Losing Session

High point of the night, approximately 90 seconds after sitting down.

Brake lights seem to waver up ahead and vanish. My eyes are dry from hours of casino air. Darkness cut only by headlights, and then an exit. Finally. Only 10 more miles to go, but I've seen the last of the street lamps and road signs.

My first hand, I flopped the nuts and got paid off. Poker is easy when it's like that, but it usually isn't. Six hours later I'm stuck and irritated.

Money is hard to earn, hard to win and easy to lose. Fleeting. And it doesn't seem to be worth all that much these days, anyway.

“I'd like to visit Washington,” says the guy next to me. He's a friendly sort; heavyset with a graying beard. He's older than me by about a decade, but I can see the resemblance. “They'd hate me there. I'm too conservative. And everything is so expensive.”

Queens versus aces, all in. Pocket fives lose a coin-flip. A set of tens versus a flush draw. Did I play them poorly? Tough to say. In New Orleans, I couldn't lose. Oklahoma is different.

Tail between my legs, questioning life and choices and identity and bank account. I hit the road, searching for a place to camp. There's a state park 30 minutes north, but in the dark it turns into a slow back-and-forth along pitch-black roads. A dog chases the van, deer bolt. There are no signs.

Finally, I find it. Empty campsites all around. I'm running on coffee and granola bars. I shove an uncomfortable wad of cash deep into one of my trunks. Paranoid delusions of being robbed by a drifter.

In the mirror, my eyes are tired and red. Beard, graying.

Cold.

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Monahans, Texas.

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The dunes in Monahans, Texas.

I woke up this morning and checked the weather. This is just self-torture because it changes nothing and only confirms what I already knew: It's damn cold.

An arctic front descended on large parts of the country five days ago, but to put things in perspective: Wednesday afternoon I was trying to sled down the sandhills of Monahans, Texas. It was almost 80 degrees in the afternoon, and still around 65 when I went to sleep.

But when I woke up the wind chill was 13 degrees and one side of the van – the side facing 50-60 mile per hour gusts off the dunes – was coated in ice.

So what's this mean?

A propane heater keeps the van warm at night, but cold weather exposes just how difficult staying in a van can be. Back in D.C., weather like this is simply license to order pizza and hang out on the couch watching movies. Those are great days. But traveling in a van, it robs you of comfort. Gone is a place to really Be and Rest.

Not having a fixed home is invigorating and exciting and fascinating. Also exhausting, draining. And cold.

Joe

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“I spent years at 40,000 feet, looking down and thinking 'That would be a great place to ride a horse.'”

These days, Joe is a trail guide for the National Parks Service. When the airline industry “went to the shitter,” he got out. He traded jazz guitar for cowboy songs (he carries a ukulele when he rides), and sleeps in the back of an old pickup . He worked at Grand Canyon National Park for a few years, but now leads groups on horseback in Big Bend, along the border with Mexico.

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He dresses the part: a leather vest, canvas jacket and boots. A purple kerchief around his neck. He has thinning hair and small glasses, and looks a bit like a high school band director who finally decided to check out. He uses a saddle for a chair, and though everything fits in the back of the truck he's still paring back.

“There's so much stuff I have but don't use,” he said.

Joe said he was raised in the Northeast, but always felt the pull of the West. He flew for a small airline out of Las Vegas, and would talk about his dreams. “My coworkers had no idea what I was talking about,” he said.

When I met him, he was heading back to Austin for the holidays.

I'd forgotten Christmas is only three weeks away.

Overheard in Texas ...

In a Starbucks: "I don't like the way this country is changing. I don't know what it's becoming anymore."

In a state park: "I can't wait to get married. Mostly so I can get a dog."

In a BBQ joint: "Do you have any dogs he can borrow? He lost his deer."

[Back] On The Road ...

I slipped in and out of D.C., mostly unnoticed. A quick trip back to the only place I know to call home. It was a bit surreal; I told almost no one. The city seems to be getting along just fine without me. I suppose it's mutual.

Sitting at a poker table in New Orleans, an ophthalmologist from Sarasota told me it was a good idea to get out of Washington for a while. "That's not the real world," he said.

He was there for a conference and had planned to make the trip with his wife, but she broke her foot the week before. "If she'd come with me, I wouldn't be able to sit here and play cards all day. So it worked out for everyone," he said.

"What about your wife's foot?"

"It will heal." He called my raise. "Spend it wisely."

Back in D.C., I saw a play called "Bondage" that had almost nothing to do with S&M and all to do with the prison created by our perception of race. But the play was still performed by two actors in masks and leather, and a man in the front row munched potato chips and fell asleep while one spanked the other.

" ... not the real world." I couldn't help but remember that conversation. You have to be pretty jaded to fall asleep in that spot.

When I returned to New Orleans, I rescued Rosy from the airport and was on the road again. Temperatures have cooled off and so I invested in a space heater. But that really only solves the problem of sleeping in a cold van. Temperatures are still dropping during the day, and so the general comfort level is a factor. 

In some ways, a second part of this trip has begun. I've been camping through the Southeast because I had a few places I wanted to be at specific times. But it's wide open now, with only one direction: west.

"God didn't specifically outlaw killing."

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Window in New Orleans

He said this to me in a Tennessee campground. I'd seen him struggling to start a campfire, and went over to offer him coffee.

Pat had wanted a combat position in the military. For reasons we didn't get into, that didn't happen and instead he was thinking about joining the seminary.

"Of all the religions, Christianity makes the most sense to me," he said.

I asked him about what I saw as a disconnect. Personal responsibility for pulling the trigger, ending a life. Versus the ministerial life he was now considering.

"God didn't specifically outlaw killing," he said.

Masking the Anger

I had him pegged as an ex con or former addict. He had the lean look and casual nature of someone who had survived hard things. And he wanted to talk.

Dario was a cab driver. He'd come to Nashville some 15 years before, during "the war" in Yugoslavia. He and his father were soldiers, and they both were wounded by snipers within two weeks of each other.

"I love the United States," he said. "Look at the life it gave me."

We talked for a bit about his experiences. He told me World Relief had paid for his flight out of Croatia: $735.

"My dad passed away six weeks ago," he said. They'd both survived bullets, but cancer had finally taken his father. And then he told me that a week before, he almost went to jail for assaulting someone who was speaking negatively about the U.S. government.

An easy-going manner can only mask the anger for so long.