3. KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON?

We drive in mad circles around the USA between 2011 and this year, me chanting Ginsberg and Brautigan and Kerouac and mantras from The Book of Secrets and N. making up raps about dumpster-diving for mountain folk and us packing bowl after bowl. We are wildly seeking out BLISS and MOTHER NATURE in National Parks that always seemed to be packed with concrete and families screaming at each other in neon-colored shoes? and neon-colored shirts? and shirts that said KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON?

We farm on a goat dairy in the desert mountains of New Mexico and homesteads along the California coast. Our home away from Home is the Wolf, an anarchist commune. My anxiety disappears when I am farming. I’m immersed in beautiful, rewarding work that feels greater than I am; local, organic farms are crucial for the health of the whole Earth; I’m excited to be a part of the sustainable agriculture movement. Farming, I feel genuinely happy and at peace.

Back on the road, we seek places to sleep outside Walmart where the cops won’t bug us, and seek food from the dumpster, and seek Wisdom from old folks, parked on benches outside cafés and at communes. They look kinda wise in our eyes until they respond hey man I don’t have no wisdom… I have a kid that won’t speak to me… and a broken back… I don’t have no wisdom…

I’m in love. I tell folks that N. is Buddha. He has truly succeeded in surrendering. He doesn’t care if he dies today. He is content to wander around the USA barefoot, poking around in dumpsters, grinning at people with a flower tucked behind his ear. I’m sure it helps him that he’s remarkably good-looking, and so his technique, whenever he’s in town alone, is to pick up a woman. He likes women. He’s a man of simple desires, he says: He likes women and music and flowers and pot. The key to happiness, in N.’s Grand Philosophy, is to keep your desires simple: “The more ambition you have, the more anxiety you have. Why are people so blind? Why don’t they just stop?”

Between 2011 and 2014, I broke up with N. and returned to New York three times, claiming that I was done with the hippie lifestyle. I never stopped being in love with N.: I just wanted more from life than to just float around.

Each time, I’d try to recreate some semblance of a steady “life” that entailed shopping-in-supermarket + job + stability), but I’d just collapse. It’s hard transitioning from hippie-world to New York City. To suddenly feel like all the values of the people around you are flipped. What is the point of all this ambition, ego-striving, hard work? Why don’t we all just move to a commune and share our possessions and chill the fuck out?

Whenever I returned to New York, I felt like I had zero emotional support from my family, and no close friends: I had nobody to honestly talk to about how shitty it all felt. Like everybody just saw me as a big clown: Haha, here is our fuck-up daughter, or our fucked-up friend, who clowned around on a commune.

Playing the role of a clown is miserable. I walked around the streets of Brooklyn, sobbing, feeling exactly as I had before I had ever met N.: telescope-in-my-chest. I drank alone before I socialized, afraid to talk to my friends if I didn’t have at least three drinks in me. Eventually, I got fed up, blamed my loneliness on that ugly soul-sucking beast New York, and thought, Fuck this SHIT! If only I could get back to N… His lifestyle certainly wasn’t solid, but at least it was one that promised beauty. So I ran back to him. Again, and again, and again.

4. X-MAS IN THE BIBLE BELT

On one such defection in fall 2013, I met up with N. in California. We sped down Highway 50 to surprise his parents in the Bible Belt on Christmas Eve. N. hadn’t seen them since he left Nebraska some years ago, and I bet you can guess whether he had a cell phone. His mother burst into tears upon seeing her son: She’d been praying to Jesus that N. was safe when we knocked on his parent’s decoration-plastered front door.

The reunion was pleasantly awkward. N. and I took showers beforehand, so we’d be all nice and tidy for his parents; N. shaved his face, and borrowed a friend’s button-down shirt and corduroy pants. We came bearing crab legs and chocolates from Hy-Vee; N. got his dad some computer game as a present. I don’t know. N. had been talking about the reunion since Home had hit Nevada: He was nervous; he wanted to make a good impression and show his parents that he was doing OK and he wasn’t some shmuck. The meal was fine. Small-talk. But after the meal, when it came time for father-and-son to catch up, the polite little charade shattered.

“Are you two mentally ill?” N.’s father asks us when we tell him that we are planning on permanently living in the car and just traveling around being free, and just, yeah.

“YOU ARE THE MENTALLY ILL ONE. YOU KNOW, YOUR LIFE IS WHATEVER YOU WANT TO MAKE IT,” says N. “YOU ARE THE MENTALLY ILL ONE STUCK IN A JOB THAT YOU HATE, WITH A WIFE THAT YOU HATE, LIVING OUT A LIFE THAT YOU HATE…WE ARE SEEKING OUT SOMETHING MORE. YOU KNOW, YOUR LIFE IS WHATEVER YOU WANT IT TO BE. WE ARE THE ONLY SANE ONES. EVERYONE ELSE IN THIS STATE IS MENTALLY ILL.”

I side with N.’s dad, Joey, that night, and tell N. to shut up. Frankly, I felt embarrassed to have entered that house at all: we probably came off as incredibly obnoxious. Joey came to America from the Middle East when he was a young child. Since then, he’s rarely had the time to leave the Midwest because of work. No shit, it must be hard for him, to have a son who is a dropout. (At the same time, from what N.’s told me, his father is a real jerk. I believe N.: N. rarely loses his temper—seeing the way Joey makes N. lose his shit, I know N. must have real beef with his father.) Still, for Joey’s son to berate him about how he should simply quit his life…yikes.