The Tramp Scamp: Part 1

Prelude to a Scheme

Well, I've been out walking
I don't do that much talking these days
These days

Not long after I hatched the idea of getting a camper and skipping town for good, I tried to get my two most stern friends to talk me out of it. Jeremy is my most stern friend; he doesn't approve, he has never approved, he will never approve; I trust him to be impatient and disapproving when I am back on my bullshit, and when I am back on my bullshit, I count on Jeremy to set me straight.

Early morning, May 2022, one of our marathon chats, one of our usual haunts. Jeremy sat down in silly sunglasses and slowly, with one finger, pushed a glass of water across the table to me and looked at me sternly so I would understand that I do not drink enough water and he does not approve. 

I dutifully took a sip and announced, "I have an idea."

Jeremy nodded, looking weary and waiting for me to say I was getting married again and adopting fourteen feral Weimaraners and planning a benefit for underserved urban ferrets and opening a boxing gym in my front yard.

"I think I should buy a camper and travel full time," I said, bracing myself for Jeremy's brilliant, rapid-fire verbal vivisection and immediate dispatch of this latest terrible plan so we could get on with the conversation we have not yet managed to finish in the past 28 years.

"Oh," he said, looking surprised. "Yeah, you should."

I waited, still braced.

"Killer idea," he said, looking genuinely pleased. I understood that he had lost his mind. "That'd be great for you.”

"Dude, no," I said. "You're supposed to tell me this is ridiculous. I'm being flighty. I'm coming up with irrelevant subplots to distract myself from the real work of whatever."

"Nah," he said. "You're the only person I know who's calmer when you're traveling. It's your zone. I couldn't do it. I need a home base. I get stressed. You, you'd have three tires dangling off a cliff and be sitting there like, Well ok but if I punch out the window I can climb out, and then I can just scale the cliff, and then I can walk the rest of the way, so it's fine."

"I don't talk like that," I said.

"No," he agreed. "But you think like that." He leaned back in his chair, sticking his feet out in front of himself and crossing his arms. Jeremy is an author and a firefighter. He's built like a linebacker but shorter. Maybe more like a panda, if a panda were dangerous. He was wearing pink suede sneakers and orange pants.

"It's a good idea," he said. "You should do it."

He looked pointedly at my glass of water, and then sternly at me.

I drank my water, because he wasn't wrong. He never is. 

These days I seem to think a lot
About the things that I forgot to do for you
And all the times I had the chance to

The first thing that really threw me for a loop about Scamp life wasn't something I saw coming. It wasn't finding out why you're supposed to put the chocks behind the wheels before you unhitch the trailer, especially when you're parked on a decline close to the edge of a cliff; it wasn't the weeks spent trying to figure out the Scamp's water systems, the hoses and nozzles, the grey tank and black tank, the sink and the shower, the buckets and bleach, before finally tracing the series of mystery leaks and hissing faucets and drain glugs and surprise geysers to a missing 3-cent rubber washer for a standard hose. It wasn't a realization of an ordinary camping fear—snake in the laundry, two flats and one spare, carbon monoxide, grease fire, Zeke chasing a scorpion, Zeke being chased by a bear, drunk dudes, armed dudes, armed drunk dudes who just want to ask you a question, a lone Hitchcockian gas station miles from anywhere with no cell service and an empty pump. It wasn't a sewer nozzle busting loose from the hose and flooding the dump station with raw sewage while a mile-long line of RVs idled in wait, which has never happened to me (knock wood), and it wasn't anything I found when I tumbled ass over elbow down the rabbit hole of online forums where idiots, newbies, and know-it-alls go to "share information" and where a novice such as myself, before I had quite discerned the difference between a black tank (under the toilet) and a grey tank (beneath the shower and sinks), might type "how to clean a black tank" into the search bar and encounter, to her alarm, long snaking online debates about how best to address such camper-specific concerns as large farts in small spaces, black tank sensors that fail when they become encrusted with the solids (???) in pee, and the notoriously problematic "poop pyramid" that vexes hundreds if not thousands of RV campers every year, leading this novice to slam my laptop shut in horror and decide to either not poop in the camper or perhaps just not poop ever again. 

None of these things really threw me, or at least didn't throw me far. Anything I didn't know about the mechanics and logistics of Scamp life and road life were things I could learn—I knew that before I left. I knew it would take time, it would be a long and constant climb up a steep learning curve, and I was bound to get pissed off by what my grandfather called "the innate perversity of inanimate objects," but that holds just as true in a sticks-and-bricks life. Anything that breaks in or on a camper can be fixed; it's just a matter of figuring out how. If aren't willing to fix it yourself, and you can't afford to have someone else fix it for you—if it bugs you to know that something's always breaking or broken, something's gotta be rigged up or torn down or jiggered together by sticking the whatsit to the hoozywazzle with ticky-tacky, post-its, and string—don't live on the road. 

People often ask what's the hardest thing about full-time road life, and the honest answer is that the hardest part is that everything is hard—just not prohibitively so. What threw me for a loop wasn't that it's hard, the mechanics of it are hard, the leanness and scarcity of it is hard, the sheer labor of it is really hard.

What threw me was that one spring morning just outside of Bandera, Texas ("Cowboy Capitol of the World!"), I woke up sick.

Now, if I seem to be afraid
To live the life that I have made in song
Well, it's just that I've been losin' for so long

I lay with my face on the coolest part of the camper floor, staring up at the underside of the refrigerator in a semi-hallucinatory snit about the fact that half the time the damn fridge won't draw shore power or propane and keeps running the battery down. Sweating, freezing, nauseous, and unable to look at my phone without stabbing pains in my eyeball, I texted my friend Karen that I wouldn't be able to visit her college class that morning by Zoom because migraine, and crawled back under the fridge like a cat slinking off into the basement to die, stubborn and alone. Karen—fellow Scamp owner, traveler, teacher, and nonfiction writer, colleague and collaborator, and my second sternest friend, who also did not talk me out of this whole scheme, and in fact is at least partially to blame for it—replied "WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO BARF???"

The yearlong conversation that has ensued between us—two deliberately solo women, experienced travelers, independent and self-sufficient people with contingency plans for the contingency plans and backup supplies for the backup supplies, people who can set up camp and tear it down in their sleep, who whip their Scamps into campsites "out of spite" and "slick as snot" respectively, who make regular use of their tool belts and circular saws, who earnestly believe that if you want something done right you should do it yourself, who would chew off a leg to get free of a trap before they'd sit around and wait for help, who can splint a broken bone with one hand and a sock, sterilize a wound with gasoline, and send an SOS with campfire smoke if they had to, which they wouldn't, because who plans so poorly they wind up having to send an SOS? So let me just tell you how appalled we both were to realize that we had absolutely no plan in place in the event that we got sick while on the road, not even a plan for a bowl in which to barf.

I was expecting to be thrown by something epic, something big. I wasn’t expecting to be thrown by something as human, something as small, as myself.

Well, I'll keep on movin', movin' on
Things are bound to be improving these days
One of these days

At the core of this life I'm trying to build, a life that allows me to disengage in small but meaningful ways from social, political, and economic systems I no longer believe to be ethical or necessary, is connection. I spend a lot of time asking questions—of both myself and others—about what it means to be solitary but not alone, to be independent but not isolationist, to consciously choose the flexible, durable love that can be found and forged in communities and between friends and reject, to great extent, the brittle fantasy of romantic love, to step outside of social structures that no longer serve any ethical utilitarian end without tipping into separatism, nihilism, or despair.

That day, as the migraine broke, I lay in bed shivering and thinking about how all of this—the power imparted by solo travel that rubs right up against its inherent risk, the strength of friendship and the fragility of the human form, the sudden flares of human light I see here and there, all the time, every day, everywhere I go, even as the social fabric wears out like old jeans, all gaps and threadbare patches and seams—is all the same story. It’s the story of people being more or less selfish and dumb on any given day and trying to deal with each other and themselves and their stupid lives and breaking things and jiggering them back together by sticking the whatsit to the hoozywazzle with ticky-tacky and post-its and string. It’s just a bunch of fools fumbling along, doing it wrong, forging a way with whatever we can.

Don't confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them

A few summers back, I had a completely insignificant surgery, one involving a single stitch, and two days later realized that I would wind up dying of gangrene alone in my apartment and no one would know for days and days because the stitch was in the exact middle of my back and I couldn't reach it to change the bandage, so I texted Jeremy to tell him about my impending demise and that fucker showed up four minutes later in a fire truck.

I stood in the bathroom dripping tears in the sink—it just seemed really sad and Dickensian to be probably dying alone in my apartment just because I have terrible taste in men and society has failed us and it wasn't even a real surgery anyway and how spectacularly absurd to be nearly dead of germs because of my own poor planning—while Jeremy wasted the good taxpayers' money on his dingbat friend in a sports bra and her solitary stitch.

Jeremy nodded and listened. He washed the stitch; he blew on the stitch and patted it dry. I realized he was good at this not only because he's a firefighter and deals with broken bodies every day but because he is a father and a husband and a friend, and he deals with human beings, and he's good at all of those things. He put ointment on the stitch while I snuffled and explained. He rebandaged the stitch.

When it was all better, he put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me sternly. Trying not to crack a smile, he said, "I promise you will not die alone in your apartment."

He hugged me and turned to go.

"At least not of gangrene," he said, and shut the door.

---

From Jeremy Norton’s Trauma Sponges: Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response:

“The worst calls can savage our minds, hearts, souls. We are the ones who carry the limp, lifeless kids from the fires or shootings or wrecks, who try to stop their tiny bodies from bleeding out, who forgo policy and breathe mouth-to-mouth into their charred little lungs—because it’s a gesture against the obscenity of wasteful death, even if futile. We are the last to touch the children before they are officially deceased. We fight for them while the parents stand behind us screaming at the heavens. We carry the frail bodies in our arms and lean over them, working them, trying and hoping and pleading, even as we look into their tiny dead faces and know they will not return. Their burned flesh, their blood, their smells: we get this on our clothes, in our noses and minds. We carry them deep within. Their parents’ gruesome anguish, their surviving siblings’ wailing: we are drowning in grief as we try to revive children who had no chance. Theirs were preventable deaths, caused by human errors of desperation, poverty, ignorance, horrendous judgment.

And we go back to the barn, restock our equipment, clean the human off our gear, and wait for the next call.”

Trauma Sponges: Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response is a current finalist for the Minnesota Book Award.

Listen to this remarkable conversation between Jeremy and Angela Davis on MPR.

Learn more at www.jeremynorton.info.

“These Days” 

Songwriter: Jackson Browne

Lyrics © Swallow Turn Music, Open Window Music