Seven Months of Summer
ARIZONA
We had arrived at our winter retreat in Quartzite, Arizona on October 10 the previous year, 2018. I planned to do something different that time in that I would pay a hundred-eighty dollars to stay in any of the four BLM (Bureau of Land Management) LTVA (Long Term Visitor Area) camps. This would permit us to stay in the area for up to seven months (Sept. 15-April 15) rather than having to move around between several free fourteen-day stay limit short term BLM camps as I had always done in the past. In addition to the extended stay privilege I had access to free water, free dumping of waste water and free trash disposal. So in all it isn’t a bad deal and could work out to be as little as eighty-six cents a day camping. That is pretty cheap “rent”.
Now having said we arrived on October 10 this was much earlier than I had planned. We were in Winslow, Arizona when the weather turned; it became quite cold−by my standards which aren’t all that forgiving when it comes to cold–and I checked the weather in Quartzite. It showed to be over ten degrees warmer and so we headed to the western side of the state. At the same time I received a message from my friend Joanna who I had met a year previously in Quartzite. She was camped in one of the LTVA areas, the one closest to town. This hadn’t been in my plan as I was thinking more of way out in the hinterland away from all the people and hub-bub. I learned she had volunteered to work for the BLM a couple days a week checking campers in and in doing so she did not have to pay the one-eighty fee. She got to stay for free. This is why she was where I didn’t necessarily want to be. Yet, I figured I would go see her and maybe stay for a week or two at the most. I could tolerate close camping for at least that long. I ended up staying with her for five months! It wasn’t all that bad. I could walk into town for supplies rather than breaking camp and the “neighborhood” for the most part was quiet and entertaining. People watching can be a great past time.
Sitting in one spot doesn’t provide the stories as does traveling around the country does in the remaining months of the year. But occasionally a story does surface and here are a few encounters during our winter lay-over before Beans and I began a new year of traveling the back roads of America.
A Special Christmas Moment
I was standing outside one of only two small grocery stores in Quartzsite reading the bulletin board ads. Nearby was a frail elderly woman, dressed in a red full-length garment, blonde hair rolled in a bun on top of her head, carefully positioning herself in her roll-around wheel chair. Several bags containing her possessions hung from the arms and back of the chair, her cane poking out in the back. The lady in red moved real slow, had difficulty in doing most everything and was attempting to make arrangements for a ride to her doctor sifting through her papers and digging out her phone. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman walk up to the lady and slip her a few dollars. The lady in red said "I'm not begging." The woman told her "You keep it. Merry Christmas" and she walked away. I talked with the lady in red. She was deeply moved by the gift and told me she had been having trouble lately with people stealing from her (I didn't inquire as to details on that) and couldn't believe someone just gave her a few dollars. I said “Maybe this is a sign that good things will come your way now.” I told her how that act of kindness on the part of the mystery woman and my being witness to it just made my day. I wished her well and couldn't get the lady in red out from my mind for several hours afterwards.
The Lady at the Water Fill-up Station
I drove down to the larger LTVA south of Quartzite to top off the water tank in the RV. There are four pipe outlets for water fill-up each stand about four feet high, a faucet on each side. As I was filling the tank a lady pulled in on the other side of me. She was in a small SUV type of car. She was heavy-set, may have been in her forties, hard to say as she was bundled up against the cold. Wearing a heavy coat, knit cap, long black braid of hair and bare foot except for flip-flops; it was too cold for me to not have anything on my feet! She was filling a white five-gallon bucket. She was going to do her laundry. “I need to get a hose like yours” she remarked as the water shot out from the faucet some of which wasn’t making it into her bucket. We got to talking.
I learned she had been bedridden for three years, with little or no use of her arms and legs following a traffic accident. She said "I used to exercise, do Zumba dance workouts and run 5k runs. You wouldn't know that to look at me now." She would tell her daughters, "If I ever get out of this bed, I am making a big life change."
Her prospects never looked good until she stopped taking the medication the doctors had put her on. Gradually she recovered, became mobile and left her prison-in-a-bed life. She told me she would watch YouTube videos while incapacitated and learned of this nomadic life on the road. She had packed what she needed in her car and this was the first time she had ever been in the desert. She was living out of a tent and so very happy. "I walked five miles yesterday!"
I have heard similar stories about the detrimental effects of prescribed medications. Someone once told me they didn't trust doctors. "They don't know anything. They don't care. They cause more trouble than they cure. They charge the earth and if you don't get better they blame you for it. After they blind you or cripple you, so that you've got no choice but to sue them, where do you have to go? To a lawyer! And that's worse!"
The lady hefted the five-gallon bucket full of water into her car (remember, less than a year ago she couldn't even lift her leg or arm) and we exchanged good-byes. I wished her the best. She left me inspired for the rest of the day.
Walking to Woodstock
Every once in awhile during our five-month long stay in camp I would see this older man walking by heading for town a mile away; grey hair, grey beard, slightly built, day pack on his back, usually wearing a tie-died shirt. A couple of times I had come across him walking down the dirt road to the LTVA camp area south of us about two miles distant. He would be carrying two one-gallon jugs of water, sometimes sitting in the shade of a mesquite tree taking a break. One day during one of my hikes we met on the road and I just had to say something to him.
“I see you walking by my camp, in town and sometimes way out here on Yuma Road. Just wanted to say I admire you walking everywhere you go.”
“Yep, I walk all the time” he said. In fact I came to learn that that was his only means of transportation–walking. He mentioned the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock. “Bethel, New York. I’m going there, walking.” Bethel, New York is 2200 miles from Quartzite, Arizona, if you are a crow. By road it is 2529 miles! He told me how he had gone to the original Woodstock event. He was thirteen years old and got picked up by the local law enforcement as a “teen runaway” and sent back home. That would make him sixty-three years old today, seven years my junior. I wished him well and continued on with my three-mile hike. I hope he makes it. He will. [Unfortunately later in the year the Woodstock celebration event was canceled]
Dave
Dave moved in near our camp a few months after we had arrived. He was sixty-seven, had a rough leathery face much like Rolling Stone Keith Richards or actor Tommy Lee Jones. His dark shoulder-length hair was always unkempt and appeared greasy and went along with his scraggly beard. He walked slowly, slightly off-kilter and was hard of hearing. He had done three years in the army, a Vietnam veteran, got out in 1971 and said “Screw the world”. A tour in Vietnam will do that to you. He bought a Harley Davidson motorcycle and rode away. He joined a Maine chapter of the Hells Angels but that lasted for only six months. “They had too many rules.”
Over time he wound up buying a sailboat, a pure sailboat with no motor. He lived full time on the boat out of Key Largo, Florida. He sailed all about in the area including to Bermuda for eight years until a hurricane de-masted the boat and he was unable to afford the repairs. He still has the boat parked on a cousin’s piece of land up in Maine.
It was at this time fifteen years ago he bought eighteen acres of land in the wilderness near the Maine/Canadian border. He built a log cabin with a flat roof, dirt floor, no electricity, no plumbing and lived there for fifteen years. All heating was done with wood and he spent most of the summer cutting up wood to get him through the brutal winters. Then one day he discovered people were growing pot on his land. In Maine you are only allowed to grow six plants; this was a whole field of marijuana plants. He talked to them about this. “You’re gonna get me in trouble.” They ignored him doing nothing about the plants so he chopped down the plants. They in turn burned down his cabin. “Oh well, I was getting tired of walking a mile through snow to get to the road anyway.” He sold the land, bought an old van, a travel trailer, loaded up Harley number ten and left Maine for a life on the road as a nomad.
Dave has had Harleys all his life. This may explain his hard of hearing problem. On Harley #8 an old lady in an Oldsmobile turned in front of him and he centered punched her in the driver’s door. He walked away from the accident; the old lady went to the hospital. Witnesses told the police it was her fault. With Harley #9 he was rear-ended by a car going fifty miles-per-hour. Dave went sailing for over a hundred feet. This time he sustained a broken back. “I got glue in there holding me together.” He was in a wheelchair for a year and now is supposed to use cane. “I keep forgetting. It’s in the trailer somewhere.” This is why he walks slow and off-kilter.
Dave was nothing like he looked. He was kind and soft-spoken. He gifted my camp mate Joanna a hundred watt solar panel that was on the top of his van. “Here, you can have this.” He had a weakness for Pepsi Cola polishing off a six-pack or more every day. A few weeks after Dave moved in we eventually moved south a mile to a quieter location away from the highway noise. We learned later Dave had had an accident on Harley #10. He was motoring along at eighty miles per hour when his weathered old rear tire went flat as he approached a right angle turn in the middle of nowhere on a lonely desert highway over in California. The accident broke his ankle and further disfigured his face.
Greg
We never knew his name for sure; was it Craig or Greg? So for a couple of months we referred to him as Craig-Greg. He was camped about a hundred yards from us in a beat up old brown GMC passenger van. A small equally abused little old fiberglass camper trailer sat in his camp site. Greg would drive everywhere he needed to go. Every morning he would drive into town to McDonalds and get some sort of breakfast. Using the drive-up window he didn’t have to get out. He would buy the daily newspaper and then pass it on to others in camp. Towards the end he quit doing this as no one ever showed any appreciation for his newspaper. Lunch time he’d go back into town and maybe hit Burger King, again not having to get out due to the drive-up window. Dinner most likely was the same routine. Other campers always were on the lookout for Greg and sometimes brought him meals, us included. We never saw him out of his van. Sometimes he would be taking a nap, in the van sitting behind the steering wheel. For all we could tell it looked as if he had died there in the driver’s seat. Greg would come by and show us “treasures” he would pick up at the give-away tables at each of the four kiosks and sometimes “gifts” left behind at the dumpsters as people would leave things outside the dumpster that may be of use to someone. Greg kept me supplied with lots of books. After I read them I would return them to him as he was taking the load back home for his daughter. Home was a flyspeck of a town on the map in the southeast portion of Iowa. Sometimes when Greg would come by we had to be sure to be upwind from him. Joanna especially would pick up on his smell. She would not hesitate in telling him he needed a bath. I think most of the smell came from his clothes as he never did laundry and traces of his fast food meals were always present dibbled down his shirt. As the months went by the back of the van grew ever so much packed with all of his finds. Greg informed us he had been coming to Quartzite for thirty years now and felt this would be the last time he would make the trip. He was ninety-six years old. Overlooking all of Greg’s short comings the fact alone that he was still out here doing this at his age was an inspiration to both of us, especially me. “Greg, when I grow up and want to be just like you.” He’d smile. He was still sharp as a tack and very witty but he knew it was becoming more difficult for him to make the drive, to get around and one could not help but notice the growing cataracts in his eyes.
We met many people while there for those five months. Everyone has a story. Two people had heart attacks while there. Each was transported to Phoenix for repairs and the installing of electronic devices to keep the heart ticking properly. Both within weeks were walking around. Joanna while working at the check-station met many more people of course and was in contact with the BLM rangers often. Occasionally a camper would come in and register a ‘welfare check’ on a fellow camper. These originated usually from the fact of just sitting there in your own camp and not seeing any activity at all from a neighbor’s camp over a period of time. So they would bring this to the attention at the check-in booth, a welfare check was written up and the rangers would go out and check. Most of the time it wasn’t anything except that the individual just holed himself up inside like a hermit. Yet there were the other instances. One ranger informed Joanna that they discovered eight individual cases last year of people having died in their RV.
For nearly a year I had been having issues with my Motoped cycle. If you can picture a beefed up mountain bike with a 50cc motor, this is what the Motoped Survival bike is. It had been giving me problems for the past year requiring frequent adjustments to the settings of the valves. Over time the problem grew worse and the bike lost power. Around the first of the year it would barely run going no faster than if I was peddling a regular bicycle. I finally gave up and parked it. A couple weeks later, with nothing else to do, I removed the head on the engine. I discovered the intake valve was burnt and had receded into the head. It was then I seriously gave thought to just get rid of this Chinese-made knock-off clone of a Honda motor and put in a true reliable Honda 50 engine. Research showed that the engines alone were hard to come by and a rebuilt motor would go for nearly a grand and that was when supplying your own motor which I did not have. Oh how I longed for the 1979 Honda Trail 90 that I had completed restored and foolishly sold some years ago. Also I wished I had my nice mountain bike with me that hung from the rafters in the garage back in California. I thought back over the past couple of years at how many times the bike would have been nice to have, surely now as the Motoped was down. I hadn’t brought a bicycle with me for I had that damn Motoped. I decided when my time was up in Quartzite I’d make the dreaded trip back through California, to the house, and get the mountain bike.
Over the winter Joanna had secured a camp host position at a small Forest Service campground in Wyoming. That was to begin in May. She wanted to spend time with family in Colorado before beginning her new job so at the end of March we left Quartzite for Lake Havasu City at the California/Arizona border near Needles California. There we camped for two days and then parted ways, her to the east and Beans and I would head west to California. After Joanna drove away I decided to take a walk up the narrow rocky road that led into the canyon near camp. I had seen several vehicles go in up that way only to soon turn around and come back out. I assumed camp spots were not to be had up that road or it just became impassable. I hiked in a half a mile or so and was surprised to see an old van and travel trailer parked just off the rocky trail. I saw someone outside and planned on complimenting them on dragging that trailer up there and getting parked as they had. That person turned out to be a lone woman and her blind little dog. I met Kat from Oregon. I’d guessed her to be in her early forties. She was tall, short spikey hair sticking out in all different directions and had the prettiest blue eyes you could imagine. She wore a dirty brown t-shirt, equally dirty levis, and flip flops on her dried cracked weathered feet. She seemed pleased to meet me and we shook hands as we introduced ourselves. Her hands were rough like those of a construction worker. Her voice gravely but she was very pleasant to talk with. I eventually told her how impressed I was that she got her twenty-six foot long trailer up that road and parked as she did. I come to learn that she had just bought both the van and trailer recently and didn’t have any money left to get it registered so was kind of “hiding out” up there until she was in a better way. She also let on that she had just left an “unpleasant situation” in Oregon. She bought the van through an ad on Craiglist for four hundred dollars and the trailer for one hundred dollars−two different sellers. She said she checked to make sure neither were stolen property before making the deals. The white van looked well used with ladder racks up top and a good share of dents in the body along with a cracked windshield as it had been used as a telecommunications service van. Despite its appearance it got her and the trailer across the Mojave Desert from Bakersfield without a problem. The trailer was equally abused looking on the outside; the inside was a whole other issue. I stepped in and went no further than the doorway as I took in the total chaos in front of me. Everything was in complete disarray as if the trailer had rolled over and landed up on its wheels once again. Her clothing, the few possessions she had, parts and pieces of the trailer, building supplies, cans of food and dry goods, all were strewn about on the floor. No cabinets remained. The interior had been totally gutted. Some exterior walls were exposed to bare wood framework and insulation. All that remained from how it once looked was half of an interior wall separating the living area (such as it was) and the “bedroom” where a mattress lay flopped on the floor. A hanging portion of the kitchen counter top remained and the cabinet that held the original refrigerator was still in place and worked…kind of, she said. Along one wall someone had installed a wood burning stove. Next to it a Pepsi Cola cooler case−not working. In the middle of the floor lay her deaf and blind little dog unaware I was there. She had lots of ideas and plans to fix things up and I didn’t judge her any since she had only had the trailer for three weeks. She pointed out all the tools and power tools sitting on the shelf up front that came with the trailer. “They alone are worth over the hundred dollars I paid”. She admitted she wasn’t all that knowledgeable when it came to fixing things but she wasn’t afraid to try. I admired her spirit and although I liked her I knew I couldn’t get involved. I wished her luck and continued on my hike. I’d really like to run into Kat again someday and see how she had come along. I think she’ll do fine.
As we made our way north over the next couple of days I had a lot of time to think. The Motoped had become an albatross to me and I resolved to get rid of it as is. I’d take my loss and move on. Maybe I could find a Honda 90 Trail bike. I had looked online and the few out there were parts bikes, needed a lot of work or were highly priced.
On April first I arrived at the house. It was good to see the ex. We hadn’t seen each other in three years. While there I went through the things I had left behind when I had purged my life of all my stuff and junk before going on the road full time. What I left behind were the things I didn’t have the courage to get rid of at the time. Now three years later it was easier to let go. They didn’t mean anything to me any longer. I wanted to help her clean the clutter, simplify her life and do various little projects around the house that she was unable to do herself and was reluctant to pay a handyman for. In return, she fed me like a king. A week into this I finally got around to putting the Motoped on Craigslist at one-third the price I paid or ‘best offer’. I got hits right away which kind of surprised me. Many offers were very low and a couple guys wanted to come see it that weekend. But when a kid from Sacramento offered two hundred dollars over the asking price I said he could have it. I wasn’t going to wait through the weekend as planned and deal with tire kickers. He came on a Friday morning, paid cash, was happy to have it and I was happy to see it go. That went much easier than I had anticipated. At the same time a very nice looking 1972 Honda Trail 90 showed up on Craigslist and amazingly it was right there in town!
Over the winter Joanna was always trying to convince me of “the power of the Universe”. She would tell me that if there is anything you want, you put the word out there in mind and thought and “the Universe will provide”. Yeah, right. But over those months too many things happened to support her belief and it began to get creepy to me. Little things like how she wished she had a hummingbird feeder so we could feed the humming birds around camp. Two days later I came by a hummingbird feeder someone was giving away. She wished she could afford a 100 watt solar panel to keep her battery for her trailer charged up. Within a week, Dave walked over and gave her that solar panel. He didn’t know she wanted one. And so now here I was wishing to get rid of that Motoped−which I did very easily at more than I had hoped for−and even more amazing, a Honda Trail 90 bike shows up looking every bit as good as the one I had (new tires, battery, other parts and pieces, everything clean, rust removed and polished) and for a price lower than similar bikes online needing work. I bought it. Four weeks later after arriving I never thought I would be driving away having accomplished everything I had.
I so desperately wanted to put California in the rear view mirror and in the last week of April Beans and I were back on the road. This year of traveling I would strive to do shorter drives, stay in places longer, stop driving earlier in the day and be in no rush to move out in the morning. And with that thought I put in a long four hundred mile drive on the very first day. I wanted out of California that bad. That’s my excuse. We stopped in Fernley, Nevada between a Walmart (no overnight parking allowed) and a Lowes. The next day was a short drive on Interstate 80 to Imlay, Nevada followed by another short drive to a rest area at Valmay. My new driving plan bit me in the butt the next morning at Valmay. We woke up to snow falling. Knowing snow was in the offering I should have pressed on the day before. We could stay put but the forecast predicted temperatures to drop down to twenty-five degrees that night. Dying a frozen death at a lonely rest stop along a desolate Nevada highway isn’t my way of choice for checking out. I decided to drive the remaining hundred-ninety miles to the Utah border−so much for my new traveling plan. We drove on to Elko where I stopped for a bite to eat and see what we would be dealing with further on in Wells, Nevada where the altitude was the highest at over six thousand feet. Snow was forecasted all day for Wells. I reasoned the sooner I got through there the less chance for the snow to build up. As it was I hit it just right with no snow falling over the high passes. Pure dumb luck on my part and I was even able to relax some and enjoy the snow-covered scenery. Crossing the border into Utah we dropped in elevation and stayed at our usual camp area near the Bonneville Salt Flats just outside of Wendover. No rain, no snow and sunny skies were predicted for the following week.
UTAH
That night after I turned out the light and tried to go to sleep Beans decided to start playing around up front. “Beans, stop it!” Groan. I got up, pulled back the curtain and saw the dashboard lights were on. What did she do now? Then I recalled having driven through the snow storm with the headlights on. I had forgotten to turn the lights off! It was now five hours later! The battery wouldn’t turn over the engine. The Dodge Sprinter has a battery boost button on the dash. I had never used it before. Supposedly you push the button, the circuit switches over to the coach batteries to start the motor. I tried it and lo and behold the engine started right up. Whew! Thank you Beans and thank you Dodge. I fed Beans extra bit more as a reward.
We spent three days there at the BLM Silver Island Mountains Recreational Area. I took the new-to-me Honda Trail 90 out twice thoroughly enjoying the bike over the Motoped Chinese junk motor powered bicycle. With just 40cc’s more in engine displacement it could do so much more in addition having a low range gear option giving me four low gears to climb long steep grades whereas the Motoped struggled and I had to pedal to help it along. It would take me awhile to get over that poor decision I made several years ago selling the other Honda Trail 90 and then later buying the “Survival Bike”.
One morning I woke up to the sight of runners passing by our desolate camp. Watching them pass by stirred up fond memories for me. For my thirtieth birthday I gave myself a present. I was overweight and out of shape. I would change that. I started jogging. The jogging craze was full-on in the late 70's. I couldn't even make it around the high school track once without hallucinating. I stuck to it and later entered a local running event of 5km (3.1 miles). I was hooked. I loved the competition. Over the next ten plus years I entered races of all lengths. I even did a marathon (26.2 miles)...once. My goal was to do the marathon in less than three hours. I made it with a minute to spare. Never again! I stuck to the shorter races of a half marathon and under. Ah, but eventually all those miles of hard training and racing took a toll on my knees and I had to quit running. Another twenty years passed and we moved next to Annadel State Park near Santa Rosa, CA. and I got into hiking the trails there everyday. I loved it. Occasionally I would see people running the trails. That lit a spark in me. I started jogging again. Fortunately this time I was in much better shape and soon progressed to running the trails I hiked. Oh my! Such joy. This was so much better and more fun than running on streets. But I was older now and a problem soon reared itself. I had developed a smooth and efficient style of running while racing. This style did not bode well on trails. I ran barely picking up my feet and thus frequently would get tripped up by even the smallest rock. Several times I crashed and burned picking myself up with skinned palms and knees. I couldn't change my style of running and I couldn't risk breaking bones miles way out in the wilderness. After about five years of this nonsense on February 29, 2016 I ran 4.3 miles on a trail. It was to be my final run.
I researched and found out these runners were taking part in the Salt Flats 100. The event comprised of three different lengths of your choice: 50 km (31 miles), 50 miles and a 100 miler. I watched them all morning into the afternoon. Oh how I wished...
The next morning when we left I drove on out the asphalt road to the salt flats itself, which were under water. There stood the finishing line on the paved road. I had passed a woman and a man on the way to that line, still walking and running twenty-seven hours after the start of the run the previous morning. No doubt they had slept some over the night. That day we put in a hundred sixty-five miles of driving before finding a Walmart Campground in Saratoga Springs, Utah. My new driving plan was going by the wayside fast.
I tried to get back with the program and split the driving distance of our ultimate goal in half with an overnight stop at an abandoned Denny’s restaurant in Salina, Utah. The next day we arrived at Willow Springs north of Moab, Utah. We had been there a year and a half ago and I wanted to return as I still had some exploring to do. One of the features of this area was fossilized dinosaur tracks embedded in the slick rock. When I found it before I discovered just beyond was a back way entrance into Arches National Monument. This I wanted to explore on my new more reliable motorbike.
I slowly drove down the rutted dirt road and was amazed at how many people were there being the start of only the second week of May. Doesn’t anyone have to work anymore? Many of the people were very young. Shouldn’t you be in school? I was concerned about having to camp near someone when I spotted an incline up to a small table-top plateau of a hill. The Little House on the Highway motored right up on top. Oh, this will do just fine. No one will come up here. There’s not enough room. Ha! That evening two cars pulled up the hill and set up tents right out our back window. Okay, they left right away in the morning. I rolled out some stumps left behind for firewood and created a little barrier blocking the road in. This pretty much solved the problem yet I was living in constant fear someone would still move in. Cars would slow down at the bottom as they drove by eyeing the real estate we had.
I tried to forget about it and enjoy my time there. My first motorbike ride took me out to those dinosaur tracks and beyond. I was stopped at that back road entrance to Arches N.M. by a new sign posted. Among the long list of things you couldn’t do were: NO TWO-WHEELED MOTORIZED VEHICLES. THIS INCLUDES STREET LEGAL MOTORCYCLES. Well great! So much for my grand plan of exploring the seldom seen portion of Arches National Monument.
When the weekend arrived the place became a zoo with all the mountain bikers and ATVers not to mention my self-imposed worrying about the increasing amount of people passing by thinking of trespassing; I wasn’t enjoying myself. The three day Memorial Day holiday weekend loomed on th