My problem with Geico lies in the insanity that goes on with their customer representatives. In an experience we had in the RV last year, we were told our RV would be fixed after it caught on fire, told we would be reimbursed for up to $1000 in expenses we incurred when we couldn’t live in it (because the claims adjuster took a week getting to us, and the RV was our house). This morning, I’m sitting in the bus with a dead battery and gave Geico a call. They wouldn’t send someone out until they could call the garage where my bus was towed to last week and verify that I’d had the repairs made. Fair enough, I understand completely: they don’t want to be towing people around who aren’t even putting the cash into their vehicles to keep from having to call Geico again. Unfortunately, it was 7:30 in the morning and the garage wasn’t open. So the representative I spoke with mentioned that she could hook me up with the towing company that Geico uses in the area, I could pay to have my bus towed, and then Geico would reimburse me for the full cost. I was very particular about those details because I had been told before that if you do it this way, that damn gecko will only cut you a check for $50 / max. That only covers the hookup fee at most places. The representative I spoke with specifically gave me a FAX number and everything, telling me I could FAX the invoice back in when I got it and they’d verified everything.

So I called back a few hours later, after having the old girl towed to my local VW mechanic, and talked to another representative. This person proceeded to give me the information I needed to get the long, arduous reimbursement process started. First thing she tells me, they don’t accept FAXes. I asked her why the other woman would have told me that Geico does accept invoices by FAX, she said she didn’t know. I asked her why their was an arcane policy of mailing invoices in when we have FAX and email and every other split second way of communicating. She had no answer that wasn’t bullshit, and so I informed her that the true reason was this: Geico only accepts original invoices. So if you send an original through the mail, there’s a chance it’ll get lost in the postal system or that they can just rip it up if they’d like. Good fat luck with that Geico, I’ll be getting tracking on my invoices, I’ll be watching your lizardy asses so carefully, you won’t finangle me like you tried to and failed last time.

I am incredibly happy with Geico 46% of the time. But anytime I have to speak to a representative and then to another one, and they are feeding me completely different shpeels, my blood begins to boil and I realize quite well that I’ll be reviewing my options come policy renewal time. I haven’t been in an accident in all of my life, never reported a claim. The only thing I’ve ever used car insurance for is towing. Bastards.

Why am I here, perhaps that’s the question on any particular reader’s mind, on the minds of the restaurant patrons walking past, peeking in at me slightly shivering, and maybe even I’m not completely certain. I spent the past few days with a very old, very dear friend high up in the mountains, a beautiful snow painted town named Estes Park which serves as a sort of mountain tourist gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park. We blew a flat tire on the way to the park, and she laid in the dirt to avoid the wind and just generally hang out with me while I changed the air deprived tire, my hands growing greasier by the moment as I watched her watching me with a sort of mild respect or astonishment at my ability to fix this bus in every situation, and it certainly wasn’t the first time it had broken down on the two of us. I probably should have viewed her surprise at my ability to do such typically “manly” things with a bit of disdain, like “Why wouldn’t you think I could?” but instead I was just pleased with her satisfaction with it all. Later, the problem solved, we walked along a shimmering sunset lake, white capped mountains between us and the retiring Sun, the thundering sound of a thick pack of elk storming out of the forest and into the Estes Park golf course the trail ran along. First the sound of an elk cow, high pitched, calling out some mating ritual song and then the clapping of hooves as three buck emerged from the forest, crossed an asphalt parking lot and seemed nearly like reindeer, ready to take off. As I sort of awestruck watched them run away my companion pulled at my arm and gave a kind of “Oh no,” sound that I took as a warning, and when I turned two dozen or so more buck elk, five feet tall at the shoulders and perhaps double that with their horns, were charging nearly straight for us. Before they trampled us into another statistic though, they swarmed around and away, disappearing into the dusk. We shared a cigarette and watched as the Sun went off to set for California or fall into the Pacific or do whatever it is solar system centers do after nightfall. On the walk back to the bus, it was warm then, only two days ago, under a pitch night sky, the moon not quite ready to make her nightly appearance, we suddenly found ourselves again surrounded by the herd, this time they were still though, many of them just staring us down. I tried stomping my boots, making “Ya!” and “Get!” but the beasts found me and all of my 5′7″ of little threat. Eventually they parted and allowed us to pass, it was all glorious and beautiful, and later as we sipped coffees and sat in the front of the bus, a virtual Yuletide greeting card as our small town setting, three deer would run right through the middle of main street, in front of our tinny abode and off into some forest park.

But that was then and after coming down from the mountain in search of whatever additional heat descending 3000 feet or so might provide, I find myself with a bus that has no inclination to start, parked in the local VW mechanics lot. He’ll be back on Monday, and it’s Saturday night. Seven blankets and this bottle of whiskey will be my only companion tonight, perhaps a phone call or two before my cell phone dies. Good is the night, and long, cold as well.

Tristan’s birthday comes and goes with the snow. He’s 8 now and so that means more chores, of course!

When we first arrived at Riverview RV Park in Godly gorgeous Loveland, Colorado, our neighbors — seeing that we’d arrived after office hours and couldn’t buy nor had any of our own wood — gave us a whole bundle. The favor was duplicated later by an older couple who came by to check out the bus, reminiscing on their younger days, and the next day we had a thick bundle of local tree laying next to our still cooling fire pit. Everyone here is afraid for our warmth, though I assure them that our little Coleman propane heater kicks it up to 90 easily, one of the local longterms hooked us up with a tiny electric heater, and our toes (and propane budget) have never been happier.

Today tops it all though. Our friend Robert, who without fail stops by for a cigarette break or better smoke on a daily basis, offered to help us install our stereo today. The speaker holes in the doors were jacked by a previous owner, and the mounting kit for the stereo itself had been completely extracted. He spent an entire day fabricating new speaker harnesses as well as rigging up a makeshift kit to hold the stereo in. I learned more today about wiring than I’d ever known and quite a deal about Robert as well.

Even before this, though, people have treated us so well on the road. You’ll get the occasional person who thinks that a family has no business with an 8 year old boy on the road like we do, but for the vast slice of people’s pie, it’s all friendliness and helping hands. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that said 8 year old is as cute as goulashes on a kitten, either.

But if we are just a collection of atoms, in turn then are our thoughts just a collection of experiences doled out to create our decisions? If a child is abandoned, will they be prone to abandon? Do our teenage years, or college years, or whatever years are most tumultuous, define us for the rest of our lives and can we ever overcome the desire to screw everything up just for the satisfaction of the temporary?

I like to stand outside in this bitter night air and let cigarette smoke burn the back of my throat. I watch the clouds with their anti-silhouettes against the bold blue of space against our atmosphere and imagine how many other human beings are thinking my thoughts, feeling my emotions, pursuing the same irrational desperate attempts at clinging to something that will finally make everything feel right in its place. It can be so easy to feel like you’re all alone in this world, but even if you can’t communicate with them, there are probably half a billion other people doing just what you’re doing. For some that’s a sickening thought. Americans love the idea of individuality, if not the practice. But it can be a comfort, like a Boston Creme donut and coffee two mornings after New Years Eve.

But life is rarely, if ever, what it seems to be and I’ve learned for certain that no plans are ever definite. Changing up the angles on your own particular life’s shape is an inevitability that anyone who grabs onto the traveling life will find themselves clinging to. Not that everyone will suffer our fate, or that it’s even suffering that needs to be our fate, but I couldn’t sit still. I felt trapped in the reality of compromise, and simultaneously, at the age of 30–maybe a midlife crisis, I don’t know–was feeling in my prime, a rebirth of energy and potential like I’d never know before. I felt and feel as though I can do anything.

And so like that everything that was wasn’t, and the next day my son and I were in a rental car headed for Colorado.

Autumn goes bountiful while Winter threatens an imminent arrival. Life in the foothills of the Front Range.

Old Man Winter was howling his best attempt at blowing us over now, and the falling sky had was exchanging leaves for small bits of snow, getting caught in everyone’s hair like crowns slowly forming on us all. This was the first good, real snowfall, where you can enjoy it, watch the stuff flake into piles and a thin blanket, the air goes dull silent as the sounds of any world around you goes quiet and the moonlight beams off the ground, the Earth becoming like a glowy moon herself. We survived through the fire as long as we could but when our boots froze through, a retreat to the inner belly of a voluptuous tin mother was well welcomed. Night would fall, the heater humming us through dreams of whats, wheres and whenevers that life might entice us with.

In the morning we would celebrate Tristan’s 8th birthday. An axe and sword, handmade of some hard and light wood, arrived in the mail. A rock tumbler, a card game, banana bread cake with chocolate icing and all done up like Champ would ensue.

I spend most mornings working on the bus or trying to bring some dollars in to continue supporting the somewhat endless work this old girl needs. In the afternoons we drive into town to pick up supplies — propane, water, firewood, an occasional six pack — and by the time the sun is resting on the tip of the Front Range we’re ablaze with the night again. There’s plenty of time to think about what the purpose of all of this movement is, to allow yourself to be stunned by the idea that you’re here, of all places, right here. We go bowling because it seems like something to do. Bowling on a Friday night in Loveland, Colorado. Why not? What else is there to do? We get lost in corn mazes and buy pumpkins we may never carve but we picked them ourselves and that seems like all the reason you need to have a set of the big orange sitting outside of your window.

We’ve another week here at least, Halloween is coming up fast, the leaves are changing now but soon they’ll be nothing but changed. I’d love to stay another month but living in an ice cube neither seems fair to our tank of a home nor is the idea of murder by cabin fever one I’d recommend to myself and son. It would be so easy to just pick up and have nothing to decide between but the border or the coast. Times will do their best to tell.