A Day In North Carolina

An oil change in Burnsville at brother-in-law Bob’s favorite mechanic. 

We walked 45 minutes across town to a brew pub for a hamburger lunch. Good beer too. Rusty drank his water and slept. 

I wanted ice cream for dessert. I’m not sure why but I hadn’t had any for a while. 

Strawberry and praline in a waffle cone. Hit the spot. 

Perhaps Layne being away with her sister had something to do with the splurge. 

Bob has lived here half a century so it was not surprising  he met an acquaintance. What surprised me was the shouted conversation across the street! Rusty ignored them and the Coca Cola invitation and put his nose in the gutter. 

Naturally Bob knows the artist who painted the mural and he had done entertaining stories of the mountain woman’s eccentricities. If you move here you are either eccentric or rich. A bit like Key West. 

House prices are high and going up as the rich incomers get irritated at having to live with eccentrics who were charming when they came on vacation.  A bit like Key West! 

Yancey County used to be dry but even the eccentrics got behind the vote to liberate the demon alcohol from imprisonment by the Baptists. Bob says that vote opened up Burnsville to a spate of tourism not seen before. 

Of course success breeds…rising prices. Trying to figure this stuff out will give you a glorious headache. 

Bob said he was in the small engine shop the morning of 9-11, and he and the owner watched the second airplane hit the tower. That prompted the shop owner to suggest this meant war. I asked Bob if he got his lawnmower running and he thought about it for a bit and said he couldn’t actually remember why he was in the shop. 

As we meandered across Burnsville Bob looked lustfully at twisted pieces of wood. He grumbled about the high prices. Well I said you’ve got lots of wood around your house, try a trade. He didn’t bite. 

We picked up GANNET2 with clean engine oil and a filter -$72 to do the work- and drove the half hour back to Bob’s rural community at Celo. Happily the speed limit on Highway 80 has been reduced from 55 to 45 mph. This is the only road in North America that had a speed limit I could not keep up with. Now I feel less inadequate though with GANNET2, 45 is a bit of a stretch. 

Before we harvested some vegetables we checked the poem of the week posted in front of the community vegetable patch. I’d never thought of a dead car battery as sleeping beauty before so I learned a new metaphor. 

It was a lovely sunny afternoon to wander the communal vegetable patch. 

The great thing about Rusty is he can look after himself. A stranger to me, not to Bob, came walking down the road and Rusty looked at her. She crossed the road as she chatted with Bob and petted Rusty. “I have to pet a dog that won’t run into the street even for a pet.”  Good boy. 

Bob takes the chilis and puts them on the gas burner and chars them and as odd as it sounds they are delicious. And not spicy. He collects them in an old fashioned wicker basket in keeping with his 19th century aesthetic. 

They are planning on buying a used Chevy Bolt like the one their son has. I looked askance at the suggestion. Bob said I was underestimating him when I suggested neither he or his wife would keep it together to keep the car charged properly so absentminded are they. I have no doubt they will strand themselves all over Western North Carolina in the years to come. No doubt knowing their luck it will be in front of homes of friends they haven’t seen for years…much conviviality will ensue. 

An unarmed survivalist prowling the bounty of North Carolina. Unarmed only in the broadest sense, that basket has some pretty lethal edges. 

The pepper harvest: 

Bob’s little helper hard at it as usual: 

Psst! Wanna a winter squash? Jeez Bob I said, thanks for the offer but I’d displace half my wardrobe to store that in the van. I see squash on the menu in the next night or two. 

Some really pretty details punctuate the deer fence.  

Dinner was pasta with sauce made from home grown vegetables, including squash, red wine from France and conversation. 

Damn he said. I wanted to read and now you’ve poured me more wine. Easy fix I said and decanted his glass into mine. 

We went heavy on the sauce, I washed the pan while Bob loaded the dishwasher. Survival never looked so comfortable. 

Bob the academic built the house with some community  help. Their eldest son was born in the kitchen. Geeta his doctor wife worked at the health clinic bringing medical care to an unserved corner of Appalachia. When my wife came to visit from California she brought Mexican food to drop some diversity into their food shopping. Things have changed over time obviously but the old timers haven’t. 

Layne came home later after a long day in Asheville with her sister. Asheville has ethnic food in abundance of course. We’ve plugged in to a power cord and our space heater is worth its weight in gold. 50 degree damp nights do that. I was listening to Rusty snore as I read in my driving seat reversed to face my desk, the recliner I always craved in a house.   

At the end of the week we move on and leave the transplanted mountain folk to their gentle, hilltop soap opera. As Celo turns. 

Celo

Six years Rusty has lived with us, and I remember his first visit to the forests of Appalachia was filled with terror. The Homestead street dog had never seen deciduous trees or deer the size of elephants. The crackling of the leaves made him jump and me never strayed far from home. This visit he couldn’t edit to get out of the van and disappear into the hemlock bushes.

That reality has changed. My brother in law Bob and his wife Geeta, Layne’s sister, know I like to walk so they took Rusty and I out for a walk the day after we arrived at their woodland home. 

They live on 1100 acres of Western North Carolina forest in what’s called an intentional community based on Quaker principles of governing by consensus. The life would drive me nuts but they have thrived on sharing their decisions with their neighbors in meetings over the past half century. Housing is inexpensive because you don’t own the land but there is that shared sense of responsibility that socially adept people thrive on but I would find to be a prison of indecision.

They built their own home (above) on a hilltop and we parked near the electrical outlet so we can run our space heater without depleting our battery bank. GANNET2 is consequently toasty warm and very much our own space for the days we visit. 

The land is crisscrossed with trails through the woods and past peoples’ homes. I find it weird to walk into someone’s front yard unannounced but they know everyone and what is socially acceptable. This home’s owner wasn’t at home. 

It’s a log house stuccoed to keep the rain out and built up its own design. Lots of Celo is reminiscent of hobbit  fantasies of communal living alone in homes decayed into the landscape. 

The outhouse was unoccupied and I saw a photo opportunity. Bob obliged with my camera. More comfortable than our cramped toilet in the van but decidedly not mobile. 

There are largely mysterious sign posts on some of the trails. I have got lost out here in the past but do has everyone else including Lisa and Bob. They tell the story of a neighbor who took their two year old son for  a walk and got caught out after dark. They spent the night huddling on the trail as the frost settled on the forest. Get home before dark is the injunction. 

You don’t need to tell me twice. These woods are damp and cold and silent and at dusk the creep factor is very high. Lots of rustling in the leafy pitch black home to many and various wild animals. Rusty was in guard but he had a wild time running through his forest. 

Once we got home he had a snack and passed out. 

Celo is a good spot to hang out with your dog. You can hang out without a dog I suppose but where’s the fun in that? 

Mount Mitchell is out there somewhere. At 6,000 feet it’s the highest point in the eastern US.  

Mountain Laurels live to two hundred years of age I’m told and get some oddly twisted trunks as they age. 

A log hut used as a summer camping spot by community residents: 

Rusty couldn’t help himself and I encouraged him to run as far and as fast as he could. 

Cows do not impress Rusty but he tip goes past in a rare burst of courage in the face of monsters. 

Celo, a dog wonderland. 

Wound Repair

We live in a society built on fear. To live unconventionally in that world is to pile fear on fear. The big “what if…” comes into view. And death is always  the feared outcome. If you go to Mexico you will be violently assaulted, your dog will starve and your van will break. And then when none of that happens the prophets of doom turn away, shrug their shoulders and mutter that he was “lucky.” To be an outlier is not how you prove fear-filled theories wrong. It’s how you prove them to be true. A world of information turned upside down, where you reinforce your fears by ignoring any countervailing information. 

I was happy, almost as happy as Rusty, in Maine, land of rocks and water and miraculous momentary sunshine and flat waters. Layne was not; the nickel sized hole in her leg wasn’t healing and it hurt. In Tucson she had a cancer cell removed months ago just before we started our circumnavigation of the country. By the time we reached Maine it still hadn’t healed and passing doctors did no more than hand out antibiotics and look glum. Laynes sister said she knew a doctor capable of running tests and doing a sensible diagnosis. In two and a half days we rolled down the interstates from Bangor Maine to Durham North Carolina, stopping at rest areas to sleep with barely a walk for Rusty. Were we living in a proper house we’d have had a whole system of medical care already known to us and right there! Silly van lifers…

The last half day’s drive took us through the Appalachians, wet and cold but with no signs of Tropical Storm Ian. That monster left just a few trees down around here, already cleared away as if it had never been. Southwest Florida knows different. The doctor, a family friend of Layne’s sister, herself a doctor, did the tests and lab work at the hospital and all is well. The wound is healing slowly and painfully and that is all. 

Spruce Pine on a fifty degree afternoon under heavy clouds full of freezing drizzle was not my ideal spot to walk Rusty but he takes everything in stride. And that I guess has been a lesson to learn. We enjoyed ourselves, more and more as the cheerful texts from Layne inside the hospital reported one negative test after another. Medicare paid for everything, no insurance companies were involved authorizing treatment or as usual denying services. I get Medicare November 1st and I can’t wait. Single payer at long last.

An oil change for GANNET2 and a squirt with the grease gun on my new heavy duty u-joints which hold the front wheels on, installed by Kip at Promasters Only in Ohio, and we we were done. On the road and babbling cheerfully like fools who dodged a bullet. 

I have never been interested in teaching others or encouraging others to do what I do. People used to ask me for recommendations for places to eat in Key West. In my linear world that question begs a biography from you: do you like shellfish? Steak? Vegetarian? Are you patient? Do you want stand up food? Take out? How clean do the bathrooms have to be?  I have come to understand the question is just a way of conversing and most people don’t really want information. I am terrible at small talk and I know it so I retreat from social situations. If cornered I can hold my own but it exhausts me. I tend to retreat into my shell. 

So I can safely say to those that have read this page for a while, a fact that astonishes me, you know my driving around in a van is strictly for me. I would not recommend shitting in a bucket, sleeping in parking lots, and not knowing what the day will bring to anyone. I absolutely love it. This is the life I dreamed of every day and night I sat at the police station and answered 911. I thought we would go back to sailing but van life is way better. People who know me say they see the difference…naturally I have no idea what to reply to such compliments. I am shy. 

I hope it is clear by now that things go wrong everywhere. Living in a van is no different and when you have a problem you fix it. Had the cancer returned we’d have dealt with it. There is no denying I had a lot on my mind, Layne’s health, the possibility of no travel for a while etc…But as we gear up to leave in two months to start the real journey, the multi year trip to the tip of South America, to anyone who asks I say we will travel until we break or GANNET2 breaks. We have prepared, we have tested our gear and we know we are on the down  hill slope to infirmity and death. But this is what those Social Media  Memes you pass around about “living life to the fullest every day”actually look like when you step outside the bounds of convention. There are thousands of old timers and youngsters like us driving, riding, walking, sailing all over the place. They have problems; they fix them. We shall introduce you to them. They like this life as we do and among the travelers I feel at home among my people. 

Meanwhile we will repack GANNET2, do some moochdocking  in the mountains and prepare for the last leg of our drive to Key West. Friends to see on the way and say goodbyes, familiar roads, vacation haunts and then the final drive West back to Naco, Arizona/Sonora  and the long drive south. Until we break. 

I cannot wait to get back and deal with the fears and challenges and emotional purity of life on the road in parts unknown.