165 Days a Hobo; A Memoir

Currently scribbling in a hurry because it’s my first night and I’m parked by the river and a van. Don’t know if it’s vacant. Want to sleep, but probably won’t. What the fuck have I done?

Though our lease ended that day and the family who owned the house was driving up from the Bay Area to reclaim their cabin for the winter, I felt nowhere near ready to pack my car. The makeshift camper I intended to live in for the next six months was almost put together; assembled from a foot-tall, jagged PVC pipe frame duct-taped to the raw, splintered slab of plywood that a burly, overweight man at Home Depot helped me cut to fit the peculiar combined dimensions of my car’s trunk and backseat. Together, these would make the bed platform. Underneath there would be storage, structured with a long, thin, lidded Rubbermaid bin for my clothes and a random assortment of everything else shoved around it: dog food in a sealed container, laundry bag, shower and hygiene products, boots, books, computer, and important documents. My food would be in bins in the front for easy access. There would be a Thule box attached to the top of my car for my snowboard and snowboarding boots.

But, like a toddler refusing to get their socks and shoes on to leave the house, this assemblage was more of a pondering in this critical stage than a reality; scattered and haphazard.

This was the nicest house I rented in Tahoe. The house had no mold, two and a half working bathrooms, a kitchen built after women got the right to vote, unstained couches, and carpet that didn’t make me itch with every step. But the best part of it was the view. This house sat at the top of a mountain with a deck that looked east towards Mount Rose Wilderness. Every evening, the pink alpenglow played along the blue ridges across a cover of green trees and an open valley.

I split the house with three friends, but it was still a cold house. It was ours for the summer only, the owners needed it from November through May to access skiing on the weekends. It was a loaner, a trial, a tease. I spent half of the last two and a half years in the area trying to figure out how to find a place to live and the other half how not to get forced out of wherever I was living at the moment. There was the raised rent, the illegal sublet that didn’t allow dogs, the loft room that left no barriers between me and three teenage boys, and the drug house. Inadvertently it seems I had spent the last years of my life prepping for this trip: I already well knew the contents of my life could fit into the back of my Subaru.

My roommates had their next houses lined up; the couple living with me already moved out and into their new place a month before our lease was up. I woke up alone in the house that last day of our lease and felt unsettled looking out onto the view of the mountains, knowing that I would not only be letting go of that but letting go of everything else in my life. It was like looking out at a tsunami from a boat in open water and deciding that this, right here, right now was the place to take off my life vest and learn how to swim.

There were hours left before I needed to leave this house, and I looked into the emptied rooms of my former roommates with resentment. I couldn’t understand if what I was doing was right or wrong, if I could do better, if I should do more. I was out of time to think about it anymore, though. Today, flight or fall, I would be forced from my nest.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t done the research; my summer and fall were filled with figuring out how to build a car, where to sleep at night, what products to take, how to stay warm, what places to travel to, what ski pass to purchase, what oil to use in my car. Eventually, the internet blurred together, spitting out the same information. There was nothing new to learn, but I felt like I knew nothing. Laying down to sleep, sharp thoughts of “where again do you think it is that you’ll actually sleep in the middle of winter in your car?” would keep me awake. The next day, I would save more videos of how other people built homes in their cars, research more products, read more blogs.

It also wasn’t as if I hadn’t physically prepared all that time either. I bought a used sleeping bag rated for 20-degree weather, I attached sunscreens to the windows in my car for privacy, I bought a camping stove, a sleeping bag liner. I bought a bear canister and was given an ax by my dad. I had brand new snow tires. I bought waterproof boots. I acquired a down jacket. But these too were mere theories not yet proven; their receipts didn’t prove my salvation.

My stomach was stone wandering through the house. All I could think was: I am a novice, I am an idiot. I am an idiot. I am an idiot. This personal backlash conjured the rejection of a guy named Kolin, who lived with my friend Francesca. He was a few years older and had kind eyes and scruffy hair. I was fascinated with his stories of traveling all over the west, stopping in small towns like Astoria, Oregon or Telluride, Colorado to pick up jobs at local museums and ski resorts wherever he ran out of money. He was odd and confident; he lived on a makeshift loft in an eight-by-five storage area above Francesca’s kitchen when I met him.

One afternoon, he invited me to come with him on a hike in South Lake Tahoe. We went off the trail a bit, and I rummaged after him, scrambling up logs and granite boulders surrounding a creek bed, huffing and puffing, hoping he was impressed at my adventurousness. All along, I felt like a child chasing the shadow of a unicorn. This would never go anywhere, “after all,” I would hear myself excusing the relationship to others, “he has the same name as my brother-in-law.”

But I was fascinated by him, fascinated by someone so willing to follow the whims of their curiosities. The first time I felt sure of this trip happening, the first time I said, out loud, “I will be taking off for 6 months to live in the back of my car and travel the mountains of the West,” was with him. I felt it impressive in the moment, a very dumb now.

I asked him while hiking back up to the road from Lake Tahoe’s Chimney Beach one afternoon right before he left town for his next adventure in Alaska if he ever thought that he was screwing himself by not having a traditional job with a retirement plan. “I mean, what happens when your body is old and can’t work on a trail crew anymore?” I posed. Both of my parents, and inadvertently growing up in Fresno, impressed upon me the importance of The Plan. The go to college, get your degree, find a job, get a 401k, buy yourself security Plan. He looked at me in a way that made me ashamed to have asked. “I’ll figure it out,” he said. The steep hike back to the car was quiet from there. He left for Alaska, never saying goodbye. Now, in this empty house, this memory berated me, exposing my nervous naivete.

One of my roommates, Brandon, showed up to help with the final cleaning of the house. I was in the garage, an emotional wreck, trying to get the piece of plywood duct tapped to the PVC frame. Everything was a wreck, cut bits of PVC pipe littered around, trash, screws, tape, glue, all of my belongings. He helped me attach the Thule box to the top of my car, a task I had no idea how to do on my own–I hadn’t even thought to ask anyone, his help was a blessing. I could feel his doubt even from behind his kind exterior. He left shortly after, and once again I was alone, facing my own creation.

It eventually fell into place. Haphazardly at best, but in place. I took one last look at the view from the house before Lady and I got in the car and started to drive off. There was no excitement, no new chapter feeling. I thought again of Kolin and the joy that bounced off of him when he talked of heading to Alaska. I, on the other hand, was in the mid-air shock of falling from a tall cliff, stomach below my feet, mind racing, trying to hold onto the air.

That first night, I had work and was glad for the good distraction. I left Lady in our new home and walked through unlit levels of parking lots and the frozen village at Northstar to the Starbucks as I had so many times before. The walk was different, though, I felt branded with this oddness, this outcastness. Marked with anxiety about where to sleep tonight. Though Starbucks was never comfortable or natural to me, there was something extraordinarily unsettling, something beyond the artificial glow of the store’s lights on a black night, on this night. The stone fireplace, with a hearth invading the wall all the way to the ceiling, was made to look like that of a great mountain lodge and promised the possibility of home but the chairs and tables surrounding it, the high-pitched beeping and groans of the coffee machines, and the toxic sugar smell from the thawing frozen pastries broke the orchestrated living room. Selling fake happiness, and I didn’t even have the money to buy.

More unsettling, though, was my want to stay there, to hide behind rows of crusted syrups and to tuck into the dingy, sticky floor mats. After work, some of my coworkers wanted to see my new setup. It was a flash of pride but after the girls oohed and awed that pride too settled around me like the caramel-flavored liquid and burnt fructose smell of Starbucks.

The drive out of the parking lot hadn’t changed, and I navigated it blind, focused instead on what was to come next. Where do I go? Panic and tears: where do I go, where do I go, what have I done?

Truckee doesn’t take long to drive through, a span of three freeway exits from fringe to fringe. I started down the road towards the historic downtown, the home of the train station and original brick buildings, remodeled over the years to cover up the saloons with fine Italian restaurants and bespoke ateliers. After I decided to move to Tahoe, I stopped here and walked door to door with a resume, eager to find a job, assuming that landing a job would be the biggest struggle. There was the Squeeze In, a breakfast place in a converted alleyway that I ended up working at when I wasn’t at Starbucks. There was the Bar of America, on the corner of the block, where a middle-aged man running the place conducted an impromptu interview with me. “Everyone in Truckee or Tahoe has two of the three, a dog, a divorce, or a DUI,” he said eyeing me. “Which do you have?”

The road follows west to the hospital, library, Safeway, and Dairy Queen. There were smoke shops and coffee shops scattered in between it all. I was scared to drive much further than the Safeway, knowing that there would be limited public places to park beyond that would be private. My research taught me that grocery store parking lots were almost always acceptable places to park overnight. Walmarts are the best bet, but any 24-hour store will do, the research told me. The Truckee Safeway is 24-hours, so I pulled into the parking lot. Minutes later, I pulled back out. The people freaked me out, they were too normal. Too many people getting beer or bread to go home, sit by a heater, kick their feet up, and turn on a show. How could I brush my teeth next to a mom situating her young child into their car seat?

There was a spot I thought of as I was leaving work, but I was too shy to visit there first. It was a parking lot for the Legacy Trail trailhead, a paved trail that, at the time, followed the Truckee River 8 miles from the town’s regional park to a detached neighborhood to the east called Glenshire. Lady and I walked here weekly, if not daily, so I was familiar with the ten paved parking spaces and the bridge that joins the parking lot to the trail across the river. I was familiar with the undeveloped patch of land between the parking lot and the river, familiar with each of the rocks that sat down on the river’s shore. I knew that train tracks lay on the opposite side of the parking lot from the river, and I knew that there was a dirt road that extended from the end of the parking lot that fishers drove down to get closer to those juicy trout spots. I aimed for that dirt road, fully understanding the irony of starting my experience as a hobo somewhere between the train tracks and the river.

When I got there, there was a van parked at the end of the parking lot, right before the asphalt turned to dust. There was a light on inside the van. It was a white van. Not wanting to pass by it, not wanting to be seen at all by it, I abandoned the dirt spot under the pine tree I envisioned to sneak in the first spot of the parking lot. I was shaking, but I felt like there was nowhere else to go and I was exhausted.

The woman I bought my 20-degree sleeping bag from owned a van and lived out of it while traveling around the country for work. We went to school together. She owned her business, a waste management company focused on helping concerts manage their waste. We graduated the same day, walked on the same stage in front of the same crowd of people. She is another unicorn shadow; out-of-reach, put together, successful, passionate. She was well-liked by students and teachers. She was a valedictorian. She offered me some advice about being a woman on the road, as a woman who sleeps at roadside rest stops: “I built my van,” she says, implying danger, “so that I can go directly from the driver’s seat to the back without being seen, without having to step out of the car.”

Her advice sprinted into my head, waving a black flag of terror. I shimmied into the back of the car, trying to make as little movement or noise as possible, while simultaneously trying to motion to Lady, who was still seated atop the bed in a way that blocked my entry, to get out of my way. I bumped into her and cursed in an angry whisper. Lady grunted so loud, it seemed like the car shook. My breath was shallow. I was still shaking. Had that man in the van seen me? Does he know I’m a woman? I grabbed my keys and locked the car, gripping them in case I would need to hit the alarm. Fuck, who would even hear me?

The van door opened, and the man walk around the back of the van. I heard the rolling click of a lighter. The smoke followed and I stopped breathing. Was he walking closer to me? Was he looking at me? Could he see my legs or my feet? Could he tell from my dreamcatcher hanging in the rearview that there is a female here? I strained my ears, frustrated with how loud the static silence was. Lady growled low and close to my head. “Shhhhh,” I begged her. “Please shut the fuck up,” I asked while grabbing onto her. Once the cigarette was done, he got back into the van and I finally let out a breath.

I didn’t get used to the cigarette breaks over the course of the night, and I wasn’t comfortable between them either. There were noises in the untamed land between the parking lot and the river. There were noises on the other side of the tracks. Were those coyotes? Was that a bear? Was that man smoking his cigarette facing my car or away? I was terrified to turn on my solar-powered, collapsable lantern I bought for reading and writing in the car. Who would see me, who would know? Lady picked up on my energy and growled each time an unfamiliar noise made me freeze. This made it worse, made the world outside my condensated windows more threatening, more real. As terrified as I always was of the outside world, I never knew how much of it one could shut out with walls, a locked door, and a solid duvet.

Impossibly, the sun came up the next morning, and with its first rays were my escape from my river spot next to the cigarette-smoking, white van driving mystery man.

Years later, I told someone about this night and they said: “Oh a white van, down by the river? Yeah, that’s Dan – Dan the Van Man!” And then, after a pause: “Yeah, you wouldn’t have wanted to meet him.”

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My first few weeks of living out of my car mirrored my last day as a house-dweller. I soon felt like a weird, outcast part of society. Daily routines, like sleeping and changing, became treacherous and demanding of time and effort. At night, I was constantly nervous about police knocking on my windows to kick me out of whatever parking lot I was in, but I was too scared to go somewhere secluded after my first night at the river.

Changing required me to find a place that had privacy and a door that could lock, which is not as easy as it sounds. My go-to changing spot became the public park. There were park benches, an open grassy field to the right with the main road at its edge, and a public ice rink to the left. Beyond the bathrooms was a softball field, and just down from there the trail that winds down to the river and eventually connects to my first night’s spot. These bathrooms covered the entire park. Each bathroom was an individual room with its own sink and door that locked. They were as clean as a park bathroom could be and because they had running water, didn't smell terrible. However, it was awkward. There’s a long walk between the parking lot and the public bathrooms that felt like a broadcast: “Homeless loser taking advantage of public restroom.”

I was coming here for a few days, early in the morning when no one was around. I could feel the eyes of the cars on me but didn’t have to face anyone. One day, I went to this spot a bit later than normal and people were already getting ready to ice skate. There was a father and his nine or ten-year-old son, sitting on the benches gearing up and here I was, hobo of the month toting my toothbrush and change of close in hand, dropping dirty underwear on the grass as I passed by. Being seen in such a public space for such a personal part of my day was terrible. What simple things we take for granted.

It doesn’t stop there. Each encounter with people I know asking about my trip dropped my courage bit by bit. Every question about changing and showering and eating and sleeping made my morale drop until I finally couldn’t explain anymore. Everyone wanted to know how I was doing it all. How do you live out of your car? I’d shrug and try to act casually feigning confidence but truth be told, I had no idea.