Staying Still

I've been back in Canada since May and I am certain I am losing my mind. It's a certainty that takes hold of me, every year.

We come home because we have to. As Canadians, we can only stay in the Untied States for a maximum of six months at a time. This past year, we stayed just shy of five months in the United States and, another two, down in Mexico. We drove back across the Canadian border with a few days left to spare. This dates-in-da-States wiggle room is important as I sometimes have to head south for work. I'd rather not get into dutch with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Being back in Canada for half the year is , a must if we want to hold on to our sweet-ass socialized medical care (which we totally do.) and for my wife to return to work. While she's a certified dive instructor, she also loves the land-locked gig she works for half of the year. We also come home because we want to. I have few friends and work remotely. Disappointment and distrust have left me happy in the small company of my partner, our pooch and a few well-chosen friends that I seldom see. My missus? Not so much. Community is important to her. Her sister's family—now my family—means the world to her. Reacquainting herself with her people, each year, brings her a happiness that I try hard to understand. I love to see her light up around her friends. It brings me pleasure to hear her pop into work mode on the phone. They're secret, sideways glances into a world that she shares freely with me but I have never been able to bring fully into focus.

This year, we set up shop on a ranch, just outside of Calgary. The owner is lovely and, as a perk, is often absent. The affluent board their horseflesh here. Rich children come to ride. I've heard that they assume us to be hands, here for the season. They've no reason to think otherwise. I work from home, ergo, I work on the ranch. Everyone is pleasant to one another. We smile, we nod. They watch me pour shit from our honey wagon in to mingle with their horse manure. I mouth a hello as I wander through their barn in a bathrobe, flip-flops and when ever possible, a profanity-laced T-shirt. The shower in the barn has amazing water pressure. The weekends are busiest. During the week, I hear more noise from ravens and the hawk that hunts the paddocks here than I do from the privileged. Most evenings, I welcome the dusk with a the local coyotes. I sip. They howl. I read a lot. I walk. I work and, a few times a month, I go to counseling in the city.

I have been in treatment for a number of years now. I adore the woman who treats me. I despise what she does to me.

The trauma from the poor choices of my youth are never far from my mind. I cannot sit with my back to a door. I often forget that I am safe. I cry or rage with no clear understanding of why. Living in a small space, like an RV, helps. A daily cocktail of painkillers and anti-depressants make it possible for me to get out of bed in the morning. I take another assortment of pills in the evening so that I can find a path to sleep.

A few days before an upcoming session with my psychologist, my nighttime pills stop working. I fret over seeing her. I stretch for what I might say at my appointment. Once I'm there, she is kind. There is care in her eyes as she rips me open like a bag of chips. I have cracked a molar from clenching my jaw during a session. I have yet to leave her office without feeling that my body has been worked over by an energetic sadist with a baseball bat. What starts in sadness and shame, for me, so often ends in physical pain. So, More pills. A massage. Then, back home and back to work. I curse our being back in the province. I miss Texas. I miss the Mexican heat and the friendly people. This is the cycle of my time at home. I would refuse it, if it weren't for the fact that, at times, I notice the difference that my treatments make in my life. I am kinder to my partner. Sometimes, I am even kind to myself.

For the past few years, this constructive torment has been punctuated by our time in the south. This year will not be one of those years. We will winter in north central Alberta. We're not ready to give up traveling yet: but the next stage of our life demands we save money, pay down debt and plan for what comes next. We want to spend more time away. Where it is warm and the people speak Spanish is where we are often the happiest. It may be that we may leave Canada, for good. My partner's wish is for a life on the water. My mind is calmed by new experiences. My body aches less in the heat. To have these things, we will sacrifice out freedom, in the short-term. I worry that I may, in staying still for longer than I have, for some time, also be sacrificing something of my sanity. The thought of how my hands, face and neck will ache in the chill of a Rocky Mountain winter brings me no cheer. I'm frightened of what an uninterrupted year of counseling will look like.

But I'm driven to stay still so that we can move forward. I suppose we'll see how she goes.

Watching life roll by from the corner of my eye

Two days of waiting in Casper, Wyoming, $1,200 and two new tires later, we were back on the road. Casper is a small city. It is one of Wyoming's most populated cities. It is a city flanked by mountains and, while we were being held captive by a blown out tire on a holiday weekend, a miserably cold, humid city.

It was a city we were happy to leave.

The man who taught me how to fight once told me that the only thing worse than getting punched is waiting to get punched. This holds true for many things in life. As my wife wheeled us back onto the Interstate, headed south, there was a tension in the air between us. We did not speak. We did little else but listen. Would the rest of our tires prove sound? Was there any indication that they might blow like one of our outer duelies had? When the next blow-out happens would it be one of our steer-tires? How fucked or dead would we be? The answer to this last question: pretty fucked and, depending on the speed we'd be traveling at when the blow-out hit, pretty dead.

Both of us were wondering these things. Neither of us talked about it until after we had stopped for the night.

Long distance trips can be full of new foods and interesting people that make for fond memories. More often, you're left to contend with hours of a ribbon of road cut through the plains mountains and dead towns that lost their vibrance years before you were born. Cities come and go. In an RV, you needn't stop in them. You're self contained: home is always with you. Only when you can't stand another moment of driving, the whimsy of a roadside attraction grabs you, or an emergency forces a stop do you partake. It's during these periods, while my wife is driving, that I work.

Just before we left Alberta, I bought a new mobile workstation to use while I sit in our rig's passenger seat. It provides me with a stable platform to type on while lashed into the only chair in the RV that will keep me from obtaining flight if we're ever involved in an accident. In years past, I'd retire to the back of our rig and set up shop at the kitchen table. Every moment that I didn't lose my balance or have my laptop slide off the table as we rounded a corner was a victory. The new workstation? It's better.

I have, however, found it jarring at times. When I used to work in the back, it was easy to ignore where we were. I had no view of the road. I was focused on my work and keeping the stuff I need for it on the table. Sitting up front, the road is always in what's left of my peripheral vision--a gray and white blur barreling towards me as we tick off the miles to the Mexican border. Sometimes, a change in the color of the asphalt, a car pulling in front of us, or an unavoidable pothole tweaks me enough to look up from my computer's display. Seeing where we are versus where we had been the last time I'd bothered to look has left me feeling disjointed. I'm doing no more work than I was while seated in the back. But I cannot shake the feeling that I am missing out as I work sitting next to my wife. The color of the sky, the slow crawl from a temperate to an arid landscape: scenery I adore as we move from north to south.

Last night we slept at a weigh station, just inside of the New Mexico border. Tonight, we'll rest in Texas.

Grizzlies

I've always felt a spiritual connection with grizzly bears. They're slow until they want to be fast, chunky and have an overwhelming affection for peanut butter--just like me. From time to time, I'm fortunate enough to spot one, or at least the signs of one's passing, while we're in Alberta. But, as they generally don't want anything to do with people, being able to spend a prolonged amount of time with one is an incredible treat.

It's a treat that I had the opportunity to partake in earlier today.

Around 30 minutes outside of Bozeman, Montana, we saw the first sign for it: Montana Grizzly Encounter. I wasn't into it at first: captive bears aren't cool. I checked out their website as we drove. Rescue bears. Rescue bears are very cool. Five minutes later we were pulling into the Montana Grizzly Encounter. Sixteen bucks for two adults and a score of steps later, we were in.

MGE was founded in 2004 and has been giving homes to bears rescued from cruel captivity ever since. Five of the six bears that MGE shelters were rescued from inhumane situations from all across the United States. Their sixth bear, Bella, was an orphan discovered in Alaska. On her own, she wouldn't have stood a chance. At the sanctuary, she's living the best life that she possibly can. You won't find any bars or cages at MGE. The bears have a temperature controlled enclosure that they can enter or exit as they please. There's a large area for the bears to do bear things in outside of the public eye. There's a large enclosure with a viewing area for the public to watch the grizzlies do other bear things in as well.

MGE's bears aren't forced to perform. Instead, the grizzlies are enticed to come out and show themselves with positive reinforcement: peanut butter, berries and other treats. In order to snarf their snacks down, they have to forage the enclosure for them. As the bears hunt for food, you'll have plenty of opportunities to take photos of the handsome beasts. They know they're pretty. While we were there, a big male named Brutus came out for a stroll. As he licked peanut butter off of the rocks around his enclosure, we were treated to a lecture about bear safety, why bears, typically, want nothing to do with us, and a million other bits and pieces concerning what makes them so cruel and, thanks to the folktales and Hollywood, so misunderstood.

We've traveled past Montana Grizzly Encounter a few times over the past couple of years. I really wish that we'd visited sooner. All proceeds made by MGE go towards educational programs and keeping their bears fed and happy. If you're in the area, check them out. It's a safe, serene and responsible way to enjoy a massive species that you might otherwise go your whole life without coming face to face with.

Stranded in Wyoming

Few things can fuck an RV up worse than a frozen water system. Grey, black and potable water tanks, water pumps and the delicate tubing that run through the undercarriage and into the living area of a motorhome don't do well when exposed to subzero temperatures. Some RVs, like ours, come with blowers that force warm air from the furnace into the undercarriage. Others, like our old rig, have systems that draw power from the chassis battery to keep the tanks heated and the liquid inside of them, well, liquid.

We started our first day headed south at -4° Celsius. We assumed that we'd be able to make it to Lethbridge, Alberta, a few hours south of Calgary. The overnight temperature would dip to -10° there. Fading headlights and the encroaching dark forced to a halt, short of our goal, in Claresholm. There, the overnight temperature dipped to -17°.

We knew that we could weather the weather in Lethbridge. Claresholm, cold as it was, would have been a test we weren't prepared to sit for. Fortunately, we were able to find a hotel. Even more fortunate was the fact that we'd winterized our RV well before the first cold. Our tanks were drained dry. Our lines were wetted with anti-freeze. For the first three days of our trip south, we traveled without any water, save what we brought with us in bottles. We used it to flush our toilet, brush our teeth, make coffee and wash. On the end of the third night, we felt it warm enough to risk de-winterizing the RV. Where we normally would spend our evening in a Walmart parking lot or a rest station somewhere on the Interstate, we instead pulled into a campground just outside of Billings. We flushed and filled our fresh water system.

Or so we thought.

Despite topping off the tank, we had no water pressure. Our pump was running, but to no end: there was no toilet flushing. No showers. No dish washing. We guessed our water pump's diaphragm had seized. We wouldn't hazard a wrench to find out. Just below freezing is still below freezing. It's not the sort of weather that you want to tinker with a water system in. Despite our tanks being full, we'd go on, sans water, until we reached a region where working the issue out felt more desirable.

We unhooked from shore power.

We retracted our stabilizers.

We immediately noticed that one of our rear tires looked a bit low.

It wouldn't fill past 100psi--10 to 20psi below where we wanted it to be. Still, it seemed sound.

So we drove.

The forecast called for snow. We veered south, eyeing Cheyenne. Once there, we'd decide whether to continue south or head east--whichever would keep us out of the weather.

By midday, we'd made Casper, Wyoming. The snow had been steady, but thin. The roads were clear. We'd made good time. We eyed a truck stop on the far side of the city where we could pick up more water, fuel and walk the dog. I pumped diesel. The dog peed. All was well.

"The tire's looking really low," my wife tells me.

"Same one?"

"Same one." The truck-stop had a free air pump. We're into that. She says to score her a Cinnabon while she fills the tire. I do. Upon returning, I discover that, in addition to a Cinnabon, she also has bad news. Our valve stem is leaking.

"Shit."

She agrees.

The air leaks out as fast as she can put it in. I nod in the direction of the truck stop: I'd see if they know of anyone who can do tire repairs on a weekend. She goes back to futzing. A man with an epic beard and a friendly hound overhears our woes and walks over to see if he can lend a hand. Inside I'm handed a slip of paper with a number of phone numbers on it. I walk back outside as my wife's walking in. She tells me that the side wall of the tire blew out on her as she made one final attempt to fill it up. The helpful stranger thought that new valve cover might help us to limp into town for repair. She tells me that it exploded next to her ear. It was kin to a gunshot. She couldn't hear for a few moments after it happened. Had the tire blown outwards instead of inwards, I would not be having this conversation with her. We both know it. She's flush. I feel numb. We both agree that there would be a drink had.

After all, we weren't going anywhere.

One of the numbers we'd been given was open for business. There'd be no tires for us until Monday, however. The mechanic we spoke with could see the tires in inventory, but couldn't get his hands on them. We'd have to wait.

There are worse places to be stranded than at a truck-stop for a few days. There's food here. Hot showers and a laundry. There are worse places for a blowout as well. Had it happened while we were driving, the tire might have disintegrated, taking out our wheel well, the contents of the compartments surrounding it or doing damage to the Jeep we pull behind us.

I know this, because it has happened to our Jeep.

While pulling it behind us, just outside of Amarillo last winter, its wheels locked up. The Jeep was dragged. Perhaps as little as a few blocks. Perhaps longer. We didn't hear it. We did not feel it. The weight of the Jeep to our RV is much like the weight of a hat on your head. All looked fine in our rear camera, as well. By the time that someone signaled to us that there was a problem, one of the Jeep's tires had disintegrated, taking our front bumper, front quarter panel and bending one of our struts.

When your home is on wheels, so much can happen. So much does happen. Much of it is wonderful. Some of it isn't.

Chicken and Booze in Bozeman

We left Claresholm after eating a continental breakfast of terrible coffee and decent muffins. The hotel’s owner chatted lazily with us as we noshed. He had been a manager of Woolworth's department stores, from Toronto, Ontario to Terrence, British Columbia. He served the chain loyally for decades of his life, never questioning when they sent him north, east or west. They fired him after 27 years of service. He’d become redundant.

I told him that I remembered eating grilled cheese sandwiches at the Woolworth’s lunch counter where I grew up. There was pride in his voice as he told me that, before McDonald's came along, the department store’s lunch counters were the biggest restaurant chain in the world.

The sun was high for it being so early in the day. We heated the RV’s engine for a half hour before wheeling south.

It’s a strange time to write for a living. Where normally I expect to raise an eyebrow when I tell folks what I do, my vocation of late has roused opinions and suspicions. I wasn’t sure if I would stand up to questioning at the border. I needn’t have worried: the border guard was more concerned about where we were going, how long we’d be there and whether we had any contraband onboard. In her rear view mirror, my wife saw our border guard staggering through a pee-pee dance from her booth to the border patrol facility a few feet away as we drove off.

Montana.

The mountains are different here than they are in Alberta. Slow and rolling, gentle and often treed to the tip. I never saw buttes until I came to this state on assignment a few years back. The landscape stayed with me. I'd love to return. Bozeman was our destination of choice for the day. Small pleasures that border on decadence were a six-hour drive away. We knew where we wanted to eat. We were certain of where we wanted to drink.

Roost Fried Chicken is the best Tennessee hot this side of the Smokey Mountains. It burns as it goes down and scalds you for hours afterwards. The Lockhorn Cider House offers a rotating score of orchids-born beverage. Most are good. Some are outstanding. We had growlers in storage for both. As my wife twisted, turned and jake-braked through the mountains, I worked to make back some of the money we’d spend on diesel to get from A to B. Silence passed smoothly between us. Her gaze was fixed on the road while I built paragraphs into something my editors would be fine with.

We reached Bozeman as dusk fled the moon. The city’s streets glistened with water and ice-melt. Prowling into a mall parking lot, we stopped for the night, stretching our legs in search of food, drink and other people conversations.

How I work

One of the big problems I've had with taking long drives, anywhere, has been that I'm forced into unproductive time when I should be working. This isn't a problem when I'm going on vacation. But here's the thing: I seldom take a vacation. As I'm self-employed, there's no such thing as vacation pay in my world. When I stop writing, the money stops coming in. Working on the road is possible--all I have to do is tether my laptop to my iPhone and I'm in business.

So long as I can keep my laptop, you know, in my lap.

Maintaining a stable platform to work on while my wife wheels us across the continent has proven difficult. I've tried lap desks, balancing my computer on a backpack, you name it. My computer always slides around, making it damn near impossible to type. What's more, a neck injury that I sustained eons ago makes it painful for me to tilt my head down for any length of time. This combination of poor conditions has forced me, up until now, to twiddle my thumbs for hours at a time, working only once we've come to a stop for the day.

However, I think that I may finally have figured it out.

RAM Mounts makes a wide variety of mobile work solutions to keep nerd stuff in one place while you're driving along. Cops use RAM Mount gear in their cruisers to keep their laptop secure. Their in-vehicle smartphone and tablet stands are, arguably, among the best out there. Before we hit the road for our annual migration south to Texas, I invested in one of their Tough Tray laptop stands, a pair of extension arms and a claw mount to secure all of it to the handrail, located directly next to our RV's passenger seat. Boom: instant workstation.

Once I put it together.

The great thing about RAM Mounts' gear is that it's incredibly durable. Their products, in my experience, will last you for years. The rotten thing is that, at least in the instance of the laptop holder I purchased, it can be an absolute fucking nightmare to assemble. It's not that there's a ton of parts or any special tools needed to do the job. It's that the work is fiddly: nuts need to stay on the right angle inside of channels, unseen, as you blindly attempt to thread a screw into them. It didn't go well. It took two hours, but I got it put together.

Today's the first full day that I've been using my new workstation. It's a huge improvement over the solutions I've tried in the past: it's adjustable, holds my laptop securely, and I can position it high enough to make it ergonomically comfortable. These are all huge wins. The only down side is that vibration from the road does cause the keyboard to jiggle around as we go. I'm thinking that placing a thick chunk of padding between my thigh and the extension arm will likely provide enough shock absorption to take care of this issue.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the results.

Crazy Cold in Claresholm

With my wife's gig in north central Alberta spinning down for another year and the cold charging hard at us like a bull moose in rut, it's once again time for us to head south. This year, thanks to the two weeks it took me to replace a lost passport, we started off later than we would have liked.

***

We left Calgary late in the day. No matter how much lead up we have, there always seems to be a few last things to do. Saying goodbye. Picking up snacks for the road. Double checking our rig's engine, air bags, air brakes, tires and all else. Even after receiving my passport last Friday, we waited until today--Wednesday. The weather was too coarse to risk in the rig.

We aimed at Lethbridge as a first night target. Not far, but out of Calgary and within reach of the border early tomorrow morning. As the dusk settled in, we noted that our headlights were not up to the task of leading us. The bulbs would need to be replaced. But not tonight. We made for Claresholm: a highway pass-through town on the road south. By the time we pulled off for the evening, it had already hit -10. We lurked through town, the size of a semi truck with our Jeep in tow, searching for a dark corner of asphalt to call ours for the night. On with the generator. On with the furnace to warm our dog and our bones.

Unhooking the Jeep in the cold is a finger-sore pain in the ass. We decided to walk to the closest restaurant--we hadn’t planned on stocking the fridge until we were across the border. Not a block away was a roadhouse. We’d passed it on the way in: Douros. An Italian joint if the specials on display out in the snow were anything to go by. It looked warm. We were sold.

With the cold, I found it hard to care about my keto diet. We both ordered heaping piles of pasta. Doing so was one of the best decisions I’ve made in months. As we finished dinner, we realized that we had misread the weather. It would go down to -10 in Lethbridge. It would hit -17 in Claresholm. While plugged in to shore power, we knew that we could keep the RV warm in temperatures as low as -10. Off the grid? That's a different story. In order to wake up with out frostbite, we would have to run our diesel generator and propane furnace all night. For the cost of topping off our diesel and propane reserves in the morning, we could just as easily rent a room for the night. So we did. Carrying our pillows, pooch grub, and bathroom kits with us through the late fall Alberta freeze, we walked two blocks to a two-star hotel. $10 extra dollars on top of $75 and the dog was inside. Good enough.

My wife had a bath. I listened to the conversation in the next room through the broth-thin walls between us. Voice One thought he was spending too much money on online gambling. Voice two said that the oil fields up north were opening again. No need to worry about small change. Their talk turned a lots of corners: How Amazon was big enough and rich enough to stop the next world war. That they found some trans women attractive. That Trump was a lunatic but some of his ideas were fine. I tapped on a white noise app on my smartphone. Their blather faded away in a wash of sound.

A Lost Passport

16 October, 2018
My wife drops me at the airport in Calgary. I'm traveling to Chicago. A fancy audio hardware company called Shure invited me to the city to check out some of the new tech that they'll be releasing in the coming months.

I pass through security with no issues. As I lace on my boots, I am certain that I have my passport. It is in my hand as I board my flight. I place my passport in a buttoned pocket in my jacket before sitting down on the plane. Standing up at the end of my flight, my passport is still there. Upon landing, I pay it no further mind. I'm on the hunt for a cab ride into Chicago's downtown core.

"They say they don't have any money but Jesus: lookit alla this construction," my cab driver says to me. "It's alla the time." I tell him that we have construction season in Calgary, too. But yeah, the traffic headed into the downtown is weaponized bullshit. My smartphone says that the trip should take 35 minutes. Curb to curb, it is a 90-minute ride.

I pay the driver his due and step out of his hack.

In the hotel's front door to the hotel's front desk. I have my luggage. I have a reservation. I have a credit card for incidentals.

I do not have a passport.

I don't have a driver's license, either. I haven't had one for years: my PTSD makes my being behind the wheel a bad idea. When we move our RV, my wife drives. I write.

I tear ass through my jacket and both of my bags to find the missing document. Bupkis. I talk my way into a room key without the aid of photo identification. I enter my room. It's nicer than I deserve: leather, feathers and curated hooch.

All of the fancy fails to return my passport to me. Calling the Chicago Police, O'Hare's customs agents and Calgary International's lost and found office inspires no joy. I flew into town with United (do not do this). I am directed by their people to fill in a web form. I do. If anything is found, they'll let me know.

I call my wife. I call the folks at Shure to let them know my trip has gone pear-shaped. I head to bed and pretend that I will sleep.

17 October 2018
At six the next morning, I wake. I start making calls: Shure, to let them know that I'll be oh so late. The Chicago Police. United Airlines. The security operations centers at Calgary International and O'Hare. The taxi company. I leave messages. I'm instructed to call back later. I persist for four hours before calling the Canadian consulate to let them know that my passport has fucked off the face of the earth. It's a balancing act: as soon as I report my passport as missing, it will be canceled. Call too soon and I'll have to jump through bureaucratic hoops to get back home. Call too late and the process of finalizing my paperwork to cross back into Canada might take too long for me to make my flight the following day. If I was staying for longer than a few days, there would be no incentive to tell the powers that be that my passport is missing. It is entirely possible that after doing so, it would be found and, having been reported, it would be useless. I am not, however, going to be in town for a long time. My flight is scheduled to leave in a little over 24 hours. So, I call.

I'm told to come to the consulate as soon as I can. It takes me 20 minutes, door-to-door.

My morning on Canadian soil consists of doing Canadian paperwork and making American phone calls to Canadian friends. Will they vouch for my identity? Most are not sure that they want me back in the country. My afternoon is full of drug store photographs and pointed questions from those empowered to ask them.

"So when you get back home, if they let you in, you're gonna need to apply for a new passport," says the consulate officer.

"If?"

He nods a yeah and tells me, "they might decided that they need more information. You're asking them to trust who you are without having a guarantor vouch for you as you're not home to find one. It can go either way."

"So I have to apply for a another passport? After I get home?"

"Yes."

"Didn't I just do that, this morning?" Upon arriving, I had been asked to fill out a passport application, along with ten other forms.

"Yes, but that isn't for that. We need that information to get you emergency travel papers," he explains. "You have to fill out another passport application, submit it with your guarantor's information and pay for a replacement passport to be be issued. Anyway, today's going to cost you $170 for processing fees." I ask him if the price covered the cost of my new passport when I apply for it in Canada.

Nah.

It's three in the afternoon by the time the consulate officer tells me to come back at nine the next morning. I was supposed to have been with the folks from Shure since eight-thirty that morning.

I let Shure know that I'd finished off with all the farmhands at the bullshit ranch and am on my way to meet them.

18 October, 2018
It is nine in the morning. Beyond explanation, my emergency travel document is ready to go when I show at the consulate. It is valid for two days.

I will need this time.

Once I finish with the consulate, I am left with 30 minutes to drive 45 minutes to O'Hare for a flight that leaves in 60 minutes. I am not made of time. Over the course of the past couple of days, Bullshit and I have become fast friends. Walking back to my hotel, I call to make changes to my travel arrangements.

I return to my hotel, lock my travel papers in my room's safe and go to sleep for a few hours. Fuck everything. When I wake, I decide to spend the rest of my new found extra day in Chicago playing tourist. Hello to The Bean and Hemingway House.

Something that I eat in Oak Park gives me food poisoning. If Chicago could not keep me it is happy to kill me.

19 October 2018
I wake up five hours before I need to be at the airport. It is, however, an hour before I want to be at the airport. I dress and check out of the hotel. Life has been a rolling clusterfuck since I arrived in Chicago. In my soul, I know it will be a rolling clusterfuck as I attempt to leave.

I am not wrong.

As I check in for my flight, I discover that United's personnel are not trained to recognize an emergency travel document issued by the Canadian government. It takes four attendants 25 minutes to provide me with a ticket. Their system refuses to accept my papers in lieu of a passport.

The TSA are on the same bullshit. This particular bullshit varies so mildly from their typical bullshit that it is hard to tell the difference between the two.

After they inspect my paperwork, I am "randomly" selected for further screening. I pass through no technology before I am told this. It's been a while since I've been pulled into a private room for a pat-down.

I dress, pack and enter the international terminal in search of breakfast.

I settle on a bacon and sadness omelet at Wolfgang Puck's.

I should have done shots, instead.

I am here to tell you that being in United's system, checked in, holding a ticket that was given to me by a United employee, along with government documentation is not enough to get you onto a United flight. I am told that I needed to be verified.

"Can I see your passport?"

"I don't have a passport. Thus this letter."

"They checked you in without a passport?"

"We live in a world of wonders."

"I've never seen one of these before."

"The story of this day will be told to your children's children."

The attendant looks at me in a way that suggests she will drink the memory of me away at the end of her shift. Neither she, United's employee help desk, her supervisor or two other agents are versed in plugging an emergency travel document into their system. It takes close to 45 minutes before it is decided that it is fine to tell me this. I am told that I may not make my flight, despite my standing directly in front of the jetway that leads to my plane. As other passengers begin shuffling their passports and tickets forward for scanning, the United supervisor calls his supervisor. It is explained that through the dark workings of blood magick, I appeared at their kiosk. What could be done with such an aberration? Should I be purged with fire?

It's fine, says the supervisor's supervisor. Just let him on and they'd take care of it later.

19 October, 2018: Part II
Upon landing in Calgary, I turned on my phone. There was an email from United Airlines waiting for me. They found my passport and wanted to know if I could pick it up.

My Life on the Road: Shit Fountains and Dump Stations

It doesn't matter what tech you opt for – composting toilets, incinerator toilets or, as we have in our rig, a john connected to a holding tank – if you live in an RV, sooner or later you're going to wind up handling your own waste.

The first time we dumped out tanks, it didn't go so well.

We hadn't quite started living in our old 1991 Triple E Empress just yet. At the time, we were busy downsizing our lives to fit into the motorhome, and my wife was enrolled in a week-long wilderness first aid course, in Canmore, Alberta. Normally, she would've had to spring for a hotel. But screw that, we were RV owners! We opted to parking-lot-surf for five days instead. Outside of a few frustrations that came from getting to know the Empress' heating and electrical systems, it was a comfortable week that made us feel like we'd made a good choice in buying the rig as our new home.

The Empress was an early example of the large class A RVs that you see on the road today. It was five feet shorter than our current rig, and has no slide outs. Despite its 35-foot length, things were a little bit more cozy at times than we would have liked. The Empress came with basement storage compartments. It was one of the reasons we chose it. Between my wife's dive gear, extras from our apartment that we weren't sure of whether we'd need or not, and the hardware I need to do my job, there wasn't much storage space to spare. This was largely due to the fact that a good chunk of the rig's undercarriage was eaten up by its gray tank (used to hold gray water from our shower and sinks) and black tank (used to hold whatever horrors we flushed down the toilet) and our fresh water holding tank. The two tanks could hold around a week's worth of waste before they needed to be dumped. The RV's freshwater holding tank holds about a week's worth of water.

The gauges on the RV's control panel on our dashboard didn't work when we bought it, so we used to have to eye our tank levels. Knowing when to dump the black tank was easy. We'd just look down the toilet as we flushed. If we could see that the shit and toilet paper was resting high enough in the tank to find troubling, it was time to dump. The gray tank was something of an enigma. As our sinks and shower drained in such a way that you can't see inside of the tank, we had to rely on other signs that it was full: bubbling when we pulled the plug in the sink, slow drainage or, when it was really full, grey water would come up the shower drain. That's a feature, not a fault: the extra water's gotta go somewhere and the shower is the safest bet in the rig.

We noticed that the water was taking its sweet time to drain into the tank. It was time to head to a dump station. We didn't have to go far. Canmore's full of campers during the spring and summer. To make life easier on everyone, the city installed a dump station outside of their tourist information center. We got the rig ready to move and drove over, confident that, thanks to gravity and a few minutes, we'd be ready to poop and bathe again in no time.

If you've never used a dump station before, it's a simple process. Most dump stations consist of two components: a hole in the ground that empties into a holding tank or sewage system and a non-potable water hose for cleaning up any mess you may have made while you're dumping. Pull your motorhome or trailer up alongside the dump station, connect your sewer hose to the station's dump drain, and pull the release levers for your tanks.

Boom, done.

In a few minutes your tanks will be empty (with the exception of a few bits that may need to be rinsed out) and you're ready to get back on the road again. My wife, being the enthusiast that she is, elected to perform our first dump. She pulled our rig up to the dump station. She connected the sewer hose that came with the RV. She placed the other end in the dump station drain and pulled the levers for our gray and black tanks.

We were treated to the breathtaking site of a shit fountain.

Our sewage hose, which was likely as old as our RV, was full of wee pinholes. Shit sprayed from at least 50 different locations. It covered the ground, the inside of our tank compartment, the hose itself and my wife. There was no way she could have moved fast enough to avoid it. Thankfully, it was late in the fall and there was no one around to watch us bathing in our own brand. We washed down the area, washed ourselves down and then, before doing anything else, made a beeline for Canadian Tire to buy a new septic hose. So yeah: if you're to remember anything I tell you, I want it to be this: if you buy an RV, make damn sure that you also pick up a new sewage hose. I like these ones. They're tough and cheap.

A few months later, we accidentally filled the trunk of our tow vehicle with frozen shit. During the winter that we spent in British Columbia, we had the genius idea that, if we bought a honey wagon (the name says it all) to cart our crap to a dump station with, we wouldn't have to worry about driving the RV in icy conditions or, as we were dirt poor at the time, using up extra gas. The honey wagon we picked up could hold 50 gallons of liquid. The plan was to fill the honey wagon, have me heft its 250 weight into the trunk of our old Toyota Echo and then drive it out to be dumped.

On a particularly cold week, we heaved the full honey wagon into the back of the car and left it overnight. We needed to go out the next day to run a few errands and wanted to save on gas by doing everything in a single trip. As we planned out our day, it made sense to hit the dump station midway through our sortie. So, off we went to the university to return library books and have a shower, hit a coffee shop so that I could download some files and then a stop for groceries. When we opened the trunk, we discovered that the honey wagon's lid had come loose. There was a layer of frozen shit and piss covering the bottom of the trunk. We tried power washing it out, but in the cold, it was a half measure. In the end, we took turns chipping away at it. Bamboleo was playing on the CD player. We really haven't listened to the Gypsy Kings since. The experience left us wondering how much worse our winter could get.

It didn't take long to find an answer to that one: power washing the trunk fried our tail lights and turn signals – a problem that we were unable to fix for months.

Since then, things have gone a lot smoother in the poop department – a lot smoother across the board, in fact. Living in an RV full-time is just like owning a house. You learn to deal with its quirks, fix what you can, tolerate what you can't, and bring in professional help when necessary. There have been no more shit fountains. The honey wagon, on the rare occasion that it gets used, no longer goes in the back of our tow vehicle for any reason, ever. Our new rig's holding tanks are large enough to go for weeks between trips to dump. Awful experiences like these make us both grateful for how much better things are now.

Sometimes, you just have to be covered in shit to know what it's like to roll in clover.

Main Image by Alexander Klink

Prologue

In passing, I've talked about the fact that my wife and I are full-time nomads. Lemme expand on that.

A few years back, we bought a 21-year-old RV with the intention of living in it while my wife completed her degree in Vancouver, Canada. Typically, winters in Vancouver are mild by comparison to the rest of the country. The climate is similar to what you see in Seattle. Not so while we were there. It dropped to below freezing for weeks at a time. Snow, a largely unknown commodity in British Columbia's lower mainland, hung around for months. We were cold. We blew through hundreds of dollars worth of propane trying to stay warm.

We were poor.

Shortly before we were to make the drive over the mountains, I was informed that, after five years of service to a site that I had built, my services were no longer needed. It shattered me emotionally and financially. I was sent scrambling to find enough work, piecemeal, to make end's meet. There was cash coming in barely enough to keep afloat. Staying in a campground in the lower mainland costs around $800 per month. We couldn't foot the bill. We made do. Weekly, we would sneak into a local university sports complex for a shower. On one occasion, we had to decide between buying food or propane for heat. We chose food. This ended up costing us $1200, money that could have kept us going for months, to replace our hot water tank as it iced up and cracked in the cold. I had to ask my folks for help after that. It felt shitty.

We drove without taillights on our tow vehicle for a month, too poor to afford anything but fuses to try and troubleshoot the problem. In Vancouver, with its being Vancouver, no one wanted our RV parked anywhere near their homes. We moved regularly, parking in industrial areas, parking lots and other less than savory locales. We found a driveway that we could park in and use the homeowner's electricity for $300 a month. It was an upgrade. It was also short lived. No one in the neighborhood wanted us there. After a couple of month's of fighting with bylaw enforcement, we admitted defeat. Miraculously, we landed on our feet: dear friends with a bit of property outside of the city invited us to stay with them. In the spring, we returned to Alberta, warmth and, with my partner going back to work, a measure of financial stability.

Despite the shitshow that the fall and winter of 2015/2016 had been, we were absolutely hooked on RV living. The sense of freedom, even in hardship that being able to move your home, anywhere, at any time, affords, is intoxicating. More than this, I've always found that travel helps me feel more grounded and capable of dealing with the symptoms that come with my PTSD diagnosis. New places and experiences occupy me, force me to interact with the outside world and keep me from turning inward. So we decided this would be the thing: for half the year, my wife would work her gig as a drug rehabilitation counselor in Alberta. The other half we'd spend on the road, living somewhere warm. I'd continue to write, building my business back up and support us in our travels. By heading into Mexico, my partner would be able to find work for our six months outside of Canada as a Dive Master.

Just before the time to make the drive south was due to hit, we agreed to take over the payments on my mother and her husband's motorhome: a 40-foot diesel pusher. It's a big rig that requires an air brake certification to drive. With four slide outs to increase our living space, a diesel generator to run all of our systems while we're away from shore power and an inverter that allows me to power everything I need for work while we're on the road, our new RV is an upgrade to what we were living in, in every imaginable way.

Last winter, money was tight again. But not so tight that we were uncomfortable. We were able to roll through the vast and varied environments that south Texas and Mexico have to offer. We reveled in Mexican cuisine and culture. Our shitty Spanish skills received an upgrade. Along the way, we were subjected to incredible acts of kindness on both sides of the United States southern border. We saw far too many examples of cruelty and extreme poverty. The latter made us feel that our complaints from the previous winter were unfounded. My partner and I married while we were in Texas, surrounded by a small group of family and new friends. Our time south was everything we'd hoped for.

In early April, it was time to return north once again. To make more money. To ensure that we'd maintain our right to Alberta's healthcare system by actually living there for a while and, most importantly, to prepare for our next trip south. This year, thanks to our home's massive freshwater, grey/black water holding tanks and other upgraded systems, we were able to spend six months living entirely off the grid in the wilds of north central Alberta. The quiet was astonishing. So were the mosquitoes.

With September in play, we're looking to run from the snows once more. This year, we may go south to revisit friends, family and delve deeper into Mexico. With the promise of a dive job on Vancouver island, we might return to British Columbia, unbroken by our last stretch of time in the province and better equipped to face any challenges that may be waiting for us.

I look forward to the movement: to the miles traveled, to sunsets in places freshly discovered. Every mile traveled demands attention for fearof missing something splendid. I'll share what we find along the way.

Woman on the Train

I was sitting on the Skytrain last night, riding home after a visit to my post office box. It was unlike me, but I wasn’t wearing my headphones. I had just finished walking close to four kilometres through the snow to get to the Skytrain station and just wanted to rest. A small attractive woman, of perhaps 25 years, got on the train and immediately complimented a tall, mannish girl on her scarf. She asked where she got it, if it kept her warm and if she liked it. The girl replied to the questions in a friendly, but not familiar manner. The woman went on to ask the girl about her day, if she was in school, what she did for work and her plans for the evening. The girls responded. It was a congenial conversation, the kind that you seldom see strangers have anymore. For some reason, it made me happy to see this. The train came to a stop at the girl’s station. The two told each other that it was nice to meet, and bid each other goodnight. 

I was thinking of saying to the woman how nice it was to see small talk like that, when a petite blond got on the train, all wrapped up for winter.

With the same warmth, facial expression and inflection, the woman asked the blond the exact same questions, all in the exact same order. Perhaps there was a loneliness here, but it smacked of lunacy. 

I put my headphones on, head against the glass and gazed through my steamed window as the lights of Burnaby blurred past me.

Gallery: A Month in Los Angeles

I spent the month of June house sitting for Geoff Morrison in Los Angeles. It was, to me, unbearably hot. The heat of the day commonly peaked in the high 30s. Breathing was like making out with a blowdryer. I sweated. I worked. I met with friends and, for a few days, I even played tourist once I was joined by my partner. The heat, vast swatches of concrete and endless streets lent themselves to black & white. 

For the sake of memory, I've collected a few of my favourite shots here.

Gallery: Freezing at Waterfowl Lake

Having survived an inter-provincial move and a month in Los Angeles, my partner and I felt that it was high time to for us fuck off to the Canadian Rockies for a bit of late summer outside time. Mountains. Stars. Campfires.

Sub-zero overnight temperatures.

As lovely as it was, we only stayed for a single night of tenting at a campground near Waterfowl Lake. It was simply too cold, and as well equipped as we are, we weren't able to keep ourselves safely warm in the unexpected chill. 

But before we broke camp, I made damn sure to make good use of the daylight to take a few photos.

That Time I Met James Ellroy...

I saw James Ellroy in the flesh on June 6th. He was giving a reading of his new book LAPD ’53 to benefit the Los Angeles Police Museum. It took me close to two and a half hours and four bus transfers to do it. As he’s one of the literary gods that I cut my teeth on and soured my mind with, it was more than worth the time and the expense it took to make it happen. 

The sprawl of Los Angeles is seemingly endless. Hot stucco. Dry 1950s woodwork. Sunburnt cars parked in front of modern strip malls and professional buildings that refuse to get with the goddamned program. Different neighbourhoods offer varying levels of threat. But the bus felt safe. I saw few white people riding. My travel companions were were largely Latino women of an age I was unable to determine. Their skin cured by the sun, they could have been in their thirties or on the cusp of sixty. A group of them, friends either through work or neighbourhood, got on together and sat, talking trash and passing around a copy of a magazine amongst themselves as we trundled on, insulated by air conditioning—a temporary balm against the 36 degrees Celsius heat that lurked just beyond the glass and steel that surrounded us. An old man boarded with a cold, sweating gallon of milk. I wondered how warm it'd be by the time he got it home.

The Los Angeles Police Museum is housed in the department’s former Highland Park Police building: Thrown together in 1925, It’s a Renaissance Revival sort of deal that holds on to the heat  long after the sun goes down. It’s gorgeous, but it’s cinch to see why the LAPD moved into better digs back in 1983: Too damned hot. Too few windows, too little space. The building was restored to its original condition when they opted to use as a museum, after getting kicked around by water damage, vandals and general neglect. Once inside, the smell of the woodwork takes you back to a time that your brain tells you was better, but anyone with a passing knowledge of history will confirm to have been just as nasty, if not more so than the societal quagmire we’re currently stuck wallowing in. The walls are lined with photos of the LAPD’s fallen, old hardware and methods of policing that have fallen into myth. 

Perhaps forty people paid one hundred bucks to come and hear Ellroy speak. The event was held on the building’s second floor: a wide open space that I’d bet cash money was used as a detective’s bullpen back in the day. 

Ellroy, as usual, was a beast, or so he pretended. He faced his congregation wearing a blue blazer, Hawaiian shirt, white slacks and cream coloured running shoes--an outfit thrown together by a blind yachtsman. Tall, wide, but at sixty-seven years old, frail, you could still see that he must have been an imposing piece of meat when he was younger. Loud, demanding attention and articulate, he was everything I’d seen in interviews on the web and TV. But when Glynn Martin, his co-writer on LAPD ’53 took centre stage, I watched Ellroy as he noshed on a piece of catered pizza. Crouched over in his chair, focused on his grub and seemingly elsewhere in his head, he was a far cry from what I’d just seen howling the pages a book at us a few moments before.

This was not a man who craves attention. 

After the reading, I was fortunate enough to talk to him. Again, Ellroy showed me something new. Neither withdrawn in the wings or a madman at the fore of the room, he was chatty, friendly and fiercely intelligent. I told him that when I was  thirteen years old, the hometown’s local library refused to let me take out The Black Dahlia because I was too young (years later, when I re-read the book, I discovered they were absolutely right.) So, I stole it, read it and, when I was finished, jammed it in the after-hours returns slot. I’d never stolen anything before in my life. It was, in turns, both terrifying and exhilarating. And while I was too young to truly grasp the full horror of what the book contained, the notion that it was forbidden to me made reading it seem that much sweeter. Ellroy lit up as I laid the tale out for him, and told me that when he was around the same age, he too swiped a book a librarian didn’t want to let him away with.

“She said it was full of sex,” he sez to me. “It wasn’t.” It was a pulp sci-fi novel. More’s the pity that I can’t remember the name. 

I’ll tell you, I got what I came for. 

I wasn’t there for the signed copy of LAPD '53  that I walked away with, although it’s great to have it. And it wasn’t for the bragging rights to have met one of the great monsters of modern American literature. I wanted to catch a glimpse of the true character of a man who’s writing has coloured my work from an early age. I’m not stupid enough to think I gained a window into Ellroy’s soul, and I wouldn’t dare say that I know the man’s mind. But being able to spend a few hours in the presence of a master of my craft and trade stories with him; to watch him wear the various masks of his profession, and perhaps, briefly, catch a peek of what he’s like when he’s off the clock? That’s a hell of a thing. 

And as far as a souvenir goes, the memory is a far cry better than anything else I could ever hope to bring home from my time in Los Angeles.