My Year Between Things

There was a time earlier in my life when I found myself between things; jobs, commitments, rational thoughts. I moved to a distant city and lived life without a plan or direction. It wasn't the first time I had done something like that. I called it "embarking on an adventure." Others called it running away.

Home was a rented trailer in a campground. Not a campground where families in Winnebagos stop for the evening to roast marshmallows. This was a place where people with limited resources could live indefinitely; sharing a single payphone and a cinder block bathhouse. They had come from better places, intending to stay only a short while then move on to a better place. Many remained for years.

My tiny trailer had electricity supplied through a frayed extension cord. Cold water ran from the kitchen faucet, into the sink, then down to a bucket emptied daily. I cooked, slept, worked occasionally and watched a 12-inch television. An adjoining bedroom, only slightly wider than the bed it contained, offered respite from the cell-like living/dining/kitchen area. I spent as much time as I could outside on a folding chair beneath a makeshift awning. Inside was stifling hot in the summer, painfully cold in the winter, and welcoming dry during frequent showers. Thankfully, the weekly rent was affordable and the trailer offered safe storage for my few possessions and protection from marauding raccoons at night.

The neighbors seemed a peculiar bunch, like a collection of characters lifted from a Steinbeck novel. I didn't mingle at first but loneliness drove me at last to seek companionship among strangers. Reluctantly I came to accept that our differences existed mostly in my imagination. We were as alike as Titanic survivors adrift in their lifeboats. Origins and histories mattered little when enduring life’s hardship was the task at hand. Sharing a toilet and a shower bred a familiarity that bordered on intimacy. Just across that border lurked contempt.

To my left lived a family that had fled the scorn and ridicule of neighbors and co-workers. The husband was a tall, red-haired ex-policeman. She was a kind and gracious African-American with a daughter from her previous marriage. Together they had adopted three young Vietnamese brothers, orphaned by the same war that brought them a new father. The family slept in a converted school bus on plywood bunk beds; sheets were hung as walls to provide some privacy. They had met and courted where they worked; he as a state trooper and she a radio dispatcher. The scandal led to their termination and life afterward had been a shared struggle. My initial impression of them as rebellious troublemakers looking for a fight could not have been more undeserved. They were kind and loving people, good parents, filled with optimism and a joy of living.

To my right a faded old military tent had been pitched in the same spot for years. I seldom saw its occupants but their two black Labrador Retrievers were frequent visitors to my door. They would emerge several times a day to prowl the campground then return quickly when their owner gave a single loud whistle. One evening I received an invitation to dinner. I was greeted at the tent flap by a man my own age and his wife. She was a wonderful cook and we enjoyed an evening talking about everything but them. Their furniture, like the tent’s wooden floor, had been built from old shipping pallets. Heating and cooking were done with a stove made from a discarded twenty-gallon drum. They lived a comfortable but Spartan existence. I was able to discern little about their past. Their families did not know where they lived. Apparently, someone once had accused them falsely of wrongdoing and they had worked only for cash since moving to the campground. I sensed that further questions were unwelcome so I contented myself with hearing more about the neighbors I had not yet met.

The campground was home to about a dozen families over the winter but its population more than tripled as summer approached. New residents arrived as a group every April and occupied the southern half of the property along the creek that bordered the forest. The newcomers all shared a common last name, Williams. They drove late-model pickup trucks and pulled expensive camping trailers. Each truck had magnetic signs attached to its doors. These bore various company names but they all referred to one of three businesses; roofing, driveway sealing or home repair. Every sign displayed the same telephone number; that of the pay phone on the bathhouse wall.

I learned from my tent neighbors that these seasonal visitors were called Travelers; a band of itinerant workers that moved around the country performing less-than satisfactory work at higher-than fair prices. They preyed upon the elderly and the unsuspecting. I was warned that they were not to be fooled with and were best left alone. I could sense that they were an unsociable bunch. The Traveler who sat all day and evening by the pay phone was always unfriendly. We were discouraged from interfering with their business or mingling with their numbers. I was glad to see them depart in the fall and return to wherever it was they called home. The license plates indicated North Carolina but even that was suspect.

The most memorable of my neighbors was a young couple who also lived in a converted school bus. He was a self-proclaimed preacher; she was young and very pregnant. Every Sunday he assembled his worshipers beside the bus in folding chairs and railed for hours about hypocritical and sinful church ministers who seduced their congregations into wasting tithing on elaborate buildings; feathering their retirement nest eggs with money from the offering plate.

There beneath the campground’s huge oak trees, he told them, was the only appropriate place for gathering to appreciate the magnificence of God’s creation. He passed a basket among them, hoping to collect at least enough for groceries and next week’s campsite fee. Exhausted after hours of preaching, he and the entire congregation would find their second wind and travel in a caravan of cars to the local Armory; there to spend the remainder of the evening watching professional wrestling matches. It was bizarre.

One night the preacher shared with me just a little about his past. He had turned to preaching after his father failed to make him a partner in the family construction business. On the day he disappeared he emptied the company’s bank account by writing checks to television evangelists. He and his father had not spoken to each other since.

Eventually I tired of my sabbatical from life, or maybe just came to my senses. I took a regular job that enabled me to live in a real house like most people. It was comfortable and the new neighbors were nice, but life lacked that certain grittiness I had come to enjoy.

Decades later I returned to visit the campground that had been my home for that year between things. A thicket of blackberries covered the painted plywood sign that had fallen to the ground. From the road there was no clue to suggest that families once had sought refuge there to recover or flee from their past. I climbed the gate and walked toward the creek that had run beneath my bedroom window. No trace remained of the tiny camper or the school buses. Only gnarled oak trees stood amid a tangle of tall grass. I found some weathered planking that had been the tent flooring; a rusted tricycle, a ring of stones that had held the fires we shared on cold nights. Alone beneath the familiar old giant oaks, I was surrounded by bittersweet memories.

I wondered; had the ex-trooper and his family found a new home among friends where they felt accepted and loved? Were my tent neighbors still living under canvas somewhere far from all they had known and all who had known them? Did third-generation black Labrador Retrievers turn and run home at the sound of a single whistle? Did the wandering minister ever reconcile with his family and, if he still preached, was it under a canopy of trees? Or, had he perhaps compromised his principles and moved God's house under a roof? Were the Travelers spending the season somewhere nearby; unseen and unwelcome?

I wondered what became of the aimless vagabond I had been so many years ago. Had the man I am now absorbed his spirit or do its remnants lurk in those dark moments when my mood turns and life feels like a threat from which I long to escape?

My life had seemed an adventure then. I since have learned that an occasional adventure of limited duration can be exciting to experience and fun to recall. But, when one's life becomes an endless adventure it can seem like a trial that must simply be endured; punctuated by welcome moments of relief spent lost in melancholy memories of more peaceful times.