demonstrate the vast resource of the RV community. I want to show the way someone will pop out of the woodwork with the most obscure component and help us with a dire problem.

We had never needed the air conditioner. We never needed the heater. When I went to try out our Duotherms, the first thing I discovered was that our thermostat/control unit was useless. It lit up but it didn't work.

We had a problem. Our thermostat was ten years old and Duotherm no longer manufactures it. Installing a five button thermo into our coach would involve replacing several circuit boards. It's a thousand dollar problem.

I put out a call in the big RV forums. I posted on Escapees.com and irv2.com. Within hours I was corresponding with other people who had the same problem. Most of them bit the bullet and got the five button thermostat with all its

attendant wiring modifications.

A couple of days later someone emailed a link to me. It was to a forum posting. A gentleman was operating a small sideline business in refurbished components from the older models of Duotherms. If we sent our broken thermostat with a hundred dollars he would return a refurbished thermostat. We did so. A few days later, a refurbished four button thermostat came via priority mail. It works fine.

I discovered that only the rear unit of our two Duotherms was operational. The heater was fine, but the air conditioner sounded like a jet plane taking off.

It was the Bay Area's hot season, September, and temperatures were going up to ninety five, a hundred degrees. We did all the intelligent things to keep our home cool. We purchased some sheets of Reflectix. This is the mylar-type stuff people use on their auto windshields. We covered all our sun-facing windows and darkened our interior. We dropped about ten degrees, but it was still stifling inside our coach.

I climbed onto the roof and took the cover off the front Duotherm. I didn't need to be a genius to see where a wire on the circuit board had jarred loose and short circuited the electronic control. About half the board was melted. I removed it with a screwdriver. I emailed our colleague who refurbished thermostats. Did he have one of these old-style circuit boards laying around?

He did. He mailed it to us, stipulating that we could pay him when we could afford to pay him. It was a very sweet gesture.

The campground electrician installed the new board in about ten minutes. She charged me fifty dollars. Our lives changed dramatically. The single Duotherm has plenty of power to cool the coach. It runs so quietly we can't hear it from the bedroom.

I can't conceive of repairing a home air conditioner via such exchanges of intelligence and resources. A home costs a lot of money to maintain. An RV costs money to maintain but the scale of the cost is a fraction of the expense on what RV people call a "stick house".

Some people who live in stick houses observe RV people and feel sorry for them. RV people observe dwellers in stick houses and feel equally sorry for those who use ten times the space they need while consuming ten times the resources. They never see their families. They never eat meals together. They're locked into separate rooms with TVs and video games.

And the dang stick houses can't even go anywhere!

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About the author:

Art Rosch grew up in suburban St. Louis and attended Horton Watkins High School. He played trumpet and drums with jazz bands, both large and small. He attended college at Western Reserve in Cleveland, Wayne State in Detroit and Antioch in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In 1977 he moved to the San Francisco area, where he has maintained his role as a musician, photographer and writer. He has taught astronomy and digital imaging with The San Anselmo Recreation and Rohnert Park Recreation Departments. His photography and articles have appeared in many places including Shutterbug, Popular Photography, eDigital and The United Nations Environmental Photography competition. He lives in a 38 foot motor coach with two dogs, three cats and an animal empath. The latter is frequently called a "Pet Psychic". He has produced a CD of his music called "Out Of This World".

Connect with the author:

Blog: www.artrosch.com

Email: artsdigiphoto@gmail.com

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