What is the best place you have taken it? Is there just one? 

I loved being in Utah and in Canada. It turns out that Canada has a lot of forest service roads that ascend to great mountain heights very quickly and they’re all over. I could spend months with trusty Tac up there. But, I’ve got to be honest, the creeks and rolling hills of Iowa always make my heart sing.

Favorite road you ridden? 

There was a road that led to these cliffs called the Book Cliffs in Utah. It is in BLM land. It goes and goes and goes and at first it looks like they are close but then as you drive you realize that they’re just huge and it gave me comfort, allowing me to accept that if you’re going for something big, you might be able to see it in the distance as if it’s close, and that might make you think you’re supposed to arrive at it quite quickly, but if it’s really big, it’s okay, it’s going to take a good long while to get there and there is so much along the way to look forward to. There were many a praying prairie dog, some falcons, and two massive eagles whose shadows were swimming on yellow sun-stained hills along this road. It was filled with twists and turns and new angles and the vast expanse of quilted sky allowed for rapid changes in clouds, stripes of light shifting across miles and miles of desert ground, rippling up mountains and disappearing to the East.

In one word, what describes your approach to life? 

Haphazardlypromising

If you could give a person one piece of advice when thinking about living and working out of a vehicle what would you tell them? 

Prepare yourself for freedom and prepare to be confronted with the fact of ever-changingness. These two things are connected. The sedentary lifestyle born of agrarian society has brought with it a false perception of consistency and lastingness as an unchanging thing, such that we now strive to make everything last forever so we don’t have to fix it. More plastic for siding on your house so you can never have to replace it. Decay, replacement, maintenance, these are more real to me. For me, when I live and work on the road I am offered the option to face up to the truth of degradation and maintenance, as you are moving through space in the same way we move through time. This movement also widens the angle of my viewing lens and offers me the option to see all sorts of things, the inequality in the world, the truth of the destruction of our precious earth, the truth of the generosity of the human spirit, the truth of greed, ignorance and selfishness, the truth of inter-special communication, the truth of death, the truth of the unexpected and the truth of hope. By thinning the veil between yourself and the world, by moving through it, you are exposed to so much, and if it does anything, it allows you to see how closely our identity is connected to our context, landscape, objects, community, and habits. I think that the more deeply we can understand who we are in a larger whole, the more settled we can be in that, and I like the idea, and the experience of settled people. You can still be a wild person and be settled inside. I want to be that someday.

Early on in my travels, I learned that I would lose my sense of self if I did not keep habits like any animal, stretch, meditate, write, wash clothes etc. Consistency while moving allows me to not have a total identity crisis. I guess what I’m saying is that maybe all we are is what we do, and what we do is based on our ideas, habits, and what has happened to us in the past, and our ideas are affected by our surroundings, so simply, if you do certain things consistently then you can hold onto identity, and those things arise from a meshing of everything you’ve experienced before so while your actions are you, you, by the fact of your actions being determined by place, people, ideas, are many many things. It’s just an idea, but I think I believe it in this moment.

It takes a special kind of person to recognize that the journey, not the destination, is the point of life. Travelers know this. Was there a point in your life where you became conscious that you were one of those people? 

Honestly, I think there’s a lot to unpack when thinking about even having the option to be “mobile.” I am very lucky to have had that option. I became truly conscious of it after college, when I was tired of thinking and writing but not so much using my hands or seeing the world.  In this day and age, mobility is a privilege and is actually an indicator of a certain level of economic and racial status. We have this trending concept of “gypsies” that has a wistful and adventurous aura about it, and people like to call themselves gypsies but gypsies weren’t well-to-do people touring around living their dreams and taking photos to show how well they’re living their dreams. I don’t know why, but I am fascinated by this acquisition of title, I find it reminiscent of the fact that back in the day, voluptuousness and pale skin was all the rage, proving that you didn’t have to work out in the fields and had more than enough to eat, and now, tan and skinny is all the rage, proving that you are not cubicled into your life and that you are somehow avoiding the atrocious excesses of modern society. I just think it’s fascinating!

Our technologically advanced modern day agrarian society has made the rich hyper-mobile, the poor stuck without resources to move and the once-nomadic societies are bound by political boundaries. Mobility is the greatest luxury; it’s how societies proved their wealth, by showing their import status, exotic spices from across the world. It’s how water stays fresh and doesn’t stale. It’s how we live and breathe, swirling the air around us into and out of our bodies, changing it, and doing it again. Ironically, communities are proving their wealth in the opposite way now, by showing how much they can produce from within. I find this reassuring.

I am lucky that, as a woman, I live in the U.S. This allows me the freedom to move through the world without needing to be married or accompanied by a man. It is still very dangerous for a young woman to travel alone in many parts of the world. Sex trafficking is a real thing. Having lived in India for months at a time, and traveled through other countries, has allowed me to understand how being one of the “status quo” holds many privileges. I cannot live as I do here, there. And though I can’t speak for Indian women, because I am not one but also because India is a massive place, it appeared to me that women had far less freedom to be independently adventurous in the ways I have been able to be in the U.S.  I am grateful for this because those freedoms fit my lifestyle desires. Living in the U.S. as a white person of Eastern European descent, allows me the freedom to not be in fear of the police, to not be afraid of deportation or wrongful imprisonment. It allows me the freedom to ignore the fact that I am allowed the freedom. I am all about developed countries and progressive politics in this way. It is also a reality that my experience is expressly the one of a white person traveling in a, let’s be honest, racist society dominated by white enforcers and white male authority figures. While it’s easy to talk about the bravery of going out into the wide world and exploring, I don’t find it to be a brave thing. I feel that I am taking advantage of an option that I randomly have due to my origin of birth and color of skin in this disturbingly unequivocal world and I hope that someday it will not be a privilege to be mobile and safe, but a given.