Date:         Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:33:23 -0700
Reply-To:     Jeffrey Olson <jjolson@GWTC.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Jeffrey Olson <jjolson@GWTC.NET>
Subject:      Dilemmas by bus...
In-Reply-To:  <2554.192.168.0.148.1234754232.squirrel@hasenwerk.homeip.net>
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I was feeling sad.  Ione strode about the house making notes about what
to give away and what to store, and what to take with us.  Even though
we'd been planning for three years - since the beginning of the
depression - and were totally comfortable with our decision to move to
the road, I was feeling really disconnected.


We'd spent so many hours talking about what we wanted to do with our
late middle years, agonizing and getting euphoric, that the reality of
the final steps seemed to have a momentum all their own.  I watched the
love the of my life noting our possessions, eventually moving them them
into three different parts of the room, into three different futures.
She was so clear about what we'd decided.


This process had been going on for weeks, over a month actually.  We
were down to little things now.  Did we need the set of postcards we
send every year around Christmas wishing everyone good cheer?  Would we
write Christmas cards, these cards, or would we find a way to make new
ones that expressed the different life we were leading?  I didn't know,
and at this moment didn't feel like going there.  This is really, really
hard...


I'd spent two years putting together the bus, crafting our mobile home.
One of our greatest joys as a couple was to go sit in the bus, or when
it was stripped down to bare metal, to walk around the shop and talk
about what we wanted to do, what we would need, how we wanted our home
to support our next few/many years.  We'd hang out for a week or two, or
longer, and finally come to a shared vision of what we wanted about some
aspect of our home, and I'd go about making it.  The Subaru engine was
in the bus.  I'd replaced all the 30 year old electrical and cooling
lines.  I'd installed new larger capacity brakes and new master and
slave cylinders and all brake lines.  The gas tank was new as were the 6
ply tires and shock absorbers.  All the rust and dirt was stripped from
the body and I sealed everything with rubberized coating and coated the
interior sheet metal with POR 15.  The exterior was ready to paint.  All
the interior body panels were insulated with foil covered bubble wrap.
We'd settled on how the bed and interior would be set up and I'd built
everything to our vision - revisiting it of course as shelves and
compartments were installed.


It'd been a heady process this throwing off one life for another.  I
remember the moment three years ago we'd sat down at Sweet Melissa's in
downtown Laramie and Ione had looked at me and said, "What are we going
to do now?"


I'd looked at her with bemusement.  This woman I'd married and loved
kept me constantly wondering.  As soon as I figured out where she was
coming from, she'd already left and was exploring another world.  I
sensed this was one of the times that she was exploring something big,
not just whether we should buy a couch, or where we'd backpack for a
month that summer.


Most of my male friends thought she was flighty, insubstantial,
emotional, and irrational.  When I first met her I thought the same
thing.  We were both part of a roving singles group of 30 to 60 year
olds that met every month at someone's house for wine, a potluck dinner,
and conversation.  Sometimes people paired up and that was ok.  They
were still welcome.  But for the most part, we were 20 to 50 friends who
enjoyed each other's company.


 From a male's point of view, one who didn't know her, Ione was a bit
too intense to be considered beautiful. At 52 the lines in her face were
crafted from intense investment in her life, and the knowing look in her
eyes stemmed from a wonderful weaving of emotional and intellectual
intelligence.  My friends were a bit scared of her - before we'd become
a couple she'd had the reputation - one that was never spoken about by
the way - of having a world that was a little bit larger than us guys.
She  played with us and we either played or kept our distance.  Most of
us that tried to play crashed and burned in our own insecurities and
black/white emotionality.


I was attracted to her fiery beauty and played.  How many times in those
first months I felt like I was barely treading water while drifting
downstream towards a waterfall.  I had to trust that I would go over the
falls and pop the surface.  I did - many times.


I knew why she was single at 52.  She presented such an intense,
substantial reality men simply couldn't find their footing with her.
Those that did apparently fell by the wayside at some point, unable to
keep up as an equal.  Her presence is that strong...


I'd realized early on in our relationship that I had to maintain my own
life in order to be with her.  I couldn't sink into her vibrance and
energy and beauty.  If I did, I felt as deep as I can feel I'd lose her,
that she would simply move on, and that would be that.  I realized this
early  in our relationship and was healthy enough to maintain my
directions and interests.  When I didn't waver when she did get
emotional and irrational and flighty seemed to reassure her.  My own
emotions and wondering wanderings were fuel for her fires.  She so loves
to ask me five word questions that have me roiling emotionally to
express what I feel.  She doesn't waver either...


When Obama had been elected we'd felt hope like so many starving
progressive types had.  When the recession officially became a
depression in the winter of 2010 and the blame began to shift from the
Reagan to Bush decades to Obama, Ione began to get uneasy.  I don't know
what she sensed, and she couldn't put it into so many words.  But I
trusted her intuition and the unease she felt about where the world was
heading.  Looking back it seems like much of our lives were caught up in
long conversations with each other and our friends about how to live the
rest of our lives..


The backdrop to our angst was a deep uncertainty about the power of
vision and ideals in public life.  We'd gone as far to identify young
leaders emerging from local to the national scene, and none of them had
the cachet Obama had had during the year before his election and the
year after.  No one was rising above the lowest common denominator to
express a vision of a possible better world.  The rifts between
ideological positions had hardened into unbridgeable spaces between
ideologues on both sides.  The "filled with hope" now seen as a naive
search to bridge the ideological divide in bipartisan politics generated
an ethos of "I'm in this for myself" across America's landscape.
America's position of power, now maintained by military hardware, was
giving over to the Chinese century.


Ione kept asking what I wanted to do in our late 50s and early 60s.  She
was perfectly satisfied working at the county hospice center even though
it didn't pay much.  She said she was open to hiking for as many years
as I wanted to, that she was open to moving to a different kind of
lifestyle not based in a house and job, that she would like to see
Alaska and Tierra del Fuego - saying this knowing my history with VW
busses.  I knew she had a preference, but that it was one that would
evolve with my preferences.  It was a totally humbling experience to
live with and love someone who was so in tune with me that she'd
travelled the paths of imagination I would travel before I did.


Ione's question "What are we going to do now?," asked three years ago,
bore the fruit of an 85 VW bus, totally tricked out into a mobile home.
We'd saved enough - $80,000 - on top of retirement to spend three to six
years living out of the bus and doing interesting things.  One of the
greatest debates, sometimes an argument, that we worked our way through,
concerned medical insurance, our retirement, and our belief in the
system that we would spend our 60s, 70s 80s and perhaps 90s within.


We liquified all our assets.  We sold our home, liquified our
retirement, and put everything into cash.  This took place before the
depression hit its bottom and these kinds of cash transfers were
restricted.  With the $400,000 I got in inheritance from my folks, and
the $250,000 Ione got from hers when her mom died a year ago, we figured
we had enough to last us til our deaths.  We realized how privileged we
were to have this cash nest egg.  Neither of us had children, and for
five years or so, we fully intended to explore the world from within the
bus.  Ione was already asking about what I thought we'd do when we got
sick of playing.  I, the dutiful straight guy, was wising up.  I said I
didn't know, simply because I didn't.  What I did know is I wanted to
spend my late 50s into my mid-sixties at least, hiking and biking and
rafting and driving from Prudhoe Bay to Tierra del Fuego.


Before I'd met Ione, I'd already planned a number of years to hike the
PCT and CDT, end to end, to bike the Continental Divide Mountain Bike
Trail, to learn to oar a raft well enough to guide a raft down the Grand
Canyon, to hike the Arizona Trail, the Great Divide Trail in Canada, the
Grand Enchantment Trail in the southwest, and maybe the PCT again.  That
she wanted to do these things too still amazes me.  I'm so lucky.


However, today, watching Ione putter and organize and build the momentum
leading to our new lives, I am experiencing grief, a real sense of
loss.  I quit my job at the college and a satisfying career.  I will no
longer play raquetball twice a week with Mike.  I won't play tennis
three times a week with Dan and Gene.  I won't hike the Headquarters
Trail above Lincoln's head at the highest point on I-80.


I watch my mate move in her confident, self-absorbed way about our home,
and I hurt.  In an important sense, Ione is my doppelganger.  I'm
cutting myself off from pretty much everything I know.  Without her
strength and resolve and directed vision I probably wouldn't have made
the choices we've made.  This scares me.  I've always realized that Ione
is with me because I have had my own vision, my own dream.  I satisfy
myself in my day to day life, and we are good together.  But I have a
deep, unalterable sense that my life is bigger than me, that my destiny
is not something I choose.  Right now I'm feeling small in my life,
overwhelmed and tentative.  The choices I've made that have led me to
this moment, to living on the road, to hiking and rafting and biking for
as long as it takes to do them - is this reallly what I want to do???


Jeffrey Olson
Martin, SD