The Road is Life

By: Erik Rittenberry

Photo: Erik Rittenberry

"On the innocent trail of their hunger,  he walked silently over the pastures  of the world." - Rilke

I’m somewhere in the western part of the United States slicing through a beautiful wasteland with my windows down and my old notched heart soaring higher than a bar-headed goose on a sunny day. 

I had to get away. 

Away from the asphalt world of guidelines and horrifying headlines and tedious talks of endless growth and prosperity, away from high-rise cities and interstates packed with vultures and machines racing to get nowhere.

Persistent bad news, division, violence, famine, and war dominate the airwaves. Politicians and news pundits are beyond horrendous and most of our leaders are criminally insane. Good folks everywhere are tired of the fear-ridden narratives and life-denying demands heaved at them from the sanctimonious political class.

I had to extract myself from the septic sludge of it all. 

And here I am, my ragged old jeans stained up pretty good and my boots might need replacin’ soon, but it doesn’t bother me all too much. It feels mighty fine to be alive and to breathe in the emancipated air out here in complete solitude as the desert sun sinks slowly toward the horizon. 

Despite the raging uncertainty in the world today, it feels good to be sitting here in the late afternoon shade of a juniper tree, my ass in the red dirt, a gush of that spring air filling my lungs, the song of the cactus wren in my ears, this little tumbler of wine in my left hand, the unregimented days, the “hell yes” feeling of being alive at this moment in time. 

Hell yes. 

Fresh air and freedom — that’s what I needed. That’s what we all need. To get away and revitalize the soul and fire up the imagination. To untangle our world-weary souls from the domesticated web of our undoing. 

And I couldn’t think of a more worthwhile way to remedy this crushing sense of claustrophobia than to hit the open road. As a poet writes, “When your mind is suffocating in its own sludge, move it.”

So I did. It was the only way. I packed the truck with old books, cold beers and wine, food, a tent, and a few essentials. Then aimlessly drove west. 

Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac were right — America’s last frontier is the endless highway. I’m off!

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I’ve been on the road for a few weeks now, boondocking on the banks of wildflower creeks up in the mountains and deep in the heart of the desert, living like a passing bum desperately trying to elude the red tape demands of this sad epoch. I sleep for free on the earth and eat very little. There’s glory in the gamble.

But this isn’t about me. 

This is about a fascinating spirit who is more alive than me. Someone more alive than most.

Somewhere far in the desert, I met a fellow camper named Charley. 

Charley was a homeless sage, a menace to the mundane, dancing like a wild man around his campfire. As soon as I laid eyes on him from my solitary little campsite across the way, I felt that this peculiar creature had it all figured out.

Perhaps I shouldn’t say “homeless,” because Charley lives quite the serene life in his 30-year-old van. He is a poet-philosopher, an artist, who belongs to the night, a man who no longer identifies with the crumbling charades of the artificial light. He stands before the veil of the cosmos naked and awe-struck, and despite being out of joint with the times, he’s aware more than most.

My curiosity won over. I grabbed two beers from the cooler and made my way over to this dancin’ shaman of the night. And, of course, he ended up being the friendliest, most poetic goddamn soul I’ve come across in quite some time.  

We slurped beers together that night around the fire beneath the fiery stars of the southern Utah sky. He told me about his life and how he recently left it all behind when the pandemic hit. He’s been living the vagabond life for two years now and smiles more than he ever has. 

He told me about his beautiful wife, and how, about a month before the pandemic hit, she left him for a tunic-wearing, crystal-fondling, kundalini yoga instructor who liked to quote Deepak Chopra between chants. Shortly after that, the virus hit, the lockdowns ensued, and his job let him go. It was a vicious month for old Charley, at least initially. 

One fine spring morning, he tells me, he woke slightly hungover to an email that informed him he’d been furloughed. He sipped his black coffee out on his back porch in the early dawn with a strange sense of joy as he read the email seven times. Slowly. Out loud. 
 
It was a soulless job, sure, but it paid well and the benefits were pretty damn good. Ten years with the company and one little measly 25-word email to inform him that he’s no longer welcome. He sat there, sipping his coffee in the soft morning light, overtaken with a peculiar sense of freedom in his heart.

“What is this?” He kept asking himself this one question. “What is this feeling I have sloshing around in me?”

He should’ve felt apprehensive and sad and maybe a bit angry, goddamnit, but he wasn’t. By losing the one thing that brought him security and normalcy, the one thing that kept him chained to the heavy stone of monotony, he now felt this incredible weight on his shoulders slowly fall away. 

The time was now. The time was now. The time was now, he whispered to himself. 

To say yes.

To say yes to the inner calling that’s been poking at him since his youth. To say yes to the unknown, to the gamble of the GO, to his artistic aspirations. To do the deliberate work of the soul. He’d always been an avid reader of the greats and he loved to write and create art. But life always seemed to have gotten in the way of these passions. He never found the time to live out his soul’s yearning. 

“No more.” He told himself. “No more.”  

After a few weeks of dull logistics and planning, Charley packed up a couple of boxes with only the essentials along with his favorite old books — Emerson, Pessoa, Hesse, Whitman, Yeats, Nietzsche, Camus, Kerouac, and all the great Russian novelists — and threw them into an old van that he’d recently bought with the cash made selling all his possessions. The van was furnished with a writing desk, a small cot, and a little compartment to store food. 

With the campfire blazing in his fierce eyes, he looks at me and says, “What else do you really need in life?” I nod in agreement. 

With the house sold and his penalized 401k cashed out, he sipped whiskey in a little motel at the edge of town on that stupendous night before his great escape. 

In the morning, as the birds sang and the rising sun splashed rays of golden light across the jasmine-scented land, he headed west along the backroads of life with no particular destination in mind. 

No striving, no goals, no clear direction — with Tom Petty turned up loud, Charley was freefallin’ into the unknown, and he’d never felt more alive.

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Two years on the road now and the bearded rambler has found his groove. His skin is worn and his clothes are ragged and his scent isn’t the most pleasant, but he’s alive, madly so, and lives on his own terms. He told me that from an early age, he knew this was the life for him — a life of wandering and writing and living untethered from the prosaic ideals of the over-civilized. 

It takes a lot of fucking courage and a radical sense of BEING to live the life Charley led. It’s not for the faint of heart as anyone who has lived it can tell you. To leave it all behind and completely abandon oneself to the chaotic current of life with little money, no security or safe havens, just wits and freedom and struggle, nursed solely by a sense of “what’s next?”

I asked Charley how he makes it out here. How does he earn the funds to venture around in this gas-guzzling van and eat and live?

“I need very little money these days,” he says. “Frugality is an art form in itself and you get good at it over time.”

He told me he’s a self-taught writer and photographer who makes a meager living selling his works online. Once or twice a month, he’d hit up an old wifi-friendly dive bar or coffee shop and send out his writings and photography into the digital abyss. His blog receives generous donations from dedicated readers that he’s accumulated over time by simply writing about his nomadic adventures across the land.

“The modern world is hungry for life,” he tells me. “I offer them a way through my writings and art. That’s the only thing I have to offer in life. Nothing else. Just my useless sentiments hurled out into the void.” 

I asked him what he has learned out here living this ramblin’ way of life and what’s the biggest change he noticed in himself. 

“The more you move around the more human you become,” he tells me. 

“When you leave behind the dryness of the safe and secure life, the senses become heightened, which of course makes you feel more alive. You feel at one with your surroundings. The earth becomes more intimate, more giving, more of a close friend. Your blood is no longer sluggish. Your vision becomes more lucid and you tend to get a birdseye view of the boundless vistas of life. You rediscover the moving power of your own unique existence on this planet.” 

He goes on. 

“Out here on the road of life, you create your own reality instead of catering to someone else’s, you see? You create a reality suitable to your deepest longings, you make the dream, flesh. With little, you become more. You unearth the true essence of who you are, you know? 

I nodded.

“Your daily death allows you to live innumerable lives and it provokes a radical sense of god-like awareness. This is what all the sages of the past were trying to teach us. Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus — they were all saying the same thing. All the great spiritual teachers taught us that eternity is right here, right now. As Jesus once said, ‘the kingdom is spread out over the earth, and people do not see it.’ Or Confucius, ‘The heavenly realm lies within each individual. It’s right there.’” 

“It’s through opening ourselves up to the sublime that we learn to live in the spirit,” Charley says. 

“On the other hand,” he went on, “people who harbor a diminished spirit feel the need to constantly consume and work their asses off to sustain the façade of success — material success. It’s empty as all hell but this is what we’re all bred to do here in the land of the so-called free. It’s a soul killer. You can see it in the eyes and in the demeanor of the nervous and frantic folks you come across — folks running amok in this country, for what? Nietzsche once said that haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself, and it’s true.”

The fire crackled, the beers flowed, and a shooting star raced across the dark above us. He raised both arms and looked up into the starry night, “look at this, look at this unimaginable world we all inhabit. God, how we take it for granted, huh?”

He takes a swig from his beer and paces around the campfire while gazing up into the cosmos. 

“We’ve turned this whole damn planet into a senseless graveyard through ignorance and fear. People are afraid to say YES to life, afraid to obey the deeper laws of their BEING, afraid to give themselves up to the direct experience of life. They’re forever stuck in the clutches of their cultural conditioning, and they’re sick and sad and needlessly sapped of their vitality because of it. A whole generation of people severed from the sacred. I know, I was there for many many years.” 

As I sat and listened to Charley for hours on end I knew damn well that I was dealing with a man endowed with the long-lost spirit of Whitman. A man who dabbles with the gods and dreams and jives like a lighthearted prophet under the fleeting clouds of the infinite. A man always goin’ and never arrivin’, a man who has learned to shun the fast-paced profane life of modernity for the simple sacredness of the natural life. 

He’s a dreamer, a drifter, a seeker with a childlike soul strapped with a furious appetite for the forbidden fruit of life. Unlike the good folks who live in the world, he now lives among the dirt and rocks and fields of the earth.

“Blessed are the solitary,” Jesus tells us in the Gnostic gospels, “for you will find the Kingdom.” And Charley has indeed found the Kingdom.

To be aware, divinely aware of the splendors of creation — the seas, the hills, the trees, even the dead leaves in the gutter, the determined ant climbing the stem of a dandelion, the stoic black crow perched upon the light pole — that’s where it’s at. 

“Awwww, yes!” he suddenly proclaimed while raising his beer to his lips. 

“Leave it all behind if you have to…put an old rucksack on your stressed-out back and go taste the earth, damnit. Get out there and unearth the wonderous nature of your own being. Live Live Live! Reach out for the Golden Eternity.” 

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It was late and I told Charley I had to get some shuteye. Before we said our goodnights and excused myself from his poetic presence, I asked him, “where’s the great journey of Charley leading to, where can I find you in the future?”

He slowly reached out and put his primordial palm on my shoulder, looked directly in my eyes, and, with a whispered voice, slowly recited a verse from the great American poet, Walt Whitman:

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

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Thanks so much for reading. You can find me around the internet at the following:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/erik.rittenberry
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/erik_rittenberry/

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