Roads From the Ashes. Megan Edwards
all, one component of the fog was work.
I was a fledgling freelance writer and newspaper columnist. My first column had been published the week before the fire, and I was determined to sell my editor on the idea that I would still file the thing regularly, whether I was in Outer Boondocks, Alaska, Off The Map, Maine, or Times Square. Nobody would be able to tell I wasn’t still firmly planted in Pasadena, California, including him. I swore to it, so he said he’d give it a try. It helped that he was already heavily into computers and electronic communication. It also helped that I had a good track record with deadlines. I hadn’t even missed the one that arrived two days after the fire, and that accomplishment had left a lasting impression.
So it was really that column, for which I was paid the princely sum of $25 a week, that led to our acquiring a mobile office equipped with $15,000 worth of electronic gadgets. To appreciate just how cutting-edge we were, think back to before “AOL” was only a typo for “AWOL,” like 1993.
It was a day when few could understand why anyone would want to access the Internet by cellular telephone. Heck, it was a day when few had more than a vague idea about what the Internet was. I was one. I read a bunch of stuff, and still couldn’t quite understand about onramps and service providers. I’d think I was beginning to catch on, but then I’d run into a POP, SLIP, or a BMP, and get stuck.
But 1993 was the year America Online began paving the continent with “free” disks. Every man, woman and child in the country received these disks on a regular basis. Every magazine on every newsstand had AOL disks stuck between alternating pages. You could walk through cemeteries and find one carefully propped against each headstone. Bars used them for coasters, contractors used them for insulation, and everybody used them for doorstops. There were so many AOL free disks thrown into New York trash cans that the landfill at Freshkill was closed two years ahead of schedule. When AOL stopped sending them out, the U.S. Postal Service laid off two thousand workers. Okay, okay, I’ve overstated things a little. But it is true that I had three AOL disks before I owned a computer to try them on, and my friend’s dog had two.
Fortunately, I knew a computer consultant who was fluent in both English and Nerd. We told him what we wanted to do, and he found all the stuff to do it. Then he taught us how to use it, all in perfect, uncondescending English.
Here’s what we got, and in January, 1994, it was bleeding edge. The laptop was a Zenith Data Systems 486 with a color monitor and a 502-megabyte hard disk. It had a slot on one side into which you could stick a PCMCIA “credit card” modem. The one I got boasted a baud rate of 14,400 which was twice as fast as most people’s regular modems at the time. I also got a separate box that could read CD-Rom disks, a SCSI cable to hook it to the computer, a Hewlett-Packard portable ink jet printer, and a black case to hold everything, including a snake nest of cables and assorted transformers, batteries and power packs.
So big deal. 1994 was the year thousands and thousands of people were diving into computerland with open checkbooks. Everything I had so far was new, but hardly unique.
Then we got the black box. It arrived with no instructions, but its manufacturers claimed it would make a cellular telephone talk to a modem. The black box was our key to mobility, but it was a silent enigma. Our computer consultant knew nothing about it. I called the customer service number on the box it arrived in. The person who answered the phone knew nothing about it. I’d arrived at the edge of charted territory, and I was on my own.
Chapter 3
The Epicenter of Burning Desire
Itching For Adventure
Itching is romantic when it means desire, and in the days Mark and I spent planning our grand journey, the word aptly described our yen for adventure. It was a pleasant itch, one we were eager to indulge. Little did we know, in those halcyon days when our travels were unsullied by genuine experience, that there would come a day when all notions of sentimental scratching would be routed by a real-life invasion of starving fleas.
Or maybe they were ticks. Whatever sort of bloodsucking pests they were, about a million of them hitched a ride when we pulled into a truck stop near Albuquerque, New Mexico. We’d taken Marvin for a walk before going to sleep. The parking lot had just been resurfaced with a layer of asphalt the consistency of blackstrap molasses. “Oh, great,” I said as I peeled my shoe away from the ground at every step. “This will be with us forever.” Marvin hadn’t liked it much, either, and we’d headed for a dusty field full of sage brush where he could walk without sticking.
We retired for the night. In the morning, Mark woke up scratching. Pretty soon I was scratching, too. From the look of him, Marvin had been scratching all night.
A closer look revealed armies of minute black bugs marching across his belly, entrenched around the edge of each ear, and bivouacked between his toes. He was swarming with them from nose to tail. Suddenly I remembered that he’d slept in our bed most of the night. Not only that, he’d spent at least an hour on my head. It had rained during the night, and Marvin was frightened by the thunder. Excuse me while I scratch. Just writing this is making me itch all over again.
I am a person who believes that one tick is hideous beyond description. One is enough, when you think about what it does. It screws its head into your vein and bloats on your blood. More often than not, you don’t notice it until it’s a foot long. When you finally discover it, it’s like realizing you’ve been hosting a body snatcher. You scream. If you’re in the shower, it scares your husband. When he sees why you screamed, he screams, too.
This situation was so extreme it rendered us both speechless. Mark held Marvin down, and I set to work with a pair of tweezers. It was a Sisyphean task, like mowing a football field with nail clippers.
If you rolled bagels in them, you’d swear these things were poppy seeds. You wouldn’t notice the difference until you took a bite. Then you’d make the delightful discovery that your mouth was full of little balloons bursting with blood. They popped when I pinched them. It was a gory scene.
I stayed at my task for an hour or so, and the war was still far from over. “I’ll keep up the attack as we go,” I said to Mark. “I hope you don’t itch too much to drive.”
I searched and destroyed all day, taking breaks only to scratch and wash blood and body parts off my hands. The bugs fought back by dropping to the floor and scurrying into corners. I added a Dust Buster to my arsenal and kept on fighting. By the time we arrived in Las Vegas, the enemy was in full retreat.
Money, Money, Money
Have you ever noticed how, once you have resolved on a course of action, life’s minutiae mobilize to thwart your best-laid plans? Distractions attack from every quarter, just like an invasion of bloodsucking bugs. How can you concentrate when you itch? How can you progress when you’re constantly pausing to scratch? Sometimes, in the months we spent getting ready to hit the road, I had the feeling we might never actually do it. We were too busy swatting mundane distractions.
And even now, psychic fleas are pestering me. Every time I set out to talk about money, I let them sidetrack me. Instead of facing my subject squarely, I find myself writing about mysterious black boxes or infestations of biting insects. But money, as it is wont to do, keeps floating back to the surface. This time, I swear, I won’t pause to itch or scratch for at least a page.
There are two reasons money is a recurring theme. One is that people always ask us about it. The other is that we keep having to drum some up to stay on the road.
People usually ask an either-or question, something like, “Did you get a huge insurance settlement, or are you independently wealthy?” Having observed our itinerary and estimating how much gas a 7-ton monster guzzles, they figure those are the only two options. I would have thought the same a few years ago.
The fact of the matter is, there are other possibilities. They aren’t the ones you’ll read about in how-to-manage-your-money magazines. They only show up occasionally in interviews with people who have “beaten the odds”: an illiterate man who manages to send eight children to college or a 45-year-old woman with cancer who climbs a peak in the Himalayas.
If