When this newsletter launched, I told you how the adventure got started: in the summer of 2022, I screwed up my peculiar admixture of chutzpah, curiosity, and cussedness, hit the road in a little camper, and left a sticks-and-bricks life behind.
Now that the journey is well underway, it's time I invited you into the Tramp Scamp. I hear the doorframe is low (I wouldn't know), so I guess watch your head.
I. This Damn Thing: A Brief Review
Once upon a time I was a relatively ordinary person who lived in ordinary places like apartments and houses and had ordinary things like dishes that don't fold and mattresses on which grown men could theoretically fit and a bathroom where you did not access the toilet by stepping into and traversing the shower.
All that changed with the Scamp.
It started with a scheme. Readers may have noticed friendship is the beating heart of my life. I adore my friends, and they are wise and full of love and sage advice and terrible ideas. My friend Karen owns a Scamp—I'd never heard of such a thing, never known that "fiberglass campers" exist, couldn't have told you the difference between a Scamp and a Casita, and was in no way prepared for my tumble into the ornately weird subculture of Scamping in which I now live. Karen's many years of solo travel in her Scamp intrigued me; one visit to hers for tea, and I was sold. James, with whom I was traveling that summer, loved the idea and egged me on; Jeremy didn't stop me. But it never would have gone beyond the scheming stage if it hadn't been for my mom.
July 24, 2022
When Roe v. Wade was struck down by a Supreme Court which was fully one-third comprised of men credibly and publicly accused of sexual assault, my mother and I convened on her back porch to discuss. As my phone blew up with frantic texts from women...and as my preternaturally restless mother held far too still, I tried to steer the conversation somewhere else.
"So," I asked cheerfully, "what are you going to do when Steve dies?" Steve is my mother's husband of 20ish years. This was not perhaps an ideal starter for a lighthearted chat, but there you are.
She replied, "I don't know. It depends on where you go."
"Not to Oregon?"
"Not if you're not in Oregon."
"I can be in Oregon," I said, grinning. "I should get a Scamp! I can drive to Oregon. I'll park in the driveway. Then, wherever I go next, you can come with me. There are two beds. You can have the big one."
"That's silly," she sniffed. "It's your house, you should have the bigger bed."
I didn't yet have the Scamp.
And then she told me something that I'd never known: when she was in her 20s, throughout the 1960s, my mother and her first husband bought a camper and traveled in it all over the world.
"I remember driving away the day I left him, sobbing," she said, then added, "because I knew I would miss the camper, and the sea."
We sat there in silence. "You should have kept the camper," I said.
She scowled. "I know."
What if she had?
My mother's journey was altered, irrevocably and not in ways she wanted, not just by getting pregnant and having a child, but by believing the story that she'd been told—by believing she had to stay.
I can almost see the animal desperation on my wild, beautiful mother's face when she realized some part of her body was caught. What choice did she have?
There are choices, of course. She could have chewed off her leg.
My mother didn't have the life she chose. I have the life my mother chose.
My phone kept blowing up. Finally, I said, "Fuck it. I should just hit the road."
Something—that dark-winged bird—cast its shadow, briefly, over her face.
"I would help you with that," she said.
(From "Setting Out." You can read the rest here.)
II. The Next Shell
And by god, she did.
Not even two weeks after that conversation, as I wafted around the drafty collapsing farmhouse where I was currently stashing myself and my stuff, writing an article, paying bills, trying to decide whether electricity or insurance was more important that month, and glancing at listings for campers for sale, I saw an ad for a Scamp—nearly new, the right size (16’), the right floor plan (critical feature: side dinette)—for sale near Minneapolis. I messaged the owner my phone number; minutes later, my phone rang. Not even half an hour after they’d posted the ad, they already had several requests to see it. Deb and Dan the Man—whom I would instantly adore—said they'd hold onto it till I could get to town.
A few days later, I drove five hours to my mom’s house and we headed over to see take a look. Karen—the only one of us who knew a goddamn thing about Scamps, or campers, or camping, or anything else—met us there. Dan opened the camper’s door, Karen ducked and climbed in with me on her heels, and my future clicked into focus like the f-stop on a lens.
It was the safest place I'd ever been.
Karen, who is eight or nine inches taller than me, bent to avoid the ceiling air conditioner, sat down, and watched me explore. I peered into the bathroom, stood in the shower, sat in both seats at the dinette, put my hands on the table to see how it would feel to type. I can write here. I opened the little cupboards above little sink. Coffee and spices. I opened the closet. I need a miniature broom. I opened all the windows and closed them all again. I lay down on the bed, keeping myself narrow, then sprawled. Karen (who does not totally fit on the bed without some arrangement) laughed at me and said, "It looks like it was built around you, it's so perfectly to scale."
I sat on the edge of the bed, looking around, almost lightheaded with peace.
My mom stuck her head in and looked around the way she does, like a crow, nearly black-eyed, uncannily smart and not going to tell you a damn thing you don't need to know.
"What do you think?" she asked Karen.
"If I had the money, I'd buy it myself," Karen replied. I knew it was a lie; she would never, never, never part with her Scamp. These things do not lose value; they are a lifetime commitment, and we’ll be taking ours with us when we go.
My mother nodded once and ducked out.
Karen and I climbed out of the Scamp and found that my mother had bought it on the spot.
The magnitude of the gift was beyond my understanding; the freedom it afforded me was vast, so vast I felt dizzy, and a little sick.
As we drove away, I said, "Thank you. I don't know what to say."
My tiny, compact, self-contained mother, driving badly down a tree-lined residential street with her hands precisely at 10 and 2, said matter-of-factly, "You're a hermit crab. Now you have a shell."
Early that first season on the road, I was sitting in a camp chair watching Zeke snurfle around for grubs in the loamy dirt of the deep woods that form the northern border of the United States, talking to Karen on the phone about the fact that I was (AND I REMAIN) convinced that the ever-loving godforsaken converter in this Scamp is fucked.
But it was lovely out and warm, so the converter's abject fucking failure as a force for good and a contributing part of this whole scheme didn't matter yet, and Karen and I were talking about solo life, and women, and American politics, and the conversation wound its way to the stories that shape women's lives, and the ways in which the story of American' women's lives is going to twist; it is contorting again even now.
Sitting in my camp chair watching Zeke, I told Karen the story of my mother's pregnancy. I said it had, in many ways, derailed her life; a generation later, women don't have to fight for space in the same ways our mothers did. And yet the sense of scarcity, of not enough, of encroaching limits, of having to fight for everything we have and do, persists. In fact, it grows.
I said, "When my mom got pregnant, she must have thought, Hell no. This body isn't big enough for two."
Karen replied, "Her body was your first shell."
III. Not Exactly a Maiden (Voyage)
August 2022
I picked the Scamp 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.
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 Neighbor 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.
(From "Bitches with Hitches, Part 1." You can read the rest here.)
My first stop was Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, not even an hour south of the farm. My plan was to do a weeklong dry run in the Scamp. The last night I'd spent in a camper was 40 years before, when I was eight; I'd tagged along with Sandra Struthers, also eight, on her family's fall camping trip to Minnesota's North Shore, and unfortunately had paid very little attention to the workings of things like propane and water, hitch tongues and scissor jacks, being more concerned with trying not to be so obviously the appallingly awkward child I was, because Sandra's father was very old and cranky and her mother very frail and French, which somehow made my awkwardness seem particularly acute. But that was 1982; now there were more pressing concerns, like the fact that I did not know how this 4500-pound camper I was hauling south down Highway 10 even worked.
Though I'd trail camped aplenty, climbed and hiked all kinds of terrain, slept in the wild in all sorts of weather, and slept in everything from narrow cliff hammocks to grandiose tents, the kind of outdoors sports I knew were concerned with endurance, lightness, and economy of scale—things that aren't heavy, things that don't add bulk. Camping in an actual structure (this is a whole debate in the camping world—whether RVs or campers of any kind count as "real" camping) felt both luxurious and daunting. It wasn't just a matter of hiking till I got tired, setting up a shelter with what I carried in my pack, and zipping myself away well enough that I'd look to a mountain lion like more trouble than I was worth; now, for all intents and purposes, I was dragging around a house.
My logic went roughly thus. Learning to live in a camper full time, alone, would be like learning how to do anything else: it wouldn't happen in one fell swoop. I'd figure it out as I went, little by little, bit by bit. The more systematic I could be about that process, the more manageable it would be. If I could break it down into discrete chunks, leaving as little as possible to ignorance or chance, I would be less prone to make avoidable mistakes. I reminded myself that I was not really learning to live in a camper full time, alone—I was learning a) how to live b) in a camper c) full time d) alone. I knew a) how to live d) alone; I did not know how to live b) in a camper, or how to live b) in a camper c) full time. Learning to work the camper itself was clearly the place to start.
But it turned out that learning how to work the camper itself was not merely a matter of flipping some switches, building a nice little bonfire, and listening to kids a few campsites over sing kumbaya. The camper itself consists of multiple systems—mechanical, electrical, propane, water, sewer—and moving parts: hitch crank and hitch cord and hitch pin, rear lights and running lights, scissor jacks and the feet on jacks and the pins that hold the feet on the jacks, refrigerator, heater, thermostat, AC, overhead fan, battery, circuits, and fuses, converter and outlets and overhead lights, toilet and shower and sink, black tank and grey tank, the metal step that keeps getting stuck, door pulls and window cranks and various seals, the plugs that plug into whatever, infinite mystery screws, exquisitely sensitive monitors for carbon monoxide and smoke with piercing, crazy-making beeps, the screens, the door, the screen door, the little pins that hinge the screen to the pulley that makes the screen door properly latch and not make a sound like sproing, to say nothing of the contents of the six-foot truck bed packed, I am telling you packed, with bins of gear, cords and adapters and hoses and washers and tools, hammers and saws and buckets and gloves and PVC piping and eight kinds of epoxy and glue and also your more camera-ready camping stuff, your hiking packs, your fancy boots, your moleskin and bug spray and fly strips and lanterns and oil and wick, your hammock and camp chairs, the lightweight aluminum camp table you use as a desk that folds up and fits in a bag, the camping ashtray from Chelsey and the camping coffee cup from James, the fire tools and kindling cracker and spare bundles of wood, and O! the bins! the stacks of bins, the plastic bins of winter coats and summer clothes and outerwear for all the weather that's ever occurred or been said to have occurred at any place on the planet in any epoch of recorded time, bins of emergency supplies for emergencies that have never yet happened nor (knock wood) perhaps ever could but still, just in case, and bins of Zeke stuff, Zeke food and Zeke dishes, Zeke pills and Zeke beds and Zeke's Halloween costume and also her green velvet Christmas outfit and glitzy blue raincoat with rhinestones and her red parka with the white fur-trimmed hood and her blowsy pink rose-covered taffeta dress, bins of supplies for kitchen and bath, lightweight camper dishes and the collapsible camper-size dish rack and camper-size trashcan and camper-size suction-cup corner-fit metal rack that holds the camper-size bottle of soap, to say nothing of the cupboards and the hinges on the cupboards and the small-unto-invisibility screws in those hinges which rattle loose over time and miles and rutted roads and sooner or later fly out, never to be found, one screw goes missing, two screws are gone, one hinge falls off, the cupboard door hangs by a hinge and then one night down the road you pull into a truck stop right around 3 a.m., stagger out of the truck, stumble into the camper, trip over something and swan dive into a heap of everything you own, which has come tumbling out of the cupboards and cubbies and bins and boxes and drawers, every camping plate and hiking boot and water bottle and miniature pot and pan, a can of peas, a baggie of curry, a toaster oven you thought you’d tossed, piles of notebooks, heaps of books, sheets and quick-dry camping towels, makeup and calamine lotion, water pressure gauges and toothpicks, silverware everywhere, and something containing perfume or powder has exploded, and that is the night you go to sleep sneezing in the heap of all your worldly belongings and dream of owning nothing at all. Nothing, ever again.
(For a fuller disquisition on the evils of stuff, take a look at “Traveling Music: Day 1.”)
Learning to work the camper itself was going to take some time; hence, the dry run.
When you take up Scamping, as when you take up any new thing nowadays, you soon find yourself lost in the labyrinthine online maze that leads to the cult—the cultures and subcultures, the meetups and forums and message boards and chats, the hashtags and producers of content and all those who follow, the YouTube channels and Instagram reels, the TikTok influencers and Facebook groups—devoted to that thing. (I mean, I belong to a very large Facebook group dedicated to the discussion not of camping qua camping, not of persons who camp or of their campers, but of fiberglass camper storage solutions and strategies.) Scamping, fiberglass camper afficionados and the people who love them, Scamps vs. Casitas, solo camping, solo women camping, camping in school buses, camping in cars, camping naked in deserts, seaside camping for swingers, camping in forests with cats—as someone said of quantum physics and online porn, if you can imagine it, there is a very great probability that somewhere it exists.
Hip-deep in the realm of all that is, camping-wise, I found the term for what I wanted to do first, which was to camp without hookups—no electricity, no direct source of water coming into the Scamp, and no sewer line going out: boondocking.
While it looked a little like diving into the deep end before I'd learned to swim, the logic was straightforward: if I wasn't using any of those systems, they couldn't break. I didn't want anything to break yet. I just wanted to get my bearings, and then things could break. Boondocking at a property I'd found on Hipcamp (one of many apps like AirBnB, but for camping) gave me a week to sit in my camp chair, read instruction manuals, watch how-to videos, test my solar generator, determine what supplies I still needed and what I'd brought that I didn't need after all, and get a sense of what it was like to occupy the space.
The first night, I slept more or less upside down, like a bat.
The next morning, I sat on the ground looking at the camper, which I'd parked at a precipitous tilt, on a hill. I took out my phone and googled how to level a camper.
When I'd gotten the hang of the mechanics, stripped down what I'd packed to only what I'd need, discovered that I sleep like a rock in the woods, hooked up with the dude who owned the property where I was camped in part but not solely to test my theory that the bed, though it offers excellent overhead leverage (the ceiling, the well-placed compact cupboards on either side), is really too short for a man and too small for two people anyway, I hitched up and headed north for a campground on the Gunflint Trail, where I backed that thing up to the U.S.-Canadian border and plugged it in.
VI. Back Then/ Right Now
I knew when I got started on this thing that the story would unfurl the way the same way the road does. I didn’t know—I still don’t—what I’d see along the way, or where it would ultimately lead.
The inciting incident was the fall of Roe in July 2022. Two years later, women’s health care is collapsing, a woman in Alabama has fewer rights than a non-viable fetus, pregnant women in Missouri are not allowed (that always feels so odd to write—that adults are not allowed) to file for divorce, and Arizona has lost its fucking mind, having yesterday held a prayer meeting on the floor of the state senate to I kid you not speak in tongues, while over in the state House, representatives refused to allow debate about a draconian forced-birth law (the passage of which, btw, is thanks to “pursuer of nubile young females” William Claude Jones, who married three children under the age of 16, the youngest of whom was 12). As
writes in the April 10 issue (“Arizona’s forced birth fascists revive abortion ban from 1864”) of his really excellent newsletter “Everyone Is Entitled to My Own Opinion,”way to go, Arizona Supreme Court. ace job, criminalizing access to healthcare by reviving a century-and-a-half old law. that’s right: it’s a fucking territorial law. wrap your mind around that: a territorial law. written in 1864. Arizona didn’t become a state until 1912.
I knew this journey had something to do with borders and bodies, what we claim and what we think we own. I had a hunch that the story had to with property and economics, with territory and land, with laws and love, with people and the ways in which we intersect and act, what we believe and how we live. And I knew when I set out that I was asking questions about endings, and asking those questions was a way of beginning again.
Is it the country that’s ending? The idea of the country, the dream of what it might have been? Don’t know. In order to ask that question, though, I’m about to go trace its southern edge.
Next week, in “The Tramp Scamp, Part 3,” join me as I prepare to travel the southern border from coast to coast. You can help me pack.
This is not a deeply intellectual reply. I wanted to let you know about Loctite, if you didn't already. It's glue for screws. Lol.
Comes in different formula strengths from permanent red to temporary purple. It's the blue or red stuff you sometimes see on the threads of screws that you weren't "supposed" to remove. Mechanics often recommend the red on screws that hold hoses or clamps in the undercarriages of vehicles/four wheelers/side-by-sides, anything that is expressed to a lot of shaking, rattling, vibrating. Maybe it will help keep you from losing more screws. Keep on driving on!