I promised to write about the people I meet in my nomadic life. However, writing about others is kind of tricky, especially if they might read what you just said about them. Do you need permission from them first? What if they are offended by what you say about them? Caution and sensitivity are required. So, I may start out writing about people who have just passed through my life, people I meet in passing and whom I likely will never see again. Or, like I do today, I may write about people in general.

Today, I offer an overview of the folks I met in the last 5+ months while traveling from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State to the great desert Southwest, where I remain today. You might think free spirits who travel extensively and/or live off the grid would be a semi-homogeneous group, but that is only true in terms of race. It is mostly white people out there in vans, RV, and truck campers. Otherwise, the people I have met on the road are the most diverse group I could have imagined. Democratic/Republican, affluent/dirt poor, educated/less so, religious/atheist, socially connected/marginalized, retired/working full time, old/middle-aged, gregarious/introverted, kind/selfish, and so on. It seems that free spirits come in every “flavor.” I never found all these variations in one place at one time, but as I moved around this fall and winter I encountered different individuals and diverse groups.

Diversity, Mar 2020

I found the most extreme free spirits at Slab City, CA, where everyone there lives out in the desert, off the grid, outside the margins of mainstream society. The people there basically squat on federal land. They are not exactly nomads in that they mostly hang out at the Slabs. With their shaggy appearance, worn clothing, and abundant tattoos, they are people who might scare you if you didn’t know better.

I found the other end of the spectrum in the RV park where I am now. It is full of mainstream retiree/snowbirds who still travel or have done so extensively in their younger years. People look plain vanilla, with trim hair and clean clothes. It is a private park that people buy into so that they have a home base and a designated lot. Like most of the other snowbirds, this group has one foot in the nomadic lifestyle and the other in an established home base.

Between the two extremes are all those who just travel in their RVs, with no home base at all. They need a residence address for getting license plates and bank accounts, but most return rarely, if ever, to that address. South Dakota is famous for its lax policy that requires nomadic residents to only return every 4 years. Some are actually on the road most of the time; however, some move around the winter circuit in the southwest (BLM Long-Term Areas, Mexico, and other popular sites) and then migrate north (AK, the Pacific NW, and the Maritimes seem especially popular) for the summer.

This winter I made an effort to connect with as many of these people as possible, and I moved freely within each group. There is an old saying, “You meet people for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” I met many of each. I learned to respect most people for who they are and to cherish the deeper “lifetime” connections I made with kindred spirits. There was only one creep in the whole bunch.

Yet, in diversity, I found a certain sameness. For one thing, every single group I mingled with had established social events, like card nights, happy hour, open mic events, karaoke, and/or a coffee hour. I observed that people love to eat out together and are always looking for an excuse to head to a diner. Even in the so-called lawless society at the Slabs there is a hierarchy of leaders/followers and of haves/have nots. The haves out there may not have all that much but they do have more than others. For example, the snowbirds who stop by the Slabs and have functioning RVs are considered rich. Some people create dramas, others try to deal with them. Some skip through life, others get dragged along. People create cliques. Substance abuse crosses all boundaries. Nearly everyone has family trouble and demons of some kind. We all have the same drives and the same desires, like communicating and connecting. One younger guy I talked to summed up life by saying, “We are all just looking to connect with others.”

So, the most important thing that I learned this winter is that, despite the outer shell that people present to the world, people are people. The human condition and our struggles to function within did not change as I traveled to new places or moved among a different subset of society. We only think that we have fooled others by wearing our masks. Of course, we have different genetics and IQs, that diversity that I mentioned at the start, but underneath it all, we are united by our sameness.

Sameness, Mar 2020

I know this is a shocking statement, especially for those who are either ashamed of their lot in life or who have spent a lifetime building a lofty image of themselves. But, our “sameness” is a concept we need to embrace now more than ever. Human relationships are so fractured and we are so divided, and I believe our very survival depends on people coming together. I know that everyone is not prepared to move around the country or hang out with people drastically different from themselves, but each of us can try to reach out, where ever we are, to someone who exists outside our comfort zone. The secrets? Just open your hearts and stop judging. It is so worth the effort because we learn so much about ourselves in the process, the connections we make enrich us forever, and we may even learn to solve humanity’s greatest problems.