#wolfisakisonwheels

[wolfisakionwheels]

Days 33 - 36 | Oasis Palms RV Resort | Thermal CA

Oscar’s making pancakes and Finn is beside himself because pancakes are his favorite food and he knows he’s played his cards right today in getting them from both camps. For the first time on this trip we’re staying at our first RV Resort, near the Salton Sea - a desert oasis vacation in the 60's, now a toxic swamp of ruins. At first look, present day Salton Sea seems a little... Quirky, in the same vein as Joshua Tree, with its towering displays of garbage art and the UFO monomaniacs. But Ari has spent some time here while on photo shoot assignments and insists it’s quirky more like “The Hills Have Eyes” occupied by societal rejects, nihilists, the tin-hat wearing types who don’t take kindly to strangers, I assume.

Ari grew up with JJ in southern Oregon and they’ve been tight since the 6th grade. I’ve never been much of a champion of my own friendships, so I tend to glob onto JJ’s, which has worked out just fine for me so far. It doesn’t hurt that she has exceptional taste in strong, stunning women. I realize I’ve more or less squeezed in there on a fluke because she married my brother and maybe didn’t have much of a choice but to include me, but I’ll take it goddammit.

Ari drove out here from the place she now calls home in L.A. to spend a few days with us at our “resort” with her pup tent and Palomas, her Zeppelin T-shirt and Jimmy Page shag. She also has ADD like me which makes her my favorite new person to talk to - not having anything to do with talking to the same six people for a month straight, because when two grown females with ADD are free to communicate in the way God intended, it occurs on this beautiful neuroatypical wavelength where the moderators of our brains take a backseat and we don’t pay any mind to things like volume control, or taking turns, or keeping to safe, surface subjects. There’s likely a surplus of hand gestures and maybe some minor flailing involved if it helps convey a point. Sometimes I’m vaguely aware of little pools of spit bubbling up in the corners of my mouth as I yammer on excitedly.

To any normal outsider it might look absurd, animated, like something resembling a mutual stroke. To me though, a lot like Finny here beside me, gobbling down his face-sized pancakes, it’s just someone in their element, being the person they were put on this earth to be.

11.6.2021

[wolfisakionwheels]

Days 28 - 31 | Serrano Campground | Big Bear Lake CA

Any Portlander worth their weight in cloud cover knows that we pay our dues with wonky joints and Seasonal Affective Disorders to earn our vast green landscapes, our water that flows like liquid diamonds right from the tap, and, for a few brief months every year - a golden burst of sunshine so pure and magical that it’s been known to warm even the coolest of hipster hearts.

(Really. I’m sure there are local, artisanal, sustainably farmed cheese plates that last longer than a Portland summer.)

Even when we’re sleeping in our coats and beanies and waking up under little poofs of our own breath each morning, I have a cheater’s heart... Like some kind of itinerant who’s forsaken their hometown for precisely the opposite of greener pastures, where you can see in monotone for miles and non-potable water is an everyday threat.

But being back under some trees for a brief respite feels like a weighted blanket for the soul. The boys flung open the door and raced out to climb the first ones they could wrap their lanky little bodies around before we’d even finished parking, and the wafting smells of pine and sap are like a postcard from back home. I imagine it would read something like this:

Dearest: The sunshine might give you a warm welcome but it will leave you with nothing but wrinkles and cancer. Please come home, your Stumptown pour overs and Pendleton throw miss you.

With Love, Portland Oregon

PS: The microbrews say hi.

11.1.2021

[wolfisakionwheels]

Day 28 | Amboy Roy’s | Amboy CA (Route 66)

I read somewhere that Madonna works out inside a glass box suspended from the ceiling in her NYC home gym. To the same end; I just completed a full weightlifting circuit inside a ‘98 Ford Jamboree while traveling across the Mojave desert. So, maybe, I guess, regardless of status quo or circumstances, we’re all just a bunch of sexy meat sacks marinating in our quests for happiness and a good life balance.

10.27.2021

[wolfisakionwheels]

Days 23 - 26 | Boulder Beach Campground | Boulder City NV

My brother and I have a handful of things in common even aside from sharing an Astrological sign and a set of parents: one; a kind and decent and loving alcoholic. The other; a volatile and willful and eccentric savant.

We were both also blessed with ragey low blood sugar issues, a zest for a clean space with smart organizational systems, and just enough childhood trauma to keep us honest.

As we close in on our first month of traveling alongside eachother, he with his trusty dustbuster and I with my bulk supply of Magic Erasers, I’ve realized (and not for the first time) that one of the greatest things we’ve ever had in common is our choice in partners.

I’m often rocked back on my heels a bit by how we both managed to have our wits about us enough to marry such cool and laid-back people. They’re the sorts who can sniff out the onset of our bullish temperaments and know precisely when they can be squelched with a slightly overdue snack. They’re able to comfortably sit back and give us the floor when we hit our stride in a good cleaning sesh, our eyebrows all tangled up in each other, using every muscle in our faces to curl our mouths downward, hoping we seem focused, not manic.

We weren’t exactly modeled things while growing up, like feelings or nurturing relationships or reaching for our dreams, so we’re totes winging this. Lucky for us though, we found our persons, the ones who come up along beside us every day, steady us, and remind us that life is an adventure, where to next?

10.25.2021