Hosmer Lake
I asked how long he'd been camped up there and immediately felt gauche. Teetotalers don't ask strangers where they buy their pot. But after a pause he told me anyway, deciding, I suppose, that I was all right; and then every time he walked past our camp spot, he stopped to talk.
I found him really interesting. He was very clearly living out if his RV, parked up there in the forest, but he was just as clearly living there by choice. His hair was stringy but his clothes looked like any other camper's clothes, though perhaps a little cleaner. The flatbed trailer hooked to his RV had solar panels on it, and cars, and two dune buggies and a land sail and a couple kayaks and a canoe – and probably more, but I didn't like to stare.
Meeting him reminded me of meeting other travelers in Eastern Europe who, like this gentleman, lived in a style radically different from anything I'd ever imagined. I asked him a lot of questions, just like I did in Eastern Europe. My husband told me later it was impertinent. Oregonians don't interrogate people during casual conversation, he said. But how could I not? I wanted to know what those solar panels powered. I wanted to know how the land sail worked, and where he sailed it, and at what time of year, and what he did with the cars, and all of that —
But what I really wanted to know, of course, was: What's it like? What's it like to live without a fixed address, traveling your own personal seasonal round?
I didn't ask him that; but I could imagine it.
I envied him a little.
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