I have long felt at odds with what I consider the “American Propaganda Dream.”  Perhaps it is more a roadmap/checklist of where you should be, what you need to have, and what you need to be doing at any given point of your life in order to be successful.  We are urged explicitly and implicitly to get in line, to stay on the path – that of college, marriage, job, career, children, grandchildren, retirement, and death.  We should do so with a smile and without much thought, because, well, that’s what you do.  That’s what we do.  That’s what we’ve always done.  This is how our machine runs.  If you can’t do these things, you are less than.  If you don’t want to do these things or have these things, you are a weirdo.

    God bless the weirdos.

    We Americans love things.  New things, better things, more expensive things.  All the things.  As grateful as I am to have been born where I was to whom I was and to have grown up with everything I ever needed, I have spent enough time outside of this country to see how others live, what they value, how they prioritize and what their roadmaps/checklists are.  People, places, and experiences are more important than possessions.

    The world was always in my head.  Be it travels large and small around the vastness of Montana or the roadtrip to Minnesota, the world seemed to me such a wild, big, beautiful place that it was inconceivable the thought of spending all my time in just one tiny part of it.  I have yet to find the place where I want to spend the rest of my life.  I cannot fathom the rest of my life.  I have always wanted to do much and see much and be free to do and see what I could whenever I want. And I have never quite found that person who made me want to either settle down or take along with me for the ride.  This ride.  That ride.  All rides.  To a greater or lesser extent, this was always the point of departure for me in relationships.  Is this the one…?

    My second-to-last relationship before leaving found me living with a lovely, funny, intelligent woman.  We laughed much, she asked me to move in, things got serious, and I…went south.  Through no fault of hers, I was as miserable as I ever had been.  Domestication was not for me.  I had a head and heart full of other things.  This was not my path.  Not yet, at least.

    Three years later, she would marry a good man.  Three years after that, they would have a beautiful son.  At the time, I found myself about 8,000 miles down the road, in El Salvador, searching for a place to refill the 1 lb. propane tanks for my camp stove.

    After a summer housesitting for a friend, I decided to move into the gallery.  The gallery and studio portion accounted for the vast majority of the main floor square footage.  I set up a bed and a dresser in an interior room, the former office of the former art supply store.  I hung clothes using a studio backdrop setup and placed a TV monitor and DVD player on top of the dresser.  The room was just slightly larger than those furniture pieces.

    I rearranged the storage room in back, making room for what would become my “kitchen,” complete with a microwave, an electric skillet pan, and a two-burner cooking plate.  Once or twice a week I would cook huge amounts of either rice and beans or hamburger and potatoes and eat those same things for days.  I collected my dishes in a bin on the shelf beneath the microwave and washed them in a small, one-basin sink in the building’s common room near the back door to the alley.  I stepped up my camping game in 2015 and 2016 and spent many nights with both less and more in the blessing of the Beartooth Mountains.

    There were three half baths in the building, but no bathtub or shower.  I would shower at the YMCA for the entirety of my 4 ½ years living in the Studio, with more homey shower capabilities after Mom retired and moved back from Cleveland in the Spring of 2013.  Nothing felt like I was getting off the grid more than showering at the Y.  Especially when I wasn’t working out.  Somewhat property rich and definitely cash poor, it reminded me of researching and playing roles while studying acting in college.  Half by choice, half by the given circumstances of low cash flow, I felt as close as I ever had to homeless, a sensation that would resurface more than a few times during the roadtrip and afterwards.  Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be truly homeless, and if it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility for me.  Dirty, shining, ecstatic, mumbling memories and fantastic tales.  

    Living übersimply and mostly occupying about 300 square feet of space at the back of the studio was preparing me for the road.  I didn’t realize this at the time.  I was often too busy judging myself for not having more; for eating the same, simple thing day after day; for not having a shower. Little did I know that I was getting ready, shrinking my list of necessities, and that I would soon set out on the greatest adventure of my life.  We Americans don’t need near as much as we think we do.

    Altogether, I would spend some 600 hours (the equivalent of 25 entire days) in the space occupied by the front seat and 234 nights in a space just larger than a 46” W x 75” L (bed/storage platform).  My kitchen was the open tailgate of the van.  Needless to say, there was neither bathroom nor shower.

    I would soon be living incredibly small and incredibly large at once, completely out of line.