Tales of the Vagabond

This is the story of my five-year, mid-life crisis, ‘odd’-yssey.

It all started on Easter day 2000 when I was doing my best Jimmy Johnson, speeding and passing too close in traffic, when the towing mirror on my truck smacked the towing mirror of an elderly couple’s van. Why was I driving like a raving lunatic? Looking back, I now see that it was a triple-threat combination of a general malaise, 9 or 10 Beck’s Darks and about 1200 milligrams of Xanex.

Unfortunately, the Xanex had me so chilled that I figured that I could just pull over and resolve the situation ‘calmly.’ When I pulled over, the husband driving said: “Just throw me a twenty and we’ll forget about it.” To which I responded (with what I’m sure now was a Cheshire-Cat-from-Hades grin): “W’aall, I don’t got any cash.” At this sterling elucidation, the wife, in the passenger seat, exclaimed: “You sound drunk!” and snatched up her cell phone.

When the cops arrived… I was still feeling so composed I figured that no field-sobriety test could pin me down... Wrong.

The upshot; my second DUI, 22 days in jail, the impoundment (and subsequent loss) of my truck and here’s the kicker: at the time I was living and working at a Christian drug and alcohol abuse recovery center. Yes, they were singularly un-amused with my antics. Consequently, the car, the job and the house were all gone in one fell swoop; an impressive, self-imposed, dick-flattening trifecta!

But the loss of all my shit held nary a candle to what happened next. At that point in time I had been divorced for about six years, and my relationship with my ex and son had been a roller coaster of agony and euphoria (this is a blog appreciating the dialectic, after all). Ergo, this latest exploit put my relationship in a vault, clad in concrete and lead, buried 200 feet below ground and covered with a blast-proof shield. Done, finished... no recovery.

“No man is an island?” Hell, at that point I was a sandbar with a Bay of Fundy high tide bearing in. So I did what every good deadbeat-coward would do… I packed a satchel and hit the street.

My odyssey commenced in Lakeland, Florida where I joined up with a carnival heading north for the summer… I could go on and on about it, but suffice it to say that the stories you hear are true. I lasted about two months with the ‘show’ and ended up on the Acela heading from D.C. to my home territory of Wells Beach, Maine. With the financial help of a great-aunt, I set up housekeeping in a local motel room and soon found work cooking at one of the most prestigious clam shacks in New England. Unfortunately, by this time, four months of estrangement from my worldly goods and family, and living hand-to-mouth, had pushed my fragile psyche into overload. Surely I kicked ass in the kitchen, but I was chirping and squawking like a madman. My tenure in Maine lasted just over a month, and I soon found myself on a Greyhound from Portsmouth, NH to Taos, NM. Let me just stop here for a PSA: If you ever find yourself contemplating a 77-hour bus ride… don’t do it!

Taos played out much like Wells Beach. I assed up in a tent at a campground and soon found work at the famous Taos Inn, right in the center of town next to the Kit Carson hacienda. The chirping and squawking continued and my tenure there lasted (a little better) just over three months.

By this time, a still-salient section of my brain came to realize that I had reached a full-bore sociopath state. No more pretending to fit in. I hitchhiked to Vegas, lived under culverts and at missions, worked spot jobs and sunk lower and lower. After a year there, I thumbed to Sacramento, found work, chirped and squawked, hitched to Grants Pass, Oregon (more chirping) and ended up, finally, under a bridge of Highway 101 in Coos Bay, Oregon. By this time, it was late 2004 and I was truely beat.

So one morning, I arose, packed my crap, climbed to the highway and stuck my thumb out again. My first ride drove me about forty miles south to Bannon. My second ride took me to the border town of Brookings, Ore. Where I stayed on the beach for a couple of weeks, grooving on the fact that I had finally, after 46 years of life, made it to the Pacific (up until this time my travels had been limited to the Eastern and Central time zones). Standing with my tootsies in that great body of water, while imbibing a bomber of that area’s ubiquitous Humboldt County clippings, I started to realize that my ‘odd’-yssey had reached a culmination of sorts. Originally, I had wanted to pull the diagonal from Florida to the Columbia River, but I knew that I was done.

In my travels across the land, I had come in contact with a little mission in Holbrook, Arizona where I actually stayed for a few months and ended up helping them out (less squawking) with various chores like client intake, supervision and the ever-present cooking. I got on really well with the Director and had an open-ended invitation to come back should I ever ‘pass this way again.’

So now, my ragged mind figured that the hitch from the California/ Oregon border to the northeast part of Arizona would be just a hop and skip… A 1250 mile hop and skip.

It took a week. Brookings to Crescent City, Crescent City to Santa Rosa, Santa Rosa to ‘Frisco, Bakersfield, Barstow… Outside of Barstow, I found myself at a tiny truck stop with slim pickings for a lift. After two or three hours, an old-boy trucker pulled over and drove me the final 650 miles to Holbrook in a nine-hour stint. When I arrived at the mission in Holbrook, I immediately showered and fell into the first bed that I had slept in for the better part of a year.

What followed was four years of relative prosperity. I regained my ‘quasi-staff’ position at the mission and decided to give college another whirl for 'grins.' By the time 2007 rolled around, I had done so well in school that I had a decent job on campus, a tuition waiver and $6,ooo a year worth of scholarships to attend Northern Arizona University.

But…