Reflections

April 1, 2020 marked three years on the road for us.

For all practical purposes our time on the road really ended in October 2018 when we flew to Mexico. After that we’ve continued to live in the bus, but we haven’t traveled like we did those first 18 months. Still, three years of traveling and living in the bus is far longer than we intended when we set out.

Living in the bus was always about far more than traveling. It would not be inaccurate to say that traveling was really a byproduct of living in the bus. A nice fringe benefit if you will.

More importantly living in the bus was more about stepping outside, literally and figuratively. Stepping back from life, taking stock, and critically evaluating the assumptions that had been handed to me about how to live a good life.

Do you need a house to live a good life? What about a car? What about a refrigerator? What about a fixed address? What about a phone? Oven? Books? Speedometer?

Living in the bus very quickly became about living with less. When you have less than 160 square feet of space — with only about a third of that truly “livable” — everything becomes about doing more with less. That’s what we wanted to learn how to do, which is why the bus was perfect.

It eliminated a lot of things by necessity. We did without and got to see if any of that stuff mattered. It is one thing to sit around and wish you could get rid of things because they cost money or you think you might be able to get along without them.

It’s another story entirely to actually do it.

Living in the bus provided a way to experiment in doing without, but offset any sense of loss with the adventure and excitement of travel and living on the road. If you want to eliminate something and learn to do without it, fill that open niche in the ecosystem of your life with something you do want. Otherwise the weeds will take over.

You might miss having a hot bath for instance, but you know, it’s also nice to be sitting here on this perfect white sand beach in the Gulf of Mexico. Or you can think, gosh I’d really love to have some ice in this drink, but… since I was willing to forgo it I get to sit here in the amazing smelling pine forest 8000 feet up in the mountains of Colorado watching thunderstorms roll in all afternoon. And I could get ice actually, but I no longer need it.

It’s harder to notice what’s missing when you’re surrounded by the beauty of the world. You spend less time thinking of what you miss when you can’t wait to see what’s over the next hill. It also helps to know you couldn’t get over the next hill — you can’t have that feeling of freedom and peace — without having given up those old requirements.

So your mindset shifts over time. The things that you were “giving up” turn out to be things you don’t need. There’s no giving up in the end, you free yourself of those unnecessary burdens — those burdens you didn’t even realize were burdens.

I could see the beginnings of this before we left. I could read it in between the lines of some of the long term travelers I follow, like Rolf Potts, Wade Sheppard, the Bumfuzzle crew, and others. But you don’t really know something until you live it yourself. Happily, I was right. And it grows. The further you go, the more any sense of loss fades and the sense of gain grows.

Having less became really wonderful quite quickly. By the time we made it to Fort Pickens the first time, about a month into our trip, I don’t think we were missing anything. And we didn’t have solar power, a water tank, or even a working shower yet.

To even get on the road in the first place we had to get rid of a ton of stuff. And that is helpful, but I think it was more important to take that step back, to, as I said above, think critically about the assumptions your culture has handed you, and to question those assumptions. Once you do that deliberately for a while it becomes second nature. You start to look at everything a little sideways.

So we questioned everything, trying to look at it sideways and see if there was another way to solve the problem. In doing so we learned all kinds of things about how we live. Do we need a large living space? No. Provided we have a large outdoor space we don’t really need any more than a place to sleep and get out of the rain. Did we really need an extra car? No. Do we really need air conditioning? No, but it can be really nice at times. How about refrigeration? No, but again, nice for some things. The list here is very long, but you get the idea.

It took a bit longer to extract overarching principles from these small lessons, but I think there are two very important things I’ve taken away from this experience so far.

The first principle is: accept the environment for what it is and learn to live in it.

One of our unspoken cultural values is that we can shape the environment the way we want it and that this is good. This is barely-consciously a part of our daily lives in very subtle, seldom-noticed ways. Take air conditioning for example. For the entirety of human history no one had air conditioning. Somehow, those people did not all expire of heat exhaustion¹.

If you don’t turn on the air conditioning, eventually you won’t need it. The first time you get hot make it a point to sweat. Deal with a little discomfort and let your body adapt to the heat. In the end you’ll be cooler and have no dependency on air conditioning. This frees you up to explore and exist in places others cannot. You body is phenomenally well-designed, it is capable of miraculous things if you give it a chance to adapt.

This principle — adapting to, rather than changing, the environment — also applies at the micro level. Don’t change the environment around you by adding an extra fork, wash the one you have. Don’t bother fixing your oven, buy a waffle iron. And so on. This is something that, once I saw it, I was never able to unsee it. I see it everywhere I look in the world, ways to make do without abound when you’re looking for them.

The second principle is really just an extension of the first: stop worrying about what you can’t control.

How do you do that? You learn to adapt to things. You let go of the need to make the “right” choice and you make the best choice you can based on the best information you have at the time. You make a choice and you move on. You can always adjust and chose differently when conditions change.

Are you going to make it to that campsite you wanted to get to? Maybe? Maybe not? Okay, then where are we going? Well, on the map there’s something over there… let’s try that. If I had a dollar for every time this played out I could buy you a couple dozen tacos.

Are you going to have enough water to stay another night? Maybe? Are the tanks full? Maybe? There are dozens of unknowns like this every day in traveling, you either make peace with the uncertainty of it or you become stressed out and miserable. It’s not for everyone.

It’s not a matter of solving all the unknowns. That’s not an option. There are always more of them. You have to learn to be at peace with them because you know you can adapt. That is peace, knowing that whatever happens, you’re going to adapt to it.

That’s not to say I don’t have moments of stress and misery because my world falls apart. I would actually say there’s been far more world falling apart situations on the road than there ever were before. If your house has a engine, expect your world to fall apart frequently.

Part of adapting is learning when you should do something. Traveling has made me very suspicious of myself whenever I say “no”. Whenever I don’t do something I force myself to stop and think, why not? Why not go swim in the river with the kids? Why not take a walk to watch the birds at dusk? Why not sit around the campfire half the night? Too many times there is no good reason for not doing it. It’s painful to admit, but sometimes I’m essentially refusing to go swimming because I don’t have a towel. That’s crazy.

That said, sometimes the answer to the question why not? is because your axle is falling off genius. The picture above is of our rear axle mount, which supports about 5000 pounds, with three of the four pins sheared off. I don’t care how comfortable you get with uncertainty, how much you can push aside worry, how much you say yes to, there’s no way to stop yourself from freaking out when your axle hangs by a single, obviously weak pin. Ditto when your head gasket blows and takes out a cylinder, or when you run out of money in Mexico, or any of the other things that will come up in life whether you travel or not. There are times you will not be able to stop yourself from worrying to some degree.

What I’ve learned is that the things worth worrying about are fewer and farther between with every passing year. After the axle almost broke and the head gasket blew, I wasn’t all that concerned when the exhaust manifold cracked in half. I’ve built a tolerance perhaps.

I’ve also learned that worry is often a way of avoiding the work that needs to be done. Worry and stress don’t fix anything.

If you want to have any control over which future you get, you have to figure out how to turn your worry into action. You have to stop freaking out and get to work. When your axle mount is about to shear off you have to turn that worry (actually more terror in that case) into action. Call a tow truck. Call a friend. Call everyone you know. In our case, my uncle came to our rescue). When there’s a pandemic and you have nowhere to park your rig, figure out your options, pick the best one, and make it happen. Call a friend. Call everyone you know. Spend all day pouring over Zillow and Craigslist. Do whatever you need to do to find the solution.

Someone said to me the other day that things always seem to work out for us. I won’t argue, but I take except to the implication that this is solely the result of luck. We are very lucky, and yes that does help, but to be completely honest the main reason we’ve had so much good “luck” is because Corrinne works very hard to make things happen for us.

I might write more about coaxing the engine along, but she’s the one who spends long hours solving all the other, much more frequent problems we encounter, like where to live in Mexico, what to do when the budget has to stretch farther than you thought, or where to go and what to do when the world shuts down. To figure those things out you have to set aside the worry and do the hard work.