Roads From the Ashes Read online

  Revcon’s operation qualified as an industrial park wonder. Inside a large garage-like space were parked three Trailblazers in various states of completion. While our eyes were adjusting to the light, a walrus of a man lumbered over to greet us. Trotting along next to him was a little terrier of a sidekick.

  “Welcome to Revcon,” said the big one. “I’m Bob.” We introduced ourselves. “And this is Wes,” he said, elbowing his companion. “Wes does a lot of our design work.” Wes smiled nervously, and we followed both of them inside the factory.

  It smelled like glue, and the rat-tat-tat of power hammers and staple guns echoed. “I’ll show you the assembly line first,” said Bob. He had Mark by the elbow. Wes flanked him. I walked behind. He steered Mark toward the chassis of a one-ton Ford pick-up truck. “This is what we start with,” he said. “And actually, we have to buy the whole truck and strip it down. Ford won’t sell us just the chassis. Anyway, we stretch the frame, and then we build the coach.”

  We walked by the three Trailblazers that had progressed to the point of having bodies, and we went inside the last one. Two workmen were installing light fixtures. Bob was still talking, and Wes was still laughing nervously, but I’d stopped listening. I was moving in, if only mentally.

  Then I heard Bob say, “They use them to hunt bastards,” and I was again all ears. “Yeah, Saudi Arabian princes buy these things and take them out into the desert to pursue their favorite pastime, bastard hunting.” He was loving our stunned looks, and he paused dramatically. “Bastards are these big birds they like to shoot.” Oh. Bustards. I didn’t bother telling him he had his vowel wrong. Without his malapropism, Bob would have been no fun at all.

  By the time Bob escorted Mark into the front office and allowed me to edge in, too, before closing the door, I had formed some opinions. The first was that for Bob, cornering a potential customer in his office was as unusual as catching a leprechaun in a rat trap. The second was that Revcon was more than it appeared to be. Beyond the factory floor was a warren of offices full of boxes, telephones, mismatched furniture, and a dozen or so aimless young men wearing ties. People were either moving in, moving out, or incredibly disorganized. It was a mystery, along with the fact that Bob’s office appeared to belong to someone else, someone with a German name.

  In any event, Trailblazers were definitely being built, and Bob was bursting to sell us one. The price was $75,000, just as Corey the saleswoman had said. There was no negotiation. That was the price. We could follow our truck from chassis to completion. In fact, the chassis we’d just seen would be ours. And yes, they’d work with us to create an office in the back in place of a bedroom, and they’d wire in any equipment we wanted, like a CB radio, a cellular telephone, whatever. So do you want it? Please sign here. By the time we were done, I felt as though Bob had been sitting on me for three hours.

  In the end, we signed, because, as I’ve said before, our good sense had been burned up in the fire. We walked back out to the factory to look at our chassis, which was supposed to become Coach Number 115 within six weeks. We didn’t know it then, but it was a lucky thing for us that it took more like twelve. The extra time came in handy for scraping together $75,000.

  Beyond the Cutting Edge

  Perhaps at this point I should explain why we were more interested in offices than bedrooms. Even though we had only a vague notion about exactly why we were hitting the road at all, one component of the fog was work.

  I was a fledgling freelance writer and newspaper columnist. My first column had been published the week before the fire, and I was determined to sell my editor on the idea that I would still file the thing regularly, whether I was in Outer Boondocks, Alaska, Off The Map, Maine, or Times Square. Nobody would be able to tell I wasn’t still firmly planted in Pasadena, California, including him. I swore to it, so he said he’d give it a try. It helped that he was already heavily into computers and electronic communication. It also helped that I had a good track record with deadlines. I hadn’t even missed the one that arrived two days after the fire, and that accomplishment had left a lasting impression.

  So it was really that column, for which I was paid the princely sum of $25 a week, that led to our acquiring a mobile office equipped with $15,000 worth of electronic gadgets. To appreciate just how cutting-edge we were, think back to before “AOL” was only a typo for “AWOL,” like 1993.

  It was a day when few could understand why anyone would want to access the Internet by cellular telephone. Heck, it was a day when few had more than a vague idea about what the Internet was. I was one. I read a bunch of stuff, and still couldn’t quite understand about onramps and service providers. I’d think I was beginning to catch on, but then I’d run into a POP, SLIP, or a BMP, and get stuck.

  But 1993 was the year America Online began paving the continent with “free” disks. Every man, woman and child in the country received these disks on a regular basis. Every magazine on every newsstand had AOL disks stuck between alternating pages. You could walk through cemeteries and find one carefully propped against each headstone. Bars used them for coasters, contractors used them for insulation, and everybody used them for doorstops. There were so many AOL free disks thrown into New York trash cans that the landfill at Freshkill was closed two years ahead of schedule. When AOL stopped sending them out, the U.S. Postal Service laid off two thousand workers. Okay, okay, I’ve overstated things a little. But it is true that I had three AOL disks before I owned a computer to try them on, and my friend’s dog had two.

  Fortunately, I knew a computer consultant who was fluent in both English and Nerd. We told him what we wanted to do, and he found all the stuff to do it. Then he taught us how to use it, all in perfect, uncondescending English.

  Here’s what we got, and in January, 1994, it was bleeding edge. The laptop was a Zenith Data Systems 486 with a color monitor and a 502-megabyte hard disk. It had a slot on one side into which you could stick a PCMCIA “credit card” modem. The one I got boasted a baud rate of 14,400 which was twice as fast as most people’s regular modems at the time. I also got a separate box that could read CD-Rom disks, a SCSI cable to hook it to the computer, a Hewlett-Packard portable ink jet printer, and a black case to hold everything, including a snake nest of cables and assorted transformers, batteries and power packs.

  So big deal. 1994 was the year thousands and thousands of people were diving into computerland with open checkbooks. Everything I had so far was new, but hardly unique.

  Then we got the black box. It arrived with no instructions, but its manufacturers claimed it would make a cellular telephone talk to a modem. The black box was our key to mobility, but it was a silent enigma. Our computer consultant knew nothing about it. I called the customer service number on the box it arrived in. The person who answered the phone knew nothing about it. I’d arrived at the edge of charted territory, and I was on my own.

  Chapter 3

  The Epicenter of Burning Desire

  Itching For Adventure

  Itching is romantic when it means desire, and in the days Mark and I spent planning our grand journey, the word aptly described our yen for adventure. It was a pleasant itch, one we were eager to indulge. Little did we know, in those halcyon days when our travels were unsullied by genuine experience, that there would come a day when all notions of sentimental scratching would be routed by a real-life invasion of starving fleas.

  Or maybe they were ticks. Whatever sort of bloodsucking pests they were, about a million of them hitched a ride when we pulled into a truck stop near Albuquerque, New Mexico. We’d taken Marvin for a walk before going to sleep. The parking lot had just been resurfaced with a layer of asphalt the consistency of blackstrap molasses. “Oh, great,” I said as I peeled my shoe away from the ground at every step. “This will be with us forever.” Marvin hadn’t liked it much, either, and we’d headed for a dusty field full of sage brush where he could walk without sticking.

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sp; We retired for the night. In the morning, Mark woke up scratching. Pretty soon I was scratching, too. From the look of him, Marvin had been scratching all night.

  A closer look revealed armies of minute black bugs marching across his belly, entrenched around the edge of each ear, and bivouacked between his toes. He was swarming with them from nose to tail. Suddenly I remembered that he’d slept in our bed most of the night. Not only that, he’d spent at least an hour on my head. It had rained during the night, and Marvin was frightened by the thunder. Excuse me while I scratch. Just writing this is making me itch all over again.

  I am a person who believes that one tick is hideous beyond description. One is enough, when you think about what it does. It screws its head into your vein and bloats on your blood. More often than not, you don’t notice it until it’s a foot long. When you finally discover it, it’s like realizing you’ve been hosting a body snatcher. You scream. If you’re in the shower, it scares your husband. When he sees why you screamed, he screams, too.

  This situation was so extreme it rendered us both speechless. Mark held Marvin down, and I set to work with a pair of tweezers. It was a Sisyphean task, like mowing a football field with nail clippers.

  If you rolled bagels in them, you’d swear these things were poppy seeds. You wouldn’t notice the difference until you took a bite. Then you’d make the delightful discovery that your mouth was full of little balloons bursting with blood. They popped when I pinched them. It was a gory scene.

  I stayed at my task for an hour or so, and the war was still far from over. “I’ll keep up the attack as we go,” I said to Mark. “I hope you don’t itch too much to drive.”

  I searched and destroyed all day, taking breaks only to scratch and wash blood and body parts off my hands. The bugs fought back by dropping to the floor and scurrying into corners. I added a Dust Buster to my arsenal and kept on fighting. By the time we arrived in Las Vegas, the enemy was in full retreat.

  Money, Money, Money

  Have you ever noticed how, once you have resolved on a course of action, life’s minutiae mobilize to thwart your best-laid plans? Distractions attack from every quarter, just like an invasion of bloodsucking bugs. How can you concentrate when you itch? How can you progress when you’re constantly pausing to scratch? Sometimes, in the months we spent getting ready to hit the road, I had the feeling we might never actually do it. We were too busy swatting mundane distractions.

  And even now, psychic fleas are pestering me. Every time I set out to talk about money, I let them sidetrack me. Instead of facing my subject squarely, I find myself writing about mysterious black boxes or infestations of biting insects. But money, as it is wont to do, keeps floating back to the surface. This time, I swear, I won’t pause to itch or scratch for at least a page.

  There are two reasons money is a recurring theme. One is that people always ask us about it. The other is that we keep having to drum some up to stay on the road.

  People usually ask an either-or question, something like, “Did you get a huge insurance settlement, or are you independently wealthy?” Having observed our itinerary and estimating how much gas a 7-ton monster guzzles, they figure those are the only two options. I would have thought the same a few years ago.

  The fact of the matter is, there are other possibilities. They aren’t the ones you’ll read about in how-to-manage-your-money magazines. They only show up occasionally in interviews with people who have “beaten the odds”: an illiterate man who manages to send eight children to college or a 45-year-old woman with cancer who climbs a peak in the Himalayas.

  If the illiterate man had waited until he had enough money to educate his children, they would have grown up illiterate, too. If the woman with cancer had waited until she had enough money, well, forget it. Somehow, both completed projects that cost thousands and thousands of dollars they didn’t have.

  The fact of the matter is, money isn’t what allows you to do things. It actually keeps you from doing things if you believe it has to come first. What really has to come first is resolve, a burning desire to accomplish something no matter what.

  We did receive insurance money to cover the belongings inside our house. We used a large piece of it to pay business expenses: all the inventory we lost had not been paid for, and it was not insured. There was enough money left over to buy an inexpensive motorhome or make a down payment on a custom- designed one. The route we chose would make a financial advisor cringe.

  It’s been five years since we’ve received money on a regular basis or from traditional sources. We’ve used up our savings, we’ve worked, we’ve borrowed. On spectacular occasion, we’ve been visited by miracles. Sometimes we’ve felt hopelessly short of cash, and other times, we’ve felt as though we had plenty. We’ve been scared, and we’ve been confident, we’ve come close to giving up hope, and we’ve ridden high on waves of abundance. Every once in a while, as we’re barreling down a highway on a fine day, we look at each other and say, “Well, here we still are.” And we are. It must be magic.

  If it is, then life is magic. Nobody waits for enough money to raise a child before they have one. They just go ahead and make things happen as the journey unfolds.

  It wasn’t money or its lack that sent us on the road. It was something far simpler. We wanted to. We wanted to more than we wanted to do anything else. We had a burning desire, appropriately ignited by a wildfire.

  A Large Shake

  By January, we were a few steps closer to rolling. The Revcon Trailblazer was slowly taking shape in the Irvine factory. It now had its own name, the Phoenix One. I’d wanted to call it Phoenix because it was rising from our ashes, and Mark said okay, as long as we added the One. “It means there might be a Two someday,” he explained. “It’s forward looking.” We were forward looking, too. Most of our sentences began, “When we leave,” or “Once we actually hit the road . . .” We were living in the future, and I was getting impatient for the future to be now.

  Then, on January 17, I 994, something happened that riveted us to the present. It was still dark when the first jolt hit, and it threw me out of bed. By the time the second tremor rolled under us, I was wide awake, and Mark had joined me on the floor. Car alarms were screaming. Dogs were barking.

  “Unless the epicenter is right where we are,” I said, “This is a really big earthquake.” Another series of shakes rattled our windows. I crawled over to the television and turned it on. Already, a disheveled announcer at a local station was on the air. Behind him, shelves had toppled. Books were scattered on the floor.

  It was a serious quake, all right, 6.7 on the Richter Scale. The worst damage was sustained in the San Fernando Valley community of Northridge, where gas mains exploded, apartment buildings collapsed, and more than 50 people died. Twenty-two thousand people were forced to leave their unsafe homes, and even more evacuated out of sheer fright. Public parks were transformed into tent villages, and the National Guard turned out to keep order. Once more, legions of insurance adjusters and FEMA staffers arrived in Los Angeles to set up temporary shop in the latest disaster zone. The fires of October were forgotten in the dust of crumbled freeways.

  A friend of mine in North Hollywood lost the contents of his apartment. Everything was smashed, and he was in shock. I told Mark about it while we were eating dinner. “I wonder what we can do to help,” I said. “Well,” said Mark, “We’ve accumulated a lot of stuff that we aren’t going to need when we hit the road. Maybe it’s stuff he can use.” It was true. What would we do with a microwave or china bowls? Only a crazy person would take crystal glasses on a road trip.

  I called Rich the next morning, and the things we’d acquired matched remarkably well with what he had lost. We loaded up his car to the roof.

  So I guess you could say that the earthquake cleaned us out, too, and we were happy it did. When we took to the road, we wanted nothing material tethering us to a specific spot, especial
ly a storage locker. I’d travel to the edge of the world to see a friend, but an aging coffee maker is hardly a worthy grail.

  While I’m still on the subject of earthquakes, I must share a bit of wisdom gained from experience. You’ve heard the standard admonishment, “When you feel a tremor, get in a doorway.” I’d heard it, too, all my life, and I’ve even told other people. Well, folks, there’s a little more to it than that. A friend of mine found out the hard way. When the Northridge earthquake hit, Barbara rushed to a doorway. As she stood there, another tremor struck. The doorframe hit her between the eyes. She lost consciousness briefly, and the next day, she had two black eyes. So remember, when an earthquake hits, go to a doorway, and CROUCH DOWN, COVER YOUR NECK AND HEAD, AND BRACE YOURSELF INSIDE THE FRAME.

  The only other piece of useful earthquake advice I can share I heard from a Caltech seismologist. “If you live in Southern California,” he said, “Push your expensive Scotch to the back of the shelf.”

  Wheels!

  Slowly but surely, our Phoenix was rising. Mark drove to Irvine nearly every day to make sure it was rising to his satisfaction. I was still working at the job I’d held before the fire.

  It got to be January. It got to be February. It got to be March. It got to be a week away from the day we were supposed to assume ownership of our new home.

  We had started applying for loans the day we decided to have the Phoenix One built. We’d heard “no” three times. We were on the fourth application, and the prognosis looked no better. Why would a bank whose usual M.O. is to loan people only money equivalent to what they already possess, lend us a cent? We were crazies with an irresponsible gleam in our eyes. We were exactly the kind of loan applicants that lending agents are trained to escort firmly to the door.