…and honestly, I loved it.
What feels like a long, long time ago, boyfriend started talking about doing this thing called RAGBRAI (I looked it up and it stands for the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa). It is a bike ride across Iowa (duh) that is held every year on a slightly different route through small towns.
Thing is—boyfriend doesn’t bike. Boyfriend rollerblades. And, he has friends who rollerblade. One of those friends also wanted to do RAGBRAI.
I watched him start the planning—for training and the logistics of getting there—and it felt so far away. He was looking at charters, which are basically groups you can sign up with who will do things like move your stuff during the day while you’re out on the “ride”. I got online and tried to help him start doing some comparisons, got immediately overwhelmed and then did the thing that I tend to do which is daydream up an adventure…and told him we should rent a camper van, drive out together, and I would drive the van while he skated.
Pretty much from the moment we landed on the plan until I sat down in the driver’s seat on day 2 of the trip, I was simmering at a low-level panic.
I don’t drive big cars. My first car was a Ford truck of some kind and I was not good at maneuvering that behemoth (ironically, in the days leading up to the trip, I looked up the dimensions of the van and my old truck and was comforted by the similarities because if 16 year old me could manage, 36 year old me should be fine which was basically just me ignoring the number of times I scraped things with that truck trying to park it). Since then, it’s been a VW Jetta, a Hyundai Elantra, and a Prius. Little babes. Wee things.
I was worried about turns. I was worried about merging. I was worried about parking. I was terrified of the situation I would find at each overnight town, picturing myself scrambling for a place to park and set up camp, waiting in insane lines s the first-come-first-served chaos played out. Where would we empty the toilet and gray water tanks? Where would we find more water? What if the house batteries died? What if it got so hot inside the van with no A/C at night that we just laid awake sweating and dying and then boyfriend couldn’t complete the skates? What if I crashed the damn thing? And, one stormy night, what if a tornado just rolled through and scooped us up Wizard of Oz style?
My stomach was a mess the day we picked up the van and packed it up. I hadn’t slept the night before and we left late in the day so boyfriend drove the first leg, which ended up being about 5 hours to just past Pittsburgh. The next morning, I decided it was time to rip off the bandaid—I took the first shift so that I could finally see what I was dealing with and (hopefully) the dread would subside.
Dear reader, it was fine. It was great even. I loved it. I mourned returning the van and have spent the week and half since researching how to build my own (none of the pre-fabs models have quite the layout I think we need). But I’m getting ahead of myself…
I think I was some kind of wanderer in a past life. A nomad or circus performer or something. Because every morning, we would wake up in camp at 5am and I would see the boys off, then I would spend a little time cleaning up the van and packing everything away before I got on the road, heading to the next overnight town with my caravan around me. I’d find a place to park, get the tent and canopy set up, and chat with the other van folk around me. And it felt like how life was supposed to be.
The whole event felt like something that is slowly slipping away in the world. I am sure there were people of all different political opinions and diverse social background (though, like…not that diverse—still a lot of middle-aged white dudes) but it just wasn’t about that. I’m not a “don’t bring politics into this space because it’s meant to be an escape” type of person—politics is literally about everything. But, it was nice to have an escape, not because unpleasantness was performatively banned but because 1,000s of people were living together for a week, sharing a goal/activity that was pretty difficult. And, 1,000s more came along to support them.
We would go to the spaghetti dinners in high school cafeterias and look around and see people talking about their day, their ride, where they came from. People weren’t stuck to their phones. They weren’t siloed and bubbled. I talked to more strangers last week than I have in the last two years because the ice-breaker was built in. We were hot, we were tired, we were hungry…and we were having a great time.
I loved getting set up in the camps alongside all the other support drivers each day. It had been so long since I had just chatted and shared with new neighbors. Someone forgot the adapter to plug in their camper so I loaned them one of ours for the night. I had too much ice to fit in our cooler so I passed the rest along. A guy parked next to me set up his tent but needed to run some errands so I saved his parking spot. Several people came over asking if they could take a peek at the layout of our van and invited me over so they could show me what they’d done with theres. One told me where I could find a dump station on my way out of town and another introduced me to her doodle, Fiona.
It was one of those experiences that reminds me how much more alike we all are than different.
Ultimately, I realized I miss seeing people in a casual way. I talk to friends every day and I usually see at least one of them a week. But, it’s done with intention, which isn’t bad—it’s wonderful—but it’s different. The things I miss about working in an office are the passing-by interactions. You don’t have those when you work remote or you work for yourself. I get a little with neighbors outside but having Lucille bark the whole time kind of spoils it.
It doesn’t feel like it’s just about me either. I think we as a whole have fewer opportunities to look strangers in the eye and chat. It feels strange to keep blaming Covid 6 years later but it does feel like a lasting shift happened. That, and social media does a good job of tricking us into thinking we’re interacting with others.
I don’t know the answer. On a personal level, it feels like “get out more” is close to the point but there is also something specific about that type of event and flavor of engagement that I don’t think comes with working remotely from a coffee shop instead of my home office. It’s the sharing. The being a piece of a whole. I feel the same when I go to conferences. I felt it when I finished my photography mentorship program a couple years ago by spending a week sharing a house with the group in Vegas.
I’m going to chase more of that. In my camper van. While I roam the country visiting every National Park.