Pfeiffer Beach
Big Sur, week one
Pocket TV channel
The fridge fix
Getting there
Scouting pipeline
Coast road at dusk
Field recordings
The kit list
Notes on slowing downPfeiffer BeachBig Sur, week onePocket TV channelThe fridge fixGetting thereScouting pipelineCoast road at duskField recordingsThe kit listNotes on slowing downI spent the first two months treating every drive as an obstacle between me and a place I'd seen a photograph of. Get there, shoot it, move on. The driving was overhead — the cost of the picture.
Then somewhere in western Nebraska, where there is nothing in any direction for hours, I realised I hadn't thought about the destination once. I'd been watching a storm build on the left side of the truck for ninety minutes. It was the best day of the trip so far and nothing had happened in it.
The photograph I'd driven out for turned out fine. It's not one I've looked at since.
It has 214,000 miles and a carburettor that needs talking to below forty degrees. Everything that has broken has broken slowly and given warning. That is the whole argument for old vehicles: they tell you before they stop.
After a year, the list is much shorter than it started.
Small enough to bring, good enough to keep.
Coffee in ninety seconds in any weather.
Older than the truck. Warmer than the heater.
The road doesn’t care what you planned. That turns out to be the feature.Somewhere in Nevada
It reads GPS traces, fuel stops, photos and voice memos, finds the story-shaped clusters, and hands back a draft with the shape already found. It doesn’t write. It notices, which is the expensive part.
The trick is heat management on a stove with exactly two settings: off and volcanic.
Judged on outlets, tolerance, and whether anyone asks you to leave.
Outlets under every table. Nobody hurries you.
Half the seats face a wall, which is the point.
Bad wifi, perfect espresso. Fair trade.
Two hundred miles is a full day. Anything more and the day belongs to the road.
The sign that says scenic route is usually telling the truth.
You only need to understand a system the first time it fails.
Nowhere ever feels finished. That’s not a reason to stay.
Awake because the walls are thin and the sun is not subtle.
Regardless of weather. It is the only fixed point.
Two hours, maybe three. Stop whenever something looks worth stopping for.
Wherever there is signal, for as long as it holds.
The part that never stops being slightly stressful.
The hour before anyone else is awake is the only hour that reliably belongs to you.
Got here for the arch and stayed four days for the fog. Tell everyone I said the light was fine.
Eastern Sierra, mostly above nine thousand feet.
Twelve trades listed, all vouched for by someone.
It was the flue baffle. It is always the flue baffle.
Both about people who left. Unsubtle.
Packed for every possible weather
Booked sites three weeks ahead
Drove to the photograph
Owned four jackets
Packed for the weather that happens
Decide by four in the afternoon
Drive, and the photograph turns up
One jacket, repaired twice
Everything
The site
Data
Thinking
Frames
Capture
The book everyone doing this has read, and for good reason.
Wyoming, and what weather does to a person.
Why fixing things is thinking, not chores.
Three from the same twenty minutes, which is how most of them happen.
Two hundred miles of two-lane
No methodology whatsoever
Every morning, any weather.
Still faster for the big decisions.
Learned on the shoulder of I-80.
Unbeatable and free.
Every task expands to fill the space between one town and the next. Plan for half of what you think.
You can argue with it for about a day before it wins. Better to just ask it what the plan is.
Almost universally, and almost always more than asked. I did not expect this and I still don’t take it for granted.
Dear whoever ends up with this truck —
The heater switch is backwards, the third gear synchro complains below forty, and if the fridge stops working it is the flue baffle and not the thermocouple no matter what anyone tells you.
It will get you anywhere. It just wants to be asked politely.
Then a ferry, and then whatever is on the other side of it. That is the entire plan and it has been enough for two hundred days.