The Road

Did you ever see so many handicapped parking spots filled at one time? Layne went in (masked) to get our food. “I was the kid at the eighty year old convention,” she said when she came out with our biscuits, reporting no one else was masked. Pushing a walker, sure, but not worried about Covid anymore. 

You live in a van you notice a different world around you. It just seems like you have the opportunity to see the world from an odd angle when you carry your home on your back. Right now Rusty and Layne are in the bed each snoring to the tempo of their own dreams and clashing, while outside commerce rushes by at 70 miles per hour, each 18 wheeler in a perfect synchrony  of beating engine and shining wheels all keeping the mythical supply chain stocked.

Sometimes when we are grinding our way to an appointment we stop in rest areas like this one which happens to be on I-40 in Tennesse, and when we do our van feels like a palace. We have a kitchen and our own toilet, we have our bed and a well insulated van that keeps out the noise and the cold. Compare that to the smoky breath of a car driver stamping back to his tiny glasshouse, engine running, windshield condensed with moisture, no room to stretch out or space to eat in civilized comfort. 

Then again they have homes to go to, vast spaces with endless hot running water and toilets that flush away that which we have to handle ourselves. They know their place, where they belong; they have a glib reply to the question: where are you from? 

A water faucet, off US 23 approaching the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, is a find. Our thirty gallon tank was down six gallons. I siphoned three buckets of “non potable” water into the tank after I walked Rusty while Layne was making grilled cheese sandwiches. The high of van life! A full water tank! Our Berkey filter makes possibly non potable water safe to drink.

The Smokey Mountains separating North Carolina from Tennessee were worth the drive. Google maps kept wanting to send us by the freeway to save a few minutes but I mapped our route town by town from Waynesville to Kodak and we got to ride through the forests on a smooth black ribbon of National Park tarmac, no commercial vehicles allowed.

It was beautiful and colorful and a spectacle of wilderness to remind you of the origins of these vast tracts  of forest that once were so thick they were considered a nuisance and an impediment to the March of Progress. 

We came down out of the mountains into a vast endless traffic jam. Dolly Parton has parlayed her breasts and her voice and her personality into a personal Disney world that speaks to her business acumen and the endless pursuit of wealth for the sake of it. 

We drove into it unknowing, puzzled by the inherent fakery of frontier papier maché buildings in the middle of Tennessee.  The penny soon dropped, Dollyworld this and that, water slides, casinos, neon and fun by the dollar. I nearly killed a motorcyclist and his passenger when the rider mistimed his exit onto the highway and fumbled a gear change and was saved from an air ambulance and a massive medical bill by my heavy foot perfectly willing to shift the contents of my house forward to save me the paperwork and him the pain. He rode away when he grabbed the right gear and I gripped the wheel filled with unhappy memories. 

Time, we decided, to try something new. We ordered meat and salad on the website and drove to the curbside pickup point. 

Cracker Barrel usually allows RVs to spent the night in the parking lot. We’d never done this but for some reason in Tennessee we figured yo give it a go. We weren’t alone:

The rattle of the generator went on all night. I only heard it when I walked Rusty. With the door closed against a forty degree night we heard nothing and slept soundly.  

I prefer camping in the woods even where the Forest Service warns of potential  thieves picking through unoccupied camping sites. I don’t see urban thieves driving National Forests to rip off sleeping bags and gas stoves but who knows, stay fearful etc…

The Cracker Barrel manager gave us an awful warning too. We should be okay but watch out for crackheads. My wife the former attorney figured it was liability coverage. If “something” happened they did warn us…naturally we slept the sleep of the just and nothing happened. Stay afraid all the same. 

There is this sense of risk incurred simply  by being on the road. The joy of exploration, the fantasy of the road trip gets smothered by the fear of death or dismemberment by wicked highway robbers who lurk in the popular imagination. With one breath they say we are living the dream and in the next they look with pity on our lonely risky life far from the safety of a tract house.

One encounter generated the comment that we were lucky to be away while Hurricane Ian walked all over Florida. Not lucky I said, we always planned to be away in hurricane season. It’s safer.