The Next Chapter: Full-on Nomad

If you think about it, you can divide your life into chapters. The time frames might change each time you review and consider. Maybe I'm on chapter eight. Maybe nine. So many events to peg changes on. Maybe years are better. Simpler. But even those divide births, deaths, jobs that might make more sense in a different movement. I've decided on years. 1956-1970: childhood. 1970-1973: first boyfriend. 1973-1977: college. 1977-1985: first jobs, first baby, law school. 1985-2000: too much to even say, so let's just put it all together. If I think of any of it in detail, it might kill me. I'm too sentimental today. 2000-2009: raising the kids in Virginia. 2009-2014: Florida job. 2014-2025: beginning to travel. 2025: Parting with everything. Setting sail.

The decision was waiting for me to make. The cabin where I lived, alone now since the kids had grown was beautiful, comforting, silent under dark skies, surrounded by forest. I've written a lot about it. It was a lot of work to maintain too though, with all of the wooden outbuildings, and it is remote, deep in the Appalachians. There would come a point where I would be too shaky on a 24 foot ladder, my senses too unreliable to regularly drive the hour into town.

Plus I'd always wanted to explore the world. Life takes us where it does and one can't always anticipate where that will be. No one needs me now. I am free from all of that, so why not toss off all remaining shackles? It was a painstaking year after the decision, downsizing to nothing. Painstaking for me because I feel so much. Too much one might say. Every childhood drawing, every lumpy clay bowl from art classes, each sports trophy, each of the 5,500 photographs, each present and card slayed me. 

But the end goal was freedom from it all. A chance to go where I pleased when I pleased. The world literally at my feet. 

I did it. But I see now that it's going to take a minute. A minute to leave the past. A minute to unfold my wings. 

My first stop was an International Dark Sky Park. I could borrow a telescope for viewing planets, star clusters and galaxies. My feelings would surely lessen in significance as I peered into the vast universe.  A volunteer, Luke showed up with a telescope he had built and generously shared his knowledge while showing us galaxies I would not have found. The other visitors there had traveled long distances for this dark sky. I cringed at their wonder. This sky paled in comparison to mine. So much more could be seen! I smiled and kept up light conversation but was actually feeling grumpy, discouraged. It was bad enough trying to ignore the intrusive satellites, and knowing that that there are thousands of satellites traveling amidst the stars beaming down their electromagnetic waves, making us all anxious, and even more debris, but to top it off I had to see one of Elon Musk's fucking Starlink trains. Why do these people think they own the sky? Why do we let them? 

I spent the next morning intermittently bursting into tears. What had I given up when I sold the cabin?

Still, I am not oblivious to the healing messages surrounding me. This old tree along my hike in the forest was uprooted too, and look at all the new life it sustains. 

The first couple days I simply sat for hours for extended periods on a spit of a beach at the junction of two mighty rivers, the Dan and the Staunton, staring out. The rivers were high after heavy Spring rains. They were muddy and swift and their waves lapped hard against the shores. It was too swift for kayaking, and the logistics of renting one not as simple as the website might lead one to believe. 

I hiked a long trail along the bank. Eight and half miles - that's long to me.  I only encountered a small group of riders on horseback. It's still early in the season. School is not out, so I have a good chance of having the trails to myself again next week. I think I will go back after exploring the wetlands around Pamlico Sound as it is on my way to the New River Gorge where I want to be soon. I will let the rivers flow through me. I've got this.

And perhaps with the new moon the skies will be darker. Will I ever find one as deep and magical as the sky above Dream Street? Maybe in Chile in the Andes. I had been planning tentatively to spend a few months in India, in the Fall, traveling by rail, but if the conflict with Pakistan doesn't simmer down, maybe I'll begin exploring Central and South America instead. 

As my European son is coming to the US this summer, I thought I'd travel about here. I can fit more in my car and by the end of summer should have a better sense of how to more efficiently load my back pack for global travel. The decisions for ridding possessions became maddening. Many days I burned out early. How many decisions can one make? What does one do with the antique gilded vase given on a wedding anniversary by a long deceased husband in a love that still feels unresolved? When I reached the point where the answer was, "just throw it against a damn rock," I knew I'd hit my tipping point and could finish the project. Ultimately, I was able to donate my favorite antique furniture to refugees and most of the other stuff to the local po' white trash who wanted everything, even half-filled cans of paint thinner. Still, there were random items about when I had to at last lock the door behind me and they ended up in my car. Honestly, four coats in this suffocating heat? I'll figure it out, day by day. The tentative summer plan was to head south. First, I have a ticket to a fest in West Virginia. I've got bluegrass in my veins and dancing centers me, so that is one of the first stops. Then on to visit a friend with a lovely beach house on the Jersey shore. I thought that after that I'd head south, stopping in St. Pete where I lived once, then on to see a cousin in Gulf Shores, then to New Orleans where I haven't been for years and on to Austin, another place I lived. I bought a ticket to Willie Nelson's 4th of July picnic. Bob Dylan will be there. And the Mavericks and the Avett Brothers and someone else I like, but forgot just now. It occurred to me to see if this was still going on, I mean Willie is 92 now, after I found a clipping from the San Antonio Express where I was interviewed at his picnic in 2000. A young Susan Tedeschi was there. She is a much stronger musician now, but Willie saw her potential back then. Maybe from there to Big Bend, a pit stop in El Paso, where I lived, maybe to Sedona just cause it's intense, then maybe L.A. another place I lived. A stop at a Navajo reservation in New Mexico where a friend lives. Up to Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef and Cedar Breaks. Then on to Olympic National Park.  Maybe get a room at the Prince of Wales Hotel in the Canadian part of the International Peace Park Glacier is part of, is it Waterton? Then across Canada heading east. 

But it's too hot. And I am dotted with chigger bites. I'd been planning to return via the northern route in the Fall, but now I am considering opting for a cooler summer and simply heading up to Canada after the Jersey shore, then after awhile dropping down to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Lake Superior. Maybe hit the Porcupine Festival. I am staying at Goose Creek State Park now in North Carolina where Goose Creek flows into Pamlico Sound. It is peaceful, the lapping water comforting. I'm not a fan of bug spray and mosquitoes, but at least they are more forthright than chiggers. You know when they are biting you. With chiggers you don't know until after they've fed and fallen off. It feels personal. A silent sabotage when you thought everything was going along just swimmingly.

I'll just fly to Austin for Willie's picnic from wherever I am.

Check this out. They call this Camping!!! This is at the Staunton River State Park campground. If we hadn't got the vaccines, I feel like COVID would have wiped a good percentage of these people out. The obese campers who don't give a thought to their carbon footprint. The park offers a crazy menu of possibilities: equestrian trails, hiking trails, frisbee golf, basketball and tennis courts, a swimming pool, kayaking, bicycling, fishing, sky-gazing and yet these folks are content to just sit and shoot the bull, mostly the same old same old, repeating FOX news headlines and eating junk food all day and evening. A plus here though: they've got to plug in, so no noisy generators spewing toxic fumes like in most of the national park campsites. To protect and preserve? It's better to focus on the cutie pies with tents and itty bitty campers and an environmental sensibility than to realize that we are probably in the decline of our civilization. I guess this is how it felt for others in the great civilizations that failed before ours. Sometimes all you can change is your perspective.

Goose Creek is a national natural landmark with pristine wetlands. No less than a dozen birds serenade my primitive campsite situated at the point. Check out the Merlin app developed by Cornell University if you want to identify bird songs. 

The water changes colors with the sky of course. Monday night the sunset cast a golden glow. Tuesday evening as a storm was moving in, silver.

 

The hiking trails are cool. A lot of wax myrtle, live oak, Spanish moss (and chiggers). Where it's too swampy, boardwalks lead you through cattails, and homes to turtles, frogs, snakes and neon blue and green  dragonflies. The signs say there are barred owls and beavers too. Tomorrow's search...

Goose Creek Trail winds along the creek, which has a healthy current and fresh winds. It's a pleasant park with benches and docks here and there and a number of hiking trails that lead from Goose Creek into other areas of gleaming lush hardwood meadows and sunny marshes.

Here and there is evidence of recent fire.

And the bright resilient regeneration that follows.

One can get lost in dreams while hiking alone and scenery becomes surreal.

These petrified herons will come alive tonight.

As my long hike came to a close, I entered back into the region of primitive campsites and the weirdness that defines mankind. What is going on here at Campsite 4?

You might think it's abandoned, but I drove by this morning on my way in to the laundromat and someone had thought to cover it in tarps to protect it from last night's rain.

I'll hike again tomorrow after I slather myself with hydrocortisone cream. 

My nephew was born today, so tonight I will stare into a small fire in the pit at my campsite and sip a bourbon I like, Eagle Rare, maybe don the pair of 3-D glasses I ostensibly bought for my grandson and celebrate the arrival of Jack, born while I was sending strength to his mom Tori from Backwater Jack's Tiki Bar.