Readers and writers blog

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is Chapter 3 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Zephyrhills, Florida. December 3, 1988.

The evening sky is the kind they name citrus cocktails for – orange bleeding smoothly into a blue as pale and serene as the waters around the peninsula. It has been another beautiful Florida day. I sit on the couch in a soft breeze, thinking it now smells only slightly sweet from the sewage leak, and peer through my reading glasses for the last of the thistle spines embedded in my feet. I find a flea instead and use the tweezers on him.

The thistles caught me by surprise this morning when I walked barefoot onto the dew-covered lawn behind the house in Zephyrhills where Ma, Granny and their friend Henry are spending the winter. I was halfway around the truck when I sensed it wasn’t the dew making my soles tingle. I lifted a foot and looked at the underside. Bristling with thistles. I hopped back around the truck and dove into the cabin door on my hands and knees, twisting around in the narrow doorway to get at the bottom of my feet. I thought of my cat, Bonzo. He had made dozens of trips in and out of the truck since we’d arrived the previous afternoon. Why haven’t those things bothered him?

Ah well, I grimace, plucking the last of the little balls of barbed wire from my undersurfaces, Bonzo is clearly the one creature in this truck who knows how to travel light.

Now there will be an additional complication in repairing the leaking discharge valve beneath the truck’s sewage holding tank. It is hard enough to crawl under there under the best of conditions. I will have to borrow a rubber mat from my mother to cushion my back against the thistles.

Damn, the whole sleeve will have to be replaced, and it is coated on the inside with sludge that, even when you know it’s yours, makes your eyes roll back when you put your hands in it.

There are other problems. The fanbelt keeps stretching loose, causing the engine to run hotter than it should. The bottom shelf in the clothes closet is working loose from the staples that secure it to the walls, causing the linen to sag down into the gas heater. Somewhere on the road, I have lost a rear bumper plug, and, as a result, a 10-foot collapsible sewer hose has wriggled onto the highway behind it.

For two and a half years, I have been living at a campground in Maine in this truck, unhooking it for weekend trips, trying to identify the weak spots and fortify them, trying to get whatever is going to break down to break down so I can repair it. Now, barely a week on the open road, the goddamned thing is falling apart.

Well, that’s why this has been planned as a pit stop, and soon I will be heading for Connecticut to join my wife, Diane, for the Christmas holidays, and we will settle the last details in this exciting new phase of our lives.

Evening has turned to night, and Bonzo and I convert the couch to a bed and slide into the sheets together. I can’t sleep. About midnight, I look out the window and see a thin crescent moon rising.

I sit at night and watch the skies

To see the moon in her ascent.

I sit alone and rationalize

The separated time we’ve spent.

Six weeks later, I am at a rural crossroads 60 miles north of Zephyrhills, parked beneath a live oak tree beside a row of empty vegetable stalls owned by Mr. Peoples. I have been parked here for a few hours before he drives up in a station wagon full of kids sharing his milk chocolate good looks, surveys my truck and asks if I am the new guy running the stalls. No, I say, I don’t know who the owner is. Well, he is the owner, he says, and I am welcome to stay here, but if the new guy shows up, will I please tell him Mr. Peoples – spelled the same as ‘peoples’ – is looking for him. Mr. Peoples then drives away with the milk-chocolate-handsome kids waving.

As the afternoon sun makes its way beneath the spreading tree, I watch two other kids, lighter and pinker in tone, walking along Route 42 where it leads away east from Route 301 toward the railroad tracks. I walked there earlier, getting my exercise in the sun. The kids are walking slower.

Diane didn’t think the new phase of our lives was exciting at all. In fact, due to her father’s illness – I know, I told her, I was worried, too – due to that and other things, she said, she wouldn’t be able to join me in New Orleans during the February break from her teaching job. As for the spring break and our plans for Savannah, well, that was just too far in the future.

The kids get to the railroad crossing and turn south onto the tracks. Now they are facing directly into the sun. I continue to watch them, wondering what it would be like to have kids, as if the world actually needed any more.

Diane and I argued. I was angry and loud, shouting about why she didn’t tell me before this, anyway. She sat there sullen and disgusted, fed up with me and that stupid truck.

Well, at least the truck is running much better now. After 2,500 quick miles to Connecticut and back – Christmas ended early – the fanbelt has found its operating length, the closet shelf is holding tight beneath the screws and wires I have applied, and a new rubber bumper plug, thanks to some well-placed hammer blows, is holding fast to a new 10-foot length of sewer hose.

Even the mighty Bonzo has learned to walk on a Chihuahua-size dog harness and long piece of clothesline I have fitted him with for outdoor visits. I reel him in from the tall grass behind the vegetable stalls and stroke him into a hypnotic purr. You can never tell about women, but it looks like we’re on our own. Through the dark canopy of gnarled branches and glossy jade leaves, we can see the first stars of evening. It has been another beautiful Florida day.

– Sid Leavitt