On the Road

[rich]

Letter responding to an article that appeared in Salon about a woman
who lived in her van by choice. Has that refreshing lived life w/o the
utopia media bullshit about hippies which I think Pynchon would agree
with.
Rich

"Funny that no one mentions that once upon a time a substantial
portion of an entire generation left comfortable (and uncomfortable)
homes to live on the road. That actual experience has long been
annihilated under a lot of media distortion and dumb stereotype, but
for those of us who spent a few years during that time long time ago,
thumbing around the country, sleeping by the side of the road and on
beaches and in forests and sneaked-into garages and barns and dirty
old gas-station bathrooms if it got too cold (yes, they'd just let
you, sometimes, if you left early), and once, for me, on a median
strip between a lot of lanes with the car-lights parting around me
like dazzling rivers, living on peanut butter and popcorn and bananas
and whatever could be easily scrounged, it was about slowly losing all
sorts of terrible gnawing internal pressures that you don't even know
about unless you've been without them.

For some, it's a nostalgia that never goes away. Dropping out. Just
dropping OUT. That it was even possible was a revelation and a
mystery.

It wasn't really that big pot-hazed party-orgy floated on Daddy's
trust fund that history invented, although that happened in some
places, sometimes, too. I didn't like that stuff much and ran across
many who were the same. I hitched across the country alone, five
times, meandering back and forth, never with more than $5 in my pocket
- a lot of us did. What I remember is stars and roads and the scary,
magical, complicated anonymity of big cities, and feeling like I was
drifting free on a secret current running in perfect invisibility
through that other, driven, unhappy world. Right in the real weather.

It's a dimension that in some ways really is safer than the one that
I, or we, finally dissolved back into. Just safer from different
things.

I'm getting to be an old lady now, but I after I work my week, and pay
my taxes, I still sometimes spend a Saturday night in a sleeping bag
on the grass outside, hidden from my neighbors, on my own damned lawn,
and I pretend that it never ended. It all had to fall apart of course
- I knew it had when I stumbled across that first Life magazine
article with hazy pictures of "real hippies." Damn. Discovered.

Homelessness forced by poverty or addiction is a horror, but those
folks sometimes find something else, too, and that's why it's so hard
to drag a lot of them back inside again. Becky hit a hard personal
grief pocket when she was well-heeled and in the bag, and she needed a
kind of space that has nothing to do with homeless shelters and job
programs. She writes about it well, too. A very different story with
different reasons, but also the same, maybe timeless.

Sorry this was so long, it plucked a resonant string. I think for a
lot of people here. Prosit, Becky."

http://www.salon.com/life/your_best_take/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2011/01/27/your_best_take_living_in_van