(Originally written on December 10, 2017)
Guys, let's real talk for a minute.
I'd be lying if I said the last three weeks have been a breeze. Nashville already seems like a distant memory, though I can't say yet if that life was better or worse than this...this thing I have now. It's been a remarkable trip so far, to be sure, but I don't want to paint an unrealistic picture of cruising around on an extended vacation - I promised from the very beginning to document this trip with near complete honesty. Though the feelings of panic and dread I dealt with in the weeks leading up to the trip have dissipated, I still get hit with the occasional jolt of...trepidation, I guess. Agitation and anxiety over the unknown, usually exacerbated by the cold.
Within the last couple of days, I've developed another feeling that's been hard to pin down. Mentally, it feels akin to a chemical withdrawal - like my overly-charged brain is full of empty receptors and it doesn't know how to plug them. I think part of it is a lack of routine or regularity; you don't think about the fact that, at least to some degree, we as humans are evolutionary predisposed to rely on a routine. Not like a circadian rhythm but more like a social rhythm - when you know where you're going to awake each morning and who will be there with you, that equals safety. Our ancestors survived because they learned to trust the familiar and fear the unknown. I'm hoping this is all part of my initial adjustment period and those feelings will fade in time, but I can't yet be sure. Nothing (and I mean nothing) in my life is as it was, even as recently as a month ago. I wake up somewhere new almost every day - sometimes in a warm, plush bed and sometimes in a dark, cramped, sub-freezing room the size of, well, the back of a pickup truck.
My brain has had a hard time adjusting to sleeping in the back of the truck, which, when you think about it, isn't surprising. On some subconscious level, I think I'm hearing and attempting to process the sounds that come from urban environments during the night - voices, traffic, sirens, even animals - in order to identify potential threats. As a result, my sleep has been sparse and fitful (though some of that can be blamed on the cold - I'll need to make some alterations before I can tolerate temperatures below the twenties).
With last night's record low temperature - 24 degrees - came the first nightmare, most likely generated from the almost constant, low buzz of anxiety I've been feeling since this trip began. I had parked below a streetlight in a hotel lot, which is generally a good practice when it comes to safety. Covering the windows of the camper shell are "blinds" I trimmed from sheets of black polyethylene - pond liner, actually - and then affixed to the windows with Velcro. From outside, they block the glow of my reading light, so that anyone passing by only sees a solid black cover. But from the inside, especially while parked below a streetlamp, light sneaks in around the blinds and creates a ghostly halo effect.
So far, when temperatures have dipped down into the mid-twenties, sleep seems to come in irregular spurts; often, I'll drift off to sleep while still being visually aware of my surroundings. That's why it was so frightening when I heard the voices, surrounding the truck. They spoke with haste, loud but indiscernible. The glare spilling in from around the blinds grew brighter as more voices approached me. Suddenly, rays of blinding light erupted from around the canvas seams overhead as they snapped, one by one, torn apart by long gray fingers. With a final violent rip, a dozen hands thrust through the cover, reaching down toward me. The streetlamp burned my eyes but I could still make out the writhing black silhouettes of the figures reaching for me. An icy hand, somehow colder than the air around it, touched my throat.
With a gasp, I jerked awake, expelling thick puffs of condensation into the darkness. Gabby stirred below the blankets but seemed otherwise nonplussed. Sitting upright, it took me a few seconds to realize where I was; unfortunately, though, a few seconds was all it took for a night's worth of heat reserves to escape from the sleeping pad below me. I nuzzled back down into the cold blankets, never managing to fall back asleep.
I knew this anxiety would come and I prepared for it as best I could. From the very beginning, I told people that I didn't view this trip as a vacation - I anticipated that it wouldn't always be easy and some of the lessons to come out of it will be difficult to accept. To set off on a cross-country road trip in the dead of winter might very well have been a mistake (time will tell), but I still know in my heart that a bigger mistake would have been to not try at all.
My determination to push forward remains strong. I will take these challenges as they come and I will learn from them. But one thing's for damn sure - the honeymoon phase is officially over.
CWO