Looking at this blog yesterday, I realize that it’s been two months since my last post. Time just gets away from us. In early June I returned to the place of my summer camp in Northern New Mexico. I was exhausted from six months of travel and camping all over the western United States. The […]
During the “Covid Year” I’ve traveled through nine western States, making camp in more than twenty places. In cities, towns and countryside I’ve witnessed the effects of the National lockdown, the mask mandate, social distancing, hyper-hygienics and so much more. The relentless conditions of fear, isolation and disconnection seem to have tested the structures of […]
For two months now I’ve traveled with my newly acquired Casita trailer. Most of this time has been spent in the company of friends and cordial strangers. I’ve camped along the Pacific shores and Redwood trees of Northern California, enjoying the gestalt of grey skies and emerald forests, so different from the Southwest deserts that […]
It’s been nearly a month since I bought the Casita. The seller volunteered to deliver the coach from his home in Phoenix to where I’m staying at the Colorado River. As it happened, he and his wife were celebrating their 29th wedding anniversary across the River in Laughlin, Nevada. The reality of having this gorgeous […]
For the past two years my Gypsywagen has been a rolling shelter with which I’ve roamed far and wide, through vast deserts and lush forests, wandering high up into dramatic mountain ranges and down along the banks of great rivers, all the while camping in countless places (about 50), some for days, some for months. […]
An old two-lane road in Alaska ran along the shores of the Cook Inlet and was called the Kenai Highway. From the city of Anchorage it coursed south about two hundred miles to its end at the fishing port of Homer. On a sunny day in early September Mick Bowman left camp just outside of […]
“In somnis innocentes sumus” Ambrose Bierce Curtis Bowman stood in the lobby of a travelers hotel in New York City. He didn’t know the town nor a soul in it. Everyone was strange to him. Everybody seemed indifferent, some even threatening. He wanted out of the hotel and out of New York, but when he […]
Twenty years ago I spent a year traveling from Los Angeles, California to the southernmost end of South America. Most of the journey was taken on local buses, traveling from town to town, through Mexico, Central America and South America. During that time I wrote a series of stories, which were published in a California […]
At the end of the Civil War, countless veterans found themselves dispossessed and began hopping freight trains to look for work on the American frontier. These migrant workers came to be known as hoboes. Like the cowboys of the old west, hoboes embodied qualities of resilience, ingenuity and transcendent freedoms. Their stories still inspire many […]