The Coffin

The Coffin

This was it, I thought, when the sliding door of the van parked at the opposite end of the trailhead parking lot opened. This was it. My first night as a Subaru dwelling hobo vagabond and I would die at the hand of some crazed man who lived in a van der down by the river. My body would be found here in the spring after the snow melted. Headlines would read Young Woman Found a Popular Truckee Trail. All to think that just that morning I was suffering through a bout of especially potent procrastination because I had this feeling that I wouldn’t survive this. And now all of those fears proved correct. That morning, the cleanness of the house I’d been renting for the last six months screamed at me, resting its argument on the emptiness within its walls. I was supposed to be out. The clouds kept the sky a monotone gray and it dampened the world outside, as if this house was the last thing on earth, a floating solitude. I was the last of my three roommates to leave before our lease was up and the family who owned this house would return for the winter.

I paced from bedroom to empty bedroom. My anxiety welled in my stomach once I closed that door, I thought, sweating and cold at the same time, I become a hobo. I intentionally didn’t look at listings for new housing, despite my instincts to do just that. I didn’t want to give myself a backup option. I was going to live out of my car with my dog, lady, for six months and and I was going to snowboard at every Mountain Collective ski resort from California to the Rockies. I walked into the largest of the bedrooms, one that a couple inhibited during our time here. I stood in the middle of the room and bitterly thought of the questions they and everyone asked me about my forthcoming journey in the snow. How are you going to stay warm? Where are you going to sleep at night? What will lady do? Where will you shower? Do you even know what you’re doing. I walked slowly to the room’s bed, feeling the carpet beneath my toes. I still didn’t have answers to those questions. The mattress in this room was nice. The whole room was nice. Bright light and soft whites.

How protected and safe it felt. How completely unlike the duct tape, plywood and PVC pipe bed frame in my car, topped with a 1 1/2 inch egg foam currently waiting for me in the silver sunshade dungeon I’d created. My stomach turned again as I walked out of the room. I couldn’t understand if what I was doing was right or wrong, if I could do better, if I should do more. I was out of time to think about it, and the only thing I knew was that I must continue on with this crazed plan. There was nothing else left for me here. There was another fear living in me, one that started well before I planned this trip. I was so very sure that I was unworthy of life, and so I lived in constant fear of saying the wrong thing, of looking the wrong way, of not being enough, not fun enough, not smart enough, of the list goes on and on and on. It was this fear that made living out of my impossibly small car during one of the heaviest snow years on record seemed possible. Going on the road was my way of escaping that fear of reinventing myself, of leaving behind the pathetic, childish, quiet, weird person I felt I’d been labeled breaking free from the boring person that a girl named Kristen announced to her 8th grade chemistry class she thought I was of those laughs that burst out around the room after she said that.

I wanted to be something more than useless. I wanted to be difficult to pluck out of everywhere I was. If I could just keep moving, I could escape the bad feelings with the pretense of seeking the newest adventure. I arrived at the Truckee Legacy trailhead parking lot around 11:30 at night. I drove for more than an hour to try to find a resting place for the evening. Nothing felt right. The parking lot of the grocery store was too bright, but the ponds behind the store were too dark. The spot in downtown had signs that said no overnight parking. The resorts had security patrolling for leftover cars and vagabonds like myself. Though it was the 1st of December, snow was already blocking access to OHV roads. I drove to the Legacy trailhead parking lot, bleary eyed from exhaustion and stress. The small lot was situated between the train tracks and the river. Plus there was already a van parked at the far end of it, a running show of bad outcomes played through my mind, but I was too depleted to keep exploring. I parked as far away from the van as I could before trying to figure out how to situate myself in the back of the car.

I was told by another traveling woman who used a sprinter van and not a car that it was safest to keep yourself hidden. I built my van so that I could walk from the driver’s seat to the back without having to get out of the van, she explained to me. This reduced how many people would see a single female positioning themselves in such a vulnerable place. I turned my body from the seat and looked at the cramped space. I half stood on my seat running into the roof. I crouched and placed my forearms on the platform and began to army crawl. My hips got stuck between the driver and passenger seat, but I was able to thrust them out and flop farther up onto the platform. There’s no way I can do that without being seen, I thought, noticing the car shake as I move into position. I turned over and laid on my back. There was less than a foot above my head. I felt like I could trace my name into the beige felt ceiling with just my nose. A coffin, I said to lady, who rested her head on my leg. I moved to grab a journal, but the sliding door of the van and in the parking lot open.

My heart pounded and my body froze, trying to discern what was happening beyond the silver sunshades that blocked my back windows. I was terrified to be seen, though my coffin didn’t leave much space for sight into the moonless night. It didn’t matter. My body pricked with danger. His feet crunched the gravel of the parking lot. Lady let out a guttural growl. I grabbed the scuff of her neck and forced her snout towards me, shushing her. I was already straining to hear over the thump of my heartbeat. My ears searched through the staticky silence, trying to become a compass, trying to map footsteps. Lady avoided my eye contact as she let out another growl. Is he coming towards me or away? I thought. Suddenly, a light erupted across the driver’s seat. My heart dropped. He was pointing a flashlight into my car. Now I imagine the nuzzle of a gun creeping through the window’s crack, forcing me outside. I couldn’t believe that I got myself here. Everything, everything in that moment was validated. All the fear working up to this trip. All the people who said it was stupid, all of the questions I couldn’t answer from the people who didn’t say I was stupid but didn’t trust I knew what I was doing.

It was all crashing down. It was proof of my worst fear that unlike everyone else around me, I couldn’t make it in Truckee. I couldn’t make it back home in Fresno, and I couldn’t make it on the road. There was something so wrong and flawed with me that I would never be able to slip into a happy existence in the world around me. The light lowered, and then came the click of a lighter and cigarette smoke wafting through the cracks in my windows. All he wanted was a smoke break, but this familiar trailhead became demonized noises that were commonplace. The scammering of coyotes, the bale of wind, the screeching of cars on roads far away. They all became threatening. Subsequent cigarette throughout the night spooked me just the same. That I had survived the first was no proof that I could do it again. I lay in what felt like a coffin stuffed into an ironic dream of escape, praying that I would make it until morning. But when morning came, there was still lingering terror mixed with a fear born from embarrassment. I wanted to lie in bed forever, tired from a night spent awake.

But I worried what an early morning trail user might think of me. I shimmied, kicked and knocked things about, got to the front seat as fast as I could. I turned the car on and jetted off. I spent exactly six months on the road. I was scared the whole way through. At nights for my personal safety, but during the waking hours, for my dignity. I never allowed myself the grace of learning what it felt like to be free. Just a few weeks later, a woman would pass by my car as the hatch was open, and though I tried to use my body to shield the back, she would see right into my bed, right into my life. She announced to the packed Vaughn’s parking lot that, wow, look at that. I wondered who else could see into the depths of my life? Who else knew too much about me? I vowed next time to back into parking spaces, to keep the hatch shut, to be better at being invisible. There I was, always hiding, always looking over my back, always feeling like I wanted to be invisible. It’s been years since I first started writing about this experience.

I look back on it and blot the whole time with this fear. Someone in a critique group told me that there needed to be moments of levity. It couldn’t have been all bad, but I felt like it was. When I came back to Truckee, after the six months was up, I called myself a failure. I didn’t achieve what I wanted. I didn’t turn into somebody else. I was scared. The whole damn time being alert all the time is me protecting myself, trying to maintain control, trying to keep myself safe. But what if I let go? What if I truly let go? What if I believe when friends tell me they love me? What if I stop stealing glances at the windows of my house and let myself believe that in this moment, yes, I am safe? That at this moment no one is holding a gun to my head? No tigers are chasing me? What if instead of tuning the colors of my personality to those around me, I ask myself, am I happy right now? Am I doing what I want? What would have been different if I woke up that first morning at the Truckee Legacy Trail and chose to be happy I made it through that first night?

If I told myself I could succeed, if I told myself I already was, that I am just fine.