An Interview with Myself

By Carolyn Cary Hall

Carolyn:

For thirteen years, you have traveled thousands of miles in the United States, camping along the way, and you have stated that you lived on the outside of society much like Henry David Thoreau. How do you compare your life with that of Thoreau?

And what made you begin such a journey?

Cary:

As far back as I can remember I had the desire to travel and to see new places, particularly the western states. So, with both my girls raised, I left in a small gray van for parts unknown with $300 cash and high expectations of adventure. I was going west to seek out the land that Roy Rogers and Gene Autry rode, and I traveled on hundreds of primitive dirt roads and dodged many a tumbleweed looking for Trigger and Champ’s hoof prints.

I didn’t know the first trip would turn into a second, third, and fourth, until it became a way of life for me. I had no plans really, just a desire to see the west, and to be free of the burdens of raising two children in a man’s world, the responsibility of that. And to be free of the men who’d abused and owned me.

When I returned home from my first seven-month trip, I was in a bookstore and happened upon a rack of Cliff Notes. I was drawn to one that had the word Thoreau on it. At the time I didn’t know whether Thoreau was a place, a person or a thing.

Thoreau wrote about throwing off the fetters of tradition and materialism, living in Nature in solitude and having the opportunity to view society from the outside. This is what happened to me, but in a literary sense I can hardly be compared to Thoreau.

At the time, family and public opinions of my activities were not high. The notes liberated me in the sense that I was able to exercise my belief that I was doing the right thing. Thoreau’s lifestyle validated my own in a positive manner rather than the negative view I was receiving from my family, and from society. That to be responsible in life meant to have a forty-hour a week job, stay home and act one’s age. Thoreau lived alone outside of town. I lived alone outside a myriad of towns.

Carolyn:

What do you mean when you say you lived on the outside of society?

Cary:

I would be in one state after another, one primitive campsite after another.

It was those times of solitude, and reconnecting with nature, that turned my miserable life around.

For months at a time, I was no one’s mother, no one’s sister, daughter, neighbor or friend. I disengaged emotionally. And in all of that silence, I began to go over my life’s story in my head. Memories came flooding out, and my first question along with the flood of memories, was why was I out here alone with my beloved dog, a thousand miles from home and miles away from any human?

I camped in National Forests or on other public lands. Financially, I was more or less forced into solitude, which was a real hell at first, an emotional hell.

After I overcame being alone, there were times when I was camped in remote areas and didn’t see or talk to another human for weeks, and that’s when the silence and solitude, became my friends. I felt like an Indian, feeling the love they had for this land. It was also a time when another journey began, a journey into my past, and all of the memories of my childhood to find out why a dog and I had ended up here in front of this campfire.

I became a true lone wolf.

Even when I found employment along the way and became acquainted with other employees, I would leave after work and return to my camping spot.  For instance, when I was a waitress at the Grand Canyon, I lived deep in the Kaibab National Forest rather than the employee’s dorm where Harmony was not allowed anyway, so I drove across the road and deep into the Ponderosa Pine forest of safety, and where Harmony could be free to roam and to be outside our home on wheels.

When I worked jobs around South Padre Island, I lived on the beach.  When I piloted a fifteen-passenger pontoon boat in Arizona, I lived in the desert. I lived in Nature all the time.

But, before we go any further in this interview, I must mention Harmony, my beloved dog and only family member on this odyssey of mine, and how she changed. She had been a neurotic barking house dog when we started out, (the neighbors called the police for her barking) but she turned into Rin Tin Tin. Her one bark or growl alerted me to danger many times.

Because of her I had the courage to go on and I feel she saved my life more than once with her guard-dog appearance at my side. Harmony was a big part of this odyssey and someday I hope to devote much writing to her life on the road. (I had the opportunity to write a few articles about our life together for a Tennessee Women’s Magazine in the 80’s.)

Carolyn:

So, she helped you with the despair and loneliness you experienced?

Cary:

Yes, she was my only company, my only friend; a warm, living, breathing, mammal with a heartbeat, and especially I loved it when her eyes looked into mine. I could touch and lie down beside her and feel comforted by her physical essence. She was part shepherd, part collie, and all the family I had at the time. She was my second pair of eyes and ears to detect danger, and over the years, state after state, primitive road after primitive road, she became a one-woman dog that listened to no one but me.

Without her companionship there would be no story here. Her death in 1989 was a tremendous loss. We had been together twelve years when she was killed by a hit and run driver outside of Columbus, Ohio. How that happened is another story I don’t want to go into right now, but it was a horrible shock and I grieved for a long time. I didn’t just grieve. I wailed. I thought I would never get over her death and leaving my life. An era had ended. Part of me was gone. I saw her face in clouds in the sky, and in the flames of my campfires for months after her death. I never felt so alone… or so sad.

Carolyn:

I can see how important she was to you and how much you loved her. Still, even with Harmony, as a woman camping alone – weren’t you afraid?

Cary:

Oh yes. The first few months I was. I had no idea when I left home that I would experience so much fear.

I wasn’t frightened in the beginning. I was in a state of excitement like a child. Then I began to have bad experiences. My van was ransacked in New Orleans during my first week on the road, and jewelry worth thousands of dollars that I had taken along for emergency cash, was stolen. One night a week later, while I was living on the Gulf of Mexico, several vehicles of hollering men circled my van for a half hour like a band of Indians around a wagon train. I was a mile from any other beach campers at the time and was frozen with fear. Another time, while working in Tucson, Arizona, women were fearfully relating that rapes had increased 50% and exclaiming, “My God, was I all alone?!” That was my third month on the road, so after my experience in New Orleans and an incident where I thought I was going to be raped by two male co-workers in Tucson, I took to the back roads and small towns which was where I wanted to be in the first place. I just didn’t know how to yet…

But I’d survived hard times in my life. I was 40 years old, had left the nest, and I was determined to go on no matter what took place. When I look back, I sometimes wonder why, or how, I continued on. In retrospect, I feel now that I was driven and guided at the same time.

Carolyn:

You have talked about the effects of silence and solitude. Would you like to talk a little about it?

Cary:

Sure. My mind was not occupied with relationship stuff, family stuff, people, or TV. There was little input other than the effects of living in nature, with nature, so in time, my brain chatter filled in the gaps with psychologically and emotionally repressed events of my life. Subconscious memories came to the surface. I went so far back in my history that I could remember things that happened before I could walk.

One Mother’s Day in the high desert of Utah, I was sitting in front of my campfire stirring the beans I was cooking and thinking about my family. I was despondent and looking at the map wondering where I might go next, when I looked down at my hand and saw three scars across the top of my thumb. I recalled having cut myself with a knife in the early sixties and I thought why did I do this? That day was the beginning of a long hard look at my life; a serious self-analysis. And the result of that examination led to an earnest look at other people’s lives as well, and eventually to the study of the human condition in general. I am self-educated in that subject; I observed so many kinds of people as I traveled. One year I camped with the homeless in the desert for three months, another time I camped with a couple of guys on the run. There was a comardarie with campers no matter their backgrounds, and we were all wounded and lost in life.

Carolyn:

Yes. I believe we all come from dysfunctional backgrounds and that some cases are much worse than others.  Do you agree?

Cary:

Very much so. I came to this conclusion after studying Handwriting Analysis, a tool that allowed me to peek into other’s psychological make-ups. For forty years, I thought I was the only one who had an inner enemy, and feelings of being fragmented at the core. But Handwriting Analysis and listening to a myriad of life stories across the country has convinced me otherwise. It was not until I began reading books on psychology that I began to assemble the pieces of my life. It’s such a long story – the psychological purging. I was born and raised in Ohio, by cold and abusive grandparents while my mother lived just eight miles away. I yearned to be with her, and grieved our separation throughout my growing up years. I was a very lonely child and took to dogs for companionship. In fact, I would say a dog on the farm raised me. Later came the abusive men in my life, and the emotional terror involved. All this is such a long story.

Carolyn:

Yes, a story worth telling. But getting back to this interview of your life on the road, what sort of work did you do along the way to support yourself?

Cary:

As far as work was concerned, I would just hang around in a small town for a few days, and eventually someone would ask me what I was doing there. I would explain how I was working myself across the United States, and that I was in need of a job, and it would blossom from there. All employment was temporary of course. Some jobs lasted two days. Some two weeks. The longest was five months, and at that time, I was the pilot of a fifteen-passenger pontoon boat on a lake in Arizona. Oh my goodness, there were so many new experiences! On the Gulf of Mexico, I cleaned houses, washed and waxed boats, worked a few weeks in a local artist’s store and even sold a piece of my own artwork, a charcoal drawing of the Gulf and the rolling hills of the beach. I was a waitress in Tusayan, a small town six miles south of the Grand Canyon. I flagged for a construction crew in Wyoming, worked on roofs in Arizona, did maintenance at a KOA campground in Idaho, and washed dishes in a restaurant in Oregon. I ran a boathouse and fishing dock on a lake in Arizona, mowed grass in a cemetery and filled in sunken graves in Tennessee, did maid work and pumped gas in California, worked in a bar in New Mexico serving drinks as a cocktail gal, and got pinched on the ass more than once. I had some great times and great experiences learning how other people lived and how they thought. We have many different cultures and ways of thinking across this great land.

Carolyn:

Where did you sleep? How did you exist?

Cary:

I slept in my vehicle, which for the first sixteen months (the first two trips) was a small camper van with a couch/bed in the rear. It had a tiny cupboard for a few canned goods and an icebox in which I would keep a block of ice. I would have to replace the ice every three to four days. I had a one-burner Coleman stove that I was afraid would explode because I didn’t know how to use it, but I’d sometimes become desperate for a warm meal and use it anyway – this was before I began making campfires to cook. Most of the time I ate raw foods and I lived on peanut butter sandwiches. There were the good times, like when I was a waitress and my meals were provided.

When I was camped on the Gulf Beach for six weeks, I used the bathroom in the lobby of the nearest high-rise hotel, and sometimes there wasn’t time for that, so I would use Harmony’s water dish, then bury my feces deep in the sand.

Yes, I would say that those first sixteen months, before I graduated to a small motor home, I lived like an animal, an elusive animal on the run from life’s woes, sneaking here and there to avoid having to pay someone for the privilege of sleeping in the rear of my van. I could not afford a campground, but as I traveled, I learned how to boon dock and find the places where I was the only human there. I loved that.

Personal hygiene was an issue as well. Sometimes I would wait outside of a small motel in hopes that someone would leave their key in the door after checking out, so that I could sneak in and shower. Later in my odyssey, I began to bathe in creeks, lakes and rivers, and I began cooking meals over my campfire. I remember being very proud of my first campfire. Little did I know that this would become a way of life. I had become a person who felt more comfortable living in the out of doors, than any other place. ‘Home’ to me, meant having no address, just my vehicle. Life was hard, but better than I’d ever had it because I was free – free from abuse, from oppression, and free of the responsibilities of raising two daughters by myself.

Carolyn:

Yes, you have talked about hard times, times of great despair. Would you expand on that?

Cary:

There were times I thought I wouldn’t survive. I had periods of great loneliness, and feelings of living as a social outcast, in abject poverty. I lost fillings in my teeth and went for months that way. More than once while I was sick with some kind of flu, I laid in the back of the van completely alone in my misery a thousand miles from anyone who cared for me. On my third trip of eight months, I fell in the Arizona desert and injured my back – almost breaking it, a chiropractor told me, and at that time I ran out of money and had to take a job with hard physical labor involved. There were hard times, yes. And I was very naïve on that first trip. I didn’t know how to read a map, other than the top was north. It just didn’t matter to me. I wanted to be free more than anything, free and wild, and sometimes I flipped a coin at the end of a dirt road as to which direction I would turn.

Carolyn:

Yet you talk about being fortunate even with all this misfortune?

Cary:

Oh yes, because I went through so many personal transformations. I overcame so much fear in my life, like the fear of driving too far from home, fear of men, fear of changes, and fear of being alone. I overcame new fears of scorpions, tarantulas, and I even skinned rattlesnakes and made belts for my children and me. At one time in the desert, I wore a gun and chewed tobacco because the pendulum had swung far.

During my travels I shockingly learned to live by my wit, by my own rules, with my own mind, and to trust myself – have confidence in myself. I now have a sense of pride and feelings of accomplishment that I never ever had. And even though I have nothing in the conventional sense of success, such as an education, property, insurances, credit, or a home, I am somehow okay. I like the fact that I am sure-footed in the mountains, that I can smell a distant bear, that I survived a rattlesnake encounter, and can swim the river currents.

I experienced the feelings and state of mind I had as a child on the farm, those feelings of being one with Nature, not separate. I captured those feelings once again. How can one be so lucky?

My heroes had always been men; cowboys. And I was fulfilling my dream of becoming one, to drift with the tumbling tumbleweeds in the magnificent west and wondering which state I was in when I awoke each morning.

But I was also cleansing, purging, meeting the dark night of the soul, healing my inner child, whatever you want to call it. That was what was happening out there.

Carolyn:

Could you tell us a little more about your life before you began this odyssey?

Cary:

Well, I was a teenage mother and had two daughters, the first at seventeen years old. Then I got divorced and remarried and divorced again. I raised the girls on my own. I worked in a factory, as a waitress, and other menial jobs.

The two marriages were terribly abusive and I lived under tremendous amounts of oppression, abuse and fear; physically, emotionally and financially.

At age twenty-nine, I fell in love again and for a decade I was the mistress of a millionaire. This affair ended two years before I attended what I call my college without walls, i.e., my travels.

Carolyn:

I can’t get over the contrast of living on the road, and living the role of a mistress for a decade before that. You were a mistress? Please tell us more.

Cary:
I didn’t know I was a mistress. In my mind I was just in love with a married man who had money. It was not something I was proud of and the relationship created a moral conflict within. He was twenty-two years my senior, so in a manner of speaking, he formed me, molded me. I’d been raised on a farm and he had to teach me which fork to use. It was just like the movie Pretty Woman, but I wasn’t a prostitute.

And after all, he was the first man who had ever been kind to me, who did not hit me, and when I was on his arm, I felt like I was somebody. I was very impressionable at the time, so riding in limousines and flying in private jets overwhelmed me. It was easy for him to program me psychologically, but it was not so easy for me to break free of it. That took some time and was also a part of the purging I’ve talked about.

Carolyn:

Tell me – when you look back on your personal transformations, your ‘rebirth’ as you’ve called it, what was the most difficult task?

Cary:

The longest and most difficult journey was to become a friend to myself. I was filled with self-contempt and insecurities. Yes, that was the longest journey of my life.

I still have personal conflicts, but I don’t have that inner enemy anymore, the one who told me I was too skinny, not good enough, dumb, and ugly.

I think we all continue to have something about ourselves that we don’t like or haven’t come to terms with, and reading has helped me understand this, but there is no doubt in my mind that my experience of living with the benign influence of nature, alone in silence, was salient in all of my healing experiences.

Carolyn:

You’ve stated that you felt inferior for not finishing high school but that you read extensively after your first trip. What did you read?

Cary:

Oh, I read everything in sight– even menus. I craved knowledge, so I read all non-fiction, and I learned early on to read eclectically. This was an exciting time in my life. The first subject I studied was my physical health and my diet. I had been in and out of hospitals and at the mercy of doctors over the years, so I began to read about prevention and nutrition. And during the times on the road when I had to eat raw foods, my health improved which was the proof of what I was studying.

Then I studied the subject of psychology, and tried to figure out why I had all of those terrible thoughts about myself. Each subject led to another and another. I was so thirsty for knowledge. I ended up studying human behavior, and the human condition in general, and what I call the animal-mammal.

Besides learning from books, I have worn many hats because of my travels. I worked with Native Americans, illegal immigrants, and people on the run, and I’ve flown in private jets with billionaires.

I think, because I studied my life, it automatically took me to studying others. I listened in depth to all the people I came in contact with who wanted to talk, and I feel like I’ve gained a certain wisdom about the human condition that I observed first hand. And because I was passing through, people felt safe to tell me things they had ‘never told a soul.’

Carolyn:

What do you mean when you say animal-mammal?

Cary:

I use that term because I feel like in all our sophistication and science, we have forgotten that we are an animal. We are mammals. We are not a plant or a mineral. I feel like we are the only species that is not raising our off-spring as mammals, and it’s showing with all the horrible violence in our country.

Mammals need to bond with their mothers at birth, not be taken down the hall to another room. We have breasts for a reason and it’s not just for the pleasure of men.

To be loving human beings, we need to feel like we belong to the pack. Our deepest need is to have affection and to feel loved.

I didn’t know how to love my children when they were babies. Like many teenage mothers today, I was an unloved child/parent trying to raise them. I was a caretaker not knowing how to be warm and loving. I raised my kids like I was raised.

I’m not saying all of society’s dysfunction stems from failure to bond in a loving, affectionate way with our offspring, but with my own experiences in life and from listening to the experiences of others, I learned that love is lacking in our society. We all know that.

Carolyn:

You’ve been a critic of the entertainment field, stating that it has been extremely irresponsible. Would you expand on that?

Cary:

Yes, the people in this field need to think about the opportunity to influence the public in a good way, because we, the public, watch boxes. We look at boxes in our homes, in our motels, in our restaurants and lounges, laundromats, motor homes, wherever there are buildings. Everywhere there are the little boxes to sit in front of and watch. It’s a form of hypnosis and affects the mental attitudes of the masses. We are profoundly influenced by what we hear, and especially what we see. I don’t know how anyone could disagree with this.

Carolyn:

So, you feel that TV is pandering to the worst in us, and as mammals we aren’t bonding, and nurturing our offspring, and it adds up to a violent society?

Cary:

Who knows how many reasons there are? But those are definitely two at the top, with number three close behind being our separation from nature – our ignorance of the fact that we are a part of the rest of the community of living things on this planet. Sadly, we live in a culture based on consumption. Advertisers program our lives for us. The end result is that we as humans have become what Noam Chomsky has termed “The Bewildered Herd.”

Carolyn:

Yes, you have raised a very deep subject.

For now, please tell us what you are currently doing. You lost your home in Tennessee several years ago but have stated, even jokingly, that wherever your motor home is parked, is your address.

Cary:

Yeah. I joke about my home address because I don’t have one. I had so many short-lived addresses over the years when I was on the road, but most of my travels, at least in the last five years, have been returning to areas I love the most, rather than rambling. Being homeless has its merits when you make the land your home. However just recently I rented a tiny cabin in the foothills of a 13,000-foot peak in the Rockies. I’m a few feet from the boundary of thousands of acres of national forests where my neighbors are big horn sheep, mountain lion, bear, elk and deer. I’m in heaven.

Carolyn:

And you have another dog?

Cary:

Yes. Her name is Blondie and she’s a golden retriever mutt. I adopted her when she was five years old, and like with Harmony, we are inseparable. She is my new co-pilot, my second pair of eyes and ears and my constant companion, my only family.

Carolyn:

Henry David Thoreau wrote about spiritual renewal and rebirth. You have stated that your odyssey, bottom line, was a spiritual quest. Can you explain?

Cary:

Ah yes. Thoreau said (or maybe it was Emerson) that we should not let any institutional church, dogma, creed or Christ himself stand in the way of direct communication with God. I understand this so well. I was searching for God ‘out there’ but found in time that the kingdom of heaven is within. To me, God is love. Love is God.

In the solitude and stillness of nature I found love. I found God. I found myself.