Adrift in America:

Diary of a Minimalist Mariner

By Sid Leavitt

© Copyright by the author 1992

To National Sanitation Services

Long may its field survey unit

patrol the highways of America

I. A Place

Charleston, South Carolina. January 21, 1989.

As it heads north into Charleston, Route 17 narrows to a two-way highway and imposes a long series of traffic lights against motorists trying to hurry through the downtown area. I look around at drivers stopped on either side of me. Their faces are serious, anxious, frustrated. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I don’t share their discomfort. I feel at home.

Later, parked for the night in a stand of jack pines near a small airport north of Charleston, I put the feeling into more words:

We all need a little place of our own. I have a place, and it is little, but I own it, and it seems to provide just about everything I require of a place. In fact, it provides more than any of the larger places I have owned. It can do this because it is adapted – in truth, over-adapted – to one of modern civilization’s more vulgar byproducts, a byproduct that in its vulgarity connects my place with just about every other place I have ever been or would ever want to be.

II. Two Words

Sanford, Maine. May 16, 1988.

The late morning sun beats down on King’s Shopping Plaza, warming the truck after a cold night. I open the side windows and smell it. Nearby, men are rebuilding the plaza entrance and several miles of Route 109. I walk along Route 109 and smell it. The smell is everywhere.

Bituminous concrete.

If I were at a party for a young graduate who I thought needed advice about the future, I would lean forward with a crooked grin and whisper just those two words: “Bituminous concrete.”

All right, maybe it isn’t for everybody. Maybe the future belongs to the other petroleum byproduct the other old guy whispered in just one word. But as the years go by, I find fewer redeeming qualities in plastics.

Bituminous concrete – the stuff highways and parking lots are made of, otherwise known as asphalt, blacktop, hot top, macadam, pavement, tar, tarvia or tarmac – covers tens of thousands of square miles of the United States. It is ugly, as only a sludge from decomposed dinosaurs and rotted monster ferns can be. And it is spreading.

But running along it and stretching away from it is still a lot of country.

And most of it is still free.

III. Another Beautiful Day

Zephyrhills, Florida. December 3, 1988.

The evening sky is the kind they name citrus cocktails for – orange bleeding smoothly into a blue as pale and serene as the waters around the peninsula. It has been another beautiful Florida day. I sit on the couch in a soft breeze, thinking it now smells only slightly sweet from the sewage leak, and peer through my reading glasses for the last of the thistle spines embedded in my feet. I find a flea instead and use the tweezers on him.

The thistles caught me by surprise this morning when I walked barefoot onto the dew-covered lawn behind the house in Zephyrhills where Ma, Granny and their friend Henry are spending the winter. I was halfway around the truck when I sensed it wasn’t the dew making my soles tingle. I lifted a foot and looked at the underside. Bristling with thistles. I hopped back around the truck and dove into the cabin door on my hands and knees, twisting around in the narrow doorway to get at the bottom of my feet. I thought of my cat, Bonzo. He had made dozens of trips in and out of the truck since we’d arrived the previous afternoon. Why haven’t those things bothered him?

Ah well, I grimace, plucking the last of the little balls of barbed wire from my undersurfaces, Bonzo is clearly the one creature in this truck who knows how to travel light.

Now there will be an additional complication in repairing the leaking discharge valve beneath the truck’s sewage holding tank. It is hard enough to crawl under there under the best of conditions. I will have to borrow a rubber mat from my mother to cushion my back against the thistles.

Damn, the whole sleeve will have to be replaced, and it is coated on the inside with sludge that, even when you know it’s yours, makes your eyes roll back when you put your hands in it.

There are other problems. The fanbelt keeps stretching loose, causing the engine to run hotter than it should. The bottom shelf in the clothes closet is working loose from the staples that secure it to the walls, causing the linen to sag down into the gas heater. Somewhere on the road, I have lost a rear bumper plug, and, as a result, a 10-foot collapsible sewer hose has wriggled onto the highway behind it.

For two and a half years, I have been living at a campground in Maine in this truck, unhooking it for weekend trips, trying to identify the weak spots and fortify them, trying to get whatever is going to break down to break down so I can repair it. Now, barely a week on the open road, the goddamned thing is falling apart.

Well, that’s why this has been planned as a pit stop, and soon I will be heading for Connecticut to join my wife, Diane, for the Christmas holidays, and we will settle the last details in this exciting new phase of our lives.

Evening has turned to night, and Bonzo and I convert the couch to a bed and slide into the sheets together. I can’t sleep. About midnight, I look out the window and see a thin crescent moon rising.

I sit at night and watch the skies

To see the moon in her ascent.

I sit alone and rationalize

The separated time we’ve spent.

Six weeks later, I am at a rural crossroads 60 miles north of Zephyrhills, parked beneath a live oak tree beside a row of empty vegetable stalls owned by Mr. Peoples. I have been parked here for a few hours before he drives up in a station wagon full of kids sharing his milk chocolate good looks, surveys my truck and asks if I am the new guy running the stalls. No, I say, I don’t know who the owner is. Well, he is the owner, he says, and I am welcome to stay here, but if the new guy shows up, will I please tell him Mr. Peoples – spelled the same as “peoples” – is looking for him. Mr. Peoples then drives away with the milk-chocolate-handsome kids waving.

As the afternoon sun makes its way beneath the spreading tree, I watch two other kids, lighter and pinker in tone, walking along Route 42 where it leads away east from Route 301 toward the railroad tracks. I walked there earlier, getting my exercise in the sun. The kids are walking slower.

Diane didn’t think the new phase of our lives was exciting at all. In fact, due to her father’s illness – I know, I told her, I was worried, too – due to that and other things, she said, she wouldn’t be able to join me in New Orleans during the February break from her teaching job. As for the spring break and our plans for Savannah, well, that was just too far in the future.

The kids get to the railroad crossing and turn south onto the tracks. Now they are facing directly into the sun. I continue to watch them, wondering what it would be like to have kids, as if the world actually needed any more.

Diane and I argued. I was angry and loud, shouting about why she didn’t tell me before this, anyway. She sat there sullen and disgusted, fed up with me and that stupid truck.

Well, at least the truck is running much better now. After 2,500 quick miles to Connecticut and back – Christmas ended early – the fanbelt has found its operating length, the closet shelf is holding tight beneath the screws and wires I have applied, and a new rubber bumper plug, thanks to some well-placed hammer blows, is holding fast to a new 10-foot length of sewer hose.

Even the mighty Bonzo has learned to walk on a Chihuahua-size dog harness and long piece of clothesline I have fitted him with for outdoor visits. I reel him in from the tall grass behind the vegetable stalls and stroke him into a hypnotic purr. You can never tell about women, but it looks like we’re on our own. Through the dark canopy of gnarled branches and glossy jade leaves, we can see the first stars of evening. It has been another beautiful Florida day.

IV. Tom Atwell

Portland, Maine. October 15, 1987.

“It’s great inviting Sid over for dinner,” Tom Atwell says. “He drives to your house in his house and has the dinner ready for you when he gets there.”

Tom Atwell is a redhaired, red-bearded guy with a temperament to match, especially when it confronts managers or anyone else who doesn’t help him get his job done. Actually, he never has invited me over for dinner. He just says that because we both think it is funny. I also should point out that the quote isn’t quite accurate. He rarely refers to me as Sid. He calls me El Pit, a corruption of LPIT, which is an acronym for late-person-in-training, which is what Tom dubbed me when he trained me to replace him as the newspaper’s late editor. The late editor is the last person on the news desk who gets the final morning editions out, and at the time, the last morning edition was going off the floor at 2:20 a.m. Tom was glad to get out of that slot. I am glad to be in it. I would stay in it permanently, but the managers already are suspicious of me for several reasons. First, I have voluntarily shifted from full-time reporter to part-time editor, a move they view as a loss of initiative. It is, but not for the reasons they think. When they ask me why I have done it, I say I am tired after more than 20 years as a reporter, and editing is a lot easier than reporting. Since they all consider themselves editors, I’m sure they don’t like the answer, but it happens to be true. A good reporter has to be a good editor to start with, making all the judgments an editor would make about why a story is important and what it should say, then is faced with the additional task of having to research and write it. As far as I’m concerned, my lack of initiative isn’t that I have moved from full-time to part-time – I want to be a full-time editor, and the part-time job seems to be the best way to convince them I am “qualified” as an editor. As far as I’m concerned, I tell them, the loss of initiative is that I have been willing to shift in fact from reporter to editor, a move I see as a step down toward the spiritual abyss called management.

“You can’t hold these things in, Sid,” Tom is fond of saying. “Tell us how you really feel.”

I am willing to make this move, I tell the managers, because while I am no longer able to function as a good reporter, I still need to work another six or seven years before I can hit the road in my truck. They say I have a bad attitude. Hell, I already know that. I developed it in the early 1960s when I was in the Army. What I can’t understand, I tell them, is that a company that insists on candor from everyone it deals with journalistically has such a hard time dealing with candor from its own employees.

Later, I have my last conversation with the company’s rising young assistant executive managing editor or whatever his title is. It is the last conversation not because it takes place shortly before I leave the company – I will stay on for nearly a year afterward – but because it takes place shortly before he starts using surrogates to deal with underlings who don’t agree with him. He and I have been at the company about the same length of time – a dozen years or so – but he is at least that many years younger than me. I came to the company with about a dozen years of experience on various reporting jobs. He came here from a cub editing job somewhere. I was put to work out in the bureaus chasing stories, while he worked in the main office through a succession of titles I never paid much attention to. He is the kind of guy you don’t pay much attention to until he pops up one day with a title that, even if you can’t get it straight, means he is a guy you now have to contend with. Whatever his title is – I honestly can’t remember if it’s assistant executive editor, assistant managing editor, assistant executive managing editor or whatever – it means he is the heir-apparent to the most powerful job in the editorial department, the executive editorship.

It’s funny how your physical perception of someone is related to how you feel about that person. We all know that physical appearance, especially physical attractiveness, influences the way we feel about someone, but I have learned that the converse is true: The way you feel about someone can influence whether that person looks physically attractive or unattractive to you. This guy has pale scrubbed skin and neatly clipped dark hair reminiscent of the trim swarthy features that Hitler tried to pass off as the classical Aryan look. Diane has the same combination of light skin and dark hair, and I consider her very attractive. On this guy, the combination produces a cross between a young Hitler and a young Stalin.

“Well, Sid, they tell me you’re doing a good job in the late slot. As you know, when you took that job on a temporary basis, I told you I saw no reason it wouldn’t become permanent ….”

There is a big “but” coming along somewhere, but I know this guy too well to expect him to say it. He’s attended too many management workshops to say a negative word straight out. A long pause and a change of tone will accomplish the same thing.

He takes a long pause.

“As you also know,” he continues in a voice about half an octave lower, “we have now finished the Editorial Directions project.”

Oh yes, I know about Editorial Directions – a massive study, headed by him, that solicits advice from employees, readers and public officials about how we can improve our newspapers (the company publishes afternoon and Sunday papers as well as the morning paper on which I work). There are meetings, seminars, questionnaires, surveys, even a film with background music from Vivaldi that chronicles the progress of Editorial Directions. It is a fraud, but only a few of us are willing to say that out loud, even to people we trust. The purpose of Editorial Directions is to give cover to this guy, who is next in line to run the place, to line up his own people – that is, those whose responses to Editorial Directions agree with what he has already decided to do. My response is succinct but genuinely felt: On my questionnaire, I answer none of the questions – most of them inquiring about my attitude toward my employers rather than my profession – and write simply that if they want better newspapers, they should put the employees who know how to put out better newspapers in the positions where they can do it. Who are these employees? If the managers don’t know, they should replace themselves. Too simple, I guess.

The biggest change engineered by the assistant executive managing whatever, presumably as a result of Editorial Directions, is to create a new level of management just below him and just above all the rest of us. Good insulation from those of us who might remember him in less-than-exalted terms. To pay for these new front-office positions, slots will be removed from the news desk.

“In creating these new positions, we have had to rethink our editorial structure, and the late slot will no longer be part of it,” he says. “Sorry.”

“Sorry” is a word nearly always abused. Those who are truly sorry don’t have to say it more than once. Those who are not sorry should never say it even once. Unless, of course, they get pleasure from it.

This conversation takes place three weeks before Christmas. I wonder if this guy has already chipped the coal for the neighbor kids’ stockings.

The company fills the next two full-time editing jobs by hiring two outsiders who happen to be former college chums of the assistant managing whatever. One of them, a roundish, jovial sort of guy, becomes the surrogate who deals with disgruntled underlings. A month or so before I leave, he calls me into his office to explain why I have been passed over for the latest full-time editing vacancy.

I cut him short, rising to deliver a last desperate, breathless speech: “You know, the sad thing about what you’re going to tell me is that you’re ignoring the fact that I’m a faithful employee. Sure, I bitch and moan and swear about management, but I keep it down to a dull roar. I’ve never let it get into my writing or editing, and I’ve always done what I was told. For the past 12 years, I have tried to do the best job I could because I have pride in my work and pride in these newspapers. With all due respect, these newspapers aren’t just the company that owns them or the management that runs them. They are also the people who work for them and the people who read them. They are all of us. I am part of these newspapers, and they are part of me. Loyalty has to mean something, but you guys are ignoring mine.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says. “The same thing happened to my father. He was with A&P for 40 years, and they dumped him.”

That’s it. End of discussion.

It seems to me his father has gotten screwed twice, once by A&P and once by having a son who emulates not him but the company that screwed him.

The third time they pass me over, it is for another outsider who, according to the announcement of his impending arrival, has distinguished himself largely in his spare time by winning awards as a furniture designer. By the time I see this announcement on the bulletin board, the handwriting beneath it is now so huge that I can’t ignore it: They aren’t hiring bad-attitude guys who spend their spare time perfecting the art of living in a truck.

My relatively new lifestyle turns out to be a wise choice. With the new full-timers – actually, the furniture maker turns out to be the best of the three, a decent editor – the company says it is up to strength and will be cutting back part-timers. I have been working four, five, sometimes six days a week. Now, I am told, I will be cut back to two, probably one, possibly no days a week. This, and winter is coming.

So goodbye, El Pit.

I have done a good job on the late desk. Tom did a good job there, too. He’s always had a knack for seeing what’s important.

V. Freedom

Portland, Maine. November 9, 1988.

I’ve always felt that Portland City Hall, a handsomely spired structure dating from the early 1900s, has been too cozily nuzzled in subsequent years by the newspaper’s three office and production buildings. The main editorial and administrative building is directly across Congress Street from city hall, and the other two sidle up on the same side of the street, all three of them done in a yellow brick usually reserved for prisons or asylums. But today, as I sit parked in the city hall 15-minute zone, I am grateful for the incestuous propinquity. It has allowed me to keep an eye on my truck from the second and fifth floors of the editorial building while I sign out of the credit union and hunt down my last pay check. Actually, the whole process takes only about 10 minutes.

I’ve thought a lot about freedom, and this is what it boils down to:

Freedom is being able to say “Fuck you” to your boss and be out of town 10 minutes later with everything you own.

Coarse, yes. Like bituminous concrete. Which is also durable.

VI. Honeymoon

Chelmsford, Massachusetts. May 24, 1986.

The first night I spend in the truck is like a honeymoon. I love this magnificent creation, and I do everything wrong.

The truck is what back in the 1950s we would have called a cherry. Talk about your little old lady from Pasadena. I bought the truck today from a little old couple from Pennsylvania who have driven it, no lie, only once – from the factory where it was assembled in Indiana to their home in northeastern Pennsylvania. The odometer shows only 650 miles, and I don’t think either husband or wife, both well into their 70s, crawled underneath to set back the mileage reading. I think their one trip in the truck was enough to convince the wife that it was too cramped for them, and I think she had trouble climbing into the loft over the cab.

I knew this truck long before I first saw it today in their driveway. I have seen larger models of the truck on dealer’s lots in Maine, and I have studied a brochure of the model I wanted in detail before I found the Pennsylvania couple with one for sale. I have done my homework so well, poring over the brochure’s schematics and interior photos, that I know before I ever see the truck precisely what size utility cabinet I can inlay beside the sink and exactly how many jars of dry goods I can fit on top of the refrigerator.

“It’s a nice-looking rig,” Mark Roberge says, sliding out from under the front end. Mark, a friend, neighbor and first-class auto repairman who has come along to give the truck a mechanical inspection, is satisfied within a few minutes that the truck is sound.

It takes me barely 30 seconds looking in the side door to be satisfied that the living area is exactly what I have seen in the brochure.

Diane kicks the tires solemnly.

The truck and I spend our first night together in a rest area off Route 495 just west of Chelmsford. The rest area is simple but scenic, a sidetrack of blacktop running off the six-lane highway onto an overlook bordered by a line of trees. By the time I pull off there at 6:30 p.m., I have been driving for nearly 12 hours in a trip that has begun at dawn in my car in southern Maine, gone to southern Connecticut to pick up Diane and then on to Pennsylvania to get the truck. Mark then drives my car straight back to Maine, challenging, I will later learn, several land-speed records for parts of the Massachusetts and Maine Turnpikes. Diane and I drive the truck back to Connecticut – well, actually, I drive the truck, dawdling and reveling through the hilly, winding roads of northeastern Pennsylvania while she lies in the loft reading a book and, with what in retrospect I will admit is reasonably good humor, tolerating the gasps and jerks of a male experimenting with his big new toy. By the time we get out of Pennsylvania, the afternoon is wearing on, so we speed on the throughway across New York State’s southern throat and on to the southern Connecticut coast and Diane’s home near New Haven. We haven’t discussed whether I will spend the night with her or go back to Maine, but by the time we get to her place, we both know without saying that I will be pushing north.

“Have a safe trip,” she says with that hint of a frown I have seen before.

I have passed this rest area on at least several hundred trips across New England, the most recent ones to connect with Diane, but I can’t remember ever stopping at it. But I am getting woozy. The late spring sun has been bright all day, and I have consumed a temperate but steady amount of beer from the two ice chests Mark and I brought along. By 6:30, the rest area is too inviting. Blue shadows have seeped out of the tree line and are blotting through the evergreens and budding hardwoods, creating an aquamarine haven that beckons me from the yellow confusion of the highway. I pull to the far curb of the rest area and shut off the engine. Across the blacktop of the rest area and a divider beyond, three lanes of traffic hurtle north at a pace that looks even more frantic against three lanes of traffic hurtling south.

There are things I have planned to do to the truck before I start living in it, but I can’t wait. I back it into a space toward the tree line, pull the ignition key and crawl through the seats into the truck’s living area.

It is the first time I have stood in the living area. Shadows have invaded the interior, obscuring all but the outlines of what is here. From the brochure and my quick inspection, I know perfectly well what the interior looks like, even the textures and glosses of the surfaces, but now I can smell it. It smells clean and new. Not the new of a new car but the new of a new apartment – new carpet, new furniture, new appliances.

I walk to the rear of the truck and sit at the aftermost end of one of the side couches. I turn on one of the lights beneath the cabinet that runs along the ceiling over the couch. The light clicks on like one of those overhead lights on a ship or plane, illuminating only what is beneath it. Through the beam of light, I look forward through the length of the truck. On my immediate left, within reach, is the refrigerator, built into a veneer casing that transforms the top of the refrigerator into a large shelf. The overhead cabinet runs forward a foot above the refrigerator and butts into the top of a narrow floor-to-ceiling clothes closet. Beyond that, although the refrigerator hides it from my vision, I know there is a floor-to-ceiling fiberglass stall that holds the toilet and shower. Across from the refrigerator, beneath a similar overhead cabinet running the other side of the ceiling, is the sink, all stainless steel and shiny. Beyond the sink, a polished white enamel stove, four small burners, a tiny oven. Wash the vegetables, steam them on the stove. Reach behind you for the wine in the refrigerator.

It is all here. A house on wheels. Not an 11-room house with 44 wooden shutters that I won’t get stripped and painted until well into the 21st century. It is a one-room house with everything I need to sustain life. Sure, the veneer paneling is fake, but with the real wood on the cabinet door facings, it is convincing enough. Sure, the heavy brown plaid upholstery and the sculptured beige carpeting that runs along the floor and up the walls are a little overdone. But hell, they are practical – carpeting for insulation, heavy plaid for stain-hiding durability, veneer in place of wood to make the truck lighter. And the appliances – stove, refrigerator, toilet, shower, sink – all shiny, new and virginal, as only a little old couple would leave them.

It is one new, clean-smelling, tight, dark, warm, friendly place.

And it is mine.

I retrieve the ice chests from the front seat and transfer the remaining cans of beer into the refrigerator. I click a small dial beneath the refrigerator to turn it on. I empty water and ice from the chests into the sink, stick a couple of beers into the drained cubes for immediate use.

I sit back down. Crack open a beer. A cold mist, like the mist from a popped champagne bottle, rises from the fliptop hole.

“Yesssss.” I clench my fists in a gesture popular these days and throw my head back to thank whoever it is up there who likes me. Through the skylight, I can see the last outlines of day etched on the high spring clouds.

I slide open the curtain behind the opposite couch. A stream of taillights is receding quietly in the northbound lanes, red spots suspended in the twilight, reflecting on the worn highway like the running lights of long ships leaving harbor.

I sit back with another beer and open Hunter S. Thompson’s The Great Shark Hunt. The doctor of gonzo journalism will later rave about drugs, thugs, fear and loathing in Las Vegas, but in the passage where I find him, he is back in 1963 in a fairly sober trip through Central and South America, just starting to raise his voice about what the Anglos are doing to the Latinos. I share his indignation, and I’m sure the good doctor would approve of my growing inebriation this night.

I look up from the book and notice my reflection in the opposite window. The tinted glass gives an amber glow to the light cascading over my hair, brow line, nose, chin, shoulders, hand, beer can, book. I feel like a passerby, looking in on a man at home in his favorite chair, reading a book, sipping a drink, looking up to contemplate a passage he has just read. The man looks older than me, but his expression tells me he is more content. He isn’t worried about his job, his creditors, the women he has loved, the women he has lost, the women he would like to love and lose.

I have to use the toilet several times, once for both functions, and that gets a little sticky because I have used the last of the onboard water. I wish I had saved some of the water from the ice chests. No problem. Have another beer. That’ll wash it down.

Somewhere around 10 p.m., I am having trouble seeing the pages of Hunter’s book. The light seems yellow and dim. So who cares? It is still a wonderful light. I turn it off, stumble forward into the cab to turn on the truck radio and, grabbing a couple of couch cushions, crawl into the loft and go to sleep listening to romantic music from a local FM station.

I will later learn several things.

For one thing, I will learn that when the truck is stopped and not hooked to outside electricity, the refrigerator must be switched onto LP gas, not the 12V setting I have chosen. Otherwise, the refrigerator’s heavy power demand will wipe out the cabin’s auxiliary power – the 12-volt source that also runs the interior lights – in about … let’s see, 7 to 10 p.m. … yup, about three hours.

I also will learn that the cab radio is connected to the truck’s main battery – the one that starts the engine – and shouldn’t be run all night.

I also will learn that running the water pump until it is dry will at least blow a fuse – the fuse box is beneath the couch where I was sitting – and sometimes the pump itself.

And I will learn that putting waste into the sewage holding tank without much water for dilution will make a mixture that, with road shock and exhaust heat, will turn into a paste that is difficult and unpleasant to hose out. A corollary: Urinating in the sink has a different but equally unpleasant effect in the drainwater holding tank.

I know none of this when I awake the morning after, sandwiched between the couch cushions and sweating in the early sunlight streaming into the loft windows.

I am just glad the truck is still here, and, as I pull a slightly cool can of beer from the refrigerator, I think how domestic and friendly the truck looks in the morning sunshine.

What a sweet machine.

I won’t realize until later, when I learn how to run all the systems and have to clean out the holding tanks, how sweet the truck really has been, how much it has forgiven me on our honeymoon night.

I start the engine, notice the radio is on and turn it off, pull out onto the highway and take a long pull on the beer can as we get up to speed again.

“Yesssss.”

VII. My Truck

Biddeford, Maine. May 25, 1986.

This is my truck.

I love this truck. If things go right, I’m going to live in it for 20 years or 200,000 miles, whichever comes first.

VIII. Stick in the Mud

Old Orchard Beach, Maine. August 1987.

Let me get something straight. While I love my truck, I am not generally enamored of trucks. And while it has been more than a year since I have had a permanent address, I am not a compulsive traveler.

Truck worship is a phenomenon that, if it weren’t so costly, would be merely silly. We Americans seem to prefer automotion to locomotion, subsidizing highways that go anywhere rather than railroads that go on schedules, allowing tractor-trailer trucks to carry most of our goods to market, even though locomotives could handle the same volume and variety of goods with a little planning and about a third less diesel fuel. The phenomenon may have grown out of the Old West and a man’s love affair with his horse, a beast of burden that couldn’t pull as much or run as fast as a steam engine but could veer off the fixed track and carry a man to any horizon. I say ‘man’ because, while they have a certain number of female groupies, trucks still are idols served mostly by males. You still see the cowboy imagery in TV commercials for four-by-fours and long-body pickups that in one frame are carrying hay from field to barn and in the next frame are clambering over the Rockies or bouncing through Death Valley. Beneath the images, however, is a different reality. Most small trucks are sold nowadays not to haul payloads – you can see that in the shiny paint of the cargo beds – but to carry off the impression that the owners could lead a blue-collar working life if they wanted to. It’s a strange message: I’m not a commoner, I’m just pretending to be one. It seems to me that faking commonness has to be worse than faking distinction. Well, there are a few exceptions. One example of feigned stylishness that particularly annoys me is the Chevrolet Corvette, a plastic-encased car of such poor design – straight out of the Jetsons – that it can’t get out of most driveways without bottoming out. What the Corvette says to me is that General Motors, in a display of colossal arrogance and cynicism, knew there would be enough buyers too stupid to realize that the same amount of money would have gotten them any number of other sports cars that are faster, more maneuverable, more efficient, more comfortable and certainly, to anyone whose taste goes beyond food that also is encased in plastic, more stylish.

So much for vehicles that make statements.

Now for traveling.

Considering that a person standing in one spot on earth is moving at a speed up to 1,000 miles per hour, depending on latitude, as the planet rotates around its axis, and considering that this circular motion is sprung into a spiral and sped up by 66,000 miles per hour as the earth revolves around the sun, and considering that both heavenly bodies are only specks in a galaxy that is pinwheeling at god knows what speed and trajectory through the universe, I’d say it was a pretty good accomplishment just to stand in one spot on earth. I have felt this way for a long time. As evidence, I offer a cross-section of statements, as best I can paraphrase them, that I have made to various wives during the past two decades:

I’ve never understood why people who are bored with where they live will go to great effort to travel to other places where people are equally bored with where they live. – To Peggy, 1975, a car trip from our home in western New Hampshire to a seasonal home in South Carolina that friends let us use for a short vacation.

I’ve never climbed a mountain, and I’m never going to climb a mountain. Why should I punish myself climbing up a pile of rocks from which I could easily fall to my death? – To Mary, 1981, a discussion about the excitement of doing new things.

I just hope the sun is strong enough to tan the white out of my knuckles. – To Diane, 1986, while clutching the back of the seat in front of me during an eight-hour, transoceanic flight to a vacation in Barbados.

My wives, of course, have had other perspectives, and these are exact quotes:

Oh, lovey, you’re so full of shit. – Peggy, who went on to enjoy the scenic and historic highlights of Charleston while I sat in the house, drinking beer and watching South Carolina Educational Television re-enact the War Between the States. On the trip back home, she was refreshed and I was exhausted.

I swear to god, Leavitt, you are the most negative, inflexible, opinionated man I have ever met. – Mary, who liked to call me by my last name, like we were college roommates.

……! – Diane, who just browbeat me into silence with that baleful stare she used on students who got out of line in her classroom.

I think I developed my bad attitude toward traveling during one of the earliest trips I can remember, a trip I like to call the Journey from the Land of Yellow Lines to the Land of White Lines. In the 1940s, when New Hampshire and Maine were even more rural and their roads even more rudimentary, New Hampshire marked its smaller paved roads with a single centerline of yellow paint while Maine did the same in white paint. Those of us along the border could tell what state we were in by the color of the road line. In 1949, when my new stepfather loaded up his logging truck with my mother and us kids and drove off to a new life in Maine, I watched every foot of yellow line as it disappeared beneath the hood. When the line turned white, my heart dropped and I said something poetic like:

“OhMaIdonwannago, ohMaIdonwannago, ohMaIdonwannago.”

“Settle down, dear,” my mother said, hugging me in the front seat as my brother pounded gleefully on the cab roof from where he stood in the back of the truck. “You’ll come to love Maine as much as you do New Hampshire.”

She was right, of course, but it has taken nearly 40 years.

IX. Caldwell

Caldwell, Texas. March 17, 1989.

It is one fine hot day in Caldwell. I am leaning on the passenger door of the truck, waiting for my clothes to dry in the laundromat. In the side mirror, I can see my face being turned rosy by the sun, aided by a kingsize can of beer I am storing just inside the open window on the passenger seat. A few feet away, a man with chestnut arms and face, about my age, leans against a post at the laundromat entrance and sips what appears to be beer from a white coffee mug while his clothes spin around in the machines. His hat explains to whom it belongs and at the same time makes a strangely appropriate observation about the weather: The hat says, “Daddy’s Hat, Daddy’s Hot.”

He can see I’m reading his hat when I ask, “How’s it going, Daddy?”

“Fine enough, sir,” he says, although it comes out something like “Fahn enuff, suh.”

We smile at each other. I bring the can out for a sip and put it back in the truck. He takes a sip from his cup.

We smile at each other again. It is time to start a conversation.

“I was wondering, sir, if you could tell me what these trees are that I’ve been seeing along the road. They look like hardwoods, but I don’t recognize them. There’s some of them across the street, in front of that white house there.”

“What whaht house?” he asks.

“That white house,” I say, pointing.

“Poce sokes,” he says.

“Poor soaks?” I ask.

“Not poe. Poce.”

“How do you spell that?”

“Poce. P, o, s, t.”

“No, not the fence posts. The trees that are behind them.”

“Poce. Poce sokes,” he says.

“Ah, post oaks,” I say. “I guess I’ve heard of them. Small, hardy oaks that were cut for posts by the early ranchers.”

He nods his head. We smile again.

He comes closer to the truck and looks at the Maine license plate. He frowns.

No one is quite sure how the state of Maine got its name. The most common theory is that the state was named because its coast was the mainland that colonial ships followed on their way back to Europe. Or because the Gulf of Maine was the first high sea that those ships bounded over. But there is a lesser-known theory that the state was named for a rural district in France that is still called Maine.

“How you get this truck here?” Daddy asks. “You a long way from home.”

“I drove,” I say.

“Not by boat?” he asks.

“Say, just where do you think Maine is?” I ask.

“Somewhere in Europe, ain’t it?”

I look at him, and we grin at each other again. I bring out the beer can and lift it toward him, he lifts his cup toward me, and we have a drink on it.

“It might as well be, Daddy,” I say. “It might as well be.”

X. Shelter

Biddeford, Maine. April 1986.

As I sit alone in the second of two houses Peggy and I owned during our 13-year marriage, I remember a couple of comments she made about this place that now seem more meaningful and prophetic than she intended.

One comment came just after we had signed the mortgage: “Don’t feel bad, love. It will take only one of us working full-time to pay the mortgage and meet the household expenses.”

The other comment came after we had lived a year or so in the house, which is located near the heart of the mill city of Biddeford: “You know, the only thing wrong about this beautiful house is that we can’t pick it up and move it to some place that is equally beautiful.”

Humans have few real necessities. I’m not talking about amenities that make life worthwhile – wine, music, deep philosophical discussions of Kant’s categorical imperative – but about raw basics that make life possible in the first place:

1. Air.

2. Water.

3. Food.

4. Shelter, maybe.

The first three are indisputably necessities. A human can live only a few minutes without air, a few days without water, a few weeks without food. I put shelter on the list because I’m from the Northeast where, at certain times of winter, being without shelter can be deadly. In other parts of the country, shelter isn’t necessary at all.

The first three on the list have something else in common that sets them apart from shelter. Air is still fairly clean, cheap and available nearly everywhere. The same holds true for water and food, although not everywhere in the world and not through much of human history. The same technology that is fouling our air and may be doing the same to our water and food has nevertheless made those two necessities relatively inexpensive and accessible nearly everywhere in our country. We haven’t made the same progress with shelter.

We Americans spend an inordinate amount of our lives working to support a house, apartment, mobile home, motor home or some other configuration of boards, bricks, cement or sheet metal that provides only one of humanity’s four real necessities – shelter – and even that isn’t on everybody’s list. In my case, I appreciate the profundity of Peggy’s first comment when I find myself alone in the house after our divorce. By this time, there are three mortgages – a second one to repay a personal loan used as the down payment and a third one to give Peggy her share of the house’s equity – and I am working just about full time to pay them and the household expenses. I clear about $350 a week, and the three mortgages total $880 a month – about two and a half weeks of pay before I can start thinking about luxuries like utilities, taxes and food. This is why I have become very analytical about shelter.

Shelter for its own sake is a fairly simple, inexpensive proposition – a bundle of slats and a roll of tarpaper will protect you from the elements – but a shelter gets more complicated and costly when you want to use it for more activities than just hiding from the weather. Drinking and eating, for example. Now the shelter becomes a dwelling. And then there’s all the stuff you need. Not just the hat, coat and rubbers you need when you go outside, but also the glasses to drink the water from and the stove to cook the food on. Not to mention the tables and chairs and couch and bed and so on. Now the shelter is a warehouse. And by now, it is sitting on a solid foundation in a fixed location. Because now all that stuff has to be protected. So you have already made a compact with the rest of society: Look, nobody else can come walking through my place while I’m here or break in and take my stuff when I’m not here, and I in return will pay a mortgage banker or a landlord for the privilege of putting this place aside for my exclusive use.

As I sit at the kitchen table of this house in Biddeford, conscious of all three floors weighing down on me, I decide I’d better minimize my stuff – it is pretty minimal already – and find some way of moving it out of the reach of the bankers and landlords. Because, as Peggy so clairvoyantly observed, the house sure as hell isn’t going to move.

So how does someone who doesn’t particularly like trucks and hates traveling end up thinking about living in a truck designed for vacation trips? It isn’t my first choice, but I know it will take too long to develop an invisibility ray for unlimited bank withdrawals.

Truck lovers think in maximal terms. They want bigger engines, heavier payloads, more speed on the highway, more gears off the road. Being a basically negative guy, I look at it the other way around:

I need something that is barely large enough to hold my stuff, barely powerful enough to move it down the road, barely fast enough to keep ahead of the people who want to be paid for the use of their space.

XI. Paul

Kingston, New York. December 27, 1989.

The man walking toward me is so large that he blots out nearly all the light coming with him through the door from the tool shop to the service bay. In his hand, he holds a four-way tire iron that looks like a cross. The image is timely because it is only two days after Christmas, although in this man’s hand, the cross looks like something he might have torn off the top of a church.

“They told me out front to ask for Paul,” I say.

He says nothing.

“Are you Paul?” I ask.

“Mmmm hmmm, whassaproblem, mista?” he says in a slurred, ponderous voice that comes from a place as hollow as the long concrete service bay. Royal Tire Service of Kingston advertises itself in the Yellow Pages as an outfitter of all trucks, large and small, but the service bay is bare. No lifts, no jacks. Driving into it is like entering a car wash from which all the cleaning equipment has been removed.

“Left rear inside tire. Flat. Road junk,” I say, bowing to his preference for unembellished conversation.

“Hmmmm,” he says. He glowers at the left rear dual wheel, which is now supported only by the outside tire. The tire seems to sag under his gaze.

He is a mountain of a man, 300 or more pounds bulging in a work uniform that once was blue or green but now, like his skin, has become a gray blanket of fresh and faded grease. On the high promontory of his head, his black eyebrows gather in thought.

In the Christmas spirit, I think of another Paul, described by some historians as a large man of intimidating demeanor and unpredictable seizures, maybe epilepsy, maybe just the Holy Ghost, that must have inspired as much fright as faith in the wayward Gentiles.

“Whassit weigh, mista?”

In his rumbling voice, I can hear echoes of some far-off place and time. No, not biblical. Wait, could it be Memphis? Elvis?

“Whassit weigh?” he says louder.

“Huh. Oh, fifty-eight hundred.”

Is this man going to lift the truck himself?

He gestures with the tire iron toward the front office, which is where he presumably wants me to stay until his work is done.

Forty-five minutes later, I ask in the front office if I can return to the service bay. I want to tighten the lug nuts myself so I can get them loose again if I ever have to change a tire on the road. But I am worried about how Paul might take the intrusion.

“Naw, he’s OK,” the office manager says.

Paul has the rear of the truck up on a portable hydraulic jack he has slid beneath the rear axle, and the left rear wheel is on a bench in the tool room, but the tire hasn’t been replaced. The spare is still on its mounting beneath the rear of the truck.

“Couldn’t get underneath,” he says. “Gotta wait for Paul.”

“Aren’t you Paul?”

“I’m Big Paul. He’s Little Paul.”

In a few minutes, a short, slender man named Paul returns from lunch, slides beneath the truck and sets about dismounting the spare.

“Where are you from?” I ask Big Paul.

“Here,” he says.

“No, I mean born and brought up.”

“Here,” he says. “All my life.”

Kingston is the seat of Ulster County, a mostly rural county that sits on the west bank of the Hudson River between New York City and Albany. The county’s pastoral fields and forested hills, which to the west and north become the Catskill Mountains, have long been attractive to refugees from both metropolitan areas – everyone from actors to gangsters, Hindus to Hutterians. In my brief sojourns as a reporter for the Kingston-based Daily Freeman, I guess I haven’t come across Big Paul’s sect.

“Done,” he says. The repaired wheel is back on the truck.

“Listen, I wanted to hand-tighten the lug nuts myself,” I say. “Just in case.”

“Won’t do you no good,” he says. “Too much weight. Never lift it on the road.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“One-ton truck. Loaded to three tons. What you got in there?”

“Everything I own,” I say.

“I guess the hell you do,” he rumbles.

“Good thing it has dual wheels,” I say. “Good thing Royal Tire Service has dual Pauls.”

He looks down at me blankly.

XII. Dwelling

Biddeford, Maine. May 31, 1986.

A corollary to the Sid Leavitt Shelter/Stuff Theorem:

The most basic characteristic of a dwelling is not the materials it is made from but the fact that they form an envelope between the occupant and the outside world.

That’s the first thing I learn after I move from an 11-room house into a four-cylinder truck that looks ridiculously small in the circular driveway of the old mansion. This house, with double-bricked walls so thick you can sit sideways in the window sills and a granite cellar that can hold a February chill prisoner until August, makes the daily changes of weather a silent phenomenon to be observed with aristocratic indifference through the panes of the heavy casements. The truck, on the other hand, turns out to be reptilian in its comforts. The air temperature inside a truck, I realize as soon as I have to think about it, is never more than a few minutes from the temperature outside, and the elements are never more than a few millimeters of steel, fiberglass or plastic from entering the cabin. You don’t appreciate just how much velocity raindrops can develop in an eight-mile plunge from thunderhead to earth until they explode in mushrooms three inches above your head as you try to crank the roof vent shut.

But that’s OK. The envelope performs its function. The fiercest rainstorm in the world is no match for a truck, which simply imposes its contour into the downpour and turns the clattering pellets of water aside in obedient rivulets. That’s just the way metals and polymers are. And I will learn in a few short months that when those materials enclose a relatively small air space, even the most insidious chill – in Maine, it likes to slither around at 20 or 30 below for a while every winter – can be banished from that space, given some simple insulation, by an electric space heater or gas stove burner in the same few minutes that it took the warmth to escape.

The envelope’s function goes beyond the physical. I can sit in a supermarket parking lot so close to people that I can hear the key sliding into the lock of their car door, yet the walls of the truck keep me as anonymous as the boy helping my temporary neighbors empty their grocery carriages. If passersby do notice me sitting at a window, they would no more intrude with as much as a stare than they would expect me to get out and slide into their back seat.

The envelope can be any size. In one sense, it can be so compact that it can be folded and put away in a pocket, provided the denominations of the currency in the billfold are large enough. A more common envelope is carried on the back and pitched at night.

Traveling south out of Denver one day, about eight months before I get my truck, I meet a guy named Steve Lutes who wears his envelope.

XIII. Steve Lutes

Denver, Colorado. September 1985.

I don’t notice him in the shadows until I have driven nearly through the underpass, so by the time I pull over to the side of the road, there is a fair distance between us. As I back up, it appears to me that he is too old and heavy to be jogging as easily as he is toward the car.

When he gets in, I can see that the heaviness of his torso doesn’t match his slender face and hands. He isn’t old, either – mid-20s at the most.

Has he been waiting long?

“Since last night,” he says.

In the warmth of the car, he starts unbuttoning his shirt – I should say shirts. Three, maybe four of them, all different plaids. Between layers two and three, he wears a broad white wrapping around his stomach and lower rib cage.

“Injury?” I ask.

“Sheet,” he says. “That’s what I slept under last night.”

It is late morning, and I ask if he is hungry.

“No,” he says, “I had a lot of breakfast. Egg McMuffins.”

There hasn’t been a fast-food place for miles. It turns out that Steve and a couple of his road buddies the previous day came across a McDonald’s dumpster just after the trash had been thrown out from the breakfast shift.

“That’s the best time of day. People order breakfast and then don’t want it. It gets thrown out in those styrofoam containers. You can see that a lot of them haven’t been touched.”

Steve and the gang gorged themselves on breakfasts, then stowed away several more of the styrofoam units for the road.

Why has he been waiting in the underpass instead of out in the open where he could be more easily seen?

“The weather,” he says. “It comes on you quick up here.”

The day is crisp and bright, the kind of day mountain resorts wait for to have their brochure photos shot.

A couple of hours later, I am ready for lunch. Steve says that will be OK with him, too. Although this is my pre-truck days, I am minimalizing even now. I am on a shakedown cruise in a 1977-78 Datsun that neighbor Mark has put together and traded to me for a small piece of abutting property. I am trying to see how far the car and I can go on a minimal amount of food and services during a vacation from my job in Maine. The car is a hatchback, and I have put down the rear seat so I can sleep in the back and, a pleasant side benefit, so my provisions will be more reachable from the front seat.

I open an Igloo cooler and begin cutting off slabs of food I have prepared for the trip. I have cooked half a ham – food writer Irma Rombauer defines eternity as a whole ham and two people – baked four loaves of sourdough bread and put in a five-pound block of cheese. As I am tearing off lettuce to put on top of all this, I notice Steve is watching this process with what appears to be trepidation.

Here’s a guy who 24 hours ago was wading through a garbage dumpster, and now he’s not sure about my sandwiches.

“Something wrong?” I ask.

“Doesn’t that use up a lot of ice? Where do you get all the ice?” he asks.

“I pick it up each time I stop for beer and wine,” I say, opening the other cooler and watching a smile spread across his face.

We make quite an excavation in the beverage cooler by nightfall.

Steve is a good-looking young man with pale features that look delicate within their frame of shaggy black hair. Given a shave, a haircut and a three-piece suit, he would fit right in on Wall Street. And that is a depressing thought. His manner of speech also is delicate – quiet, slow, deliberate – and I let him take his time.

Steve follows the seasons. Spring and summer in Denver. Fall and winter in Tucson. Since he doesn’t work in either place, his only means of transportation is his thumb. His parents live in Tucson, but they don’t like him around. Something about his being a bad influence on a younger sister. Instead, he hangs out at a church where he rakes leaves and does other chores in exchange for a bed and an occasional meal.

There is only a limited number of overland routes between Denver and Tucson, and all of them make a huge rectangular dogleg around the Rocky Mountains. Steve usually takes the simplest, the backwards L formed by Route 25 east of the Rockies and Route 10 across southern New Mexico and Arizona. In the spring, he hitchhikes to Denver for the summer. In the fall, he hitches back to Tucson for the winter.

In both places, because of his predominantly outdoor lifestyle, Steve occasionally runs into the police, who just as occasionally lock him up for the night. Although he has no church for a haven in Denver as he does in Tucson, he says he likes the police in Denver better.

“Why’s that?” I ask.

“The Denver cops don’t step on your fingers.”

He turns out to be right about the weather. We are traveling along an eastern rib of the Rockies, and while the road is doing only gentle ups and downs, it isn’t so obvious that the downs are bottoming out at more than 4,000 feet. In New Hampshire, where I come from, Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Northeast at only 6,000 feet. I have no experience with weather that starts at that altitude.

We are headed up a rise between two ridges when the stars go out like someone has pulled a black sheet across the sky, and from the darkest part of it, a pitchfork of lightning comes down in three prongs. I roll down my window and stick my face into the air to see if it is cold enough to freeze. Probably not, I decide, but without much resolution. It is, after all, September, and we are in the mountains.

Now I know that lightning doesn’t always descend from sky to earth. Lightning also can rise from earth to sky. But I learn in Colorado that when the earth is in the sky to begin with, lightning can go all over the place. What has been a quiet alpine landscape turns into a drive-through electric arcade, lights flashing from every direction, long spikes of incandescence arching across the sky, touching down in bony fingers that leave faint scratches on your vision as they disappear.

I look over at Steve. He is sitting stock still, his right foot pulled to the seat so that his right knee is higher than the left, both arms straight out with the elbows bent so that his hands are lined up vertically at his face, one hand in front of the other as if he is about to give the world a solemn nose-thumbing.

“It’s a karate position,” he says secretively, his lips barely moving. “It protects you from everything.”

He looks pretty weird sitting like that with his profile etched in green light from the dashboard. But I have to admit it makes me feel safer. And we never do get hit by lightning. Or any precipitation, for that matter.

My next exposure to Steve’s karate comes the following day after a long stop in the northeastern grasslands of New Mexico – Steve suggests I borrow a bolt from an engine mount to secure an emission-control pulley that keeps whirling off, a solution I also would have thought of in, say, two or three days – when we stop for an early dinner at a restaurant near Albuquerque. It is a fancy-looking place in a plastic sort of way, and Steve is hesitant about going in, but I have found that most restaurants will admit even the most commonly dressed patrons as long as they are quiet, clean and pay their bills. We qualify on at least two of those counts.

While the hostess is taking us across an open space that appears to be a dance floor, I notice that Steve is no longer with us. The hostess and I look back, and there is Steve, stuck in his karate pose, right knee up, elbows bent, hands at his face, staring up at a large spherical glass fixture filled with multicolored lights. He stands there unmoving, like a praying stork.

“He’ll be all right in a minute,” I tell the hostess with a confidence I have no reason for. To her credit, she says simply, “Fine,” and continues leading me to a window seat. People at tables around the edge of the dance floor must notice Steve, but they never so much as glance his way.

When Steve sits down a minute later, he says, “Those lights try to control you.”

I say nothing.

“Look at those,” he says, pointing into the window. “Don’t you feel they’re trying to control you?”

“Steve, those are reflections from that globe thing over the middle of the floor.”

“Reflected lights are worse,” he says. “They’re more powerful.”

Thank god for LSD, I think – the gift that keeps on giving, the lift that keeps on living, the score that has a thousand refrains and no finale. No wonder his parents are scared.

On the morning of the third day, after a night of tossing down toasts of beer and wine to Elephant Butte, a name I found on the road atlas, and sleeping on the ground near Truth or Consequences, we watch a red sun come up over mountains that look like pipe organs as we drive into southern New Mexico. It is time for us to split, Steve west along Route 10 and I south into Mexico.

We stop for breakfast near Las Cruces at a diner that is empty except for a middle-aged waitress who looks as hard as the white formica counter. We order breakfast and try to sip coffee. Steve has to go off to the men’s room, probably to throw up. The waitress, who has spent most of the time we have been there with her back to us, looking into the window where she has placed our orders, comes over to me and says:

“Your friend’s schizophrenic, huh?”

“Huh?” I say, hearing my echo.

“Poor kid. I’ve got a son who’s just like that. Real quiet, like he’s someplace else most of the time. Hard time concentrating. Easily distracted. Gets obsessed with things.”

“Well . . . yes, that’s right.”

“I knew it when you walked in here. Poor kid. People are so cruel. I guess they’re afraid. But, my god, my son couldn’t hurt anybody. He’s hurting too much himself.”

She stands wiping an ashtray without looking at it.

When Steve returns, our breakfasts are ready. He eats silently, bent over the counter, facing down into his plate. He is an intent eater, stuffing eggs and sausage and fried potatoes into his mouth, his eyes darting from side to side as he eats.

I’ve seen dogs eat like that, and it didn’t have anything to do with schizophrenia. Somebody had hit them too much.

I leave Steve as I found him, under an underpass, this one on Route 10 west. I give him some money that I know will be gone soon and a thermal blanket that we both know he probably won’t keep beyond the first night. Too much bulk around his waist.

Steve will stick with his sheet, pulling it over himself at night, trying to keep the world outside, especially if he is in a place where he has to keep his fingers in there, too.

XIV. Bitumen

Center Ossipee, New Hampshire. May 23, 1990.

You think I’m kidding about bituminous concrete, but consider this: It’s all one huge piece.

About four years after moving into the truck and driving it over more than 10,000 miles of back roads, I find myself curious about the other dimensions of that mileage. To make a linear mile of roadway, how much adjacent land is required? And how many miles of roadway have been laid? In other words, how much square area of our beautiful country has been covered by gooey black stuff? So I take a trip from my grandmother’s house in Center Ossipee, where I am spending my second summer off the road, to the University of New Hampshire library about 50 miles away in Durham.

It has been more than 25 years since I have visited the UNH campus, and I have to look at a road map to remind myself how to get to Durham. As I approach from the west and see the agricultural buildings stretched low over the fields off Madbury Road, I remember that the library is somewhere on the right beyond the railroad overpass entering town. I have forgotten how much traffic there is on Main Street. This is one of the worst times of year, the week before second-semester finals, and immediately beyond the overpass, I get into a snarl of traffic. I take a desperate right turn, the first one I can find, onto a side street that within a few hundred feet angles off into a parking lot amid a cluster of buildings. A channel of orange cones leads to the entrance of the lot. I turn into the channel before I discover not only that I will have to take a ticket from an automatic dispenser at the entrance, but that I will need the right kind of parking sticker on my vehicle to use the ticket in the first place. When I try to back out of the channel, I realize I can’t see traffic beyond the building I have just come around to enter the lot. I will need some help.

The permanent boredom on the face of the parking lot attendant, a graying man of 60-plus years, tells me he has seen everything at least twice. He steps out of the toll collection booth at the exit, walks the few feet to the entrance channel and scrutinizes my truck.

“You makin’ a service call or a delivery, mac?”

“I’ve got to go to the library. Is it around here?”

“How long ya gonna be? A few minutes? An hour?”

“Probably most of the afternoon.”

“Jeez,” he says. He puts his hands on his hips and looks out over the parking lot, squinting his eyes. I can’t see an empty space. There are no trucks, not even a large car. The lot is full of compact, collegiate-type vehicles.

“I got somethin’ for ya. Can you fit in there?” he asks. He points toward a space I can now make out between two cars beneath a tree. I nod. He moves several cones and has me drive in the wrong way through the exit. I back cleanly into the space.

He motions me back to the booth and gives me a special ticket. “I’ll tell the guy on the next shift about you. No problem. Just drive wide around the booth when you leave or you’ll take out the overhang.”

I thank him and ask his name.

“Charlie,” he says. “I’m originally from White Plains, New York, but I’ve lived up here for a lotta years. People back home say I’ve picked up a New Hampshire accent.”

“Not completely,” I say.

“Really?” he says, looking surprised.

The space he has found me is right in front of the bookstore. The library is just around the corner. Leave it to a downstate New Yorker to find you a way through a maze of bituminous concrete.

Bitumen is the mineral grit of petroleum, the nonflammable component of petroleum that remains as asphalt when everything else that easily evaporates or burns off is removed from petroleum. There is evidence that people around the Mediterranean were using asphalt from natural tar pits as binding and paving agents as early as 3800 B.C. But it wasn’t until nearly six millennia later, at the turn of the 20th century, that humans began manufacturing asphalt on an enormous scale that wasn’t so much mass production as mass byproduction. Asphalt is a byproduct of petroleum distillation. Kerosene, benzine, toluene and other volatile constituents of petroleum had found limited uses in the 19th century as lighting and cleaning fluids, but gasoline found its place in the 20th century. The automobile – the word literally means self-moving – is made mobile by a portable engine that derives its power from internal combustion, and the stuff that combusts is gasoline. The development of the automobile created a demand for gasoline that made petroleum refining a big business, but it also created a big problem: What to do with the residue, what to do with the sludge left in the bottom of the barrel after the gasoline, kerosene and other volatiles had been cooked off? An asphalt-based concrete, that’s what. Not only was there plenty of asphalt to bind together stone, crushed rock and gravel, but there were huge machines powered by internal combustion to spread the mixture around. In a sense, the gas-thirsty automobile invented the road that it rides on.

In this century, we Americans have spread bituminous concrete over nearly two million miles of public roads. It has been only natural to extend the blacktop into driveways, parking lots, shopping malls, residential subdivisions. I can’t find a reference book that will even estimate the amount of asphalt used in this off-road paving, but I’d be willing to bet it is at least half as much as the roads themselves.

If all this blacktop were pieced together like a giant jigsaw puzzle, it would cover at least 20,000 square miles. Nine of our states are smaller than that. In fact, our hypothetical conglomerate of bituminous aggregate would cover all of Maryland, Delaware and most of New Jersey.

There’s another strange sense I get from studying bituminous concrete. Unlike portland cement, the concrete made from petroleum never quite loses its fluid quality. In a way, it’s like the material of America’s first great highways – its rivers and canals. Bituminous concrete flows like water, or, more appropriately, like a glacier, taking decades before its fluidity is apparent. North America’s most sought-after natural waterway, the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, wasn’t traveled entirely by ship until 1903-05, and even then, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen spent most of his two-year passage locked in ice. America’s first great manmade waterway, the Erie Canal between Albany and Buffalo, New York, was finished in 1825 but was useful less than a half century before railroads put it out of business. Building water canals required torturous excavations to depths that would accommodate boat drafts. Building bituminous concrete canals requires only superficial excavation because the fluid that is poured into them soon freezes into a surface that our internal combustion vessels can skim over, our destinations and urgencies too temporal for us to notice that our roadways too are moving. There is a modern Erie Canal, and it is called the New York Thruway. There are several modern Northwest Passages, and all of them bear interstate highway numbers.

Like one huge national canal, America’s bituminous concrete flows together. When we stand in our blacktop driveway, we are standing on one edge of a huge network of slowly flowing hydrocarbon that links us with the rest of the nation. Our driveway is connected to a street that flows into a larger road that then spills into even larger highways that branch off into smaller roads that separate into smaller streets that diffuse into other driveways – Aunt Tillie’s in Cape Cod or Uncle Ned’s in Washington State.

This huge network of bituminous concrete is a utility, like the telephone, electricity or natural gas systems, that is useful to all of us. It is especially useful to those of us whose homes are not at the back of the driveway but at the front.

I spend the night in Durham in a second parking lot, Parking Lot A, an expanse of several acres of blacktop that pushes deep into the university’s agricultural fields. Although the lot is unbarred, it is open only to residential users who have another category of parking sticker. I drive all the way to the far end of the lot, over several speed bumps, and pull off into a field where some kind of earthworks is being excavated. Again, I am the only truck on the lot. Several patrols of campus police pass me by without a second look.

XV. Planning

Biddeford, Maine. February 1986.

A trailer is out, I decide as I sit at the kitchen table and try to figure a way out of this massive, costly, lonely house. A trailer would be the cheapest, easiest and fastest way to make me and my stuff mobile, but it also has serious drawbacks. Length is one. The smallest trailer I can find with the minimal facilities I require – a toilet, small sink with hand-pump faucet, two-burner stove, small refrigerator, a place to lie down, the whole package for about $5,000 – is only eight feet long. But even that length is too long. An eight-foot trailer, with another foot or so for a hitch, added to the length of the smallest compact car – 12 to 14 feet – makes the whole linkup of car and trailer at least two to four feet longer than the longest parking spaces laid out by most municipalities and commercial areas. Security is another problem. Disconnecting a trailer and leaving it in a strange place, even for a few hours, is an invitation to someone else with a vehicle and a trailer hitch to haul it and my stuff away. So I will be driving around with a trailer that I won’t dare disconnect. Ever try backing up with a trailer? My neighbor Mark, a man with as much experience as anyone I know driving all kinds of vehicles, everything from motorcycles to diesel rigs, has acquired some basic wisdom about trailers.

“You never think about backing up until you have a trailer, and then you seem to spend all your time backing up,” he says. “Trailers are a real pain in the ass.”

The most troublesome liability of a trailer is that it is a transient vehicle and looks that way. It’s hard to park a car with a trailer anywhere for very long without attracting the attention of police or property owners or vandals and thieves.

A van? Same problem. A van is a transient vehicle that draws attention to itself. A van also is considerably more expensive than a trailer, especially if outfitted with the facilities I want. Putting appliances into a van and adding a pop-top roof extension for enough head room to use them can push the price of a basic van, currently anywhere from $8,000 to $12,000, into the $20,000 range.

No, what I need is a small truck. Sturdy enough to hold basic appliances and a limited amount of other stuff – a few clothes, books, maybe a typewriter – but small enough to park anywhere and neutral enough to be left alone for a respectable amount of time in most places.

A new truck is out. A 15- or 16-footer with a plain square box is running in the $20,000 range. I am looking for a solution to my shelter problems in the $10,000 range.

A used rental truck may be the answer. The most reliable rentals I know are Ryder trucks, and an equipment manager at the company’s district office in Portland tells me I probably can buy a used 15-footer for somewhere around $7,000. But, he says, the truck will have at least 100,000 miles on it. Rental miles are tough miles. Well, I can have a rebuilt engine put in for another $2,000 or $3,000. Then I will have to do some work on the cargo box to convert it to a living space. I make the rounds of local mobile-home and recreational-vehicle dealers to get catalogs and prices on appliances. I compile a list of what I need and what it will cost:

Refrigerator $650

Stove 350

Furnace/space heater 350

Water heater 250

Toilet 200

Auxiliary batteries 150

Water tank, pipes 100

Sink 50

—————————————

$2,100

Gasoline-powered generator 1,500

—————————————

$3,600

Then there will be wiring, plumbing, insulation. Also, I will have to cut into the cargo box to install any vents, overhead windows, maybe an extra door. Well, at least the cutting will be easier on a rental truck. Heavier commercial trucks have steel bodies, but the cargo boxes on rental trucks are usually thin aluminum that can be replaced easily after inexperienced drivers run them into overhead bridge abutments or gas station canopies.

I know enough about basic carpentry, sheet metal work and auto mechanics to do most of the work myself, but time may be a problem. My conservative estimate is that the work will take at least six months of spare time, days off and holidays, and because of my previous experience with my conservative estimates, I know the time will run more like a year. Cost also is getting to be a problem. The truck, engine and equipment are now pushing $15,000, and I figure the unforeseen nuts, bolts and widgets can blow another $5,000.

I am planning to finance this scheme with profits from selling the house. So I’ll probably wind up living in the truck, moving it from place to place, while I rebuild it.

Damn, damn, damn. I know I won’t be taking the kitchen table with me. I am poking too many holes in it with my pencil as I draft plan after plan after plan for moving onto wheels.

XVI. Jerry Walker

Ankara, Turkey. May 1964.

“Working on a geometry problem?” Jerry Walker asks, puffing on his pipe.

“More like a fantasy problem,” I say. I take off my headsets – I haven’t been listening to the dumb-ass tank maneuvers, anyway – and push the diagram across my radio console desk toward Jerry.

“Interesting,” he says, squinting at the smoke from his pipe as he leans his head down to inspect the diagram. He takes the pipe out of his mouth. We are pretty convinced that a pipe makes a man in his early 20s look like a man in his late 20s. That and a mustache. We each have one of those, too.

“That’s a diagram of what I would take with me in a 10-foot cube that could be transported anywhere back in time.”

“Oohhh?” he says, raising his eyebrows. The diagram is a tangle of lines, layer after layer superimposed on one another inside the cube.

“I’m thinking about the 12th or 13th century, probably the 13th,” I say. “That would get me well into the Middle English period. I could probably learn the language well enough beforehand to get by in it.”

“You’re going to medieval England?”

“No, probably the southern Pyrenees. Better base of operations. Warm weather. Mountains for security.”

“Mmmm hmmm,” he says, reinserting the pipe at an angle that will keep the smoke out of his face.

I’m not sure why the cube is 10 feet on a side. I think I have read somewhere that all the gold in the world could be fit into a cube of that size. I’m not planning to take gold with me.

“What are these diagonal lines across the top of the cube?”

“Rotors. After I got transported, they’d pop up out of the cube and fly the whole thing wherever I decided to locate it. They’re connected inside the cube – right here – to a small hovercraft. It would travel mostly at ground or sea level, but the rotors would lift it whenever that was necessary.”

“Uh huh, hmmm. These lines along the side of the cube?”

“Galvanized barbed wire. If the transporter dropped me into a dangerous place, I’d pump juice through the wires to serve as a perimeter until I could get out of there. I figure a mountain cave would be the best place to set up. Secure the entrance with the electric wire. Blast a skylight out of the back of the cave and use these seeds – in this box tucked into the hovercraft – to grow food hydroponically. These other boxes are dried meats, vegetables, grains that I’d live on until my cave garden started producing.”

“I take it you couldn’t come back once you were transported?”

“Nope. One-shot deal. These other containers are all books – agriculture, botany, geology, metallurgy, pharmacology, electronics, geography. I’d use the hovercraft to find the ore I needed for metal and electronic parts, and I could smelt and fabricate them in a small electric forge back in the cave.

“I’d also cruise the countryside, maybe villages and towns, for meat and vegetables I needed to supplement my diet. Anybody gives me any shit, I zap ‘em with this pneumatic dart gun. Tranquilizer tips. Knocks ‘em out but not kill ‘em. Good for game animals, too.”

“Ummm, hmmm,” Jerry says. He takes a thoughtful puff. “What about energy? How are you going to power the hovercraft, the forge and all this other stuff?”

“Well, that’s another of the ground rules. Besides getting a 10-foot cube and transportation back in time, I get a one-cubic-foot fusion reactor that pumps out unlimited electricity from a little water I put in it every now and then. The reactor would stay in the hovercraft, but I would run off wires to charge batteries that would power my cave operation.”

This is pretty sophisticated stuff for the early 1960s. Although the principle of nuclear fusion is known from the hydrogen bomb, no one has begun experimenting with controlled fusion, but we in the intelligentsia know that the experiments will start soon and that the world will have fusion reactors within, oh, no more than 20 years.

“I like it,” Jerry says. “It forces you to reduce everything to essentials, fit them together in a fixed space, figure ways to put them to multiple uses.”

He straightens up and walks back to his console, picking up the earmuff-type headsets that have been lying on the metal desk in front of the console.

“Well, back to work,” he says. “It’s about time for Sergeant Bozo to be coming through.”

Jerry clamps the headsets over his ears and reaches ahead for one of the dials on the console. Within seconds, his eyes have a glazed look that we all know means he isn’t listening to anything.

Who in hell cares what the Russians are doing.

Eight hours a day, five days a week, on a schedule that rotates ahead eight hours each week, Jerry Walker and I and several dozen other specialists-fifth-class sit in one of several long rooms in a low building on a plateau outside Ankara, listening on radios for what Soviet-bloc tank battalions might be doing in the Transcaucasian regions just north of Turkey and Iran. We dial at random through thousands of radio frequencies – our antennas are powerful enough to pick up the short-range transmitter on an individual tank hundreds of miles away – and, if we find maneuvers, we record them on reel-to-reel tape decks. These recordings are transcribed in triplicate in the original language, then translated into English, also in triplicate, and then all the paperwork is sent off to god knows where. Probably the incinerator.

Our mission presumably is to detect any large buildup in forces, presumably the first sign of a Soviet invasion into the Middle East. We presume all this, but the Army brass never tells us anything about what we are doing. It is classified.

In return, we never tell them that finding maneuvers with our super-sensitive, far-reaching equipment is about as hard as finding trees in a forest. The Soviets are always there. If you were a Soviet general in charge of a tank division, would you hold winter maneuvers in Siberia? Or pass up a chance to visit the Black Sea in the summer?

Our production of transcriptions seems to depend less on the activity of the Soviet military than on the sensitivity of the Army Security Agency to its budget. Every once in a while when things are slow, the Army brass notifies us that they expect increased activity in Transcaucasia. I’m sure on these occasions that somebody in the National Security Agency, the civilian side of the operation, has remarked at a staff meeting or cocktail party to someone in the Army Security Agency that things seem slow in the Mideast. Not so, the ASA guy will say before he gets on the teletype to the outposts, telling us to check for activity. We check for activity. Sure enough, it is still there. We fill more tapes and do more transcriptions.

Tank maneuvers make for a lot of paperwork. Individual transmissions are only a few words long, and each gets a separate line on the transcription:

“Control, this is One.”

“One, this is Control.”

“Permission to turn right?”

“Permission to turn right.”

“I am turning right.”

“You are turning right.”

“I have turned right.”

“You have turned right.”

“Control, this is Two.”

“Two, this is Control.”

And so on. The Soviets are very good at radio security, always identifying themselves only by call signs or numbers and never talking about specific locations, just their specific maneuvers. They know we are listening. Our base is covered with listening antennas that, unlike broadcast antennas, have uniquely long grids of wires that can’t be mistaken for anything else. And just in case the Soviet overflights miss those, our company commander insists that our barracks next to the antenna fields be surrounded by a West Point-type lawn – Kentucky blue grass, I think. On top of an arid plateau where the only natural growth is brown wiregrass and purple sage, the bright green square that is our lawn must be visible from the moon.

The base is run by hard-stripers like Sergeant Bozo and lifers like our company commander who know nothing about what we are doing and care even less. Sergeant Bozo – so named because his hair grows only in tufts above his ears – would be equally happy in an infantry rifle company or a special services entertainment unit. He has the same pay grade as a specialist five, but his stripes, a stack of three chevrons, give him the authority to tell spec fives what to do. He cares only that shoes are shined, uniforms are crisp and military courtesy – yes, sergeant – is maintained.

Anyone who has been in the military knows what life is like in a civilian dictatorship or a large corporation. People are stratified in a top-heavy hierarchy of authority that compels those in the lower levels to support, not question those above them. There are no ballot boxes. Nor is there much incentive to do good work.

These are the days of the draft, and while every specialist in my company theoretically is a volunteer, they chose to a man to sign up for three years as linguists – the whole first year is language training – rather than two years as draftee riflemen. Talk about bad attitudes. Those in the lower echelons spend most of their time trying to stay out of trouble while circumventing the system. Those in the upper echelons spend most of their time kissing the asses above them, trying to get into a more advantageous position.

Jerry Walker and I will work together for about two years. In the nearby barracks, we also will live together. He is a quiet, unathletic, rather soft, sandy-haired man who has studied math and German at Yale and hates the jock-type, hail-fellow life I have come from at Dartmouth. He specifically hates what he calls “crude mentality,” including but not limited to rock-and-roll, fraternity parties, drinking to the point of regurgitation, chasing women like small game that must be trapped and nailed to the wall. Jerry – that is his name, not Gerald or Jeremiah – grew up in a modest home in Kansas City with a single-parent mother whom he obviously loves deeply. I have come from similar circumstances, and eventually he gets me to confide it. We become close friends, discussing all subjects with the earnestness of people just out of college. He eventually concedes that Ray Charles is a passable folk singer, and I eventually concede that I yearn for a meaningful relationship with a woman.

I am secretly in love with Peggy, but I admit that to no one, not even myself. She is the sister of my best friend back home, and I have known her since she was 10. She is still a teenager – 19, I think, when Jerry and I get to our most serious conversations about women – while I am an older man. Twenty-three. And my best friend’s sister, for god’s sake.

Jerry loves classical music, especially the classic guitar music of Andres Segovia. Jerry is no musician, but he has brought an acoustic guitar to Turkey, and, through the two years we live together, he teaches himself from recordings to play Segovia’s rendition of “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.” It is a quiet but complicated piece with difficult fingering. Hour after hour, Jerry plucks it out, over and over, in our room. I never find it irritating. I come to love that piece.

Jerry goes to work each day with a book of differential equations. The hard-stripers think it has something to do with radio frequencies. Actually, Jerry likes to solve the equations without using the formulas in the back of the book. He also brings in books of German literature because he knows that no one in authority on this foreign-language listening post can tell the difference between German and Russian script.

I have to credit the Army with one thing: They know how to teach language, probably because memorizing and repeating words and phrases around the clock, a system that only a dictatorial organization can impose, is the best way to learn language. Jerry and I were trained at the Army Language School in California, and we both speak Russian pretty well. Our knowledge of the language is rarely challenged by our work in the field. Once you get past “control,” “permission” and a few numbers, you pretty much have the job cold.

I sit at the console for hours, looking blankly at the radio dials and imagining myself at the controls of the hovercraft, bathing in the blue light of the instrument panel as the moonlit waves of the North Atlantic speed beneath the cowling. Sitting in my blue cocoon, rocking in the waves, I am comfortable and safe. Insulated from a world that will feel me only when I choose to reach out and feel it.

XVII. Doing the Math

Kansas City, Missouri. April 12, 1989.

On my Rand McNally, central Oklahoma looks surprisingly close to Kansas City. It’s surprising, all right, but not close. I have driven all night to get here, adding more than 500 miles to the odometer. But it’s a chance to look up Jerry Walker’s mother and find out what he’s doing these days.

A second miscalculation. I haven’t seen him for years, I have no idea where she lives – including whether she lives on this side of the river or in the other Kansas City on the Kansas side – and the greater Kansas City phone directory lists several hundred Walkers, almost as many as the Joneses.

Well, the weather has been nice, and fresh spring air flows through the window screens into the truck as I sit at the pop-up table and drink a cold beer, contemplating nothing in particular.

As I look around at the interior of the truck, it occurs to me that the volume of this living space – 6 by 6 by 17 feet – is a good one-third smaller than the volume of that fantasy cube.

XVIII. The Big House

Las Cruces, New Mexico. September 1985.

My envelope in the big house in Biddeford has been getting emptier for years, but I don’t really feel the emptiness until the trip to the Southwest. Somewhere on the road, the feeling takes hold. After I leave off Steve Lutes in Las Cruces, I find myself wanting to just keep going.

Driving through El Paso to the Mexican border, I think of Jack Kerouac and his friends roaring in an old Ford jalopy into Mexico, smoking marijuana the size of cigars, copulating with a harem of dark-skinned women in a small-town whorehouse, penetrating so deeply into the central Mexican jungle that they become part of it, swooning into it with their bodies caked with dead bugs and sweat, their breath mingling with the humid exhalation of trees and swamp.

I get lost in Ciudad Juarez looking for a post office to mail bullfight postcards back home. I stop a group of teenage girls to ask directions to el correo. One of them says something like, ‘Vaya por esta calle dos cuadras, luego la calle a la izquierda . . .,’ but it is hard to follow her Spanish and gaze upon her black eyes, cashmere beige skin and sparkling teeth as white as the blouse of her school uniform.

The wrong number of izquierdas later, I am sitting at the bar of a large hotel, drinking beer before noon and acknowledging that I am a dirty middle-age man getting older and no cleaner. I leaf through the postcards. Back home. What a joke. The postcards are to my co-workers, most of whom live in other towns, to an ex-wife, also in another town, and to my mother and grandmother, both in another state. Even the cats are in another town with a veterinarian who is showing them more attention than I have. There is no one back home.

I have lived in that house with three women, and all of them later confided they thought it was haunted.

After Peggy and I bought the house, I spent hours walking through it, looking at every brick, feeling every casing, treading every floorboard, getting to know every piece of the beautiful old place and planning how I would embellish it. All I got done was to tear away the top half of a kitchen wall, filling in the empty studs with shelves to the ceiling and then building what became my favorite piece of furniture – the kitchen table – by gluing together strips of heavy maple flooring, supporting them in the center by a hardwood post and anchoring the whole thing with bolts to the wall of shelves. It was a solid job – the table never swayed a millimeter – but that’s all I got done. I liked planning better than working. And something happened.

Peggy was standing at the end of that table one Sunday night when I came home from the office to announce that I, in our 13th year of marriage, was going off to live with a woman I worked with.

I thought I had struggled with my secret long enough, and I thought I was braced for what had to be done, but I wasn’t ready for the look in Peggy’s eyes. And as much as I had hoped the worst would soon be over, that announcement became more terrible to me as the years went by.

Peggy stayed in the house about a month until she could move out of a place she now despised. I moved back into the house with Sara, who was sitting at the kitchen table five months later when she informed me she was taking a new job with the company that would require her to live about 50 miles to the north. Our romance really had ended some days earlier in an adjoining room, the dining room, when we spent a candlelight dinner arguing about my sleeping with a former co-worker of hers while she was sleeping with a former co-worker of mine.

Eighteen months later, Mary, who had become my second wife nine weeks after we met, sat me down at the same dining room table, folded her little-girl hands and told me in the sweetest voice she could summon that I was picky, overbearing, critical to the point of being verbally abusive, and she needed some space for an indeterminate period of time. Our life together continued for a few more months, but it was sad and lame, and I knew she was right. Because all I could think as I sat there listening to her in the dining room was that I was being dumped by a woman who at age 35 still spoke in a teenage falsetto and found sociological meaning in words like “space.”

Diane, whom I met six months after Mary left, liked the house but wasn’t about to move in. Diane lived and worked in Connecticut, liked her life and career there and, she told me, believed in the traditional values of marriage. So did I, I said, and that’s why I didn’t want to screw up a third one. For about a year, we alternated visiting each other, but she had longer vacations and spent longer periods with me in Maine. When our second summer came around, I thought she might spend most of it at the house, but I returned from work one night and saw as I drove up that there were lights shining on all three floors. She was sitting at the piano in the first-floor living room, playing a melancholy piece by Chopin.

She too felt there were ghosts in the house, but she knew who they were.

She left after a week. A few weeks later, after I had visited her in Connecticut, she returned to Maine for another stay in the old house, but after the first night, I was sitting at the kitchen table when she emerged from the bedroom with her bags repacked. I asked her where she was going. She asked me the same thing.

She said I seemed to spend most of my time feeling sorry for myself or about myself, and I refused to make commitments, even to the house. It was 150 years old and needed attention, but I just sat there at the kitchen table or wandered around in rooms that were nearly all empty now. I was just drifting, she said, and she wasn’t going to waste any more of her life while I couldn’t seem to get any direction in mine. I sat silently at the kitchen table and watched her drive out of my view of the circular driveway.

Now I took to serious wandering. Most of the furniture had left with Peggy – it had come from her family, anyway – and I had lost other pieces through a series of moves with Sara and Mary. I was now down to less than three rooms of furniture in an 11-room house, and that was fine with me. I moved those few possessions from one part of the house to another, changing with the seasons, bumping off more edges as I moved, letting everything wear and run down together. When I wasn’t at work, I sat or wandered in the house, letting the sun go up or down as it would. I spent whole weekends without touching a light switch, walking around in the dark like the cats did, knowing every step, every turn, every stair. Where I once had been fascinated by the house, I was now being absorbed by it, dissolving into it.

I am drinking the fourth or fifth of a long list of unfamiliar Mexican beers the hotel serves when reality washes back in. I become aware that people are crowding around a television set in the lobby just through the door. I keep hearing a word that sounds strange even in my unpracticed college Spanish. Terremoto . . . terre moto . . . te rre mo to. Earthquake.

People are watching the screen with their hands at their faces. Some are weeping. Early reports are incomplete, but the immensity of the disaster is apparent. I feel like a spectator at a bad traffic accident, unable to help anyone but unwilling to leave without a long gape at the bleeding victims of the Mexico City earthquake.

I find the post office, mail the postcards, head back for El Paso.

Nature has an additional message for me when I get back to the East Coast just as Hurricane Gloria arrives. I am on a clogged parkway north of New York City when the rain gets heavy. As I drive through a long stretch of standing water, I hear the left headlight pop. I turn off for Diane’s place for shelter.

By the time I get to the top of the hill they call a mountain in southern Connecticut, the area has lost power. Diane’s father, wearing only a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts, is in the yard battening down the swimming pool. Even soaked to the skin with his black hair matted down, Norman still looks like an industry executive – in charge but charming, a tanned smile and a cordial handshake, like it hasn’t been more than a year since he has seen me.

Inside, Diane is quieter but equally nonchalant. Later, sitting in the glow of an oil lamp as the wind whistles outside, we agree to resume seeing each other. I will try to be more committed, she will try to be more patient, and we will see what happens.

Back in the house a few days later, I sit at the kitchen table and look out at the ‘77-78 Datsun in the driveway. I could have just kept going, I tell myself. I look down at Killer, a fat orange cat who twitches his tail at me in anticipation of being fed. Killer’s adopted sister, a tiny gray cat named Mouse, sits purring in my lap. How could I have left them? Bonzo is off in another room, probably in a corner, looking at the walls. He isn’t as easily won back. He knows why I am looking at that car.

That car carried nearly everything I needed for a month on the road. If only it had been bigger. But not too big.

Listen, I have to go back to work tomorrow.

OK, so what size would a vehicle have to be to contain my already meager possessions? And would I really need all of them?

I will have to think about it.

XIX. More Planning

Biddeford, Maine. March 12, 1986.

One of the stories I heard in the Army was about an old guy in the Caucasus – you know, one of those hardy people who eat only yogurt and live to age 130 in remote mountain villages that still haven’t gotten electricity – who had been consigned in life to be a goatherd but so yearned for literacy that he taught himself from the Bible how to read and write. From the moment he could write, he began dreaming of a machine that would make letters like those in the Bible. He spent the rest of his life building such a machine – a grid of buttons, one for each letter of the alphabet, that when depressed with a finger would strike the letter through an ink screen onto a piece of paper. He had invented the typewriter. Unfortunately, when he brought his invention down from the mountains, it was the early 20th century. The rest of the world had been using typewriters for more than 50 years. I don’t know how accurate this story is, but I’m sure it is based on truth.

I am making a visit today to Boucher’s RV Sales in Goodwins Mills, a village on the outskirts of Biddeford. I am trying to look like a potential buyer, but all I want is free information and brochures on mobile appliances, specifically an LP gas furnace I am researching for the truck I want to buy and renovate as a home on the road. After months of planning, I have decided on a 16-foot, over-the-cab truck body, probably a used rental truck if I can’t find a private sale in the want ads. I have drawn the truck body’s shape on a proportional grid and have cut out proportional outlines of the appliances I need to fit into the space. After shuffling the cutouts through endless combinations, I have found what I think is the best arrangement for everything but an LP gas furnace that comes in several sizes.

I am getting excited about the plans because I have just gotten a firm offer on the house. I still have reservations about living in a truck while renovating it as a dwelling, but what the hell. The possibility is no longer hypothetical. The money will soon be available. It will soon be now or never.

At Boucher’s, a personable young salesman named Steve Bennett tells me a furnace similar to the one I am considering has heated the small mobile home his company uses as an office for about $20 a month. I am impressed, but he has no brochures for the furnace.

“Hey, c’mere, I got something I want to show you,” Steve says, walking toward one of the motor homes on the lot.

I’m not in the market for an RV, but out of courtesy, I step into the vehicle, a model called a Rader TK micro-mini with a loft over the cab. Well, the interior has all the appliances and equipment I have studied, but they are laid out all wrong. Too much wasted space.

“Whaddaya think?” Steve asks as we step outside.

“Too long. That thing looks like it runs 24 feet.”

“Nope. Twenty-one. Look at that undercarriage.”

The chassis is sturdy. The cabin is mounted on hollow-beam steel joists the size and shape of two-by-fours. The engine block will rust out before those things do.

“The truck is a four-cylinder Toyota. Good gas mileage,” Steve says.

“Yeah, but it’s so damned long. The ass end hangs out way too far over the rear wheels. Besides, I can’t afford it.”

The truck is a 1983 model with about 25,000 miles on it. Steve is asking $16,700.

“They make a smaller model,” Steve says. “Same undercarriage, but the cabin is four feet shorter.”

“Oh? Let’s look at one of those.”

“Don’t have one. It’s called a Monterey, but I haven’t seen many of them. I don’t think they make many of them. Most people want something bigger.”

He does find a brochure that he lets me have.

I take the brochure home. I make a phone call to the manufacturer in Indiana. Where can I get a used Monterey? The sales manager doesn’t have one. The only one he knows of on the East Coast belongs to a couple in northeastern Pennsylvania, but he has heard they find the model too small. He wishes me luck in bargaining with them because he is anxious to sell them something bigger. I have a funny feeling I won’t need any luck.

The Pennsylvania couple paid $18,500 for an ‘85 model, less than a year old, but the wife lets slip in our first phone conversation that her husband is willing to sell for $15,000. When I call the husband later, he is annoyed that his wife has mentioned that price, but he eventually agrees to it. He has to. For one thing, I tell him, it is all the money I will have from the sale of the house. Paying off all the mortgages and my other debts will leave just about $15,000. For another thing, I know but don’t tell him, there is something else at work.

I’m sure fate will be kind to Harold and Martha Mang of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, who will undoubtedly find a motor home that provides their every comfort. I’m equally sure fate will be just as kind to Steve Bennett, who no doubt will make many sales to compensate for the day I walk off his lot with only the brochure in my fidgeting hand.

Because, Jesus, there it is. When I open that brochure, after months of planning and drafting, there is the truck I have been designing. The overhead schematic, but for a foot of length and six inches of width, has the appliances, toilet, table, couch and storage space in virtually the same order I have laid out on the grid. I have invented a 1985 Sunrader Monterey before I realize there already is one.

XX. Greenville

Greenville, Mississippi. April 16, 1989.

I am walking along Route 82 south of Greenville on a sunny Sunday afternoon. The air is clear and dry, and the roadside vegetation is bright with the pea-green glow of shoots and buds, drawing vitality from soil enriched by thousands of years of flooding from the nearby Mississippi River. Grasshoppers click and whir at my feet. It would be beautiful if I could stand back far enough not to see the litter. In Greenville’s case, I guess, that would have to be about a thousand feet above the median strip of the highway.

Which isn’t too bad. I walk nearly 700 miles a year for exercise, most of it along roads, and as a self-appointed sanitation field surveyor, I conclude as I pass the first buildings on the outskirts of Greenville that its roadside litter is about average for a community of 40,000. The inventory of discarded items seems typical – beer and soda bottles and cans, plastic oil jugs and loose pieces of automobiles, styrofoam cups and food containers.

Styrofoam isn’t all bad. I have a grandmother who is kept healthier because of the styrofoam that makes it possible to package and handle hot food inexpensively in the Meals on Wheels program. That one meal delivered each midday helps Granny, who is entering her 90s, to remain independent in her own home. My mother is often there, too, but she also is retired and living within the strict limits of Social Security. I once cooked for my grandmother for a few weeks and found out something about the old lady that shocked me: She hates vegetables. Meat and potatoes, meat and potatoes, that’s what my Granny calls for. For Christ’s sake, grandmothers are supposed to get you to eat your vegetables, not hate them. Maybe her attitude is a result of living too many of her years among the rural poor where meat was scarce, potatoes often blistered and rotted, and vegetables were the only things you had to eat to get through the winter. Well, between Ma and me and Meals on Wheels, Granny’s been getting her vegetables again. And besides generally approving of the Meals on Wheels menu – well, not the stuffed peppers, but she peels off the pepper and eats the hamburg stuffing – she finds the styrofoam containers just the thing to perk up a sputtering fire in the woodstove.

Other trash isn’t all bad, either. On this particular day in Greenville – it is, in fact, the day before the deadline for filing personal tax returns – I find a letter alongside Route 82 that tells me something about the addressee, Patricia R. Baker of 2606 Old Leland Road, Greenville. The envelope, its top edge torn, contains Patricia’s W-2 forms from Jimmy D. Beaty of PJ’s Truck Stop, 2824 East Alexander, same city. In the previous year, according to the quadruplicate form, Jimmy paid Patricia $14.00 in wages, minus $1.05 for Social Security, no federal tax withheld. Patricia apparently has decided not to file. Nothing illegal about that in the $14.00 bracket, but a little sad. Also intriguing. I hope Patricia and Jimmy are still friends. Or maybe they never were.

As the city draws nearer, the brush gives way to grass spreading around small businesses and middle-class homes, and the litter grows heavier. There are more bottles, cans, auto parts, styrofoam and now a champagne bottle, a baby bottle, a shit bag from the portable toilet of a truck or van, a hypodermic needle (you see a surprising number of those along the highways of America), a small blue plastic sign with engraved white letters that might have hung on a hospital room or department, an air syringe, maybe for enemas. Near the city line, a low brick house set far back on a large lawn of closely clipped grass is being invaded by trash that has crept in nearly a hundred feet from the road.

A few minutes later, I come across two men and a boy hunkering over a large old car they have been hauling behind an equally old pickup truck that is now parked on the outside shoulder of the two oncoming lanes. The men, both swarthy and mean-looking, are cursing a rear wheel rim of the car as they try to jack it up and put on a worn spare tire. The boy, a chubby teenager with thatchy blond hair and cutoff jeans that crimp his thighs, is balancing a shredded tire on the edge of the shoulder. He kicks the tire with disgust, turning away from it as it rolls down the shoulder and falls over in a shallow pool of water at the brush line.

As I walk past the vehicles, I stare at the tire lying amidst other litter in the pool. The men and the boy are too busy with the car to notice me.

On my return trip to the rest area where I have left my truck, I am on the opposite side of the highway when I pass the place where the pickup, car and their crew have been. They are gone now, and with four lanes of road and a median strip between me and the shredded tire, it looks less ugly in the water.

XXI. National Sanitation Services

Old Orchard Beach, Maine. June 1988.

So just what is this National Sanitation Services? In a word, camouflage.

Although tiny by motor-home standards, a 1985 Sunrader Monterey as it comes out of the factory still looks like something people take vacations in. In many places I want to visit, the authorities are wary of such vehicles, fearing that they will, without warning, disgorge a couple of adults, at least as many children, a family dog or two, and that this crowd, already half mad from the joy of vacationing, will quickly strip the local vegetation of twigs and branches, build a bonfire, break out the styrofoam and cellophane junk food, crack open the beer and soda and then, just as quickly as the horde descended, leave the area in a smouldering, littered ruin, punctuated by piles of turds flapping toilet paper streamers. That’s an extreme case, but such things do seem to happen now and then. More common but equally squalid, litter will show up as a piece or two at first, then in an increasing flow as succeeding groups of litterers see that their predecessors didn’t care. Sometimes the damage begins innocently – a bag of food waste left in a roadside container is an invitation to animals to strew the trash around – and then the other stuff follows. Besides this legitimate concern about litter and damage, the authorities in many places I want to visit also seem to believe that tourists should be kept out of the way of all local folks except those who plan to milk them in rows of restaurants, motels, gift shops, bars and other points of interest where people can be lined up and squeezed. Also a legitimate goal, I suppose, but it doesn’t fit into my budget.

So I plan to travel quietly and cleanly.

That’s why National Sanitation Services seems like such a natural idea. Nobody objects to sanitation – we claim to put it next to godliness – but nobody is likely to be attracted to a sanitation truck, either. A perfect cover, dead neutral.

But it does take some time to think of. At first, as I sit in this campground in Maine figuring out how I can get away with a new life on the road, I think of trying real camouflage – you know, two shades of green and one of brown in blotches. If only it were that simple. I soon realize that forest and lawn green would stand out like an oasis if I were parked in a desert and that sand colors would glow like neon if I happened to be stopped in a forest. Besides, traditional camouflage would be too military. The truck would be a target for people looking for guns – or a target for people with guns.

No, I need some kind of commercial look that will fit in anywhere. How about a security company? National Security Services? Well, that would fit into a security-conscious residential neighborhood but would look strange in a rural area. Also, too much of a challenge to crooks who feel nothing has a right to be secure in their presence.

Maybe something meaningless. My first thought here is National Geodesic Survey, sort of a tribute to Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, but it is too technical-sounding. Thieves would be breaking in for transits and sextants.

Something less attractive. A sewage company. Too gross, but close.

National Sanitation Services. Just right. It has a clean sound, and it is official enough to discourage all but serious inquiry, yet vague enough to be construed as anything from a government sewer agency to a private diaper service. To add one more small touch of meaninglessness, I will call the truck a “field survey unit,” a perfect excuse for being anywhere.

Even the words “national,” “sanitation” and “services” are about the same length, making it easy to bank them over one another in a block on the front door panels. I do the lettering myself – before I got into the newspaper business, I once apprenticed as a sign painter – and this probably saves me a few hundred bucks in professional fees, even though some of the lettering is a little shaky if you look at it up close.

First, I have to strip off all the red, orange and gold stripes and brand names that seem to come on all recreational vehicles. Most of the names allude to winds, cruises or escapes, but mine, Sunrader, seems almost aggressive, like a solar stormtrooper. Stripped of its sunrise colors, the truck looks more like a pregnant ice cream van.

To choose a color for the lettering, I take a paint-store color chart to the Biddeford Post Office parking lot and match the blue of the lettering on postal trucks. I do my own lettering with non-stick tape, a stencil knife and spray paint. Besides the door panels, I letter the front across the prow of the loft and the back above and below the rear window. The letters are simple, straightforward, understated. But I can’t resist making up a logotype – an oval with the mythical company name around the rim, surrounding an outline of the United States with a glitter burst over the state of Maine – that I center in white areas on either side of the exterior cabin walls just forward of the side windows.

All this dovetails nicely with some changes I have to make to the truck’s configuration for practical reasons. To carry extra water for the road, I install a railing around the loft roof to hold four 10-gallon tanks equipped with small wheels. Designed to collect drain water, the tanks are ideal for taking on fresh water because the wheels make them manageable on the ground – 10 gallons of water weighs 80 pounds, a hard load to carry from a service station tap to a waiting truck – and easier to pull up the side of the truck onto the roof. The tanks, made of polystyrene, come only in a light blue similar to the color I have chosen for the lettering.

To help trundle these tanks up the side of the truck, I need a stepladder, so I strap one to the rear bumper, giving the truck a workman-like look. Also attached along the passenger side of the roof are some aluminum poles and a large mylar sheet that I have fashioned into an inexpensive canopy for the campground. The poles and plastic look like something you might use in sanitation.

On the rear bumper, I have installed a 3,000-watt gasoline-powered generator for those long hauls without house current, and with road reflectors plastered over it, the generator case takes on a businesslike look.

Even the strips of velcro I have glued to the truck to hold a homemade mylar weather skirting and a half dozen insulation patches for the appliance vents help dispel the vehicle’s recreational look.

All in all, it’s very official-looking. So official-looking that somebody asks me if it is legal to put a fake name and logotype on a vehicle. I don’t know. Worse yet, I don’t know whether there really is a National Sanitation Services out there somewhere.

Whatever the legalities, I soon find that the disguise works.

The water tanks are the last addition to the truck, and I have already started driving it to work before the tanks are installed. I am sitting by myself in the office one Sunday when one of the press operators comes through on his way to the composing room.

“You know, I wondered about that lettering on your truck until today I finally noticed the tanks on the top,” he says. “You must be pretty busy with that sanitation job and this one.”

He isn’t kidding. So I don’t, either. I tell him I have been pretty busy.

A few weeks before I leave Maine, I am parked outside a convenience store near the campground one night when a car full of young men pulls up. They seem to have been celebrating and run short of supplies.

“Well, well, sanitation services,” one of the young men says as he walks toward the truck on his way to the store. “What do you have in the truck, sanitation man, a lotta garbage?”

No, I say, just a little toxic waste, not too radioactive.

He looks at me, not sure if I am joking. He takes a wide path around the truck.

XXII. Slocomb

Slocomb, Alabama. February 22, 1989.

“You livin’ in this ve-hicle, are ya, Mistuh Lea-vitt?”

James Tew, assistant police chief of Slocomb, is reaching a conclusion that other people have a hard time accepting, too.

“Well, actually, I’m just sort of traveling through,” I tell him. “I’m a retired newspaper editor, and I’m . . . well, seeing the country.”

It isn’t a lie as much as it is a convenient synthesis of truths. I did that work for a couple of years when I couldn’t think of anything better to do, and my employer decided I shouldn’t do even that any more, and that is like being retired. And while I have been moving the truck only enough each day to stay out of trouble, I have been seeing the country in the process. I don’t want to have to tell Assistant Police Chief Tew that I am an unemployed itinerant because people in small towns have another word for that: bum.

He sits in his cruiser with the rear of my truck in his headlights, and he is trying to make out the lettering across the back of the truck in the glare cast back by the white fiberglass truck body and the mylar-and-velcro skirting I have put around it for the night. He remarks about my television antenna, an airfoil V of aluminum that cranks up and down and rotates by hand from the inside, a pretty impressive device for $125 and you-install-it.

“When I saw you parked here by the tower, I thought maybe you were working on it,” he says, stressing the last word so it sounds like “ee-it.”

“No, I just pulled up here because it was off the main road and there wasn’t anybody around,” I say.

He asks me for “some documents I could look at,” and I have to go into the truck for them. Bonzo is standing with his front paws on the back of the couch, peeking through a curtain at the blinding light outside.

When I return to the cruiser, Assistant Police Chief Tew still hasn’t gotten out. He reaches over and unlocks the passenger door to the front seat.

“You wanna sit in here for a minute, Sidney,” he says. I wince. Nobody has called me Sidney since I was in elementary school 40 years ago, but that’s what my driver’s license says, and I’m not going to argue with an armed, heavy-set law enforcement officer on a rural road in a small town in Alabama in the middle of the night.

He lights a cigarette, and I can see that his reddish wavy hair is streaked with white across the right temple. The police radio blares. I guess he already has called in my registration plate numbers. Wind in the high wiregrass is making waves that spread away from the road through a chainlink fence and, about a hundred yards beyond, lap against the base of a tall metal tower that holds several satellite receiver dishes to the sky.

Does Assistant Police Chief Tew figure me for a foreign agent who is planning to sabotage the tower – a single incendiary device at the base of one of the legs would do the job – and thus deprive a significant section of southeastern Alabama of its cable TV service?

“What kinda power you use in that rig?” he asks. I tell him 12-volt batteries. Do I have an isolator between the engine and cabin batteries, he asks. I do, I say.

I’ll be damned, he wants to talk batteries. Besides being Slocomb’s second most prominent police officer, James Tew also is a knowledgeable hobbyist in radio and electronics, and he wants to tell me how I can install a second auxiliary battery with a toggle switch that will allow me to take cabin power from either source.

Ten minutes later, he lets me out of the cruiser.

“Nice talkin’ to ya, Sidney. Now if somebody else notices you out here, I’ll be able to tell ‘em who y’are.”

It is comforting to know that even if the Russians knock out all our satellites, the oldest network in the world – the good old boys – is still working fine in Slocomb, Alabama.

With his thumb and forefinger, he flips the cigarette out into the wiregrass and points to the truck.

“That’s what I wanna do someday,” he says and drives off.

I search the grass for a long time in the area where I last saw the red glow of that cigarette. I never do find it, but there is no fire.

XXIII. Byl Tam

Monterey, California. April 1962.

His name is William Thomas, but he likes it when I call him Byl Tam, a complicated pun that only he and I and a few others understand. It is based on a double nickname, a tortured Russian-English homophony and a somewhat obscure graffito, and I guess I should explain it. The Russian word “tam,” meaning “there,” is pronounced about the same way a New Jerseyite like Bill would say “Tom.” The Russian word “byl,” pronounced somewhat like “Bill,” means “was.” By the early 1960s, when Bill and I meet, not everyone remembers the wall drawing of an egghead face and droopy nose known as Kilroy, supposedly a World War II soldier who drew his caricature on the walls of every liberated town he passed through, a signature to let posterity know that “Kilroy was here.” Early in our Russian training at the Army Language School, our class is repeating simple sentences when the elderly Russian emigre who is our instructor comes to “Ya byl tam,” meaning “I was there.” “Nyet, nyet,” Bill tells the instructor, “ya byl tam.” The instructor doesn’t understand. “Ya,” Bill says, pointing to himself, “Byl . . . Tam.” The instructor sort of gets it – Bill is making a pun on his name – and smiles weakly. Then Bill shows the drawing he has made, a sketch of Kilroy drooping his nose over a wall. “Ya byl tam,” Bill says again, and now the instructor gets it. �