Bitches with Hitches

Part 1 of 3

Photo by Mark Trockman (www.trockstock.com, IG @fotographium)

Northland, August 2022

            I'm crouched on the lip of a rock that juts out over the water, trying to coax my dog through the woods in the dark to see a sunset that has saved its most shocking shades of red and orange for last. She balks. She is a chihuahua in a florescent pink harness with day-glo trim, feet dug into the soft loam in a thicket of pines in the far north woods at the end of summer in the quickly falling night. I see only the stubborn day-glo glint of her eyes, the first sign of discs that, in old dogs, reflect light.

            I give up and hunker down on the rock, enveloped in a stillness so great it seems to move.

            It is the first conscious thought I've had in days—redundant as that is, a consciousness of thought, mind considering mind—because for days, maybe weeks, I've been preoccupied with solid things, with the heft of facts, with purposeful acts: I have pulled fuses, thrown breakers, walked around with a needle nose pliers in my fist as if I just might jab somebody with it, found they can be used for damn near anything—the worth of a tool, perhaps, can be measured by its ability to do the work of any other tool, if not perfectly, then well enough—I've fussed with propane tanks, deadlifted a generator over my head, bellied over the ground and under machines to get a better look at what's what, attached and detached hoses, I've eaten my weight in meat, probably, burned through more energy than I've had time to consume, I feel lean and wiry and strong, I've forgotten to put on makeup and barely bothered to shower because who's going to smell me, the cat and the dog? And Lord knows they don't care, and no one else gets close enough to sniff, not the woman who tends the general store up the road, which is open or closed according to some mysterious schedule known only to her and has no posted hours, not the guy who walked in with a chest holster over his Carhartt to buy a bucket of leeches and a pound of lard and paid in cash, not the old man who stopped chopping wood, leaned on his axe handle, and narrowed his eyes as he watched me hike past like he knew me from somewhere and I'd best get back to wherever that was, none of them care if I take a shower, not today, not this week, not ever again.

            This is the Scamp's maiden voyage, and mine. I picked her up from Deb and Dan the Man in central Minnesota a couple weeks back; we drove to town three times that day in blazing heat, to Walmart for hoses and nozzles and chocks, to a small-town hardware store for a hitch pin, and to the local one-room DMV. They transferred the title, I paid the tax, and the Tramp Scamp was mine.

            And I'll tell you what, this bitch is a pain in the ass.

            For a week she sat in the driveway of the rented farmhouse on the rundown farm while I got her outfitted, tried to figure out what to do with all my shit, and dodged Neighbor Bobby, with whom I'd had an ill-advised fling some months before, and whose incessant scowly lurk was made mildly threatening by the fact that I knew he was good at pool, great in the sack, possessive as hell, and also possessed of a number of guns; the day we met, he taught me to shoot a 9mm Glock. While the Tramp Scamp waited, I spent the week scouring thrift stores and Walmart for my best guess at the essentials, many of which I knew would prove completely inessential (tiny makeup drawers, for example, which I purchased and organized with great care and have not opened since) and which I knew would soon be taking up space I'd rather use for things I didn't yet know I'd need but was bound to find out. I came and went at night, tripping the floodlights every time I walked into or out of the house, illuminating the smooth white curves of the camper in the driveway like a tiny earthbound moon as I trekked to and fro, lugging boxes back and forth, hauling trash bags hither and yon, rolling dollies stacked with gear out to the truck, and plainly preparing to bail on the lease, while weed smoke billowed out the unlit bathroom window of Neighbor Bobby's house next door.

            Then one morning, I hitched the camper to the truck and headed down the long dirt drive, faster than was strictly necessary, past the rusting Quonset hut, past the sagging roof of the rotting south barn, past the tractors and the abandoned tractors and the picked carcasses of old cars, past the pasture and the bellowing cows; I gave Bobby the lift-two-fingers-off-the-wheel wave that's customary in the country as I passed him at the mailbox, then whipped around the corner and roared off in a satisfying cloud of dust.

            Like every story, and every journey, this one began with a question: what if? I began to wonder what would happen if—as the kids say—I really did "reject the narrative," the pre-fab storyline that describes not most people's actual lives but a fairytale that is neither realistic nor, in some ways, particularly desirable. What if I really did finally say fuck it, and walked out on the domestic life I had built and was raised to believe I should want, a life wherein success is measured by markers that clearly have value to someone, but mean very little to me?

            What would it feel like? What would I do, how would I live, if I could start over again?

            People start over again all the time. People break up, most marriages end in divorce, whole industries and livelihoods evaporate, faith fades or implodes, senses of purpose and meaning collapse, we wake up one morning to find that the organizing principle of who we are and what we do is gone, nobody has any money, and in more ways than one, most of us are barely getting by. I'm far from the only person who, at midlife or some other point, for some reason or no reason at all, found themselves at a crossroads and/or pretty much fucked.

            And the fact is that what might have been a crossroads to an earlier generation is now, at least economically, pretty much fucked. The Baby Boomers were the last generation to be economically better off than their parents, and for that matter, the last generation that really bought into the myth of American progress. For people my age and younger, from Gen X to Gen Z and beyond, the reality of America's social and economic decline is not theoretical or abstract; we're watching it play out in every area of our lives.

            It's not a good feeling. It's tempting to hunker down in the warm wallow of resentment and regret; plenty of people do, if for no reason other than that it can seem like there's no other choice. Other folks throw themselves back into the fray, find a new job, go back to school, learn a new skill, find a new thing to lean on and love, and all of those things involve work and self-doubt and failure and fear; they also require resources more and more of us don't have. (The economic collapse of 2008 made it all too clear that going back to school or learning a new skill or getting a new license or degree or "reframing" or "rebranding" is not enough to solve a crushing systemic problem.) For a lot of people, that "crossroads" is actually the intersection of several dead-end streets; it was for me.

We all make Faustian bargains; we all give up something to have something else. Some of those trade-offs have social and political implications—the tired question of whether women can "have it all" comes to mind—and some are just part of being alive: time is finite, resources are finite, life itself comes to an abrupt and unscheduled halt. Choices have to be made. When I found myself with resources too finite to allow me to live on what I could make with the hours available in a day, I had to make a choice about how I was going to spend the unspecified remainder of my time. Ultimately, it was a choice between comfort and freedom. I traded the comforts of Home™—a sense of place, a home base, the daily human interaction and often deeper connections one has with people in that place, a little space to spread out, a mattress, an address, somewhere to throw my bag on the floor, put up my feet, make a meal for friends, take a lover to bed, spend time—for a life marked by economy of scale, a sense of lightness and movement, a feeling of being perched rather than nested, of being at the ready to take flight. It's a life many people wouldn't like, wouldn't want, but I do. 

            Nearing 50, I found myself in the statistically unusual—some would say enviable, though I'd wager they've never been there themselves—position of having very little in the way of either responsibilities or resources. I was single, childless, seriously underemployed, not particularly employable, and flat broke; as my most maudlin friend often says of himself, I was living for no one, and no one was living for me. While I had nothing but chutzpah and improbably good health to go on, I also had nothing to lose.

Stay tuned for Part 2: a look at the intersecting influence, in American law and economics, between marriage, bodies, property, and power.