Snow Birds

As I write this, Lora and I are in Yuma, Arizona, one of the principle snow bird sites.  There are reasons for this, some related to climate, some to the economy.  Today, the temperature is projected to rise into the high seventies.  The climate in Yuma does have some drawbacks, most notably the wind, and the dust carried by the wind, but for the most part it is sunny and pleasant during the winter months.  And it is not San Diego.  Mind you, I have nothing against San Diego.  I grew into adolescence in the surrounding suburbs.  My earliest memories are concentrated there, and so I still consider it my point of origin, if not my actual place of birth.  Having said that, however, for those of us who live on the fringes of the tourist trade, the RV parks in San Diego are enormously expensive compared to Yuma, and there is nothing like the expanse of BLM land where camping is virtually free. It's the difference between a thousand dollars a month vs. 180 dollars for the six month stretch between October and April.  Although it doesn't have the beaches, it does have the Colorado River, and for those whose amusements involve motors, one can cruise the Colorado in an oversized boat, and there are thousands of miles of ATV trails where one can zip along in a Razor.  Consequently, the San Diegans descend on Yuma to play on weekends, where it is cheaper, and less constricted, and the snow birds follow suit to escape the arthritic cold of points north.

Lora and I did not set out on this adventure to become part of a community, much less an unrelated extended family.  If anything, we set out expressly to escape community.  I should say that our attitudes toward this idea of community are rather contradictory.  We both, I think, would like very much to belong, but this belonging seems always to elude us.  It's puzzling, and I have given it much thought, but have come to no definite conclusions.  Neither Lora nor I are individualists, at least not the sort who feel it necessary to cultivate their eccentricities as a form of public display.  To all appearances, there is nothing much unusual about us, in dress or behavior.  Lora chides me for my conservatism on occasion, though she seems aghast when I dress or act in ways that would draw attention.  We both spent too much of our early life alone. My father's itinerant military career meant that I was always the new kid on the block, or in the class, and while there was a surge of popularity surrounding my novelty, it quickly wore off and I found myself once again alone.  Lora's father, her step father, was an abusive drunk in the grand Irish Catholic way, which helped insure she spent most of her adolescence alone hiding away to avoid his wrath.  No doubt our combined sense of unwanted isolation can be chalked up to adolescent angst, but even after, I spent most of my young adult life in the Air Force, not because I had a military temperament, or because it provided me a coterie of companions, but rather because the uniform itself gave an official stamp of belonging and it concealed those unconscious eccentricities and insecurities that isolated me.  I suspect the same was true of Lora.  The uniform covered the scars of her abusive childhood, with the added benefit that military life, at least in peace time, demanded a certain arbitrary tidiness. 

I mention all this because those RV parks that cater to the snow birds go well out of their way to foster an illusion of community.  For the San Diegans, it's irrelevant, of course, because they come here simply to play and go home.  If there is community there, it's the rather tenuous community of those who enjoy the same sorts of over-powered toys.  For those, like us, the more permanent residents, however, it's a powerful illusion.  When we first arrived at Imperial Dam, we parked unwittingly on "music row."  We really had to idea.  We selected our site because it was flat, easily accessed, close enough to the waste water dump, and yet afforded a modicum of privacy.  We had no idea that the sites along that row were ostensibly "reserved" for a coterie of amateur musicians who returned year after year.   As we were informed later, we had parked on "Roland's site," though we were forgiven and welcomed when it was discovered that I played the guitar.   I put all this in scare quotes, because none of it is official BLM policy, more simply an understanding among those who return to Imperial Dam year after year to winter. 

Buster was the unofficial initial ambassador of music row.  One learned quite a lot about Buster, quite quickly.   He sketches his own back story in the way that a novelist or playwright might describe an important secondary character.  As it turns out, he was the only professional musician of the lot on music row, and he has tales of the time he was invited to tour with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis.  He turned it down because he already recognized that he was an alcoholic.  Life on the road with Jerry Lee Lewis, and perhaps others of the early rock and roll pantheon, would not contribute to his sobriety, and so he chose his marriage over alcohol and fame.  As it turned out, he was married over fifty years, and his sobriety and the longevity of his marriage are his core points of pride.  He had given up music along with the alcohol, at least initially, but had rediscovered it when he and his wife had come to Yuma to winter and he fell in with mythical Slim and others of the picking and grinning crowd.  The three chord 1/4/5 songs of rock and roll gave way to the three chord 1/4/5 songs of what might be called classic country.  He has been coming to Yuma now for 30 years.        

Buster had a sardonic sense of humor with the men, and a flirtatiousness with women that many might consider inappropriate in our overly sanctimonious times.  He was fond of saying that all women were beautiful, though too he was fond of quoting the mythical Slim who would point out in response that some just barely made it.  Still, one suspected that Buster did indeed believe that all women were beautiful, and it was clear he enjoyed the company of women, particularly those who were willing to play along with his bravado.  He was fond of Lora, and was quite open in his admiration of her behind, and Lora for her part would tell him to quit being a dirty old man and keep his eyes where they belonged.  He delighted in the idea that, if he had to be an old man, at least he could be a dirty old man. 

He called me over early on, with the imperative to bring that guitar of yours along.  I enjoyed playing with him, partly because he did play all of those songs that originated in the fifties and early sixties.  In their basics, they weren't difficult to figure out.  If it was in they key of C, one knew that it would be composed of the C, F and G chords, with an occasional "minor fall" (as Leonard Cohen might put it) of A minor or E minor (hallelujah).  He complained that I couldn't hear the chord changes.  It wasn't that I couldn't hear them.  I heard them fine, but we skipped around from song to song to song so quickly that I couldn't quite anticipate which variation on a theme we were stumbling through.  Then too, while on rare occasions I have played with other people, my guitar playing has been mostly  a solitary affair, and because it was a solitary affair, I could take great liberties with a song, if I even bothered to play a recognizable song.  What I enjoyed most was a sort of improvisational finger style, taking a melodic or progressive theme and playing around with it.  One of Lora's earliest memories of me -- one she alludes to often enough for me to believe it is iconic -- was of me doing just that in Kunsan not long after we'd met.  She was returning from somewhere and was laboriously climbing the stairs to the apartment.  She had badly sprained an ankle.  The awkwardness of the pain and the crutches made the climb difficult, but she didn't call out and I didn't hear her because I was lost in playing the cheap guitar that I had bought at an open market.  I remember telling her that playing was a way to let the universe flow through me, which immediately embarrassed me because it sounded so pretentiously new age and because it was true. When a theme took me, and I could just play -- just play -- disappearing into the playing the way smoke disappears into a breeze.

Our private jam sessions were one thing, but he quickly involved me in the Sunday afternoon jams at the gravel pit, a pavilion about a half mile from our campsite.  Buster was more or less in charge of the affair, and on Sunday afternoons, at about 1 p.m. he would drag his supply trailer down to the gravel pit and set up the speakers, amps, and mics that helped facilitate the weekly event.  They weren't really "jams," at least not in the way that I think of a jam, but more an "open mic."  Each person was expected to stand up to the microphone and sing, while those in the background played along.  There was supposed to be back porch feel to the gathering, but it wasn't really a group of friends gathering together to play and sing familiar songs.  It was more like karaoke, an opportunity to put oneself on public display.  There has been much talk surrounding the notion of narcissism of late -- the current white house has more or less assured a national reckoning with our national narcissism -- still, though, the whole exercise struck me as an exercise in narcissism.  At one level, of course, it's the five year old's "daddy! daddy! look at me!" -- a child diverting attention to itself in search of affirmation.  Buster's playing is accomplished enough to escape this sort of trivialization, but for most of us, if we expected actual judgment, if we expected anything other than affirmation, it would be an exercise in public humiliation.  Ostensibly, it's all in good fun.  If someone said, "well that truly sucked!" and meant it, a taboo would have been broken.  It would be as though daddy had watched his five year old and said, "sugar, what you're doing isn't that special.  Anyone your age can do it, and to be honest, most do it better."      

The taboo is never broken.  We applaud enthusiastically enough, and occasionally offer up a "good job" when a performance seems to transcend the individual performer's skill set.  Peace in the gravel pit is preserved.  Buster once or twice has said to me, "I'm proud of you," and his paternal tone struck me as both odd and amusing.  Although at 64, I am young enough to be his son, and it mattered.  For a moment, I was part of the community, though I knew it would be short lived.  I'm not sure whether it is something in me that repels, or something in me that rebels -- Lora and I go back and forth on that topic -- but I'm the sort of person who expects actual judgment and usually gets it. Growing up, I was usually the kid singled out by the bullies for exclusion, the reviled other, and so I tend to rebel preemptively before I can be excommunicated.  Having said that, however, I run the danger of putting self-pity in the place of self-infatuation, which is really just more of the same.  No one who is rapt with self-pity thinks they deserve their fate, and so the spite of others becomes just another way of affirming that one is somehow special, truly special, perhaps in ways that only god can see.

Round we go round we go round.  At the core of it all, I think, is an emptiness.  The couple that Lora and I have taken to calling the twins are a case in point.  They live in Yuma, now, though they wintered at Imperial Dam sometime in the past, and so feel entitled to crash the jam at the gravel pit.  They are among the not quite elderly (that is to say, not yet infirm) and they show up at the gravel pit dressed alike in outfits no doubt specifically selected for the occasion because they always feature musical notes.  They both play identical baby blue electric guitars, which they play robotically, she especially with a repetitive spasm of a strum.  I'm trying not to sound too judgmental, but their whole being seems to cry out for exactly that -- judgment.  At one point, just before Christmas, they must have had an anniversary, and they sang a song that went something like "if you want to know what love looks like, look at us."  There was no sense of irony, not even the least hint of self-mockery, and the audience clapped appreciatively and a few voices added congratulations.  They seemed deeply gratified, but it struck me that they must gaze lovingly into the other's eyes to see what?  a reflection of themselves.  Someone remarked to Lora that she knew we were a couple because we looked alike, which puzzled and mortified her.  I suppose it's difficult for two people to live together for thirty years without mirroring each others pet phrases and gestures, even facial expressions, and I suppose too that it helps to have a common understanding of the world and shared values, a common micro culture, but the matching baby blue guitars points at something different, something utterly superficial and devoid of substance, each a reflection of the other, each affirmed in the rapt admiration they see gazing back from their reflection.

Lora has told me to avoid politics, and religion, but I'm not quite sure how to do that.  All things ultimately are political, or religious, or both.  The twins are about as white bread as one can get, and on one occasion they sang Merle Haggard's "I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee," and I remember thinking at the time that "good golly miss molly, they're still fighting the culture wars of the late 60s/early 70s."  I absolutely loath that song.  At the time, it was associated with Buck Owens and Hee Haw, the heartland's answer to the more urbane Laugh In and the Smother's Brothers.  Looking back on it today, it was the first anthem for the disaffected rural voters who have helped create our current and contemptible political climate.  Even in its day it was a revanchist vision of America that never existed except as a nostalgic fantasy, and I've thought of rewriting the lyrics to reflect current realities.  They may not "smoke marijuana in Muskogee," but plenty of rural folk seem fond of huffing meth, and they may not "take their trips on LSD," but opioids seem to be the Greyhound bus to disability and the lassitude of the welfare state.  The twins, however, are far from being "Okies," at least not in the originating, depression era sense of the epithet, and seem to be the pure product of small city suburbia, the sort who giggle over the naughtiness of a glass of Chablis, not the dust bowl refugees described by Steinbeck, the original hardscrabble disposables.

Lora worries that I'm becoming cynical in my advancing age, and perhaps I am.  To give Merle Haggard his due, there was perhaps more than a bit of irony in the song, at least when he wrote it. The song has been covered by the likes of Arlo Guthrie and Phil Ochs, and with Arlo in particular, it would be hard not to hear a note of sarcasm.  Still, we live in a country that suffers from chronic irony deficiency and it's become a sort of literal version of what America was like, before the hippies spoiled it, not to mention the democrats and people of color, and so a vision of what America should be like again.  It's difficult to picture the male half of the twins singing "Irma Jackson," Merle's song about interracial love, and given the current imbroglio over immigration and black lives matter, I'm pretty sure that all this love of country is about a far from being "color blind" as ever.  Among the snow birds, there aren't any blacks, at least none that I've seen.  The twins are overtly religious in a sort of white bread protestant way, and they insist that the last song be "I saw the light."  I'm guessing (unfairly perhaps) that their illumination is blinding and bright white, and they would view interracial love as "a sin," not only against their image of god, then against the unspoken, "I'm OK, you're OK" covenant of narcissism.  It's difficult for us white folk to see our own affirming reflections in a black face, and no doubt vice versa, and so this snow birding is, for all that I can see, a segregated activity.

Ok, so I am growing cynical in my advancing age.  When we pulled the camper out of Mountain Home, we were leaving behind a settled community and what Lora would call the "bullshit."   It's a word that carries a lot of freight with us, but boxed up with the other freight is the unremitting pressure to "fit," to conform within the covenant of narcissism.  As I said at the outset of this post, Lora and I have never quite "fit," and we have both spent a considerable amount of time thinking about and discussing our lack of "fit."  Lora can't help but feel that there's something wrong with us, something hidden from us, but obvious enough to others, like being nose blind to our own stink.  We spend a lot of time affirming one another within our own covenant, assuring each other that we've showered sufficiently, but ironically enough, by pulling out of Mountain Home, we were saying in effect, "oh to hell with it" and running away from everything except each other -- running away as a more or less permanent lifestyle.  We hadn't counted on the winter, however, and the need to hunker down in place, and there seems to be no place to go for the winter where one isn't immediately surrounded by flocks of snow birds, who bring with them the expectation that we will be birds of a feather.        



        

Getting Started

It's  been about eight months since we decided to sell everything, put some in savings and invest the rest in our camper home.  We were both quite enthusiastic, almost euphoric, about our little adventure at the beginning, in part because it felt transformative. We had cast off the material chains of our previous life to experience a rebirth in freedom of the sort that Kris Kristofferson sang about in Bobby McGee -- "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."  We still have some stuff to lose --the camper, the Ram truck, and some of the accoutrements of camping like the generator -- but for the most part we have condensed our potential losses down to what will fit comfortably into our camper, what can be loaded up and moved to the next spot, and it did feel a whole lot like freedom.  We spent most of the summer in the state of Washington -- first at Pacific Beach, where our grand daughter came to stay with us, and then at River Bend near Twisp and the Methow river.  I won't say it was the best summer of my life, but in truth I can't remember a better -- the image of our adolescent grand daughter bounding about the beach in childish joy scavenging drift wood for the 4th of July bonfire, while frigid gale force winds blew in off the north pacific and Lora sat huddled like an Inuit against the cold --  waking early to just sit and watch the sunrise behind the Cascade mountains, at times blood red, obscured by the smoke pouring down from the Canadian wildfires.  I  actually learned the Methow River, its pulse and what worked to catch its fish. 

The summer officially ended at Henry's Lake, near Yellowstone, when eight inches of snow piled on the roof of the camper, and we abandoned what seemed to us like paradise (minus the tourists) for the long trek south to Yuma, where we had decided to winter. As I write, just now, we are at the Hidden Shores Resort, just outside of Yuma near the Imperial Dam.   Yuma brought us back to the reality that we had not transformed ourselves, only our circumstances.  We may have cast off the material chains, but the transformation was incomplete. We should be glad that we've escaped the frigid cold that has clamped down on the rest of the country, and we're not really doing what we'd be doing had we stayed in Mountain Home -- what Townes Van Zandt (that most cheerful of songwriters) expressed as "waiting round to die." It comes close though.  Yuma is a town designed to capitalize on the snowbird, most of whom it seems are over 80.  They all seem hale and hearty enough (the infirm stay home  in Missouri or Canada and wait out the remainder of their time in nursing homes and hospitals) but there is a generation's difference between us and the majority of the snowbirds.  Buster epitomizes the differences.  He's in his mid-eighties, a good musician who plays the rock and roll of his generation with an enviable ease, but the musical timeline ended for him at about the time the Beatles burst upon the scene.  Of course, I'm aware of the irony that my references to Kristofferson and van Zandt date me no less than Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis date Buster, still, we're talking about my generation (pronounced guh-guh-gen-eration).  It's a bit dispiriting to be perpetually reminded by those much closer to the happy trail's end that we will not be, as promised, forever young.

Then there's the desert.  In the attempt to plan, we had booked an initial month in a resort on the outskirts of Yuma.  We did so because the October temps outside were reaching upward toward 110 degrees and we wanted the hook up for electric so we could run our a/c.  Our generator is sufficient to charge the batteries, run small appliances, including the TV, but insufficient to the a/c.   The resort, however, was a dump.  There's no other word for it.  It was mostly filled with trailers that had seen their better days 20 years ago, most of which were empty and awaiting occupants most of whom wouldn't arrive until January.  One of the few residents who was actually present subsisted on disability and supplemented his income by buying abandoned storage units, arranging the accumulated junk around his trailer, and holding a perpetual yard sale.  He lived with his son, who had downs syndrome, and had not been treated well either by his ex-wife or the RV park where they had resided previously.  They had also prohibited his "business," or so he told us, while this park allowed it, at least on the off season.  At the first opportunity we moved to a park outside of Yuma, near the Colorado River.  It was certainly more vibrant, too vibrant.  The resort provided a convenience store, along with a bar and grill, and was occupied by party people, those for whom big boats and alcohol are the primary forms of entertainment.  We weren't there more than week when the couple in the trailer next to (and I mean "next to," within inches) of our own erupted into a fight.  There were two hours of drunken verbal insults, crashing and slamming that actually rattled our windows. 

We stuck it out there for a couple of weeks, mostly because it was still pushing the high 90s and we needed the electric hook up, and we did some scouting in the area. We didn't exactly chance upon the BLM land near the proving grounds -- Lora had done her research -- but on first encounter it seemed almost like paradise after the two previous resorts.  There were essentially two campgrounds, one set up for short term, the other for long term residency.  The short term was near Squaw Lake, which resembled every bible illustrators idea of a desert oasis.  From the bluff, we looked down on water that was a crystal cerulean blue, surrounded by reed lined banks and dotted with two small islands each with a stand of desert palms. There one found the showers, which had hot water and were clean.  The longer term camping was on the so-called Florida Flats, the top of a bluff overlooking the second lake, Senator Wash.  Although not quite so picturesque as Squaw Lake, it was water, and the campground provided the other necessary amenity if one were to boondock -- potable water and a dump station.  On our scouting trips, we selected a site, and when our reservation at the resort ran out, we moved on over.

I am not adverse to the desert, per se, at least not quite so much as Lora.  It has an austere beauty that appeals to me on a visceral level.  When we first arrived, there were few other campers, and the landscape seemed uncorrupted by too much humanity.  With the exception of a few desiccated cacti and the scrub brush that lined the wash that bordering our campsite, one could have been on Mars, as the rovers must have discovered it, a landscape of rock, and more rock, with rusty hills fading into a line purple mountains in the near distance, and in the greater distance a line of ethereal blue mountains.  The desert has always been a place where one could live a life of bare necessity.  It is a place returned to origins, scoured free of all the merely human illusions by an abrasive wind.  It's a place where, if one listened closely to the surround outside one's self, with concentration, one could hear the voice of god itself, not unlike the distant howling of the coyotes or the alarming quick buzz of a hummingbird.  It's perhaps not surprising that three of the great world religions found their origins in deserts, and I wouldn't want to denigrate or dismiss their prophets, who no doubt did find illumination in the sun baked clarity of the desert, though I have always felt that I am the impediment to a true religious experience -- literally the "I am."  I have never been so enamored with myself to believe that I am created in god's image, which, conveniently, means that god is reflected in my image, god reflected in me, me reflected in god, back and forth in a tunnel of mirrors where god worship becomes a form of self worship extended into eternal life.  I have always felt that, if we really want to know god, we must reduce the self, the "I am," to its vanishing point and then let it vanish.  To do so takes a different sort of privation, a different sort of austerity that has always been beyond me, and no matter how hard I try to release myself, there I am, braying like a burro to myself.

So it goes.  When we first moved over, the weather was still unendurably hot, with temperatures climbing into the 100s during the day.  Although it cooled down some at night, the heat rose along with the sun.  Outside, with no shade except that created by the camper itself, you could actually feel the heat sear your flesh.  Inside the camper, with no breeze, the heat quickly became suffocating, and so we found ourselves hoping for a good breeze, though there seemed to be no median between suffocating stillness and gale force winds.  We have a generator, but it wasn't sufficiently hefty to run the a/c, and even if it would have run the a/c, we wouldn't want to run it for 16 hours a day.  Our best bet was shade, and we tried a couple of things to create shade for ourselves.  The first, and least successful, was our portable canopy.  We put it up and secured it to the ground, and it was fine for a day or two, until the wind lifted and twisted it almost into a ball, ruining it.  The failure was disappointing on a number of levels, not least that Lora had hoped to create something that resembled an oasis for us.  Throughout our marriage, Lora has had the unique ability to imagine almost any place as home, with all the comforting associations of home, and she set about making even the desert our own, putting out our square of green felt carpet, hanging a couple of decorative solar lights and surrounding it with tiki torches.  It was, briefly, homey, and the loss of our little oasis simply reinforced just how hellish the desert could be. 

The second, slightly more successful strategy, involved a roll of puffy silver reflective cut to fit the windows of the camper.  It did help some.  The sun still beat down on the south side of the camper, baking from the outside in, but it kept the sun from slating into the trailer and baking us also from the inside out.  With most of the windows covered, inside, it was perpetually dusk and still with no breeze, even when the wind outside was strong enough the sway the camper on its springs.  The third, slightly more successful strategy yet, involved shade cloth slated down from the roof of the camper and staked to the ground, which shaded the south side of the camper.  It allowed us to open the windows again, getting some breeze.

For the most part though, we just endured the heat.  Lora would run the sink full of cool water and bathe the dogs.  They didn't much like it, but it did cool them down some, and our own showers became one of the highlights of the day for much the same reason.  We would drive down to the showers in the Squaw Lake Campground, and luxuriate in the tepid water.  On the worst of days, in the late afternoon, we went for long pointless rides, adding mileage and burning gas so we could sit in air conditioned comfort for a couple of hours.  We did run the generator for a few hours in the evening, mostly to recharge the batteries, but we would watch a couple of hours of television from the list of channels available to our antenna.  The local weather people kept assuring us that the heat was "unseasonable," though they also saw no particular end in sight, because a high pressure zone had stationed itself off the coast of California, keeping the cooler winds from the Canadian north from reaching us.  We endured the heat in part because we kept expecting it to break.  How long could the "unseasonable" persist?  How many "record setting highs" could follow day after day?

There is a sort of madness associated with the heat, though it has nothing to do with divine sense.    For my own part, I don't complain, at least not aloud.  Lora does complain.  She holds no secrets, at least not for long.  There aren't many thoughts passing through her mind that don't find expression, and so I have never once had to wonder what she thinks or how she feels about something, and I absolutely love that about her.  I am all secrets, not in the sense that I have malignancies of the soul that I must keep hidden, more in the sense that I live mostly within my own head, within Chrissy land as Lora sometimes puts it, and I really could go days without speaking to another soul unless drawn into it, happily preoccupied with whatever might be preoccupying me at the time.  Normally that just means I'm introverted, and I rely (too much?) on Lora to draw me out, connect me with other humans, tether me to the Earth, though on those occasions when I am unhappy -- and the stultifying heat did drive me mad -- I can grow sullen, surly, selfish, and the last thing I want to hear is another's litany of complaint.  I still don't complain, at least not aloud, but it isn't hard to imagine myself with a defiant glare that may as well shout, "shut up and suck it the fuck up."  For her part, finding too little sympathy, Lora stood in our tiny bathroom and hacked half her hair off.  The heat was driving us both mad.

It did, however, eventually break, and we settled into a routine or a succession of chores that facilitated daily living.  Though Lora chided me about my single chore, which involved the hauling of water, fresh, grey and black.  Near the entrance of the campground, the BLM provides both potable water and a dump site for waste. It is perhaps not surprising that the primordial task of hauling water to and fro takes on an outsized significance in the desert.  Those that winter here every year have developed some rather elaborate methods involving trailers with two plastic 100 gallon tanks and pumps, along with the accoutrement of hoses and gloves.  They store their water rigs for the summer at the Christian Center, who offer reasonably priced storage as a way of generating income in support of their evangelical activities.  It's very unlikely that we will return her next year, and so our general rule applies -- if we acquire it, we must find a permanent space for it within the trailer, which, as it stands, would mean creating space by disposing of something else.  My methods did not involve a rig, though we did have one accoutrement, what is called a blue boy, or more profanely a turd taxi.  It holds about 25 gallons, and fortuitously Lora and I together give way to about 25 gallons of human waste a week.  To be honest, I would not have thought it quite so much, but each Wednesday morning, there would be enough black water to fill the blue boy to the brim.  I would haul it to the waste station behind the pick up, driving along at five miles per hour, and there I would dump and rinse out the blue boy.  I would dump whatever other trash we had, and would fill the two blue plastic jugs set aside for fresh water.  Each held six gallons of water each, which I would haul back and pour into the fresh water tank, completing the circle.

Likewise, once or twice a week, I would make a grey water run when those tanks filled.  As it turned out, we created grey water at about twice the pace of black water, so one can do the math easily enough.  When you are lifting and pouring water, you learn rather quickly to conserve it, though it's impossible to imagine a modern life that doesn't involve the consumption of about 15 gallons of water per person per week, and that excludes showers.  Everyday, we would haul ourselves down to the Squaw Lake campground, where the BLM provided showers at the modest cost of a one dollar token for seven minutes of hot water.  At first we showered separately, then economy won out over modesty and we began to shower together.  There was a time when showering together might have occasioned an erotic adventure, and I can close my eyes and still see Lora as I saw her the first time, our intimacy has changed over the years.  I wouldn't say for the better (there are times when we both miss the raw intimacy of physical desire) but I wouldn't say for the worse either.  The subject comes up now and again -- the "what would you do if something happened to me" conversation -- and I am really at a loss at what to say.  Losing her would create such a void in my life that I'm not sure how it could be filled, though I am relatively certain that I couldn't go on living really with it unfilled.  I solve the dilemma by simply refusing to think about it, except when it is pressed upon me by a panicked imagination, when we are separated and she is late returning.  In her more cynical moods, she says it's because she takes care of me, and of course she does in more ways than I can count, but it's more because she cares for me, and it's impossible to imagine anyone caring for me with the depth and breadth that she cares for me.

Lora's chores have remained pretty much the same.  The rough division concerns outside and inside, which means I take care of things outside the camper, she takes care of things inside the camper.  Many things cross the border of outside and inside -- like cooking on the grill or in the smoker -- but the one inside task from which I am excluded is house -- or rather camper -- cleaning.  My job in that regard is to minimize my mess, particularly right after she has finished cleaning, the undoing of what she has done.   I am not sure what occasions a thorough camper cleaning.  It erupts spontaneously and doesn't seem to happen on anything resembling a schedule.  From my benighted perspective the camper never comes close to the condition of filth, and only rarely is it really untidy, but there seems to be some internal valve in Lora that, when the camper reaches a certain level of dirtiness or slovenliness, it must be cleaned.  I don't share in this task because, frankly, I would never do it well enough to suit her.  She is the Maxwell's demon of our little universe, engaged in the perpetual struggle against the evil forces of dirt and disorder.  When she goes into her demonic mode, I make an ineffectual offer to help, here and there, but mostly I just try to stay out of the way.  In almost every way she is more spontaneous than me -- we wouldn't be on our little adventure were it not for her --  but there is a paradox deep at the heart of her spontaneity that seems anything but spontaneous.  She abhors clutter, the accumulated disorder, which normally follows in the wake of those who would consider themselves spontaneous.  Again, though, from my benighted perspective, her tidiness is a good trait to have when living in a small space.

All this by way of saying, we have a good marriage.  It would be enormously foolish of anyone to expect that living on the road in close quarters would fix an ailing marriage.  There is a line in a song I'm trying to write -- "trees don't move, but gypsies do, and so I've put my roots in you" -- that more or less sums it up.  If one's connection to another is mediated through stuff, or through a place, then better to keep the stuff in place.  There is another aspect to this "gypsy" reference, which distinguishes us from the snowbirds proper, those who have their homes in Missouri, or Idaho, or Quebec, and have come to the desert to escape the frigid temperatures of "home" through the worst of the winter.  When we sold the house in Mountain Home, along with everything in it, we gave up on that idea of "home," and we more or less knew, when we did it, that there was no turning back, no starting over somewhere else.  We're gypsies, on permanent diaspora.  Lora commented the other day that we never quite fit, and in all our career motived moves in the past, from Alabama to New Mexico, to Michigan, to Illinois, to Utah, we have always made the attempt, but have never managed to quite fit, as though each place has sensed something in us and kept us on the periphery, just outside the boundary.  We have rationalized it in any number of ways, but no matter where we go, there we are, always on the periphery, just outside of what might be called acceptance. As it must have been for the Roma, so it is for us, a perpetual mystery, and so we fantasize about finding a place to park at some point in the future, and eventually, no doubt, we'll need to just stop, but I doubt that we'll ever find a place where we really fit, a place to call home.