We Sleep in a Thousand Beds: An old hippie and a retired scientist explore cultural differences while house sitting around the world

We Sleep in a Thousand Beds

An old hippie and a retired scientist

explore cultural differences while house sitting around the world

“Each time that we—as nation, a group, a continent or a religion—

look inward in celebration of our specific identity,

we do nothing but lionize our own limits and sing of our own stupidity.

Each time we open ourselves to diversity

and ponder that which is different from us,

we enlarge the richness

and intelligence of the human race.”

~ Carlo Rovelli from Anaximander and the Birth of Science

Chapter 1

Accidental Winners

My knees hurt. I’m convinced cataracts are on their way. Energy levels continue to plummet. Conrad’s hip bursitis flares and we search out a bench.

Carefree movements are gone forever.

Then how is it possible we’re two of the luckiest people in the world? How is it possible we flit about the planet becoming wiser, more enlightened people? It’s true. Truer than most things I’ve known in my seven decades on Earth.

Here’s how it all started:

In 1973, I started a commune with six other college dropouts. The two-thousand bucks I kept in a shoe box—earned waitressing at Gino’s Italian Restaurant in Keego Harbor, Michigan, U.S.A.—was the down payment on our house.

We partied on a flat part of the roof, accessed by climbing—effortlessly—through a second-story window. After a year, police uprooted our marijuana plants from the back yard garden, filling the trunks of three squad cars. The front page of the Detroit Free Press announced the biggest pot bust in Oakland County history. I was charged and arraigned.

(Photo deleted)

Josie, second from left. My brother, (right), set up his 35mm camera on a tripod for this photo

and then developed the film in our basement darkroom.

In his 1973, Conrad had already worked ten years at the University of Michigan in human genetics research, was married with two kids, and lived in a nice split-level home. He had recently gone back to school for a Masters. Along with his scientist workmates, he enjoyed jogging—effortlessly—on lunch hours and in local 10K races.

(Photo deleted)

Conrad in 1973

In the intervening thirty-four years until we’d meet, Conrad and I each divorced our respective spouses, married again, and divorced again. We survived tragedy, moves to new homes, and hectic family life. We each had enough triumphs to believe life was worth living, most having to do with our kids—three of his and two of mine.

When we met in 2007, we each harbored our own kind of quiet defeat. Divorce, we’d learned, interrupted life progressions in every aspect: financial, personal, and careers. We didn’t expect much out of life at that point. But decades before, Conrad had become an Eagle Scout and I’d been a Girl Scout leader so, getting acquainted, we found common ground in wholesomeness—a sweet return to principles learned early on.

The joys of life came in small bites when we started dating. We enjoyed a bottle of wine and The New York Times on a blanket in the park. A girlfriend once told me, “If a new date can’t take me to a restaurant I could never afford, forget it.” For me, the NYT on a blanket in the park was near perfect. Conrad and I took miles-long walks. Our conversations covered a million topics, peppered with philosophies. We cherished a holiday when the kids showed up and stayed, the house insanely chaotic, truckloads of food devoured twenty-four hours a day, the place a hideous mess. The glorious silence when they left: beautiful.

Then we embarked on a month-long trip to Australia and discovered our affinity for travel harmony.

We were surprisingly compatible. Shockingly. Remarkably. Compatible.

The two of us are a unique pair—one could say we’re half science and half art. Hybrid Vigor, or heterosis, refers to the superior being that can result from combining two different varieties. In science, it can occur with dogs or corn, for example. It happened with Conrad and me. The Joyful Hybrid of Us is a superior being. And our pairing—our unique combination of traits that jibe perfectly during the stress and discovery of travel—gives us this winning opportunity.

Now, we’re old enough to know these last years of our lives must matter, too. Our remaining time must be filled with forgiveness, self-love, and enlightenment. We dismissed those important actions earlier in our lives because we thought life was infinite. Our time is not infinite. At our advanced ages, there’s an urgency to keep going as long as we can. We gotta soak in all of life, until we can’t. Even as bursitis acts up and schlepping luggage is dreaded now, we’re too addicted to stop. Yes, addicted. Because the benefits are still feeding our souls. We’re gonna travel ‘til we drop.

So, what is this book about?

• It’s about cultures. By virtue of being international house sitters, we’ve watched the human spectacle around the planet— with all its foibles and beauties and differences. Our long-held cultural notions are turned upside-down.
• It’s about our marriage. The good and the bad. We happen to be compatible traveling companions but not every moment is peachy keen.
• We’ve sprinkled in “History and Culture” blurbs throughout the book that add facts and figures to our experiences.
• Our mission statement: To express how our unique travel style has changed our perception of ourselves and the world.

Postscript:

While I’m writing this book in first person point of view, it’s a two-person journey. It’s a two-person collaboration that showcases what we’ve gained, in hopes our stories will bring a bit of enrichment to your day. To this project I bring emotions, analysis, and the regurgitations of what happened to us. Conrad brings encyclopedic knowledge—what I call ‘the expanding universe’ of his mind—and a great deal of research.

With Love,

Josie & Conrad

Chapter 2

It’s Okay If I Die Out Here

On a remote mountainside in southern Spain in 2010, our lives were changed. The change was not outward, like new hair color, or wearing a spiffy yellow rain jacket, but deep in our souls. It’s the one experience Conrad and I talk about the most because we both felt it then, and the feelings linger still.

We often recall the time we sat outdoors, taking in our lovely mountainside, and I said, “You know, when we tell people about this, no one’s gonna understand.”

“I know,” he said.

But we still try.

Wanting an adventure, Conrad and I took a house-sitting assignment for an off-the-grid tiny adobe home in southern Spain. There was something about the photo of the simple white house with an Medieval dark wooden door that spoke to me. Trees and weeds surrounded the place on a scrubby hillside. A few potted plants lined a front porch. Solar power? We wanted to try that. Collect your own water? We were game. Remote? Yup. In Skyped conversations beforehand, we came to an agreement with the homeowner, signed contracts and packed our bags.

How can I explain the remoteness of this little house? It had no address. The roads had no names. The homeowner had sent me the geographic coordinate numbers so I could locate the house on a map. Once there, no other homes were visible unless we hiked up the mountain to a far ridge, and even then, the mountaintop village of Aledo was miles in the distance. The little Spanish city of Totana was twenty minutes away by car on dangerously crumbling edge-of-the-mountain roads.

The homeowner had said, almost as an afterthought before leaving us there, that drug dealers had squatted on—and trashed—his property recently. He wanted house sitters staying in his second home there in Spain as a security presence.

That scared me. The fear paralyzed me for days when I realized just how alone we were.

I’ve since been challenged on this notion of my extreme fear in this situation—by two men. My theory is that girls, from early ages, learn quickly to assess their surroundings for danger, unlike boys, who are more likely to run toward risk. Growing up in the 50s and 60s, I was independent, navigating the outside world on my own or with a gang of kids. I took seriously the responsibility of staying safe. I had to. Kids were on their own back then. Play dates—with a constant parental presence—didn’t exist. We kids navigated on our own. And then as a teen, understanding the intentions of others was vital. I learned to listen to my instincts and minimize risk. More than once, my antennae kept me out of trouble—and alive.

On the Spanish mountain, my fear was all-encompassing because I had no life experience to help me understand. What if the drug dealers came back? In addition, being our first visit to Spain, we were unaware of crime. Was there any? And what would be the challenge of contacting emergency services and directing them to our location if we needed them? We only knew a few words of Spanish. I was more vulnerable than I’d ever been, and it made me question my sanity in accepting this assignment.

The first two nights trying to sleep, my imagination conjured up a clear vision of bad guys barging in—there were no locks on anything out there. My visions were horrific. Additionally, on the third night while I lay awake, I heard the screams of an animal being ripped apart by a predator not far from our open window. The macabre screeching adding a whole new dimension to the already fraught situation.

The lack of sleep made me physically ill.

In contrast, Conrad was not scared. (Our travel experience was too new for him to recognize my fear, mostly because I was trying hard to be stoic.) What Conrad experienced on that mountain was an adventure he couldn’t wait to get his hands on. He felt empowered.

For the first five days, we operated as two separate people, experiencing very different realities.

On the sixth day Conrad drove the four-wheeler up a steep hill, a small trailer attached. The incline was so steep that the front wheels came off the ground in a dangerous wheelie. In his scramble to correct the situation, the four-wheeler and trailer jackknifed, ejecting him off the vehicle and over a cliffside. From across the yard, I watched in horror as he disappeared out of sight.

Thankfully, my very fit husband saved himself. In what can only be described as an Olympic-level gymnastic move, Conrad, who was thrown headfirst, performed a back flip and miraculously landed on his feet. Thinking the four-wheeler was about to come over the cliff and land on him, he jumped out of the way. Thankfully, the four-wheeler stayed up top. Conrad heard me scream, so he yelled out he was okay.

The added stress of watching him disappear over the cliff pushed me to my breaking point. I thought about death. Conrad’s death. My death. The possibility of death was real. Too real. We were so alone out there.

Then my brain cracked open from stress.

“It’s okay if I die out here.” I whimpered to the mountain. The words just poured out. The words shocked me but at the same time opened an intense, beautiful release. And then, as if death was staring me down, my life flashed before my eyes. Mostly I thought of my two kids, now adults, and knew they would survive without me. I was at peace with my own death. How strange and exhilarating. It was one of the most profound moments of my life.

I was already crying from Conrad’s tumble down the hill. By the time he climbed back up and we embraced, my emotions exploded. We embraced for a long time, staring over the edge where Conrad’s spill could have broken his neck.

The four-wheeler and jackknifed trailer sat in its crippled state for three full days while the two of us wrestled with the emotions, the release, the realizations, the relief, the totality, until our bodies and minds were capable of dealing with the metal and motor of the thing.

We were both alive. Close enough to feel its hot breath.

Then, I scanned my surroundings. How could I have not seen the glorious undulating hills and rocky canyons? Or the silvery-gray shine of the slate cliffs? How had I missed the wild jasmine, morning glories, rosemary, almond and pomegranate trees? How had I missed the date palms with their perfect symmetrical plumage? How had I not felt the dry warm breeze or smelled the orange blossoms?

In the biggest turnabout of my life, I fell so deeply in love with that mountain for the next five weeks, not caring if the rest of the world existed. I didn’t want the rest of the world to exist. Everything was on our mountainside. Glorious were the mornings when the sun rose over the eastern hills as we sipped our coffee; some days we lingered until two in the afternoon in the same spot, mesmerized by the surrounding wonders of life. Fox kits wrestled on their nearby hillside playground, snarling and scrambling. A pair of eagles flew westward at daybreak, and I’d see them return later at the same time each day. A forty-strong herd of Ibex mountain goats rambled by every evening precisely at 7:00, so close at times we could smell them.

The morning wind on our mountain had a distinctive sound, rustling through the larger trees across the canyon. I can still hear it as I write this. It was gentle and constant. Then at exactly 2:30 each afternoon, loud cicadas fell silent by sudden extreme wind gusts whooshing down the mountain. I imagined the heating day, the flow of the hills, and perhaps even the angle of the sun created perfect conditions for this extreme push of wind to occur—every day at the same time. I found it fascinating. We got to know each stage of the day. The rhythm of the land was intoxicating. I felt a special part of the world I’d never recognized before.