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Chapter 1 of Passages, A Memoir of Camping in Changing Times

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Our first travel trailer, the Casita!

PASSAGES: A memoir of camping and travel in changing times

By Toby Neal

CHAPTER 1

My husband seduced me into leaving paradise with the promise of a travel trailer.

And…it all had to do with passages.

Passages.

Such a rich word, plump and glossy with meaning, a round, taut-skinned grape of a word that pops in the mind and on the tongue.

I’ve long loved this word as a therapist and applied it to the many ways we as humans move through predictable events: that first day when we walk away from parents, tiny backpacks on, to start kindergarten. The braces, menses, and pubic hair of adolescence. That first driver’s license, prom, then high school graduation. The adult job, college, or trade school which segues, sometimes bumpily, into the beginning of a career and, along the way, major relationships. Marriage, in whatever form that takes. A first child with heartbeats, footprints and diaper changes recorded. Buying a home if we can find a way  notch that bedpost. Then lateral or upward job moves or lack of them, the ushering of children into their adulthood. The eventual end of work and beginning of retirement. Downscaling into some form of elder care.

One of the more interesting aspects of being human is that we can read about, and intellectually understand, all of these ‘passages’ without believing that we ourselves will go through them.

Each of us is a pristine snowflake full of promise—until we pause for whatever reason and discover that most of our lives have already taken place and our individuality looks like everyone else’s.

There are exceptions. Some people’s lives are violently or surprisingly disrupted. Newness must be cobbled together from the (sometimes literal) ashes of what’s left.

My life followed a “normal” course (as I desperately wanted it to after my wild upbringing, written about in Freckled) and it was progressing toward a conventional, if colorful, conclusion—when a plot twist occurred.

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My husband Mike and I lived in a modest split-level house built in 1973 on the side of a volcano overlooking the ocean on the island of Maui. After much effort, we’d achieved the American dream, complete with home ownership, grown, happy children, and two cars that worked. We resided on Condé Nast Traveler’s “Number 1 Island in the World” where we had it all, including meaningful and enjoyable work: I was a full-time writer, and Mike a social worker and artist.

We likely would have cruised into the end stages of our lives on that dot in the Pacific if my father-in-law hadn't died after a sudden decline. My mother-in-law, dependent on him, needed ongoing care at her assisted living facility back in California. Mike and his three siblings met and agreed to divide the year into segments: each would be responsible for overseeing her needs for a part of the year. Mike was to be given the crisis phone to monitor her wellbeing following Christmas of that tumultuous year.

My husband, haunted that he hadn’t helped with his father’s end of life, unilaterally decided to move to California to help his mom.

I did not agree with this plan.

We fought. We wept and blamed and snarled and snapped; all of the things they say not to do, and a lot of name-calling, too. There had been several times over the thirty years we’d been married when we, both strong-willed firstborns, dug in and refused to compromise. This was one of those times.

It seemed like we were coming to the end of our journey together when Mike quit his job, packed a bag, and left Maui. He took up residence in a camper in his brother’s back yard in Novato and began his stint supervising his mother’s care.

We had stumbled unawares into a ‘passage’: that predictable and often unplanned time when a child must step up to care for a parent.

I had no intention of joining Mike on “the Madland,”  that congested tangle of freeways, cluttered crowds and frenetic strip mall sameness. Rohnert Park, where my mother-in-law had been installed, was a bit of California farmland that had been paved over with multitudinous soulless old folks’ homes.

I hunkered down in our house, resentful of Mike’s departure, but resigned that he must follow his conscience. That had always been his way. I loved that about him even when I didn’t always agree with particular interpretations.

We grieved over his family situation. Phone calls were turbulent and tearful on both sides, and it didn’t help that California was having a savagely stormy, wet winter that year. Mike was miserable at first but determined to make the best of his choice. He took a new social work job working in the Russian River area and was helping homeless drug addicts funnel into rehab and housing when he wasn’t overseeing his mom’s care.

The Bay Area was where Mike had been born and raised and most of his family had settled. But I had chosen my “forever home” on Maui twenty years before, after we’d spent a stint in the Midwest for college. I was dug in.

My connection to California was more complicated. Two of my sisters had settled not far from his family center in Marin, and many of my extended family lived in Southern California, so I had ties there too—but the overpriced urban sprawl that had taken over the Golden State in my lifetime was a landscape I grieved over.

I didn’t feel guilty about not being involved with my mother-in-law’s care. I loved her, but her cognitive state was such that she didn’t notice my absence—and she couldn’t appreciate Mike’s sacrifice in moving back to be with her, either.

I continued to take beach walks with my dog, write my mysteries and thrillers, visit friends, see a handful of mental health clients, and spend time with my sister and divorced, ageing parents, both of whom lived on the island nearby.

I asked Mike if he was coming back after his assigned stint caring for his mom was up. He said he didn’t know. He’d felt like he was stagnating on Maui. He was energized by new challenges, new places, new things to see and do.

Maui was an island after all, and we’d been there a long time. Two hours in any direction, and we were halfway home already. That made Mike feel stifled, trapped, while I was comforted by the island’s smallness and familiarity. I’d grown up on an even smaller island, Kauai. I liked to travel, sure—but I liked coming home to Hawaii just as much.

I always knew where I was on an island, with one side mountains (mauka) and the other, the sea—makai. The place between mauka and makai was my home, and always would be.

Our stalemate seemed insurmountable.

One day, Mike called me from his brother’s camper. He’d made up his mind about something: there was a new, confident clarity in his voice. “Come back and visit for our anniversary,” he said. “I don’t want to break up—I want us to stay together, all the way to the end. There’s only ever been you, for me.”

That was true for me too. Love had never been our problem; we’d loved hard and long, through thick and thin, poverty and struggle, faith and despair. Sadly, sometimes love isn’t enough.

I said nothing.

“Just come visit. Let me show you how it could be.” He waited a beat, then said, “we could get that travel trailer you’ve always wanted.”

A travel trailer. My kryptonite.

I’d been fantasizing about one, cutting out photos of teardrops and Airstreams and even making a Pinterest board, ever since the last big road trip we took (documented in Open Road.) I had a theory that if we road tripped in a trailer, I could travel around the country with less of the free-floating agoraphobia I’d experienced previously. We would go from sea to shining sea, and experience all the National Parks from our little home on wheels.

I agreed to a two-week trip to visit him on the Russian River for our anniversary.

***

The days leading up to my departure were marked by apprehension alternating with excitement. I was scared but hopeful, a seesaw of emotions.

“You’re not really going to move back there,” my sister Bonny said confidently, but her green eyes were worried. “Just say no. He’ll come back. You’ve got a whole life here.”

“Of course,” I agreed, but I was secretly tempted, adrift in possibilities that swirled around me, thick as the ocean-scented mist that fed the redwoods and vineyards of the Russian River valley.

As I packed, rolling each item of clothing into a small carryon,  our sunlit house sparkled around me, comfortable and visually pleasing after years of ongoing renovations. The unassuming place had been through many incarnations since we’d bought it twenty years before. Seventies-itis fake overhead beams and gold-veined wall mirrors we’d hidden behind paneling were affectionate memories, as were the annual garage floods we’d finally conquered with gutters and a French drain system.

A wall of photos of the kids at every age from toddler to teen decorated a long hallway leading to Mike’s first carved wood sculptures, displayed in the airy living room with my precious collection of original paintings. A crow’s nest Mike had built crowned the house’s roof so we could enjoy vistas of unrestricted views. Best of all, the house’s wide windows overlooked Haleakala on one side and the ocean on the other, showcasing my beloved mauka and makai in one place. 

I sat on the glider bench in the crow’s nest and watched the sun rise on the day I left. The sky lit behind the ten-thousand-foot purple volcano and burst into salmon and gold flames to bid me goodbye. A warm breeze rattled the palms beside our house, scented by blooming plumeria trees. The cooing of ring-necked doves and chatter of mynahs was leavened with cardinal chirps. Off in the distance, the ocean was a hammered metal mirror reflecting the pageant overhead.

On the continent, it was winter, and cold. Another world.

The flight to California alone was a long quiet anxiety attack as each mile stretched taut as the strings of a guitar, vibrating at the slightest touch. Was I even considering joining Mike for a duty-driven stint in the Madland with no end date on it? Even if he sweetened the deal with a travel trailer, I’d be nuts to agree.

As I emerged from the plane into the baggage area, Mike stood waiting, his tall form alert and keen blue gaze searching mine for a sign of my mood. We exchanged the three-cornered hug and cautious, closed-mouth kiss married white people engage in publicly.

“How was your flight? How are you?” Big questions hidden in ordinary catechisms.

“I’m here.” I sweetened it with flirting. “And looking for a good time.”

“Me too.” Mike took my hand in his much bigger, weathered one, and squeezed it. I’d always liked how mine fit into his.

He’d rented us a cabin on the Russian River for the week. In February, out of season, the place was cold and damp and hadn’t been occupied in a while. We opened the windows, cranked the heater, aired the bedding, stocked the fridge, and curled up in front of a fire in a wood burning stove with a couple of glasses of Sonoma Pinot Noir from a nearby winery.

This place was a temporary refuge where the possibility existed to mend the frayed edges of our bond without our usual patterns and distractions.

We drank, the regional wine’s rich, earthy notes grounding us in the moment and to each other. Eventually we went to bed, silent and hesitant, then more confident—relearning each other’s bodies in the wake of upheaval. We were halves of a broken locket trying to fit back together, worried the edges would never align as they had.

The days of that week were a sensory tapestry—coolness of mossy paths through redwoods, shadowed and fragrant. Walks along rugged rocky gray beaches, picking up olive and curled black turban shells. Delicious lunches of Dungeness crab and artichokes. Bags of Bodega Bay taffy consumed in the car. Hikes along windswept bluffs, looking for raptors to photograph—and finding Cooper’s hawks, red tails, even a bald eagle sunning himself beside a raft of sea lions on a pebbled shoal at the river mouth.

Mike cast for steelhead in the swollen torrent of the Russian River, wading through willows as I walked the gravel banks, looking for colorful rocks or tumbled glass.

I forgot I was in noisy, crowded California. The Russian River in winter was another world entirely, a land of fog, rain, and velvet moss wrapped up in secrets and solitude. Nights were magical with the whisper of the river through the half-open window, the musty scent of aged timber and woodsmoke as we reminisced on a lifetime, limbs tangled together in bed.

"Don't you want to have one last big adventure?" Mike asked. “We could live here on the river. Not in town. It’s only an hour or so to my mom’s facility from here.”

‘Town’ was Santa Rosa or Rohnert Park, much too busy with human activity for me.

Here, in the towering green redwoods beside the river, so close to the sea, I felt peace—but also a new awakening of creativity and a dreamy excitement. The river called to an unknown place in me that felt familiar, a puzzle piece to a hole I hadn’t known was there. “What about that travel trailer you promised me?”

“That too. Of course.” 

Our fingers found each other's in the darkness in a silent promise that no matter where we were, we carried our shared past with us. Love was not just the grand gestures; it was willingness embark together on something that neither of us had seen coming.

Maybe I, too, was ready for a passage to somewhere new.

“If we get the travel trailer, yes,” I said. “Let’s have one last big adventure.”

***Here’s a sneak peek of the cover!***

P.S. If you liked the chapter, hit the little ❤️ and leave a comment! Means so much to me, writing is a lonely business…especially writing memoir.

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