<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are circumstances which require a history and others which merely invite one, and I have become increasingly suspicious of the latter. A life, examined with sufficient determination, will furnish reasons for nearly anything; and there is no calamity so complete that its victim cannot improve upon it by supplying several chapters of explanation.
The necessary history is shorter.
I had not always been poor, nor homeless, nor particularly accustomed to being helpless. Indeed, much of my life had been spent in occupations in which helplessness was generally somebody else’s problem by the time it reached me. I had built systems, managed companies, answered telephones at unreasonable hours, and been sent toward situations from which more sensible people were proceeding rapidly in the opposite direction. Competence, when practiced for long enough, acquires the unfortunate character of identity. One ceases merely to know how to solve problems and begins to assume that being unable to solve one represents some deficiency of character.
This belief had served me tolerably well until circumstances undertook a more rigorous examination of it.
There was illness. There was surgery, undertaken because the alternative had ceased to be an acceptable one, and there were consequences which neither I nor those treating me had intended. There followed a body considerably less cooperative than the one with which I had previously negotiated, and employment which disappeared at approximately the point when employment became especially desirable. Money followed employment with that particular loyalty money displays when departing.
None of these things occurred separately enough to permit the courtesy of dealing with one before the next arrived.
I had savings. I spent them.
I had credit. I used it.
I had income. Then I did not.
I had a house.
That distinction would shortly become grammatical.
It is possible, certainly, to reconstruct the chain backward and identify a great many junctions at which another decision might have produced another result. There is considerable entertainment available in this exercise at three o’clock in the morning, and I recommend it to anyone who has grown tired of sleep. Given sufficient imagination, every catastrophe can be prevented retrospectively. One need only know beforehand precisely those things which became obvious afterward.
By September, however, retrospection had lost most of its practical utility.
The house was being lost. The bills would not be paid. Most of what I had accumulated during the preceding decades would remain behind, not because I had achieved some fashionable enlightenment concerning the burden of possessions, but because possessions are stubbornly physical things and there was neither time, money, strength, nor cubic footage sufficient to preserve them.
I was not downsizing.
I was determining what crossed the border.
The border, in this instance, was the threshold of a seven-by-sixteen-foot cargo trailer called Meridian.
She was an unpainted creature of natural aluminum gray, relieved by black trim, and had been manufactured with no apparent expectation that anyone would someday regard her as architecture. There were no windows. There had been no kitchen, no bed, no water, no heat, no office and certainly no reason to suppose that a woman and an elderly dog might shortly depend upon her for nearly every ordinary function of domestic life.
We had been correcting these oversights.
Meridian acquired insulation and walls, a raised bed, a small kitchen, electrical power, batteries, solar panels, ventilation, heat, communications, storage and the miscellaneous machinery by which civilization may be reduced to something capable of traveling on two axles. Some portions were carefully designed. Others were devised because it was Thursday and something had to work by Friday. All of it was being built beneath a deadline which had ceased to be metaphorical.
She was unfinished.
This was unfortunate, since I was very nearly out of house.
There would be two of us leaving in her. Yang, who had reached an age at which longevity becomes less a statistical expectation than an act of personal obstinacy, had not participated in any of the decisions which brought us here. He had nevertheless acquired an absolute interest in their outcome. Whatever philosophical accommodations I might eventually make with poverty, failure, responsibility or fate were therefore constrained by the rather simpler requirement that the old dog have food, medicine, shelter, a tolerable temperature, and his person.
It is useful to have at least one moral problem which admits of no ambiguity.
There was no corresponding certainty concerning what came afterward.
I was not moving, in the ordinary meaning of that word. There was no other house awaiting furniture, no forwarding address to be written carefully upon boxes, no new employer expecting me Monday morning. Meridian was not transportation to the next home.
Meridian was the next home.
Beyond that lay roads, public land, occasional private ground, uncertain work, finite money, winter, and whatever arrangements could be made between these things. I had plans, certainly. Plans are one of the more durable luxuries and remain surprisingly affordable even after most others have been discontinued. Whether circumstances intended to consult them remained unknown.
Nor did departure settle what preceded it.
Debts would remain debts after the state line disappeared behind us. Physical limitations would remain physical. The affairs I could not put right before leaving would not become right merely because I had placed several hundred miles between myself and their consequences. There would be people inconvenienced, institutions unpaid, possessions abandoned and promises which, however sincerely made, I could no longer perform.
I had searched for a cleaner conclusion.
There wasn’t one.
By then the choice had narrowed to something considerably less romantic: I could leave voluntarily, on the best terms still available to me, or remain until the machinery already in motion completed the decision on my behalf. Both roads arrived at the same vacant house. Only one allowed me much control over the condition in which Yang and I departed.
So I chose the road.
This should not be mistaken for courage. Neither, I think, should it be mistaken for surrender. There are moments in which those two words describe the same physical motion and differ only in the story one tells afterward.
For the present there remained six days, an unfinished trailer, an elderly dog, an alarming shortage of money, and Don beneath my bed in one hundred and five degree heat doing work for which I could no longer afford to pay him.
The future could wait its turn.
We still had to get the lights on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are circumstances which require a history and others which merely invite one, and I have become increasingly suspicious of the latter. A life, examined with sufficient determination, will furnish reasons for nearly anything; and there is no calamity so complete that its victim cannot improve upon it by supplying several chapters of explanation.The necessary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16,"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions\/16"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}