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I didn’t know whether to be glad or depressed that everything I owned fitted easily into the storage spaces of my recreational vehicle. Having spent the previous winter in a cheesy motel on New Hampshire’s Seacoast, I had long since shed anything that wouldn’t fit into a suitcase, a couple of gym bags and some banana boxes, Chiquita written on their sides, scrounged from a local market.
There had been a sort of freedom in that minimalist winter. I had a paltry income from Social Security and a job slicing deli meats at a local Walmart. Not much but enough to keep body and soul together. And I had the freedom to keep them together wherever I wanted to be. Anytime I had felt the urge, I could have packed my possessions into the trunk of my Honda Civic and gone somewhere, anywhere, else. I just hadn’t felt the need; until now.
“No one to see, I’m free as the breeze; no one but me and my memories,” songwriter Johnny Mercer wrote in “Travelin’ Light. Well, why not. That applied to me as well as anything did.
Over that winter, I had come across a book written by a group of unemployed depression-era writers hired by the federal government to take a trip down the East Coast of America and produce a book. They called it “U.S. Route 1 from Maine to Florida.” Intrigued, I ordered the book from Amazon. When it arrived I poured over it.
It consisted mostly of listings of all the towns the writers drove through along with descriptions of points of interest along the road. But the book planted a seed: I was an unemployed writer. What was stopping me from fashioning such a trip?
The idea had been a long time coming. I’d left the newspaper business in 2002 to return to New York to be near my aged mother whose health was deteriorating. By the time she passed away in 2005, the newspaper industry was in decline. Given my age and the state of the industry, getting another job as a newspaper reporter looked impossible. The idea of taking a trip down U.S. Route 1 and producing a book about it began to grow in my mind. More research.
Prowling the aisles of the local library, I found a number of books about the road. None more recent than 1988, when a New York Times reporter produced what was mostly a picture book. I found a few other titles about Route 1. Most of these were historical pieces. The time seemed right for an updated account of life along America’s first interstate highway.
I began by making lists of the things I’d need. First priority: get a recreational vehicle. A few phone calls about RV rentals were enough to nix the idea of leasing one. The cost of a three-month rental would have been astronomical.
How about buying one? I searched the Web. Prices even for used RVs floored me. Was this idea a stupid pipe dream?
Then, on my way to work one night, I drove past an RV sales business. I Pulled over and got out of the car to look at the goods on display. In the fading light, the RVS parked on the lot looked like giant prehensile insects. There was no way I could afford something so large. Nevertheless, I resolved to return in the morning.
I was there as soon as the place opened. The owner, Bill, spotted me. Tall and rail thin with an ever-present cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth, Bill made a beeline for me and asked what I was looking for. Within a few minutes he led me to a used 1987 Ford Coachman RV.
I was more than a bit skeptical. Was a 22 year old used RV really what I wanted? Perhaps it would have been more accurate to describe it as deeply used. I pictured spending every dime I had on constant repairs. Later, in Fort Kent, when the starter fractured its vitals and on a suburban street outside of Fredericksburg, Virginia, when the fuel pump decided the time was ripe to give up the ghost, I was to remember my doubts.
But my tight budget dictated a very used RV and this was the only one on offer after three months of looking.
The engine started on the first try. I got out and walked around to the rear. No telltale blue smoke emerged from the exhaust pipe. Okay, good sign. A test drive followed.
Having driven big box ambulances, horsing around something larger than a sedan was no big surprise. I drove it far enough to get a feel for its handling and how wide turns would need to be. Backing it up would be difficult but a previous owner had installed a back-up camera, so that mitigated the difficulty a bit.
Even before returning to the RV yard, I knew I was hooked. I wanted to pack up and hit the road. Before leaving, I paid Bill a $1,000 down payment and told him to get started with the alterations it would need.
How much was this jaunt going to cost? I did the trip’s arithmetic obsessively. One morning at breakfast in a diner I covered my napkin with numbers, trying to figure mileage and gasoline costs, camping fees and incidentals. My waitress asked, “Balancing your checkbook?” “No,” I answered; “just trying to figure out if I am crazy or not.”
The estimated cost of three months on the road: $16,600. In this if not in anything else about the trip, I proved amazingly prescient. With my Social Security and a small pension, I figured I had enough. What was I waiting for?
So on Thursday, May 13, I was emptying the contents of my room into the RV and eyeing the weather. The day was warm and sunny with a stiff onshore breeze, familiar conditions for the New Hampshire Seacoast in early spring.
A last check around the room showed that everything I intended to take with me was aboard. There was an image of a mallard duck in flight was painted on the side of my RV. It was time to get that little bastard flapping his wings.
