The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [117]
We were young and romantic and needed a place of our own where our parents, friends and family couldn’t meddle. The Hitchhiker we lived in was an egg, a protective environment to live in, and argue out our goals, plans, and lifestyle. We were in a complicated mating ritual, trying to figure out which traditions and values to choose from his side of the family, and which to choose from my side of the family. He talked about running from the devil of materialism, excess consumerism, and status concerns of northern Italy, and what he considered close-minded provincial thought. He had read the Bhagavad Gita, and wanted to believe that life is, at the core, a spiritual adventure.
For my part, I was running from the pressure of traditions, fatalism, and the dysfunction often seen in post-Indian boarding school families. I was enthralled by Thoreau’s Walden, and the Hitchhiker presented opportunities to both live in nature and hike every chance I got. Migrant work made life simple, the small space we called home made it impossible to buy junk, and there was an independent quality to it that I enjoyed very much. We relied on pay phones to call our parents collect and traveled so frequently that it was impossible to forge lasting friendships. Occasionally a Navajo welder would come to our fifth-wheel for a home cooked meal. His worldview was as separate and marginalized as our own. We liked it that way. We had seen in our respective hometowns, a limiting vision of freedom and life, and though we knew we couldn’t escape it forever, we knew that we were buying time. The longer we stayed in hibernation, the longer we delayed our indoctrination into society, and pressure from our families to conform to some dead-end office job. The longer we lived in the Hitchhiker, the longer we could retain a sense of our childhood, and believe whatever our imagination led us to explore.
I admit that much of our speculation was simply the romanticism of youth, but in retrospect I see how, in many ways, our life in the Hitchhiker had an impact on our lives that can still be pointed to today. We are still not big shoppers. We still remain independent, and more immune to peer pressure than average, or the idea that we have to keep up with the Joneses. We only recently had cable TV installed and still have only a vague idea about what is going on in pop culture.
Simone worked. Every town we moved to I had to locate four things: the grocery store, the library, the park, and the post office. These were the essentials of life and they point to how I spent my time, reading to myself and the kids, walking at trails in parks, and cooking homemade meals that we drove out to Simone on his lunch break. I didn’t bother signing my oldest daughter up for school, even when she hit Kindergarten, I just schooled her at home though we both knew, as the kids grew older, that it would soon be necessary for our years in the fifth wheel to come to an end.
I would have never expected to own or live in a fifth-wheel for as long as we did, a total of five years, not including the three months every summer when we parked our beloved Hitchhiker at a storage facility and took a flight to Simone’s parents in northern Italy. I think our summer abroad each year made it possible to maintain our migrant-welder adventures because it helped Simone avoid burnout. I am certain that going home to relax gave him strength to return