[I’ve previously published the introduction here in this blog.]
Have you ever done the exact opposite of what was good for you? I don’t mean something small, like staying up all night by yourself (as a grown woman) watching the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice while you cut off your dreadlocks. I’m talking something big. A huge change in your life that you plan out, with all the right intentions, but you still end up slipping into a mirror universe with the exact wrong life for yourself.
Here’s a better example than my dreadlocks (I did do that, and maybe it was the wrong thing! But this is a meatier example). I once decided to make an album of myself playing the ukulele and singing, with my son Finn as the producer. The idea was for the two of us to work on a project together even though we weren’t in the same location. He was in Michigan working toward a doctorate in physics (I never miss a chance to slip that in) and I was traveling the country with my new husband, always on the move: we were towing our Airstream home and camping off-grid as much as we could.
Yeah, I know: Finn and I are odd people already; put us both on a project together and it’s bound to get intense. I should have seen that coming. Just like with my life.
My plan was to make the album be casual instead of precise, as if the audience and I were sitting around a campfire together goofing off. I already had recordings on my phone of myself playing my favorite songs, plus nature sounds I’d collected over the years across the country that would be perfect inserted between the songs: coyotes singing together, cicadas clicking en masse, pileated woodpeckers laughing the way they do. I thought, this is gonna be a fun little album, kind of like the soundtrack to my life on the road.
Instead, Finn and I got lulled into wanting a clean-sounding set of songs instead of a fun-sounding set of songs. In all our increased focus for precision, I’d forgotten that I actually can’t sing or play worth a damn, so I was quite surprised when I listened to the album after we were done and it wasn’t at all what I’d wanted. And, actually, it was terrible—within the genre that it became a part of: beautifully produced singer/songwriter, pretty girl accompanying herself on gorgeously composed classic acoustic songs. Except, this was someone who barely strums the same pattern over and over with five chords to her name and zero vocal training.
I’d lost sight of the album I’d planned on making, and I got very focused on the album that was fascinating to make with my smart, caring, talented son who could make almost anything sound great.
The story I’ll tell you here is about a five-year trajectory, from one fabulous idea—to thumb my nose at a difficult life I’d led until I was 51 years old and dive into an entirely new kind of life. Without any objects I’d owned before, and, wonderfully, with a new husband, living a life on the move.
I had truly smart intentions, to live in the moment, to shuck off all the attachments I’d had, the good ones and the painful ones that had eaten away at me, and see the country, feel what it’s like to experience life without to-do lists, deadlines, obligations, nights slept in those miserable reclining chairs they have in hospitals beside your loved one, the one who’s truly suffering, days spent in fear that the few members I had left in my family would implode.
What did that well-intentioned life turn into? You tell me after you read this. I’m thinking: a strange start because of Covid. An astronomically eye-opening tour of the U.S. and Canada is all their beauty and sociological oddities. A series of slow changes to my health that created anxiety and depression worse than the average menopausal nomad.
These last set of changes gradually pulled me into that slow-cooked frog scenario where one day, when I was trying not to cry inside my trailer in central Colorado (who cries in an Airstream, anyway?), I realized this whole five years was the wrong trajectory for me. It was the freaking opposite of what I should have done with my life in order to heal myself from trauma, trauma that started when my dad died in front of me when I was little, onward year after year until all my family was dead, and I’d played one part or another in every grisly bit. Well, my son is not dead, thank god, and to me he’s the most important member. But dead family is dead family, and the way mine each died is enough to make even my heart’s delight, Finn, a scribble in the margins of my family trauma.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the point of this whole book. My amazingly gorgeous travels, which I think you’ll enjoy hearing about.
It all began when I fell in love with the man who turned into just as much a victim of my whims as I was. Tracy’s dream had always been to save up his money so that, when he retired, he could sell everything and hit the road with an Airstream and travel, travel, travel. Truthfully, before I met him, I didn’t know what an Airstream was and (shh, don’t tell anyone) I had never been camping before. But man, did I fall for him, so the rest was the small stuff you’re not supposed to sweat, right?
My mistake was I was impulsive, and his mistake was he listened to me.
I also blame the timing, though. And the timing monumentally pointed in no uncertain terms that we should DO THIS. Here’s what happened, all so quickly together that I hardly remember the order. It was all in about three years:
1. I got a divorce.
2. My son went to college.
3. My sister’s child died.
4. My sister died.
5. I ended up with money.
6. Tracy got an early retirement offer.
7. Covid hit.
If you’d had a life full of responsibility (and I mean full to the brim) and suddenly it was all gone, if you were in love with a man who is so smart and responsible that you knew he could pull off a crazy plan like living on the road, and if you had the money to quit your job and join him right when the world seemed to be falling apart, wouldn’t you? It is indeed living the dream, am I right?
So we did it. In January 2020, we sold the house and all our belongings (we were good at that by the time I’d sold everything of my sister’s and my mother’s), we left our jobs, we adopted a dog, we bought an Airstream and a truck to tow her with, and we ditched our going-away party because here came covid, right on our heels.
The day after my last day of work, we towed our new home straight to a campground in Virginia, thinking we’d be there for a week. It was near friends and distant family in Richmond, kind of near Finn at the College of William and Mary, kind of near my ex-law family in Charlottesville. As the virus spread and as state parks and rest areas were all closed down, this first campground stay lengthened. We added one week, then two weeks, then one month, then two.
It was a terrible time for some people, but also a great opportunity for some people, and we were in the latter group. Being forced to stay in place in our first campground allowed us the chance to learn how to live in our new home before we put the travel part to test.
How do I even begin describing everything I learned in that very first campground? It was like the first few weeks at a new job: you’re learning while you’re doing so quickly that it’s all a blur, like you’re at the center of all these rays of information shooting at you. And I had to learn stuff over and over and over, and often by screwing up. Tracy’s brain is different, not just from mine but from nearly everyone’s: he retains new information in such a rich format that he can apply it later down the road (literally), even in emergencies that you’d not expect it to apply to. I, alas, seem to have reached some kind of brain-data limit right when we moved into the Airstream.
It’s true that, until that point, I’d been busy, like every working parent in the sandwich generation, maybe me more than the usual. I had been good at that world, too. But when I entered a new world, my brain called a strike. I wish I’d been able to predict that so I could warn Tracy. I wish I’d said, “I do, but I can’t think anymore, so that’s all going to be on you. Sorry about that.”
Things we were learning back then: monitoring our three types of electrical sources (Don’t turn on the water heater while you’re using the microwave, even when you’re plugged into shore power!) and monitoring our three types of tanks (one fresh, two types of waste, best not ever to confuse them.).
One thing we learned early on that I turn out to be good at is ::drumroll:: living in a small space.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a standard Airstream travel trailer, but they are tiny inside. That’s due to two things. 1) Very few have slides, which means the interior is one long narrow hallway. Think airplane aisle. 2) That iconic curved shape is not just outside but inside, too. You really are living in a tube. Friends who’ve stepped inside mine for the first time say, before they can stop themselves, “It’s smaller than I thought it would be!” No fear: I know it’s small. But I’m good at small, and I’m good at sharing space, especially with Tracy.
The fact that we were newlyweds helped. You’re much more willing to pass each other in the hallway by turning your fronts together when you really like each others’ fronts.
We hit the road in March, 2020, right when Covid hit us, and despite our plans to always be “where the climate suits our clothes,” we stopped and had to stay in Virginia, which ain’t all that tropical. So, how did we pass those first cold weeks inside? Tracy learns, is what he does. He spends his time quietly, churning practical planning and learning in his brain all day. I, on the other hand, am nothing but words, and words I want to share. I was gabbing at him as usual one morning about the ways my friends were living out the quarantine period—some dealing with complex family relationships, some completely alone—and I mused about how hard I would find the loneliness. He countered, as I’d have bet, that he would be fine alone. In fact, he’d rather be alone than be quarantined with anyone. Except for me. A practical statement from him that I’ll take for romance.
Living together in a small space: check. Living in nature: check (I’d grown up in these very woods of central Virginia.). Figuring out the balance between the two, that check was harder.
Because we couldn’t travel south until travel bans were lifted, our dreams of living outside for the rest of spring in warm Florida had to wait. As our stay-in-place lengthened, though, so too did the chilly spring season, and we slowly fell into a pattern of outside life that we’ve held to for five years. If the weather permitted, and mostly it did), we both would naturally step outside in the morning, and then we’d not go back in the trailer (except to cook and use the bathroom) until it’s bedtime. That’s not far from how I grew up and how I chose to live as an adult.
But, I’d had control over my immediate environment back then. A campground is very different. I hadn’t even thought that until our first one got dicey.
We had a few neighbors in that campground who also qualified to stay there despite the travel ban in Virginia as long-term campers; most were working construction at a nearby solar farm, although some were travel nurses (bless them). We’d see them and their families come and go from work, but that was about it. When Memorial Day rolled around, though, man was that an eye-opener.
That holiday weekend was only the second weekend that Virginia had opened campgrounds to vacationers, and, starting that Thursday, RVs filled the long drive in and then all the spots in that 200-spot campground. I remember being shocked that all 200 campsites were suddenly filled, but now I know. That how Americans roll.
Turns out that camping on weekends equals partying; that’s what people come to campgrounds to do. City folks come to campgrounds on their only days off to be in nature, and they bring a cooler full of beer; country folks come to campgrounds with the intent to socialize, and they bring more than a cooler full of beer. People have family reunions, birthday parties, frat parties (from the sound of it); they swim, boat, and sunbathe. A favorite weekend campground activity is tooling around in golf carts with more people packed on board than will fit, plus a dog or two.
The construction guys who lived near us would get together in the evenings for grilling and drinking and cornhole most nights, but that holiday weekend they had a real party, as in with special guests—according to the making-out going on one of the car hoods.
That Thursday before the holiday weekend, these guys’ even bigger party started with shirts-off, shouting and drinking, wrestling in the field in front of us, with a climax of a picnic table collapsing, loudly. Things had gotten so out of hand that two sheriff cars made the rounds that evening, a practice I now know is actually common.
Other stuff I saw on that first holiday weekend:
A kid riding a teeny tiny minibike back and forth in front of us, wearing a massive helmet (a rarity, I would soon learn), a tiny wife-beater, and a small cape with an American flag on it.
An older guy in a golf cart with a huge American flag flying above it (now I know American flags are de rigueur in campgrounds) with neon lights around the base and wheels, and, in neon on the back, that sexy woman icon of truckers-gone-by.
A younger guy who likes to inspect what’s going on in his golf cart will drive up to the dumpsters to throw away a single cup as his excuse to survey the scene.
And several Trump flags, one that’s been photoshopped in such a way that I regret ever having seen it.
Just golf cart after golf cart packed with more people than you’d think could fit, holding on to beers, children, dogs. Extra points if you finish your beer and toss it into a dumpster right when you pull up.
One family didn’t let not having a golf cart stop them: they’d open the side doors of their minivan and cruise around slowly, gawking and drinking and pausing at the dumpsters just like everyone else.
Amid the mass hysteria that weekend was one group of campers having my kind of time. Thus began an odd practice I would never have expected of myself: an affinity for people just because they like the same brand of something that I do, in this case, an Airstream. Tracy and I had been walking around looking at everyone’s set-ups (the thing to do), and we saw a small group 1) sitting at a portable bar outside their Airstream (I always have had a soft spot for outside bars) and 2) playing on their speakers an Americana band I like.
For the first time in what would become a habit, I stopped to introduce myself and chat. They’re two families with two trailers who have been camping together for years. And they were the only people we saw who seemed to be trying to stave off the coronavirus, with a nifty hand-washing station they’d set up between their two trailers, including a homemade sink contraption decked out with soap, wipes, and hand sanitizer. They seemed to be a bastion of smart in the middle of insanity. Later I learned to allow myself to say Hi to fellow Airstreamers, with caution, and, indeed, later it’s the Airstream community that saved my attitude.
[To come, to round out and end Chapter 1) the topic of how hard it is to plan travel, with planning for the Florida next winter as my example, and 2) the topic of place and all that came to mean to me, with camping that spring in my home state, Virginia, as the example.]
Copyright 2025, Some Who Wander, Michele Cox, registration no. TXu 2-478-085
