Clay takes the Airstream out in preparation for his Travels With Charley tour beginning later this month.
April is the cruelest month, says T.S. Eliot, perhaps because it brings you some false spring that often enough is put in its place by late blasts of winter. This is certainly true on the Great Plains. But I am leaving on my big John Steinbeck Travels With Charley Tour on April 27, and I needed to take my Listening to America Airstream trailer on a shakedown cruise before the main event. I needed to de-winterize the rig, check the tires and hitch, and then take it on some short hops to make sure that all the systems are working correctly. After that, it’s all human error.
I fetched it out of its winter storage garage a few days ago, without much trouble, but before I could haul it anywhere I needed to hook up the twin 12-volt batteries, which work in parallel. For me this was about equivalent to doing the Rubik’s cube. Fortunately I had taken a photograph of the configuration last October and after considerable “cogitating” I hooked the batteries back up, with the same sense of doom you see in a Tom Cruise movie when they disarm the nuclear device.
I renewed the Airstream’s vehicle license at the dreaded DOT, which in North Dakota is a pretty friendly place, actually. I gassed up the pickup. I filled the 30-gallon water tank with 30 gallons of water. I bought a few groceries and a bottle of gin. I tossed new sheets on the bed to be properly made up later. I walked around the array three times to make sure I was not about to commit some catastrophic rookie error.
Baby Steps
And then I drove 112.6 miles to the village of Sykeston, North Dakota. Population 100. I chose Sykeston because it was close to Bismarck in case of ignominious retreat, and I had a special affection for a municipal RV park on the western edge of town. I had stayed there a couple of years ago in another life. But now it was April 16, 2024, on the sub-Arctic northern Great Plains, latitude 47.46.60. High winds, gusts up to 55 mph, temperature 31 or so, slow freezing rain to the point that the gravel roads were slippery. I found a lovely pull through campsite. Needless to say I was the only person in the RV park. Nobody came to check up on me or collect the fee or remind me that the park is not technically open until Memorial Day. No deputy sheriff stopped by to question my sanity. Sykeston is important in North Dakota because it was the hometown of one of North Dakota’s greatest writers Larry Woiwode, the author of the plains novel Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975).
It rained steadily but lightly through the day. Good news: no leaks. I spent a couple of hours opening every cabinet and drawer, stowing the food in the pantry and the refrigerator, making the bed, checking the water pressure, finding a place for books (five), electronic devices (three), notebooks and journals, and four days’ worth of clothes. I tried all the cabin lights. I boiled water in the microwave for herb tea. I made sure the gas furnace was working. This would be important.
Then I had my first evening in the Airstream. I poured myself a glass of light red wine. I made a very modest dinner. I typed a few emails. And I read for three or four hours (before and after dinner), from three different books. As darkness set in, there was the usual plashing of rain, creaking and settling of the rig, humming of onboard systems, and the whistle of the wind in the trees and grass — just enough to keep me alert for the possibility that a vicious gang of local toughs would descend on my little idyll with clubs and machetes and cut me into fish bait. By 10 o’clock I was fast asleep.
Finding a Rhythm
I’m not at all sure what the rhythms will be when I start to pull myself across the entire continent, but for the moment it looks like this:
- Wake up ca. 6:30 a.m. no alarm
- The stuff we do when we wake up
- Check email and read the newsfeed on my phone
- Make a cup of coffee or tea
- Make bed
- Tidy up the cabin
- Read and write for a couple of hours
- Then break camp: decouple from campsite electricity and water; make sure everything in the rig is put away carefully; go through departure checklist
- Drive for a few hours, catching up on national affairs on Satellite radio
- Refuel and buy bottles of water
- Find new campground around 2 p.m.
- Hook up water and electricity
- Read and write for a couple of hours
- Dinner
- Wind down with a couple of good books
Rinse and repeat, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon; from Seattle, Washington, to St. Petersburg, Florida; from Bottineau, North Dakota, to Beaumont, Texas.
To get ready for this great adventure, I swore off television altogether a couple of months ago. At every campground I’ve visited over the years, I see couples beginning their stay by positioning their television antenna. Top priority. As dusk comes on you can see the blue flicker of television screens in every other RV, several large screens in the mammoth bus rigs, not many in the teardrop miniatures. Our national addiction to television must be exceedingly strong, if you prefer the Late Show or Wheel of Fortune to the star constellations in the American outback or the quiet of a night beyond city limits. So I decided to go cold turkey so that I wouldn’t be tempted on night eight of the journey.
More reading time. More sleeping time. More musing time.
When I am at full alert I read at the dining table in the Airstream, which is surrounded by seating cushions on three sides. But later in the evening, I like to read in bed. I have extra pillows for this purpose, and it turns out the Airstream night reading lamp is perfectly positioned. I read from 15 minutes to two hours, depending on several factors, and place the book next to me on the bed, in case I wake up in the night and cannot go back to sleep.
The Curse of Henry David Thoreau
I’ve been reading Thoreau’s Walden lately, so I’m yearning to be more minimalist — well, less maximalist. In his chapter “Higher Laws,” Thoreau says that by reason, morality, and instinct he is enamored of vegetarianism, though he does eat some flesh. He wrote, “I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind.” Well, that explains why I have written so little poetry! That was then (1845) before we broke the planet. Today there is a strong additional argument against meat: we know that the industrial beef/pork/chicken complex is hard on the planet, hard on the animals, and not sustainable. But we love our beef — I love beef — and we just don’t want to transition to a largely vegetable diet, which would be better for the planet and probably for most humans, too. I’ve made a pact to eat less meat on this journey (though some) and to cook that meat out on the picnic table on a small portable tabletop grill I keep for that purpose.
The best laid plans of mice and men …
We’ll see. I know I’m not willing to give up the best and, for travelers, the most reliable, meal of the day: breakfast — eggs, toast, juice, bacon, perhaps some fried potatoes. Coffee. Besides, that’s where you meet the “colorful locals” that William Least Heat Moon specialized in in his 1982 Blue Highways.
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau also reminds us that “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” Thanks to Kindle and eBooks, I will only carry 10-15 book books at any given time, mostly by and about Steinbeck. But I’ll have a full library of more than 100 books on my iPad. I’m taking clothes for 10 days — Yelp can help find laundromats, can’t it? — and a spare set of sheets. Enough food for light repasts. Unlike Steinbeck, no full liquor cabinet. Just gin and wine and a bottle of special Steinbeck-related whisky a friend gave me the other day. I don’t want to fill the space the truck bed and the Airstream provide. I’m leaving my tuxedo at home, for example, and the Tiki lamps and AstroTurf. Minimalism!
Day Two — Wednesday. I woke up in the double fetal position. The heater had failed. I was too cold to sleep any longer even when I put my coat over two blankets and lined up the extra pillows for insulation. The only thing worse than how cold I felt in bed would be the truer cold of getting out of bed and moving around. I got up and lit the gas burners on the stove, which took off the chill in no more than 10 minutes. I soon discovered the problem. Sykeston’s camp units did not have their electricity turned on yet, so I had reckoned the twin batteries would keep things percolating through the night. They were dead. I have a small “super quiet” generator in the back of the pickup, so I went out barefoot in a bathrobe, cursing the sleet storm like King Lear. The bathrobe ballooned out like a kite or a debutante’s wedding train. I hooked the generator up to the Airstream’s power grid and yanked the cord. Note: The generator started better when I thought to put gas in it.
All systems perked up thanks to the carbon economy. Within minutes I could feel circulation in my brain and feet.
I read for a couple of hours and took a not quite efficient not quite hot shower, shaved, packed up carefully, and drove due west (into the storm) to a state park on North Dakota’s Lake Sakakawea, a giant reservoir backed up by Garrison Dam on the Missouri River in central North Dakota. Total distance from Sykeston to the state park campground: 118 miles. But it was rough hauling. The wind was now approaching the heroic. There were AM radio warnings against traveling with high profile vehicles. Everywhere I stopped the store clerks were a little crazed by the wind and not afraid to bitch about it. In O.E. Rolvaag’s famous novel, Giants in the Earth, about the pioneers who created the modern Dakotas, Beret Hansa is driven insane by the isolation and the incessant wind, and Per Hansa, her husband, freezes to death on a haystack in a blizzard. But who’s fretting?
The rig was buffeted and I had to grip the steering wheel in the genuine 10:2 manner. Only once did I panic a bit, when the whole array — pickup and Airstream — were thrown across the median by a single gust.
When I finally arrived at the state park, the ranger who checked me in, noting that I was his first customer in 2024, six weeks before sensible people start to visit state parks, had to fumble all over the office to find the right forms and brochures and the cardboard mirror tag showing that I was a legitimate occupant of Site 136 North Loop. He chose well. I was as sheltered from the gale force winds as I could be in the state of North Dakota.
When I deployed the door steps and opened the Airstream, I began by picking up all the things that had been redistributed by the ride, plugged into the park’s electrical system (no water yet, not until the last frost), and settled in. It was about 3 p.m. I read and napped and read and wrote and made dinner and had a celebratory gin and tonic. The heater worked this time, though in such close quarters you definitely hear it go off and on through the evening.
Reading for Inspiration
Day Three — I woke up just warm enough to feel the luxury of good blankets. When I checked the weather on my smartphone, it did not seem prudent or useful to seek another campground another 100 miles away. The wind had reduced my gas mileage to about 11 miles per hour. I let the office know I would be staying another night.
I spent the day reading and writing. I should be reading Thoreau’s Walden, because I will be interviewed about it soon for a documentary film. But I’ve always made a habit of reading something other than the thing I should be reading. And I wanted to inaugurate my travels in the right spirit, so I read Hampton Sides’ new study of Captain James Cook’s third voyage (1776-1780), The Wide, Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook. Just out. I brought along Tony Horwitz’ superb Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before (2002). I read the two books in relays, back and forth, relishing Sides’ masterful telling of the story and Horowitz’ many (and I think deeper) insights about western civ’s colonial project. The books filled me with lust for my own (my daughter would say bougie) adventures. Exploration has been one of my handful of intellectual interests for decades, ever since I first read a one-volume edition of the journals of Lewis and Clark. But I did not know much about Cook except the obvious.
The fascinations of Captain Cook’s three circumnavigations of the Earth are unending. I marked several hundred passages in the book, wrote several dozen texts of query and exclamation to my Enlightenment friend David Nicandri, whose own book on the post-Cook search for the the Northwest Passage, Discovering Nothing: In Pursuit of an Elusive Northwest Passage, will come out this summer.
Then I slept, with visions of what Nicandri calls the “palm tree paradigm” dancing in my head. It might have been the gin.
Day Four — Friday morning I woke up snug in my bed for a change. The wind was still howling all around me, but the Airstream did not buffet or stir. I don’t have a thermometer on board, but my smartphone informed me that it was 23 above zero. Light dry snow was dusting the gray landscape, each flake (but they were not really flakes) like tiny Styrofoam pellets, gentle baby hail. I went out to the pickup in my boxers and t-shirt (the campground was entirely empty), and immediately realized that with the windchill it felt like actual below zero weather. By the time I plunged back into the Airstream my hands were raw from the cold. Now it wasn’t just a capricious spring. Now it felt like winter. No day for a spring hike.
I thought of what William Clark said at Dismal Nitch on the storm-tossed Pacific Coast on November 22, 1805, when the men were sleeping in crevasses on the rocks and the Columbia River tossed giant tree trunks up on the shore: “O! how horriable is the day.” I could see the headline: “Lifelong Dakotan Found Frozen in His Boxer Shorts Next to Luxury RV. Few Surprised, None Who Knew Him Well.”
After I thawed out, put on some clothes, and found some gloves, I battened things up and drove slowly back to Bismarck. After just four backup setbacks I was able to ease the Airstream into its storage bay. Then I began to fret about the water pipes. The weekend temperatures would hover in the mid to late 20s. So I pumped all the water through the system until the faucets sucked air. And drove to town. Then I began to worry that the wastewater holding tank would freeze, so I drove back out to the storage facility and drained that water, all benign, onto the hillside next to the storage garage. Then I drove to town to take a few hot showers and get back to work.
What can I conclude?
This is going to be a blast!