There were practical things to consider before I hitched up the camper and hit the road, of course. Not being a particularly practical person, I did not particularly consider those things, and so it came to pass that the better part of my day, many days, is spent figuring things out.
My life is an actual Scamp life, not #vanlife, a distinction as fundamental and great as the distinction between being sent home with a live baby and walking around with a doll. Living in a camper is harder than you might think, in some ways; so is living alone, and so is living on the road. The challenges are many and maddening; meeting them brings about an almost electrical surge of triumph and a growing sense of self-determination and internal power.
I did not anticipate—and could not have, never having felt anything like it before—the terror of freefall. The clear, piercing awareness of what it means to be truly alone. The clarity of thought, for good and ill; clarity comes at the cost of comfort, and the stripping away of stories, of indulgences, of faith, is a double-edged sword. The return of concentration that contemporary life deliberately disallows. The erosion and eventual collapse of a sense of time; hours and days and weeks and months mean less when you answer mostly to the weather and yourself. The clean taste of knowing—like running your tongue along the edge of one absolute, irrefutable truth—the pure, buoyant joy that comes when you feel your body catch the wind and begin to climb.
There were practical things to consider, of course...
The Tramp Scamp serves as both safe haven and mode of transport, cause of stress, cost, and conflict, source of laughter, solitude, and peace. The Scamp is also the physical manifestation of several issues that go to the heart of solo travel and solo life, and to several intersecting concerns embedded in American policy, life, and law—such as the right to and protection of physical safety, the right to earn and retain financial security, the right to own property, and the right to move, with unfettered bodily autonomy, throughout a nation that guarantees every one of these freedoms to every one of its citizens and calls them “inalienable” rights. As freedoms, as rights, they are also forms of power.
This project is driven by the question of why those rights, while noble in concept, are at best guaranteed to and protected unequally, and for the few; at worst, and for most, they are theoretical in nature and unattainable in fact.
My friend Karen, also a writer and solo by choice, owns a Scamp. She's trekked hither and yon in this thing, and I'd become quite attached to hers in theory, long before I even saw it, before I ducked into it for the first time when she invited me over one summer morning for tea, and in that moment, everything in the world felt right.
I perched myself tentatively on the seat of her Scamp's dinette and looked around. A cozy 13-footer, full of light. Everything was compact, precise, exact; the cups that stacked, the tiny racks above the other tiny racks, the micro laundry bag, the sliding shelf she'd installed under the bed, the shower rack she'd ingeniously repurposed as a bedside bookshelf, a tiny plastic plant. The space shimmered a little, tinged lake water blue by the curtains Karen's mother had made. Everything she needed was here; everything here was hers.
I'd thought about that morning—the tea in my teacup, the cackling laughter, the shimmering light—who knows how many times before I sent Karen a link to an ad for a Scamp—nearly new, the right size, the right floor plan—for sale near Minneapolis. I wrote, "Is this for real?"
A few days later, I drove five hours to meet my mom and Karen for a look at the Scamp. I clambered around it, lay on the bed, peered into the bathroom, stood in the shower, opened the implausibly reachable cupboards above the little sink. Karen laughed at me and said, "It looks like it was built around you, it's so perfectly to scale."
The politics of gender and property are inseparable, particularly in the almost Faustian bargains that shape many women's lives: we have neither, and we need both. Without financial security, I cannot own property, or in fact even rent it; and without property, owned or borrowed, my gender renders me unsafe.
One of the things I liked about the idea of Karen's Scamp, years before I got my own, was its self-containment. During a difficult period in her life, and a heatwave in the South where she lives, she said it felt like her skin was too thin to hold everything in; though she has a house, that summer she often went into the Scamp and closed the door, creating a hard boundary between herself and the world. I thought of it with increasing frequency during the two years I spent in full flight—skipping all over the country, disappearing suddenly, going off the grid, covering my tracks and staying in touch only with my closest friends, and even they rarely knew my actual location—from a situation I couldn't, no matter how many times I ran, seem to escape.
Eventually I did, or thought I had; even then, another city, another address, another window with a view of both doors and both streets, I would often descend the back stairs, walk through the alley, and go sit in my car. It felt safe; it felt contained; it felt removed from the world. It was my own little spaceship. I could put the key in the ignition at a moment's notice; I had the mechanism of escape; I was free to go at any time.
When people learn I live full time on the road, alone, they always call it brave; it is and it's not. I'm no more at risk alone in a camper parked in the woods than I've ever been in a city, no more at risk fixing a flat in a well-lit parking lot than eating a burger at a roadside bar; in both cases, probably less. I'm good with a knife, not bad with a gun; I can kill a man with my hands, if that's what I've got. When I looked up from my laptop one morning in the Scamp's dinette and saw the situation from which I was running roll up in his sorry-ass truck, I thought to myself, "Well, I guess it's today," stood up, opened the door, and had him on the ground so fast he still looked shocked as I pulled away, Tramp Scamp in tow, hollering, "Wrong bitch, fucker!"
This is my property, my home. I can leave anytime I want. When I get where I'm going, this is my door, and it locks.
I could put the key in the ignition at a moment's notice; I had the mechanism of escape; I was free to go at any time.
In July of 2022, with the Tramp Scamp purchased and waiting for me to trade in my cheapo Jeep for a vehicle big enough to tow her, I sat on my Craigslist couch in my fourth, maybe fifth collapsing short-term rental in under two years, researching transmissions and tires and cylinders and throttles and making lists: things I would need that I already had, things I would have to acquire and what they would cost, thing I wanted but could do without, what to use instead of the things I wanted but couldn't afford, things I knew I would need to learn and how to go about learning those things, checking my lists against other lists, looking up terms (a whole new language, packed with the most delicious, hard-stop consonance, mouthfuls of bottle jacks and hitch cranks and chocks), and even with these detailed lists, these itemized costs, these carefully calculated tow capacities and down-to-the-decimal point dry weights and the knowledge that Scamps tend to list to the left, or passenger, side, I knew I didn't know what the fuck I was getting into, and there was no way to find out but to begin.
I also knew I didn't know what it would be like. I knew it could go a whole lot of ways besides well. It could be messy. It could be costly, stressful, lonely, riddled with crisis, grandly disastrous, mildly dull. It was unlikely to be smooth sailing in all ways at all times, or perhaps ever, at all. It would teach me something, regardless; for that reason alone, it seemed worth a try.
As I focused on stripping my life down to make it less cluttered, less weighted with excess, less crowded with inessential things, my childhood seemed to follow me, a large-eyed, wordless shadow, appearing at the strangest times, reminding me of things I'd forgotten I knew, sparking muscle memory my body didn't know it held: how to dig a hole with your hands, how to sling a rope over a branch, how to jump and land on your feet, how to catch something, free something caught, kill something, climb. I found myself thinking about what, if anything, is truly essential, irreducible, about our lives, our memories, even ourselves.
I had no way of anticipating the thing that keeps me going now: a changed sense of purpose, of meaning. The awareness, each day, of why I do what I do, of my reasons for being, which do not answer to any other version of what matters, what has value, what counts for a life.
I’m glad to know you were afraid to start your scamp journey. Knowing you felt such uncertainty somehow validates my fears. And softens them, somewhat.