It’s a lifelong disease. There is no cure that I know of, but then I’ve never known anybody who wanted to be cured.
Though Western America is now a Happy Meal collection of fast food franchises and big box stores there is still a lot of heart to be found in the Heartland if you know where to look.
You look in small towns away from major cities and highways, in out of the way places where ordinary people live extraordinary lives.
You look by just wanting to find American treasures of passion and goodness boiled down to old fashioned common sense in very uncommon people. And by not being in a hurry to get where you’re going. So much the better if you’re not going anywhere in particular.
My friend, Chuck Woodbury, has lived the life of a motor home vagabond for nigh on to 50 years and has managed to earn a living and buy gas writing about his adventures, the oddball places he has discovered and the people he has met. Inevitably, all of Chuck’s stories are wonderful in their uniqueness and astonishing in their consistency.
Americans everywhere are all the same. When you peel off the layers of anxiety, necessity and pretense we all just want to enjoy our lives with our families, our friends, and most importantly, ourselves.
My father, Don Williams, surely wasn’t the first person who ever said this but he was the first who said it to me:
“Until you learn to be alone and love yourself, you’ll never be worth a damn to anybody else.”
Like Dad, I found myself on the road.
My buddy Chuck Woodbury publishes a very popular website called RVTRavel.com. His delightful Roadside Journal entries can be found and enjoyed here: https://www.rvtravel.com/category/editors-roadside-journal/
Like you it took the wandering around America to make me see my true self. I enjoyed my career as a LEO of 32 years, BUT my Santa persona, discovered in Tucson, Az. in 04, is the one that makes me the happiest. We have been on the road 14 years full-time and would not trade a moment of it. Sure it has had it’s up and downs, but no more so than living in a sticks and bricks house. Plus, no grass to mow, if you have bad neighbors, get up and move. We are currently in Shipshewana, In., the heart of Amish country. This morning, Sunday morning, I awoke to the sound of clip clop, clip clop of horse’s hooves on asphalt as the Amish went to their friends house for service. There were all kinds of carriages going by our RV site, 2 door, 4 door, tops and doors, “convertibles” for the brave, and then the men on bicycles, black hat, white long sleeve shirt, black vest and pants. I later went by where they were praising God and saw at least 2 dozen buggies. This is a piece of Americana that not everyone has the fortune to see. It reveals a whole other side of our country. I admire the Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites for basically sticking to their beliefs and not bending to the ways of the “English” for over 300 years.
Nice to see you over here at Aging of Aquarius. Lovely thoughts.
I understand and appreciate the allure of the open road because I was a back-seat passenger in my parents’ restless travels in the late 1950s. By the time I was 12 years old, I had traveled 39,000 miles with them — 13 road trips between New York City and Southern California, including nearly the entire length of U.S. 66, from Kankankee, Illinois to L.A. It certainly got in my Dad’s restless blood, and I was a perfectly willing passenger.