Readers and writers blog

There’s no doubt we’re finding new horizons with our new electronic devices, but I can think of one — the cell phone — that would have destroyed a world I discovered two decades ago.

Twenty years ago, they were called ‘cellular’ phones and they weren’t exactly hand-held. They were bulky, heavy, and they required radio equipment that took up as much space as a medium-size kitchen appliance, which is why they also cost about the same, and hooked into an expensive network, if you could find one.

I was about to embark on my life in a truck. It wasn’t going to be just life in a truck. It was going to be a minimalist life in a truck, expenses cut to the bone, squeezing each dollar until, as they say, the eagle screamed.

(Yes, you can read all about it in ‘Adrift in America,’ a book that is, conveniently for you, available free on this weblog.)

I lived five years in that truck, traveling for much of that time, and I managed to live a minimal life that stayed within my meager budget. And yet, minimalist that I was, I would gladly have had a mobile telephone in that truck. I just couldn’t afford it.

So it was stopping every now and then to use a pay phone when calls were necessary. And, of course, nobody could call me. On the road, I was incommunicado, cut off from all the world except for the immediate part I happened to be occupying.

Personal security was a concern.

When I was preparing for my road life, the truck and I lived at an RV park in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. When we weren’t commuting to my editing job in Portland, I was busy outfitting the truck with such things as lightweight cabinets, a generator, an auxiliary water supply, and the truck and I went on little shakedown trips to other wooded areas of Maine and New Hampshire.

One of the troubling questions I had in those days was how to assure my safety on the road. Without a phone, calling the police was not an option.

Then should I carry a gun? If so, should it be a rifle or a handgun? Now, I’m no stranger to guns. I grew up in rural New Hampshire where everybody had guns, and I qualified in the Army as an expert with a rifle.

It was this background that finally convinced me not to take a gun on the road. I planned to shoot no game, and as for personal confrontations, I knew, a gun is no help unless you’re ready to use it. I didn’t want to be on either end of a gunfight, lose or win.

Protection against animals? One of my discoveries: A spray bottle filled with ammonia, nozzle adjusted to ’stream,’ will stop most any animal dead in its tracks.

The best safety measure, I found, was avoidance.

In March 1989, I was parked in a picnic area in Cross Plains, Texas, enjoying a quiet evening, when the woods were suddenly full of pickup trucks and sedans with throaty mufflers. I had no interior lights on, and when the vehicles began circling my truck, I pulled the window curtains closed. The vehicles kept circling, counterclockwise.

From one of them, a young voice: “There’s someone in there, so wake up, you old bastard.” From another, “Pervert.”

This mini-Nascar event continued for 10 minutes, then the vehicles sped away, the reason for their departure no more apparent than for their arrival. Even if I could have called the police, they wouldn’t have had time to get there. And I shuddered to think what would have happened with a gun involved.

After a polite interval, I also drove away, well out of town.

Parked later in a less-public thicket, I pulled out the Bible and did some reading. Nowhere did I find words like “old bastard” and “pervert” shouted at strangers.

Then I thought about TV evangelists in that Bible Belt, and it occurred to me that they’re sort of the junk food of religion. I guess you could argue that a glazed doughnut or a greasy hamburger is better than starvation, but I wondered. About the additives and their poisonous effects. Because I felt I had just witnessed some of them.

Then I wrote a long letter to a friend. I did that a lot. No PC, no word processor, just a small manual typewriter. No Wikipedia, just a Webster’s dictionary and a Bible.

It was a different world, one that a cell phone from today would have evaporated. It was a world of isolation, a quality I still value. It has helped me discover a lot about myself.

– Sid Leavitt