I bought a watch. A gift to myself for my 31st birthday. Nothing wild or expensive: something that can sit on my wrist and endure the absentminded abuse of my limbs. Hiking and wrenching, swimming and fatherhood. A straightforward device for measuring time that I can hand to my daughter in 20 years with a note that says,

“Don’t waste it.”

We were on the warpath even before we left. Digging through boxes we hadn’t opened in eight years, investigating relics we’d stashed under the steps the day we moved in. Tossing everything that didn’t have an immediate value. I was thumbing through a stack of photos and notes when I found it: a few lines of scribbled text on a sheet of notebook paper, the blue ink smeared, maybe from rain. A quote from Emmanuel.

“Every moment of your life, you are offered the opportunity to choose—love or fear. To tread the earth, or soar the heavens. Fear would walk you on a narrower path, promising to take you where you want to go. Love always says, 'Open your arms and fly with me.'”

The bartender is insistent: “Fred, there’s no food here.”

Fred stares for a minute. If he’s insulted, or disappointed, his face doesn’t say. He looks down at the concrete floor, deliberates, then turns and wanders off, his long, graceful legs hesitating half way between each step.

Something told me to start at the coast. To run for the Atlantic, where I spent every summer of my youth with the salt kiss of the ocean on my lips. If you’re born in the Appalachians you can’t help but make the migration. Follow the water down off the mountain and across wide plains of Virginia or the Carolinas, right up to the country's edge where the land falls to bits into the sea.

Maybe that’s why I fell in love with my wife. She’s a Virginia low country girl, raised up out of marsh mud and Gloucester grasses, counting oysters and Chesapeake blue crab as kin. She’s been gone from that place some 13 years but I swear I still smell the coast on the nape of her neck.

Virginia was an inevitability, a shade of a homecoming before setting off in earnest. Beth and I found each other here, spent the first shaky years of our love together, here. The tangle of crooked county roads, the red brick of a 400-year-old downtown, the close and fierce shadow of the Blue Ridge—all of it felt like climbing into a familiar bed.

I needed the comfort. The reality of leaving everything behind had spun me about; I’d never felt so entirely uncertain. We'd spent six months building and packing and wrenching at hell's own pace and we needed to catch our breath. The original plan was to churn south and east for warmer weather and a salt breeze. Instead we were leaving the green of the Tennessee Valley for bare trees and cold, muddy ground, running north again towards winter. Spring takes its sweet time making its way to the Virginia hills.

I haven’t been still in months. The deadline for our departure came down like a hammer, swift and heavy. Complicated, in part, by various failures. The new clutch fan I installed a month ago lunched itself spectacularly, seizing then destroying the hub bearing behind it. Two days before we were set to leave I had the entirety of the truck’s cooling system dismantled.

It’s times like these that I love the truck more than I can say. It’s a big Lego set, a stack of pieces that go together easy enough. Spin the right bolts, pull off the right bits. With some time and patience the work gets done, but it sucked up the morning and a piece of the afternoon, hours I had planned to use packing what was left to pack.

In a matter of days we’ll load up the truck and head somewhere. Anywhere, or everywhere we can get to inside a year. It’s exhilarating, that intoxicating rush of possibility spiked clear through with worry. The past two weeks have been a certain flavor of hell as we try to pack up what’s left, button down the truck and the camper, and check off an ever-expanding list of must-dos. These past weeks have also been a perfect reminder of why we love this town.

The sun shone on the cold desert, the sky drowning blue and cirrus fractured, clouds floating 18,000 feet over the calamity unfolding beneath my boots. The windshield was full of the painted desert, white with snow from a week-gone winter storm. The voltmeter on the Dodge’s dash floated at an uncomfortable 12.5 volts, two below normal. The alternator wasn’t charging. Ninety miles outside Delta, Utah, I sat inside the truck, shouldered on the side of Highway 50. The two-lane vanished to perfect pinpoints on the frozen basin, east ahead and west, behind. I took a breath. Ran my hands over my face. I hadn’t yet had the camper for two full days.

I put this job off because it’s hell. A guaranteed shitfest of writhing around on concrete, tangled in extension cords and air lines, scrambling in a dusting of burnt rubber and metal shavings, hands and tools and coveralls slathered in tacky assembly grease and blood. But, with three of the six bushings torn on the Dodge, they’d all need to be replaced before installing a new camper in California.

I had a moment of panic when they bolted the flatbed onto the Dodge. There it was, staring me in the face. The 63 square-feet we’ll call home for the next year. It’s a tiny amount of room. Unfit for a bathroom or closet or bedroom, let alone all three, plus kitchen and dining room. It stoked that now familiar whisper.

What the hell have I done?