Timelines I

Yesterday

Blue sky and clouds roll beneath the wings of a plane. Suitcases roll past an airport table, past tarmac playing out its orange-flagged, taxiing, conveyor belt choreography behind glass to the syncopation of overhead announcements and boarding calls and murmured bits of conversation. The earth rolls around the sun, giving me moon outside a shuttle window. And all the while, my fingers on the keyboard roll back years, reaching forward to you.

Six years ago

I set out in a gutted van called Ruby to live on the road full-time, building her into a home as I rolled.

Here a toilet, there a kitchen. Panels to harness the sun. A closet and bed and windowsill planters and sturdy plants to fill them. Faux tile floors and string lights. A rack for the bike. Year one.

A ceiling fan and upgraded heater, a sink and cabinet, new shelving, and fresh paint would come later.

Five years ago

The Covid-19 pandemic hit, and I found the gift of solitude seeping into me like a salve, exploring largely solo in deserts and forests—just me and Ruby and the creatures of the wild.

We were circled three times, once, on a hill above Tucson on a waning gibbous moon night. Yips and growls and maybe a howl brought my nose to Ruby’s pane. I held still. The rods in my retina tuned in, and dark forms emerged in the silvery darkness, a dance of paws and snouts and bushy tails.

Later, it was wild burrows at a hot spring off the Nevada 50, a road like a familiar dream. I was still soaking, stirring the moon with my fingertip, canary bleeding into ebony, sensing more than seeing the tiny bats dive all around, when the first brays sounded from a distance. I listened, mesmerized by their growing nearness. And my dreams and waking moments that night merged and switched places, the squealing, whuflling, snorting figures outside my half-open window in both, so I couldn’t be sure if they’d disentangled when I woke the next morning to stillness. I don’t know how long it was before the stone statue of a jackrabbit, kissed to life by dawn or me, sprang off its hind legs and became one with brush.

Another morning, I woke to the clatter of tiny hooves. Pulled curtains revealed a squadron of javelina, a swarm of grunts and snorts.

A sword found me. A forty-eight-hour windstorm surrounded me. Blue dragonflies darted in the diamond flecks of spray from my first outdoor shower.

And all of it formed a single word: Yes.

Four years ago

Ruby and I, having traveled from Arizona to Washington and back, headed north once more and kept going—up the Alcan Highway through the Canadian Yukon, into Alaska, and up into the northerly parts of the Last Frontier.

Glaciers and northern lights and romance.

An entire town that runs on a generator (until its owner bailed for the winter) and lighted nights and land as vast as god.

Moose and caribou and bears.

Oh my, oh my, oh my.

Three years ago

I visited my kiddo in (then) Oklahoma, family in Utah and the PNW, friends and loved ones in Northern and Southern California, and my old friend Joshua Tree, too briefly.

A cat, I skitted. A fox, I darted. A goose, I sat on couches and tried not to look like I was desperate to paddle webbed feet.

Masked, I ventured into shows and bars and restaurants, the experience new to me in a different way than it was new to my companions. Me, crow, drawn to shiny things. Them, creatures I almost recognized myself in.

Two years ago

I took a 6-month house in a cabin like a bay-windowed treehouse so I could chop wood, so I could churn the soil of a memoir, so I could blow on the glowing embers of who I was always becoming. Poor Ruby waited patiently in the driveway, soaked often in rain and sleet and snow, growing a little greener for the wear.

“Sorry, girl,” I would whisper when I passed her up for a jog or a hike, purring a rubber-on-asphalt-and-gravel-and-washboard lullaby. “Soon.”

Launching this desk, rolled me into a silo of wide open hearts and talent like vistas.

One and half years ago

A pain so deep it felt ancient settled into my bones with a suddenness that took my breath, and I soon found myself almost unable to walk. Getting out of bed in the morning, excruciating, stairs, nearly impossible.

I shuffled. Alone at night, I wailed. In the shower, I braced myself, arms against tile and sobbed as water, like purging fire, flowed over my back.

I wrote. Words that had been living in my belly for ages beyond me poured onto the page. I basked in the glow of connections formed across the globe for the love of words.

I don’t know how to say this, but I’ll try. I cried till I laughed. Animal, human animal, I found a place where excruciating met sublime, and I was only pain and joy, and they were the same.

But that place was made of float glass.

One year and some change ago

After a handful of tests, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease of the large joints and spine called ankylosing spondylitis (AS).

I was lucky. AS can take a long time to diagnose, especially in women.

A few months after that, I cleared some lab hurtles that enabled me to finally start treatment to slow the progression (AS has no known cure) and the pain.

One year ago

Ruby and I moved in with my cousin in Oregon, Ruby in her beautiful wild garden, me in her beautiful cozy home, my heart comforted in her wide beautiful heart. After some complications, my docs and I settled on the meds I’m currently taking to keep the pain mostly at bay (or at bay enough) and the flares and reactions to a minimum.

Six months ago

Three brilliant writers/teachers (Marya Hornbacher, Paul Corman-Roberts, and Matt Smythe) and I came together to form Caravan Writers Collective. This return to two long loves—helping authors bring their visions to the page and building community—a buoy.

Four months ago

Anxious to get back on the road but no longer physically suited to Ruby’s quirks, I purchased a new-to-me, pearl-colored van home I call Vivian and said a bittersweet farewell to Ruby and her lovely new human, Witchy Mama.

Two months ago

I started moving into Vivian and have since been discovering that every one of her “luxurious” systems I’d treated myself to to ensure I could stay on the road even with the AS has functional issues, many major.

Me: “No projects this time!”

The universe: “So many projects for you, girl.”

One month ago

I tested positive for a second time for a blood test that usually indicates yet another autoimmune disease, this one with even more serious implications, but remain asymptomatic.

“This is the one you don’t want,” my doc has said, a refrain in blunt.

I like the way he gives it to me straight. Him, character. Me, writer. Him, patient. Me, a champagne cork of questions. Him in a white coat. Me, patient.

Earlier this month

Some friends met me and Vivian in a couple different forests and once at my cousin’s to take on one of the largest (and most dangerous) repair projects. Yay, road fam!

My brother’s offered to help with the next. Yay, fam fam!

Today

Viv and I are rolling east. And this post rolls into your inbox.

It’s what we do, the rolling. I mean me and you and time. We roll along, a Möbius strip of memory and longing and planning and surprises we didn’t plan for and surprises we’d never plan for; around a ball of fire that gives us life; through a line that isn’t nearly as linear as we like to think.