The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [118]
Looking back I remember the many trips, the travelers, the snowbirds we met, and the woods, beaches, and deserts where we set up home. The cyclical pattern we moved in, the same seven states, the same seven or so power plants, reminds me now of the ancient hunter gathering societies. We met plenty of homeless people, hoboes catching trains, refugees camped out in America’s wealthy backyards. During those years we couldn’t help observing as if from the outside, looking in. All those people who think of themselves as tethered, who cling to the idea of society and place, people who live with an illusion of permanence and safety, people we have joined. Simone and I are stable now, middle-class with five kids, we only go away for Christmas break and summers. However, we still do not have that luxury of centering and place, because our family roots and individual cultures are important to us and they stretch to two different continents. When one of us arrives home, the other is necessarily traveling.
We went back to my birthplace on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation to sell our Hitchhiker in the end. We put an ad in the Thrifty Nickel, a classified section that contained RV’s for sale and that features the Buffalo head nickel on the cover.
A lady with frizzy split-ends and a harried expression answered our advertisement. No, she did not have the total amount we were asking. No, she did not have a truck to pick the Hitchhiker up. She planned on parking it in a permanent location for herself and her adult son. Between the two of their jobs they’d be able to make a second balloon payment. She could give us one thousand today and another thousand-five-hundred in a month.
We hooked up the fifth-wheel and drove it out to her. It had its scrapes and bruises. Our oldest kids got teary-eyed watching it go. When we arrived at the designated meeting point we discovered that the woman was a squatter on a section of land between Yuma and the reservation known as No-Man’s-Land. The shoreline of the Colorado River has changed occasionally through the years, mostly due to earthquakes. Since the Colorado River creates the boundary of ownership between the city of Yuma and the Yuma Indian Nation, this creates disputes: in the late ’40s a man looked to increase his real estate and farm land by using dynamite blow a new bend in the river’s shoreline. The resulting section of land, No-Man’s-Land, is still disputed today.
We dropped our Hitchhiker off at the squatter’s park on No-Man’s-Land and collected the money the woman had on hand. As we drove back down the dirt road, I looked back in the rearview mirror, at the white paint, the red stripes, the frilly pink curtains of our first home together in America. I suspected we would never receive the balloon payment, though I didn’t mention it to Simone who tends to be gullible about the goodness in people. Ten years later, it doesn’t matter. It is a consolation that the Hitchhiker sits steady in a place that belongs legally to no one.
Deborah Taffa was born for the Keepers of the Water clan on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation. A writer of mixed Yuma/Laguna/Latina ancestry, she has backpacked in rural Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Her work reflects both her roots and wings. She is currently an M.F.A. candidate in the CNF program at the University of Iowa.
SABINE BERGMANN
Death Road
If you have a death wish, this is a ride for you.
ILEANED CAUTIOUSLY TOWARDS THE ROAD’S EDGE, WHICH gave way to a sheer cliff, a gashed rock-face stretching towards the distant earth. At the bottom, a mere speck of yellow on the floor of rocks, lay the tiny carcass of a yellow bus—tiny from here, at least. Squinting, I could see spray-painted designs covering the bright yellow shell like psychedelic graffiti.