“You folks must be that monster I saw.” The woman behind the window—her hair pulled back fiercely, Lilith Sternin-Crane-style—was not smiling. Her demeanor suggested she had been done with her job at the drab, small-town county tax assessor’s office years ago. But her desk represented one of the hurdles we needed to clear. If the pile of legal documents and forms we’d slid across the counter passed her scrutiny, Walter, our big yellow adventure truck, would get shiny new license plates—a crucial step in our quest to become Texas residents.
One of the required items in our paperwork was a printed photo of the vehicle. Even reduced to a black and white image, there was no mistaking which vehicle in the lot was ours. Walter stands out in a crowd. I flashed the most Texas-sized smile I could muster. “Yep, that’s us—we’re that monster.” I chuckled, hoping to pry open a crack in her stern demeanor.
Nope.
I smiled again, but she was already flipping through our stack of papers, frowning and muttering to no one in particular about how every state formats their documents differently. I looked out the window and considered her words.
“That monster.”
I think it’s an inherently human trait. We objectify that which we don’t understand.
Child abuser: that monster.
Three-year-old in a grocery store throwing a royal fit and melting down in the middle of the shampoo aisle: that little monster.
Nazi war criminal: that monster.
Brown-skinned immigrants who crossed the border to escape war and find work, and who reportedly snack on household pets (false, fake, utterly disproven): those monsters.
This tendency is a common theme in books and movies, too.
Frankenstein
Where the Wild Things Are
Shrek
Wicked
We don’t understand. And trying to understand would take a significant investment of time and curiosity. So, we dismiss the person as a monster. We call them heartless, which must be something other than human in order to survive. This allows us to move past the discomfort of not understanding and be on our way.
Sometimes the term heartless is deserved. Sometimes people act in truly evil ways, as if they have no conscience, or their conscience is seared. But other times, we monstrify1 simply because we don’t know and aren’t willing to learn.
In a backwards sort of way, I was secretly pleased that Walter was deemed worthy of this sort of dehumanizing. After all, to dehumanize assumes personification, right? The woman at the tax assessor’s office didn’t call him a monster truck, which is simply a subset of trucks. No, she called him a monster, a subset of living creatures. Walter does seem to project a human-ish personality out on the road. As I’ve mentioned before, he is a goodwill ambassador, an opener of doors, an icebreaker to preclude significant conversations.
We encounter a great many people who look at Walter and don’t understand. A woman pumping gas across from us one day stared at him for quite some time before shaking her head, turning to Andy, and saying, “I don’t have any vocabulary for this. What is it?”
The security guard at an overland expo once mistakenly directed us to where the food trucks were setting up.
Another person narrowed their gaze and asked if Walter was a fancy garbage truck.
Just yesterday, someone asked if we were a portable dog washing operation.
His shape is unfamiliar. His sunny yellow paint is disarming. His stud-muffin stance doesn’t fit into the standard RV categories. People stop and stare. Sometimes they smile and give a timid wave. Sometimes their mouths form words we can’t hear, but can clearly read on their lips: “What the #@<&?”
I turned my attention back to the woman behind the plexiglass window at the tax assessor’s office. She was printing and stamping and signing things. To my untrained eye, this seemed hopeful. She slashed at some of the papers with a yellow highlighter pen and pushed them toward us with a few gruff syllables of instruction.
I complimented her on the pretty hummingbird and flower tattoo that traced around her slender wrist like a delicate bracelet.
My words apparently caught her by surprise. She smiled, despite herself, and looked me in the eye for the first time. I grinned back. Like a snowman on the first warm day of spring, any former frostiness between us softened, then melted clean away. She thanked me for noticing and commenting, then asked us about the truck.
Where did we get it?
Has it taken us to some amazing places?
Do we live in it or just vacation?
Neither we, nor our truck, were monsters anymore. Sometimes it doesn’t take much.
We signed and dated. She sorted the documents into her pile and our pile, then handed us our new license plates and vehicle registration. We thanked her for her help. She smiled.
By the end of the day, we had completely converted our home base from Montana to Texas—or at least established an official domicile there.2 Walter had new plates; we had a new mailing address, new car insurance, and new drivers’ licenses.
Howdy, y’all, and welcome to Texas.
Some people we talk to don’t really understand what we are doing at all. They might not go so far as to monstrify us, but they don’t get it—we can tell. Rather than expressing curiosity, though, they dismiss our lifestyle with a definitive comment on why they could never do what we do:
I like my house.
I like my things.
I love my family.
I couldn’t afford to travel all the time.
If they asked us about these things, they might be surprised at our answers.
I like my house. So did we. Ours was a family property that was very special to us. We put years of sweat equity into turning it from a simple two-bedroom, one-bath, thousand square foot rectangle; to a sprawling six-bedroom, four-bath beauty, located on six acres of hills and Ponderosa pine trees, facing the Bitterroot Mountains—plus a barn and a huge woodshop that had its own one-bedroom apartment attached. It was a great house. Having raised our family there, we loved that place.
I like my things. So did we. As a history buff and a world traveler and a collector of all things quirky and old and artsy, a strong percentage of our possessions had fun stories. I loved my antique camera collection and the art on the walls—my own personal artwork, as well as oil paintings from Andy’s family and things we’d collected throughout the years. I loved my stack of cozy sweaters and having just the right jacket for every occasion. I loved my bookshelves and the books that filled them, along with the brightly colored roll-down classroom wall map of the United States from the 1950s. I had cool stuff.
I love my family. Ouch. The implication in this one hurts a bit. We love our family, too. But we haven’t lived near many of them very often over the years, as the family has spread in all directions. With the exception of one of our kids, we mostly had to travel great distances to visit the various segments of our family anyway. As far as we are concerned, visiting our family hasn’t really changed, for the most part. We can hop on a plane from anywhere.
I couldn’t afford to travel all the time. This one is interesting. Many people have a hard time distinguishing “taking a trip” from being a nomad. I get it. They have no frame of reference for what we are doing. Although we travel in chapters (the 10 weeks in Mexico, the past three weeks in Texas, the upcoming Canada/Alaska adventure), we are not on a “trip” or a perpetual “vacation.” Vacations are expensive, and for most people, that is the only way they’ve ever traveled. It’s the only thing they know. The thing with vacations, though, at least for Americans who rarely get to travel beyond a week or two at a time, is that they are fast. Indeed, speed travel IS expensive. Airfare, car rentals, hotels or even vacation rental homes, eating out, theme park admission charges, souvenirs and snacks—wow. That stuff really adds up fast. Even RV travel is expensive if you consider the price of the nightly need for a campground with hook-ups. Our lifestyle, however, contains very little of that. We travel slowly, our home on our backs, power from the sun and a composting toilet so we never need hook-ups, groceries in our fridge so we can make normal home-style meals three times a day. Between public lands, and urban streets with no overnight parking bans, the kindness of folks who allow us to park on their property, plus the occasional truck stop or rest area, we rarely ever pay for lodging. We do pay for fuel, but not every day. It averages out to not much more than if we had a daily hour-long commute to work and back. Of course, we still have to pay for our phones and internet and health care, and toilet paper and dish soap and the occasional pair of shoes—but those are not travel-specific expenses. Our lifestyle is actually much less expensive, now that we are vehicle-based instead of bricks-and-mortar-based. Our money is stretching much further now than it used to.
But people don’t get it. They are either starry-eyed, wishing they themselves could do something like this (many of them could if they were willing to sell 99% of what they own), or dismissive, relegating us to at least weirdo if not monster status because of our unconventional, misunderstood new lifestyle. We objectify what we don’t understand.
Anyway, we’re Texans now, y’all. We were sad to remove the cool custom Montana plates from Walter and put the basic white Texas plates on in their stead, but it was the best choice for things like state income tax (none), mail delivery and handling services (through Escapees), and renewals of our licenses and registration. Becoming residents took us a grand total of one day of running around to various offices in our new hometown—Livingston, Texas. We have already moved on (currently camped on a lovely lake in Arkansas) and likely won’t need to return to Texas for legal purposes for at least another eight years. Crazy, huh?
Who would have believed the newest Yellow Rose of Texas would be a beefy Mitsubishi Fuso 4x4 adventure truck named Walter?
That MONSTER.
Until next week,
Sherry
MONSTRIFY, mons-tri-fy, verb, 1. to dehumanize a person to the point of referring to them as or treating them like a monster. 2. to turn someone into a monster. Not to be confused with Mon Stir Fry. See also MONSTRIFICATION.
(Like William Shakespeare, that great inventor of now-common terminology, I made this term up myself. You’re welcome.)
The tax and licensing laws in Texas are favorable for full-time travelers. Most nomads in recent U.S. history have established their domicile in South Dakota. Driving through an RV park or wintering in Baja, there are a disproportionately large number of South Dakota plates. But with South Dakota currently making things more difficult for nomads and Texas currently making things easier, the tide will begin to shift. I will be writing another post very soon for our Nomadic MidLife website about the ease of establishing a domicile in Polk County, Texas as a full-time traveler.
Canada trip means maybe Ohio eventually?
Do you know the Texas State motto?
Most know New Hampshire’s - Live Free or Die. My home state of Vermont - Freedom and Unity. Now Texas, just one word- Friendship.
It’s fitting for you both
Welcome to Texas