Road Trip to Reclamation

This, I reminded myself, crying myself to sleep last month, scared and disoriented the second night I illegally slept in an RV—as it’s illegal to sleep in an RV parked on a street in most places, and in the entire state of California—This is the most intense version you’re going to do of this.

There are much more intense versions, in much less safe places. I wasn’t parked far from where I’d lived for the last two and a half years, in two different expensive apartments, in a county where the most expensive home that had sold the year prior was $28,100,000 and had, according to the listing, “off-street parking for 30 cars.” I lived, and was parked, in the next town over, where crime was low but cop-calling was probably high, and after the third night I slept there, instinctively curling myself into a ball in the dark when I heard the person whose property I was in front of bring out their garbage cans, scared that if I moved they might hear or see something and report me, it was clear that this level of rogue RV living was not what I wanted if I could avoid it, which, fortunately for me, I still could.

I headed south to Santa Cruz. I got to the redwood RV resort in the dark, but still managed to back into my first back-in spot (reader, they are all, they are always, back-in spots), where for $70 I could not just spend the night securely but could plug into power and water and a sewer, all of which I had also not done before but, being familiar with both plugs and hoses, figured out the first two in a matter of seconds. The sewer hookup I waited to do until daylight, and until, as it happened, a very butch lesbian pulled into the spot across the way in an RV longer and taller than many houses, and to whom I sauntered up directly and asked for help.