Like a Gypsy

There was a time about twenty-five years ago when I found myself between things; jobs, commitments, rational thoughts. I moved to a distant city and lived my life without a plan or direction. I had done things like this before. I called it "embarking on an adventure." Others might call it "running away."

My home was a tiny rented trailer in a campground. Not the kind of campground where families in Winnebagos stop for the evening and roast marshmallows. This was a campground where people with little money could live indefinitely, sharing a single payphone and a cinder block bathhouse.

My trailer had electricity and running water. The water ran from a faucet, into a sink , down a drain then into a bucket at the end of a hose. I cooked, slept and watched a 12-inch television. Life was undemanding.

My neighbors were interesting, like a collection of characters from a Steinbeck novel. They had come from a hundred different places, intending to spend only a while in this place until they could travel on to a better place.

Beside me lived a family. The husband was a tall, thin red-haired ex-state trooper. His wife was a pleasant black woman with a child from her previous marriage. With them lived three adopted Asian siblings. They all slept together in a converted school bus with plywood bunkbeds and sheets hung for privacy. The pair had met while working together, he as a trooper, she a radio dispatcher. Their relationship became a scandal and it was difficult to find good jobs after being terminated because no one gave them a good reference. I enjoyed visiting them. They were kind and loving people, raising their children to respect themselves and others.

In a tent at the edge of the campground lived a couple with two black Labrador retrievers. It was a large Army surplus canvas tent in which they had constructed a wooden floor and installed a wood stove made from a 20-gallon steel drum. They had lived there for a number of years. Neither spoke much about the past, but the little I heard included talk about a bum-rap and the need to disappear. They often invited me to dinner and were willing to share all they had.

The most unusual neighbors were a young couple also living in a converted bus. He was a self-proclaimed preacher, she was very pregnant. Every Sunday worshipers would assemble beside the bus in folding chairs. He had gathered his followers one at a time by ambushing the members of other congregations as they arrived at church, urging them to forsake the lies of false prophets inside those temples, inviting them instead to join a fellowship of true believers who met beneath the giant oak trees of the campground. One night the preacher shared his secret past with me over a beer. He had turned to doing his Holy Father's work only after his birth father had failed to make him a partner in the family construction business. On the day he disappeared he emptied the company bank account by writing checks to television evangalists.

Eventually I found a job that enabled me to live in a real house like most people. The house was comfortable and the neighbors were nice, but life there lacked a certain grittiness that I had come to enjoy. I returned to visit the campground some years later. Beyond the entrance gate I found only a stand of oak trees in a meadow of tall grass. All traces of the neighbors I had known and the gypsy life we had shared were gone. I stood alone beneath the giant oak trees surrounded by nothing but a thousand memories.