Roads From the Ashes. Megan Edwards
Maybe the simplest road to unencumbered success would be to buy a Eurail pass and relive the days when you traveled light and traded paperbacks in youth hostels. Maybe you can find yourself a monastery and embark on a month-long retreat in a cell without closets. One thing’s certain, though. If you stay where you are and follow the stuff-attracting patterns that define American life, your suitcase won’t just bulge at the end of a week. It’ll explode. By the end of the month, you’ll be the curator of a brand new archive. Inexorably following its law, your stuff will have expanded to fill all available space.
Back in the seventies, when the Shah of Iran was sent into exile, hundreds of American expatriates left with him. A friend of mine was a teacher in Tehran at the time. One day while he was at school, he received instructions to drive to the airport, leave the keys in his car’s ignition, and get on a plane. He left a large, nicely furnished apartment full of mementos of a life of travel and an Ivy League education. When I met him in Germany a few years later, it was in the living room of his large, nicely furnished apartment. Conspicuously devoid of Persian rugs, it nonetheless displayed ample evidence of a love of travel, a fascinating life. “Sometimes you have to swap possessions for experience,” he said.
After a disaster, a giant machine mobilizes, and its motto is, “Put Everything Back.” Government agencies like FEMA and the SBA arrive in a blizzard of forms in triplicate. Insurance adjusters explain about “replacement value,” and “policy limits.” Vaporized homes are recreated on paper, and the stuff they contained fills sheet after sheet of foolscap. Everywhere, scores of people began work immediately to do what people do after catastrophes: make everything look the way it did before.
But what if you were thinking, “Well, thanks, but I’m not so sure I want everything back just the way it was. After all, how many times do you get to start over in life? Isn’t this a good time to stop and think a while? Isn’t it a chance to maybe do something different?”
A perfect place to think materialized magically for Mark and Marvin and me. It was a guest house on a secluded estate in the town of San Gabriel. Designed as the ultimate entertainment pad, it had a huge living room, three bathrooms, and one bedroom. Sliding glass doors opened on one side to a camellia garden, and on the other to a large swimming pool. It was beautiful, which made us smile. It had enormous closets, which made us laugh.
Don’t get me wrong. I love stuff. I love the people who brought us stuff when we had none. Family, friends, and strangers gave us clothes, furniture, dishes, pots, books, a bed, a table, food, a computer, and money. We were, quite literally, showered with gifts. Without them, life would have looked awfully bleak. After all, we live in three dimensions, where down comforters feel good on a chilly night, a dining room table is a great convenience, and china plates lend elegance to the simplest meal. I have never appreciated ordinary household stuff more than I did while I lived at the secret villa. It had appeared out of thin air. It was magic. It was love.
Christmas Came Anyway
We lived at “The Villa” for five months, from November, 1993, until March, 1994. One day in December, a package tied with string arrived, forwarded by the post office from our former address. It had German stamps and an illegible customs declaration stuck to the top. At first, I was baffled, but then I remembered.
In 1990, Mark and I had taken a trip to Europe. From Athens, we’d taken a ship through the Corinth Canal north through the Adriatic to Venice. We rented a car and drove through the Alps to Bavaria. In Oberammergau, we stayed with friends who introduced us to one of the master wood carvers for which the town is famous.
Before we left, we commissioned a Christmas crèche. Each December, we’d be receiving a piece or two until we had a complete cast of characters. The first Christmas, we got the Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. By the time everything went up in smoke, we’d added two shepherds, a goat, a cow, a donkey, and a couple of angels.
When Mark got home, I showed him the box. “Do you know what this is?” I asked. He, too, was puzzled for a minute, but then he smiled. “It’s got to be the wise men,” he said. We opened the package, pulled away the excelsior, and there they were, each holding his perfectly carved little gift, each looking intently in the direction of a recipient who wasn’t there.
“Sorry, no baby Jesus here,” I said as I set them on the dining room table. “I’m afraid you guys came to the wrong stable.”
But they didn’t, really. They proved that no matter what happens, Christmas comes. Christmas doesn’t even require a baby Jesus. It comes anyway, and the wise men proved it that year by insisting on arriving at an empty rental cottage.
And Christmas did come. By the time it arrived, we’d celebrated my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary and my birthday, and we’d announced our grand plan. We’d hung a huge map of North America on the living room wall, and we’d begun sticking pins in all the places we’d always dreamed of visiting.
The wise men stayed on our table through January. Before I packed them away, I wrote to the wood carver to explain what had happened and ask him to start over. “We need a new holy family,” I wrote, “And shepherds and animals and angels. Everything but the wise men.”
Next Christmas, even if we had no table to set them on, the wise men would have something to look at, a reason for bearing gifts. I figured it was the least I could do for them, since they’d traveled 6,000 miles on faith, and arrived just when we needed some.
And now, we were about to follow our own star, with not much more than faith to fund it. We were fairy tale youngest sons, the ones who pack a bandana and leave home on foot to seek their fortunes. Maybe we should have followed their lead, but we were post-Ford children, and we needed something more. Before we could hit the road, we had to find ourselves a vehicle.
Chapter 2
A Phoenix Hatches
Trek to Traveland
Before we decided we wanted to acquire one of our own, neither Mark nor I had done much more than peek inside a motorhome. As children, we’d camped in tents with our families. We’d felt superior to people who didn’t like “roughing it,” overly civilized softies who couldn’t be away from television for a weekend and felt compelled to tow their own bathrooms. Never in a million years did we see ourselves as members of the Winnebago crowd.
We still didn’t, but we also didn’t want to hit the road in a tent. If we were going to live on a roll for six months, we wanted a few amenities. Suddenly, we had metamorphosed into the people we’d snickered at. We’d be equipped with television. We’d be hauling our own toilet.
It was a novel idea for us, but Americans have been in love with recreational vehicles since 1929, when the Covered Wagon Company in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, offered the first mass produced travel trailer to the public. By the end of the 1930s, 300 companies were building homes-on-wheels, and the growth continues. Hundreds of thousands of vans, trailers, campers and motorhomes are on the road at any given moment today, and even more fill storage yards and driveways from coast to coast. We wanted only one, but we were daunted at the prospect of finding it. We hardly knew where to begin.
Fortunately, just about every motorhome, camper, and trailer ever built can be found and purchased in southern California. It’s an RV shopper’s Mecca, rivaled only by Florida and Arizona. We decided to begin our search at a gigantic consortium of dealers known as Traveland USA. Its billboard promised hundreds of manufacturers and thousands of units, all in one magnificent location. It was the kind of place we’d heretofore assiduously avoided, but early one Sunday morning, we drove straight to Irvine and parked in the shadow of fourteen Winnebagos.
A guard at an entrance kiosk gave us a map to Traveland that identified all the manufacturers and their locations. Not knowing where else to begin, we went to number one. It was a warm day, and a salesman was lounging in a folding chair outside an office in a trailer. He stretched, rose, and walked toward us.
“Howdy, folks,” he said. “How can I help you this fine, fine morning?”
“We want to buy an RV,” said Mark. “What can you show us?”