The Senescent Nomad Hits the Road

By John Walters

After his grown children move out, a divorced writer faces the prospect of living alone in a small apartment in Seattle. Instead, he buys a camper van, dubs it Good Fortune, and sets out on the road full time. As he journeys down the U.S. West Coast, he experiences ostracism, acceptance, harassment, and unexpected romantic encounters. In his youth, he spent years wandering around the world, and he begins to reconnect with his road roots, regaining the rhythms and metaphysical realities of the free nomadic lifestyle. His first destination? A science fiction convention in San Diego.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Astaria Books
• Release date: Apr 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393160038

John Walters

John Walters recently returned to the United States after thirty-five years abroad. He lives in Seattle, Washington. He attended the 1973 Clarion West science fiction writing workshop and is a member of Science Fiction Writers of America. He writes mainstream fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and memoirs of his wanderings around the world.

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The Senescent Nomad

Hits the Road

By

John Walters

––––––––

Published by Astaria Books

Copyright 2019 by John Walters

All rights reserved. No portion may be copied, other than brief passages for review purposes, without permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events - except those in the public domain - is purely coincidental.

Contents

1. The Road

2. The Goal

3. The Van

4. The Purge

5. The Ferry Ride

6. The Beach House

7. Supplies

8. Lake Crescent

9. The Ocean

10. The Phone Call

11. Resting Place

12. Brief Liaison

13. Bookstores

14. Independence

15. The Crossroads

16. The Rendezvous

17. Exercise

18. Rejection

19. The Mystical Passage

20. Wolf House

21. The Elusive City

22. The University

23. Rocinante

24. Big Sur

25. San Simeon

26. The Waitress

27. Los Angeles

28. Good Fortune

29. San Diego

30. Science Fiction

31. The Convention

32. The First Panel

33. The First Party

34. The Second Panel

35. The Second Party

36. Aftermath

37. Onward

38. End Notes

For JD, Nestor, Timmy, Mickey, and Tom

Companions on my journey

And avid travelers on journeys of their own

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)

My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,

No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,

I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,

I lead no man to a dinner table, library, exchange,

But each man of you and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,

My left hand hooking you round the waist,

My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you,

You must travel it for yourself.

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Chapter 1: The Road

Imagine the open road.

What does it look like to you?

When I was younger and just starting out on my traveling adventures, it was a spot by the roadside, my thumb out as a query to drivers, my duffle bag at my feet or resting on my shoulder. I got my first ride from a freeway entrance near the University District in Seattle, but my first memory of really feeling like I was on the road was south of the city at an anonymous turnoff in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing special about the place except that at that point it dawned on me that I had truly broken free. I was on the road on my way to somewhere and it didn't matter where. If I think back, I can picture many other specific hitchhiking places by the sides of roads in numerous states as well as in Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Iran, Pakistan, India, and other places.

I'm not young anymore, though, and now when I think of the open road, I envision myself driving down a highway in a camper van. In my mind's eye, I'm not in a city; I'm out in the countryside amidst meadows and stands of trees with lovely hills in the distance. I can see the scenery unrolling before my eyes as the asphalt or concrete of the road slips away behind my vehicle. I'm at peace with the world and I'm on my way to new adventures...

That's when the vision frays and comes apart. It's never so simple, is it? For years now, ever since I got divorced, left Greece, and returned to the United States as a single parent, living with two to four of my sons at a time, in my melancholy moments, in the times when I wonder what errant decisions I must have made to lead me into this stalemate, when culture shock weighs heavily upon me, when I feel lonely and out of place and frustrated and discouraged and on the edge of despair... Those are the times that I long for the open road. Those are the times when I imagine what sort of van I would drive, how I would outfit it, and where I would go.

Until recently all those speculations were in vain, of course, because I had responsibilities that precluded my departure. Not to mention that after all the bills were paid and food was bought I was always broke.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Right now I want to tell you about the road.

Maybe it will inspire you to hear what others have said about it.

One of my favorite passages is from Walt Whitman's poem Song of the Open Road.

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

I have to take care or I'll end up quoting the entire poem here. Not that there would be anything wrong with that: Whitman is incomparable in writing about what it's like to be on the road. However, this is my story, not his, so we'll have to make do for the moment with the above lines. I think that in the present era we can substitute traveling the road on foot with traveling it in a vehicle without any sense of compromise.

Unlike Whitman, Henry David Thoreau was of the opinion that travel was unnecessary for self-realization. In the concluding chapter of Walden he writes:

If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travelers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and explore thyself.

However, Thoreau also adds this qualification:

It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some Symmes Hole by which to get at the inside at last.

Symmes Hole is a reference to John Cleves Symmes, Jr., who early in the nineteenth century was popular for his Hollow Earth Theory: a postulation that the Earth was hollow, the inside was habitable, and you could get there through openings at the poles.

We can trust that Thoreau was using the phrase metaphorically and that he meant that if you can't manage to explore yourself where you are, it is permissible to travel as long as you understand that the ultimate goal is self-realization.

That's what it's like for me. I can delve into my psyche and soul to some extent wherever I am, but some sort of fountain of life blossoms within me when I get out on the road, and instead of having to dig deeply for insights, I can pick them freely from all around.

That's what the road means to me.

Chapter 2: The Goal

It's time to tell you why I'm leaving and where I'm going. In the big picture, I don't really need a destination, and once I reach my initial goal, I might go anywhere at all. For the present, though, I do have a plan. I'm not going to get into my van, start it up, and then decide which direction to drive.

Before I tell you my itinerary, perhaps I should let you know why I am doing this.

Circumstances have something to do with it. I've been a single parent since I moved back to the United States from Greece. My older adult sons come and go, sometimes living for a year or two with us and then moving along, but I have mainly been focusing on raising my youngest. I have seen him through middle school and high school and now he's off to college. As many young people not only nowadays but also in past eras (such as when I was young) he loves me but he doesn't want to live with me anymore. He wants to be off on his own. That's great for him; I'm happy for him, but that would have left me alone in Seattle in a small apartment, working all the time to turn out enough material (novels, stories, articles, and so on) to be able to survive. I have been fine with that until now. After all, there have been few alternatives.

But then, not exactly out of the blue but at a serendipitous moment, a piece of business became finalized. It's one of those things that I have been dealing with, whenever it popped up, for years. Way back when I was still living in Greece (and this first contact was out of the blue) I received an email message from an independent filmmaker. He had read one of my stories, had loved it, and wanted to make a short film out of it with an option for feature length. Sounded great to me. However, one thing after the other came up that prevented our coming to an agreement and signing a contract. He started at a new job; he got married; he and his wife had their first child. Eventually, after about five years of correspondence, he sent me a contract: thirty pages of small print single-spaced legalese. I consulted a lawyer and sent back my suggestions; he had his lawyer revise the text; we closed the deal; he sent me the small payment, and that was that. I more or less put it out of my mind. Lo and behold, a year and a half later, the filmmaker contacts me again, tells me that he's got financing for feature length and sends me the payment we had agreed upon for the rights.

My first impulse was to put all that money into an account at a credit union, live frugally, and stretch it as far as I could. I had become intensely frustrated with spending most of my time, seven days a week, morning until night, ghostwriting crap for other people's blogs for ridiculously small amounts of money. I'd slot into my daily schedule an hour or two late at night, after all the other work was done, to focus on my creative work, but such an arrangement was unsatisfactory. I couldn't help but think, over and over again, how much more I could accomplish creatively if I could focus my entire mental and physical energy on doing the writing I believed that I was meant to do. I figured that if I apportioned this money out wisely, I could buy myself a lot of writing time.

But then I had second thoughts. What I was considering seemed too much of a compromise. I was postponing the process of dying instead of stepping out and living. What else could I do, though? I had to try to survive, didn't I?

The enlightenment of realization didn't hit me with a sudden blindingly bright flare. It came to me slowly as I pondered my possibilities.

I was alone. I didn't have to keep house for anyone. Therefore I didn't have to remain in one place.

And therefore...

I could do what I had wanted to do for years: buy a van and head out on the road. Instead of working fulltime to pay rent and utilities in a fixed location, I could take my house with me and work while traveling.

There was more to it than that, though. A few years previously I'd been diagnosed with early-stage cancer. It could take decades to develop into something life-threatening, the doctors told me. To be honest, I brushed it off. Who has time or inclination to dwell on such things? But when unexpectedly the money came in, this was another facet of the choice between waiting to die or stepping out to live.

I could do this, I realized.

I should do this.

I will do this.

Once I made the decision, a rush of relief swept through me and a conviction of inevitability steadied me. I felt a sense of destiny. No other option had ever really been possible.

I had recently watched the award-winning documentary Free Solo, about a man who decides to climb the El Capitan cliff face in Yosemite National Park without ropes or other climbing equipment. I don't like looking down from heights; some of the camera angles in the film terrified me worse than any horror movie. But one thing that the climber mentioned struck me as applying to my own proposed adventure. He said that he did what he did because of the warrior mentality - the mentality that causes you to face danger instead of run away. For me, getting out on the road and traveling instead of holing myself up behind the walls of an apartment was my manifestation of the warrior mentality.

One final consideration that caused me uncertainty about setting out was my loneliness. Since the divorce I have been deeply lonely. Not only have I not had sex during this time, but I have not even gone out with a woman. That's a far cry from my youth. I was a late bloomer in a sense; although I lost my virginity during my one disastrous year in college when I was seventeen (she was high on acid and I on marijuana), I didn't have my first prolonged relationship until a few years later when I got together for a few months with a colleague at a temp job. Once I started traveling, though, in my mid-twenties, I met many wonderful women from a variety of countries and backgrounds; with some of them I fell in love, and some I still love deeply, although I have not seen them for decades.

As far as the present circumstances, even though I had not been with a woman in years, I still longed for female companionship. Part of me didn't want to go off on my own alone. I wanted a partner, someone with whom I could share experiences: the wondrous scenery, the unexpected occurrences, the subtle yet profound pleasures that enter into life at random moments.

I had been corresponding with a woman I had known in the past for some time, and I had been hoping that she would decide to leave Europe and meet me here, and that then we could start off together. However, it was all very nebulous.

When I thought on the matter, I could only come to one conclusion: I had felt the same decades ago when I had contemplated hitting the road. I had been lonely, oppressed by my job, alienated from the society around me, trapped in a dark pit from which there seemed no hope of escape. I had had to step out without knowing what the consequences of my decision would be in advance. It was only after I had taken the plunge, quit my job, got rid of my possessions, and set out ready for anything that wonderful things began to happen. It was only when I embraced the road as the source of endless possibilities that I met people with whom I was able to bond as lovers.

So what was it going to be then? My apartment would become my coffin. The road would become, if not my salvation, at least a means