It was Christmas Eve and irrationally warm. I’d just spent four hours tearing around a local wildlife refuge, shaking out our tagged and titled Honda XR400R. Enjoying being alone in my helmet for a spell, a wide nation away from the ceaseless tide of decisions that accompany moving your family into a truck. The joker in front of me was putting along at a ripe 30 mph in a 45 zone. I checked for traffic, dropped a gear, and swung into the oncoming lane. Cranked on the throttle and let that hilarious little cylinder spin its brains out.  

Man, this thing pulls.

Last Wednesday, I went to go pick up a new truck bed in Pennsylvania. Out of the blue, my father asked to join. If it’s a busy time for me and mine, customizing our Dodge Ram into a home to spend a year on the road, it’s just as hectic for him and his. He’s a month into new fatherhood, having just had a daughter at 50 years old. It’s a strange thing holding your sibling for the first time. Feeling the gulf of 30 years between you and her. Knowing her world will be the same as my young daughter’s, a universe away from anything anyone knows.

The bed came off this week. It’s the first real step in the truck’s transition from hammered work mule to roaming home. Eight bolts, some wires, and a fuel neck. That’s all it took. I had the thing dangling from a cherry picker inside of an hour. In a few days, I’ll load up and aim the Dodge north, for Pennsylvania, to pick up the aluminum flatbed that’ll serve as the base for our pop-up truck camper.

Beth and I weren’t married when my grandfather passed. How do you sum a man? Put him in words? He laughed like a jackal, but rarely. Grinned sly, never smiled. Spent his war years in the Navy, wrenching on Corsairs under the California sun and fighting nothing fiercer than farm boys twice his size, a lump of lead in his neckerchief to bring them down or stand him up. Raised three boys in a house smaller than a fair-sized flat. Worked. Always worked. And fought, always fought. His jobs. His cars. His house. His marriage. Himself. Finally, cancer. Got licked and did the licking, sometimes.

I bought wheels. That’s not entirely accurate; I was given wheels. And then I spent $200 on them. This is not something the Dodge needs. Of the inexhaustible list of bits and pieces that have decayed, shattered, broken, or vanished over the last 13 years, the five brilliant factory alloys have escaped unscathed. Three of the four center caps look like they’ve fallen from space, but otherwise, my rolling stock’s just fine. So why replace them with hateful, heavy steel?

The alternator’s been giving me fits. A good cold morning will send it dead, leaving a pair of shiny new AGM batteries to shoulder the burden of keeping the lights on and the heater spinning. With enough eyebrow raising and a few quiet curses, it will wake up long enough to get me where I’m going.

It happened the other night. I finally got excited about what we’re doing. It sounds insane, I know, but I’ve spent the last three months in various shades of panic, jumping from one immediate question to the next as we put a bow on our life in Tennessee and prepare for a year on the road. I hadn’t given myself time to think about the next 12 months. About what we’ll see, where we’ll go. Then I got something in the mail.

My sister cried. Big, wild sobs like I haven’t seen since we were kids. I didn’t expect it. Everyone’s taken the news that we’re tearing off for the horizon differently. We didn’t make the announcement all at once, afraid of saying the words and making it true, of spooking it off, maybe. We started by selling our things. And not just clothes and gadgets and useless tools but cars and furniture. It’s not something we do in America. We don’t shed belongings, we acquire them, hoard them up until our worthless treasures tell the dusty tale of our lives. It wasn’t a week before a friend called and asked quietly,

“Do you need help?”

We sold our books. The tattered paperbacks and solemn hardcovers. The last living survivors of a liberal arts education and the soft-breathing mementos from old flames. I piled them in plastic bins and sent them off to a soulless used bookstore in the soulless part of town, a massive metal building with no windows and a parking lot view of I-40. I have become some kind of ruthless.

I’ve heard it all my life, felt it pulling at me from the dark and lonely places behind my ribs. It’s there when my mind goes quiet a second, when the distractions and noises I’ve painted all around me bed down. There, in the last long minutes before dusk gives up the dance floor, when the stereo lulls and there’s nothing in the air but the soft smell of her hair from the passenger seat and the spice of roadside eucalyptus. It wells up, that old echo. Run. Run. Run.