In Search of America's Heartbeat, Twelve Months on the Road

In Search of America’s Heartbeat:

Twelve Months on the Road

Robert H. Mottram

Publisher Information

In Search of America's Heartbeat

Robert H. Mottram

Print Version; 2nd Edition Copyright 2013 Robert H. Mottram; All rights reserved.

eBook; Copyright 2014 Robert H. Mottram

Cover Design by Alan Pranke

Cover Photo by Robert H. Mottram

Published by Armchair ePublishing at Smashwords.

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Anacortes, WA 98221

The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to the author’s parents, John and Fay Mottram, whose journeys through life set worthy examples of courage, patience and love.

* * * *

The author wishes to thank his wife, Karen Mottram, for the pleasure of her company on this journey across America and for her able assistance and sage advice on this manuscript. She is a wonderful partner in every sense of the word.

Chapter 1

I'm waiting at the state Department of Licensing office for someone to call my name, and finally somebody does. I’m about to renew my Washington state driver’s license.

This your current address? the guy at the counter asks, glancing at my old license.

No, I tell him. I lived at that address for 30 years, but no longer. I’ve sold the house and I’m about to hit the road. My new address is a personal mail box at an office suite a couple of miles from here.

Can’t use that, the guy says. Gotta have a permanent street address.

But I don’t have a permanent street address. I sold the house. I live in a fifth-wheel trailer. I’ll be traveling. Constantly. The only address I have — my official address — is the personal mail box in the office suite.

The guy peers over the tops of his bifocals, and fixes me with a bored look.

Ya gotta have a permanent street address, he says.

Okay, use the one on my old license — the one I'm no longer associated with — it’s permanent, and it’s on a street.

That’ll work, he says.

I don’t know when the idea occurred to us. But by the time Karen and I got to within a year of our retirements, we’d both internalized it. We’d sell the house, put our stuff in storage and hit the road full time. We’d be gone for a year or more.

Gone where? In search of what?

At first, we weren’t sure. In search of America, I guess. The real America, whatever that might be. Wherever we might find it. If we could find it, we wanted to put our hands on its heart and see if we could feel the beat.

I’d spent my life in daily journalism with newspapers and a wire service; always, it seemed, in the eye of a hurricane. It’s the nature of the job. But after 40 years I was ready for a change. Like cops, newspaper people tend to become a little jaded; a little warped. For 40 years, it had seemed as though everybody had a grievance. Everybody wanted something that was claimed by someone else.

I was tired of the shouting.

Karen was a registered nurse, working most of her life in public health. She tracked communicable diseases for our Western Washington County, zapping them — when she could — before they had a chance to run barefoot through the population.

She loved the work, and did it well. But her work environment had grown toxic, she sometimes said. She was ready to bail.

One week after we walked out of our offices for the final time, we rolled out of town in our diesel pickup truck, a 32-foot, fifth-wheel trailer hitched to the center of its bed.

Actually, my plan had been to buy a camper for the truck; the kind that sits inside the bed and hangs out over the cab.

No freeways, I told Karen. We’ll go through the little towns, the crossroads communities. We’ll be there for the county fairs, the farmers’ markets. We’ll be there in the little general store in the Southern Appalachians when the local folks show up with their guitars and mandolins. We’ll hit the back roads. We’ll see how people really live.

Actually, what we hit here was our first bump in the road.

"No way in hell, Karen says, am I going to live for a year in a pickup camper."

Well, marriage — as you probably know — is a series of compromises. To say the least. So a 32-foot fifth-wheel it is. Freeways are in. Back roads are out; at least while we’re hitched to the fifth-wheel. But after we park the trailer and unhitch, back roads are in, too.

We decide we’re going to see as much of America as we can see in a year without hurrying. We’ll take it as it comes; no schedule, no itinerary.

We find a trailer after weeks of chasing classified ads and calling around the Northwest. A new trailer in the size range we were looking for would cost $40,000-plus, we discover. We find a used one, finally, for half that. It’s five years old, single-owner and ready to roll. The guy who owns it claims it’s never known shoes or smoking or pets, and it looks it.

Why they call these trailers fifth wheels I’m not sure. The trailer ends in a goose-neck shape at the front, and the pin that hooks to your pickup extends down vertically from the front of the goose-neck. The hitch to which the pin connects isn’t located at the rear of the truck, but sits instead in the center of the truck’s bed. Whoever named these trailers must have thought that, with so much of the trailer’s weight at rest on the bed of the truck, the truck in effect served as the trailer’s fifth wheel.

We don’t realize how complicated life has become until we begin to get ready to hit the road. How do you pay bills on the road? How do you get bills on the road? How do you keep in touch? How do you get medicines? How do you do taxes?

The first thing we need is a cell phone, and we need a calling plan that won’t impose roaming charges. After all, we’re going to be away from home for the next 12 months. We don’t want every call — even from our campground to the pizza place just down the road — to be a toll call. So we buy a phone and a plan that gives us free roaming. We can call from anywhere to anywhere in the country at no additional charge as long as we stay inside the number of minutes allotted for talking each month.

The next thing we need is a lap-top computer. One that will work off the cell phone to access the Internet. No problem. This stuff is out there, but the phone plan is pricey. We pay $79 a month for Internet access.

With it, however, comes a degree of independence. We can access the Internet from anywhere — from inside our trailer, from the cab of our truck as we travel — as long as we’re in range of a cell tower.

The Internet allows us to keep in touch with friends, and more. We close our account at a regional bank and switch to a national chain so we can bank on-line and visit bank offices, if need be, nearly anywhere in the country. We arrange for our pension payments to go directly into our account, and for our credit card company to take payment from our account automatically on the first of every month. We charge virtually everything to our credit card. If we need cash, we use an ATM at a branch of our new bank. The service is free.

Mail is trickier. We rent the personal mailbox from a company that specializes in this service. For an added monthly fee they’ll forward mail to us anywhere in the country. We leave them an additional $200 to pay for the postage. When the postage runs out, they’ll let us know. Every couple of weeks we call them with the address of the campground we expect to occupy a couple of days hence, and they forward a package by Priority Mail.

Only once does it fail to reach us before we move on, and that’s in the week before Christmas.

We see our physicians shortly before we leave town, and ask them for prescriptions that will provide 90-day supplies of the medicines we take. We order the drugs on-line, and have them sent to our personal mailbox.

Federal taxes we do long-distance, through our regular tax preparer, communicating by mail and, occasionally, by phone.

He gives us closure on last year’s taxes, and provides us a figure for the quarterly payments we must make on the current year’s taxes.

Finally, we’re ready to go. The sale of our house has closed. We’ve put most of our stuff in storage in a moving company warehouse, and paid several months ahead. We’re already living in the fifth wheel, because the new owners wanted to occupy our house. Retirement parties are behind us. Our jobs are about to wind down.

We have a few last-minute jitters. We’re comfortable at the trailer park where we’re living now. Suppose we leave and have an accident? Suppose something on the truck or trailer breaks? Suppose we can’t find a place to camp when we need one? Whenever you move a trailer you put it, to some degree, at risk. Do we really want to haul this humongous thing onto the highway?

Yeah, we decide. We do. It’s time to see America through a different lens. Tacoma, Washington, has been the center of our universe for far too long.

It’s time to get out of the box.

Chapter 2

Although we’ve lived in Western Washington for more than 30 years, both Karen and I come from other places. So we love our home with a passion that arises from having chosen it. We’re not here simply by an accident of birth.

Beautiful though it is, we’re anxious now to see what’s somewhere else. We hitch up and head south, bound for the Oregon line.

We can’t believe we’re finally on the road. We don’t know what we’ll find or if, in fact, we’ll find anything at all. But excitement makes our spirits sing.

If you get all your information from T.V., you might think a pall has settled over these United States. Television anchors lead each broadcast, it appears, with new reports of horrors or the threat of them. Nearly every week they tell of some barbarity that heretofore was unimaginable. They seem to obsess on tragedy.

Do they reflect America at large; its ordinary people? We’re not sure. We know that danger is real, and can strike at any time. But do Americans live in fear of it? Is it the focus of their lives? What we find out in the next 12 months gives cause for hope. For celebration, in fact.

Three hours after we hit the road, we pull into a campground in Wilsonville, Oregon, a few miles south of Portland. Distance driven? One hundred fifty miles. I’m pleased that after an actual day on the road, I’m keeping my promise — so far — to Karen: no 500-mile days. No driving ‘til we drop. We’re going to enjoy our trip, I’ve promised her. Going to soak it up. See it all.

Karen is skeptical. Dr. Phil, the national television guru of pop psychology, says the best indicator of future behavior is behavior in the past. She says she’s heard him say it. I say, what does he know?

Our son and daughter-in-law live in a nearby Portland suburb, and we’ll spend the next few days with them. On Saturday they barbecue some ribs in their back yard, and our daughter comes down from Washington State to join us. The kids give us goofy goodbye gifts, as well as a beautiful global positioning system receiver to help us find our way.

After the barbecue our daughter has to return to her home, and as we say goodbye her eyes fill up with tears. She gives me a hug.

Get yourselves home safely, she whispers.

It hits us all of a sudden how long we plan to be gone. How much we’ll miss our kids.

We’ve drawn up no itinerary for this trip, because we want nothing to interfere with our new-found freedom as retirees. We’re like newlyweds, in a new relationship with ourselves. The feeling is almost giddy.

We have a general idea, however, of what we want to do. In the broadest terms, we plan to follow the autumn season south along the West Coast, then creep east along the bottom of America when winter comes. We’ll follow spring north through the Appalachians to New England, then zig-zag west across the continent with the summer season. We hope to get home to the West Coast the following fall, before the passes are hit by snow.

One part of our anticipated journey looms especially large. Almost directly across the country from our son’s home, on the opposite arm of the horseshoe-route we plan to take, my elderly dad is living out the final phase of life in a nursing home in New Jersey. He turned 90 in the spring, and he’s had his ups and downs. We’d lost Mom the year before.

Every year for more than 90 years, the sun has risen on a world that contains my dad. It’s hard to believe a sunrise will come when he’ll be gone, but a part of us knows that it won’t be long. It’s important that we see him again before that time. That we try to connect once more before he’s finally lost.

I’m not sure when Dad began to exhibit the first signs of senile dementia. While he still lived in Tacoma, for sure, but I didn’t recognize it then. For the most part he seemed okay. I noticed that he sometimes repeated questions several times. As though he didn’t trust the answer. I’m embarrassed to say I sometimes reacted impatiently. Pay attention, I’d think. It never occurred to me he was losing his grip.

He and Mom had retired to Tacoma at age 65. They made friends easily, and soon became part of a circle of people who shared theater and cards and dinners out. Dad was a retired executive, trained in accounting, and in his retirement he enrolled to practice before the Internal Revenue Service. He was authorized to do people’s taxes and to represent them before the IRS. Every year he took a course at the Community College to keep abreast of changes in the law, and every year he did his own taxes and mine.

He and Mom had planned to live out their lives in Tacoma, and eventually to be buried in a small family plot in a large New York cemetery, next to my mother’s immigrant parents. Their plans, and my world, changed one January afternoon nearly 15 years after they’d moved to Tacoma. My phone rang at home.

We have something we’d like to talk to you about, my mother said on the phone. It’s nothing urgent. But we’d like to see you when you have a minute.

I’ll be right over, I told her.

Twenty minutes later I was sitting in the living room of their apartment. I wasn’t prepared for what they were about to tell me.

We’ve decided we don’t want to go home in a box, my mother said.

I believe now that Mom realized what had begun to happen to Dad. She was looking ahead. I can only imagine the fear she must have felt as she contemplated their prospects. I can only imagine the need that she felt for what was familiar; for scenes from her earlier life, for the region where she had met her love, reared her children, buried her parents. I can only imagine the desire that she felt to be close to her daughter at this critical time. Mom discussed none of that.

This is crazy, I told her. We love you. We want you here. How can you leave us?

They’d enjoyed a wonderful retirement in Tacoma, she said, and now it was time to go home. She spoke with certitude, with courage, as always. Her mind was made up. Dad studied me with sad eyes, nodding in support of Mom. As always, she was the mover, the driver. He went along.

The moving van came on St. Patrick’s Day, and the men loaded their things in the truck. The apartment where we had enjoyed so many hours together, so many meals, so many holidays, echoed oddly to our footsteps and our voices. It was empty now, as was my heart. I still had no clue what was happening.

They settled in northern New Jersey, a few miles from my sister’s home, where they moved into a ground-floor apartment. About a year went by, and then the official diagnosis came. Alzheimer’s. My sister and I were in shock. Mom was not.

Karen and I spend the next few days near Wilsonville, enjoying the beauty of Oregon’s burgeoning wine country, home of world-class pinot noirs. We’ve reserved a site in the park for about five days. Then I realize that if we stay a week, the seventh day is free.

If we’re here, we stay for nothing, I tell Karen. If we’re somewhere else, we pay. We have to be somewhere, right? So let’s just hang around.

We’re thrilled with the newfound freedom that allows us to make a decision like this so casually. Our lives had been regimented before. Multiple deadlines, demands, appointments. We feel like kids turned loose from school for summer. And, like kids with a summer before them, the end seems too far away for us to contemplate.

We fritter away the week, and finally the morning arrives when we break camp, hitch up and head for the Oregon coast. I’m following the pre-travel checklist I composed on my laptop computer. It contains reminders such as Close windows and vents. Turn off propane. Raise stabilizer jacks.

Karen is making fun of me. Only old people use a list, she says.

Hey, pilots use pre-flight checklists all the time. The lists help keep airplanes from falling out of the sky. Do you make fun of pilots?

You can find it on the back of nearly every tractor-trailer rig in America. It’s the little sign that says, If you can’t see my mirrors, I can’t see you.

A simple principle? That’s what the guy who wrote it probably thought.

But he never met Karen. She grew up thinking mirrors are for makeup.

Karen’s not only my sweetie of several decades and my partner in crime, she’s my partner also in guiding our fifth-wheel into America’s ubiquitous back-in-only campsites.

I know we’re in trouble the first time we try to slip our rig into a narrow back-in site. The campground provides no pull-throughs.

I’ll help you, Karen says brightly, as she bounds out of the pickup and disappears.

I pop the truck into reverse, and study the view in my left-hand mirror. No Karen there. I shift my gaze to the right-hand mirror. Karen is gone.

I put the truck into park, climb out of the cab and walk toward the back of the trailer. And there stands Karen, blocked by the back of the rig, flapping her arms like a flightless bird.

What are you doing? she says in surprise.

Looking for you.

I hauled a boat trailer most of my life, and backing it into and out of tight places became second-nature. I’d scootch around in the driver’s seat, toss my right arm over the back of the seat in a manly manner, and finesse that baby backwards right down the ramp to the water, sometimes even running zigzag courses around obstacles.

I’d just have to remember to steer in the direction opposite the one in which I wanted the boat to go; kind of like steering a boat from a tiller. Tweak the steering wheel to the left, and the back of the boat turns right. Tweak the wheel to the right, and the boat turns left. And you only have to tweak it, because the trailer doesn’t dawdle while it makes up its mind. It responds immediately and consistently.

Then Karen and I buy our fifth-wheel, and my comfortable world tips upside down. It’s like leaping from a kayak to a super tanker. I pop the truck into reverse, start to crank the wheel, and ease the trailer backward in the general direction of our first back-in campsite. My truck begins to turn, but the trailer does not. It rolls obstinately back along the road we came in on until finally it’s ready to begin to cut the corner. By then we’re rolling past the site.

Time to abort and go at it again. This time I pull a little farther ahead of the site.

We’re rolling backward again, I’m cranking the wheel and — in its own good time — the trailer responds. We’re doing it! The rear end turns smoothly into the site. A lucky shot, but I’ll take it. When the moment looks right, I straighten the wheel and continue to back. My pickup ceases its turn, but the trailer does not. In a moment it’s sitting kitty-wampus across the site, an embarrassment to the driver and his entire extended family. Fortunately, it doesn’t look as though anyone else has noticed. So I pull out of the site and get ready to try again.

I’m getting the idea now. This is not intuitive. To turn a fifth-wheel in reverse, I have to start to crank the steering wheel sometime before I want the trailer to turn. And to straighten it out, I have to straighten the wheel before I want the rig to stop turning. OK, we can do this. It just will take getting used to.

I glance in the mirror and there’s Karen, God bless her, right where I can see her, arms waving. Trouble is, I read arm signals in English. Karen transmits in a language so obscure that it’s never been reduced to writing.

I continue to back into the space and seem to be doing OK, but the tempo of Karen’s signals is increasing. This makes me worried. Where the heck is that water connector? I can’t see it anymore. And the electric utility box; where has that gone? My eyes are glued to my partner, still waving like a survivor adrift at sea.

All of a sudden, she slaps both hands to the top of her head, fingers intertwined, elbows tucked alongside her face. Like a child awaiting an explosion. Or a crash.

I put the transmission in park, apply the brake and climb out of the cab. Karen’s hands remain on her head.

What does that mean? I ask.

I didn’t know how to get you to stop, she replies.

A good thing I checked. The rear of the trailer has halted scant inches from the