The Road

I’ve been on the road for about a week now. Last night sucked. I couldn’t find anywhere good to sleep and ended up literally in a ditch. It was so cold I hardly slept. Mostly I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve been so focused on walking and eating and sleeping that I haven’t spent much time just thinking. I still don’t know where I’m going. If this is what life on the road is like then it’s not too bad. I wouldn’t mind a hot shower but I don’t feel too icky yet. I plan on skinny dipping when I do. I’ve always wanted to go skinny dipping but never had the chance or the nerve to find the chance. I was playing “I’ve-never-ever” once at this girl’s birth day party and was surprised how many people had gone skinny dipping. I’m not sure it really counts if you do it alone – that’s more like just taking a bath. It seems like a right and proper thing to do in my present situation. (“Right and proper” always makes me think of “Dolce et decorem est”. Every time we talked about war in school I thought about white men attacking Indians and I desperately wanted those images to be feel personal but they never really did). I can see myself telling folks later “What did I do for a shower? I just skinny dipped in whatever river or lake I could fine of course, this one time I even sneaked into someone’s pool, they came home and I had to jump the fence naked.” I actually have a friend who sometimes sneaks into the jacuzzi of this really fancy hotel in town. I was invited to come along once but it ended up not happening that night, which was a relief to me at the time, even though I was always jealous when they talked about it. Now I’ll have skinny dipping out in public, once I actually do it of course. Not icky enough yet to make it worth it. Food has actually been the biggest issue. I’ve had to spend a little bit of money on food. I’m thinking I might try shoplifting. That’s another one of those things my friends do that I never have. My friends pull crazy shit. I don’t feel like I am the lame one though. They have crazy stories but they’re not crazy. I see a therapist. I’m the real kind of crazy. I once read that most, or at least a disproportionate number of, homeless have mental issues. I’m a statistic now! Except I’m not really homeless. I have a home, I just left. I even wrote home yesterday. Just a postcard to say I was alive. At first I didn’t want to send a postcard because then they could tell where I was. Actually, at first at first I was surprised that a tiny nothing of a town like the one I was in would have a postcard. It was a picture of their water tower. But then I realized that when they stamp the stamp it usually says the zip code it was mailed from so it didn’t matter and a postcard from a tiny nothing of a town with a picture of their water tower was just too good to pass up. I didn’t write much. I spent the whole day trying to think of something clever to write. In the end I went with “I write therefore I am.” Too many philosophy classes in college I guess. The guy at the post office read it and thought it was pretty funny. I don’t think they’re supposed to read the mail even if it is a postcard. Van Gogh and his brother wrote postcards to each other because it was cheaper than regular mail. They would write in English so the mailmen couldn’t read it. If I knew whatever the native language of my tribe was I’d write in that. My mother knows it a little but I’m pretty sure my dad is as clueless as I am. (My parents made me take French in High School because they thought it would be useful to me, as if I was some cosmopolitan elite. My pronunciation was good but my teacher was insane so I didn’t learn much. I hear all French teachers are crazy.) I thought about learning once but I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to so I gave up on it. If I end up at one of the reservations I’ll regret that – though almost nobody speaks it there anymore either. The English First people don’t have worry, they’re already winning anyway the racist bastards. I always get worked up when I read about racists in the newspapers. I haven’t actually faced that much racism myself. That’s not entirely true. I was always “the Indian”, not just Joseph, in High School. Most kids called me by name and all but whenever I did something extraordinary – both for good and bad – it was attributed to my Indian blood, or if there was no way to bend the stereotype to make that fit folks would see it as a repudiation of the stereotype. But I never had overt “I hate you because you’re an Injun” racism. Mostly cautious curiosity, which was worse in a way because I didn’t have an answer to it. I know very little about my Indian background. Racists I could dismiss but questions I couldn’t answer. Usually I changed the subject. I used folks’ fear of racism against them so they would be afraid to bring it up too much. Once in a while, and usually only with my close friends, I would make up an outrageous lie. I never told my parents about any of this. My mother would have probably sat me down and started telling me all about “our people”. Not that it would have helped. I never knew what to do with the few stories she did tell me. They were fine rattling around my head but I could never find a place for them at school. I’d sound like a pretentious freak if I actually tried to share them. Mother doesn’t have many friends. I know she sometimes tell her friends about Indian stuff but she always packages and sanitizes it. She has a really low opinion of her friends, especially with regard to how open minded they are and willing to try new things and understand strange concepts. The funny thing though is that sometimes she tries to make Indian stuff sounds more foreign than it actually is. “Well our people ...” and then say something that is basically universal to all humans, or at least fairly common in modern America. I always hate hearing her talk about Indian stuff to White people. I don’t really think of myself as Indian but I do think of others as White. When I overheard the Latinos in High School – and also, though less often, in College – talk about “that White boy” or “that White girl” I always smile and feel like I know what they mean even though I’m sure I don’t because they’re looking at White from an even greater distance than I am. Those migrant workers I saw yesterday would probably think I was loco for voluntarily taking to wandering like this. “Easy for a white boy to go on a journey of self discovery, we go on a journey to make a few pennies”. But I’m not the son of a yuppie going down to Mexico to build houses with Habitat for Humanity for a weekend. I ran away. They’d probably see the distinction as academic. For now I’m taking it as a tenet of faith that they’re wrong.

I’m starting to get tired of these fields. I had no illusions that I would be walking romantically in idyllic nature, but that doesn’t mean all I should get to see is brown grass. When the Inuit go on vision quests they go out onto the tundra where everything is white. The sensory deprivations, along with hunger and fatigue helps give rise to whatever it is they see. Dead grass isn’t doing it for me though. I think I’ll cut over to the coast. I’ve always had a love hate relationship with the ocean, but I haven’t been in a while. I was glad I was living by an ocean when I got my first girlfriend. Long romantic walks (and make out sessions) on the beach were pretty sweet. The only problem is I’m not really sure where I am, or which road would take me to the ocean. That’s been the nice thing about just heading north, it’s always easy to find north. It shouldn’t be hard to find a library of course. But, I’ve been avoiding libraries, too easy to check my email, the news, friend’s livejournals, that’s not running away that’s just voyeurism from a distance. I figured after I’d been out “in the wild” for long enough I’d lose interest in all that. But I don’t think one week is long enough.

I’m an idiot. I just realized I don’t have to go into a library. I guess I’m so used to finding information on my own from behind a computer without talking to anyone that I didn’t even think about just asking someone. I‘m an idiot. I haven’t really talked to anyone for a week except for a few automatic words at a store here or there. You hear about folks who spend time alone in the woods and then shout because they’re not used to hearing their own voice. I haven’t been miles from civilization or anything, mostly on well paved roads (or at least next to them) with cars zooming by in fact, so I should be fine, though I never was the type that enjoyed striking up conversations with strangers. I’ll ask at the next gas station or whatever. I wonder how I’m going to explain that I can’t take highways because I’m walking. Hopefully it’ll be a “don’t ask don’t tell” type of thing.