road by luck

Cooking off the tailgate up on Rabbit Ears Pass is best done before sunset. Just east of Steamboat Springs the campground is set in a grove of aspen at 9400 feet above sea level. In the early days of touring, I traveled by pickup truck. These were spartan times. I could afford a sleeping bag, camp stove, ice chest and a mattress for the bunk I slept on in the rear of my rig.

Driving into the teeth of autumn for a tender Californian was shocking. Californians do not get too many firsthand experiences having to do with inclement weather. Salt Lake City come January will sit at somewhere near 10 degrees Fahrenheit and waits to tutor the uninitiate. If you are not a quick learner Minot, North Dakota is more than willing to provide further lessons in the cold hard truth. 

Rambling the blue highways hopscotching between appearances out among the folk living in the hinterlands is still a common circuit among the entertainers plugging away in the lucrative small time entertainment business.

A variety act like the kind I offered to local communities wasn’t just affordable it was almost a kind of necessary means of warding off the confounding isolation that comes with building a life out there where there is this abundance that is known as emptiness.

You won’t go broke eating at a Dillion, Montana coffee shop. You may spike your cholesterol, you may not always like their coffee, but you will for sure enjoy the waitress salt and peppering your morning with her heartfelt terms of endearment— what’s on your mind honey— a little more coffee for you sweetheart— how about one more cup before you break my heart and pay your bill and leave me— 

Some weeks were leaner than the fatter weeks when my wallet set full against a stool where I’d sit waiting for counter service. A thin wallet generally meant I was cooking off my tailgate. Didn’t matter if there was wind, rain or it was cold some weeks you made your own meals. Life in the small-time entertainment business required budgetary discipline.

The act I advertised was a mix of juggling, acrobatics followed by the surefire-works- every-time closing routine that I presented with my performing dog. Having a dog to help fend off the solitude solved some of the loneliness that the road can stir up. 

Playing an in-tune ukulele helped too. Both of my show dogs, Sunshine and Lacey, traveled the road with me. Added up together I was out there giving it the one-two, juggler then the cute dog act for 30 years. 

Up on Rabbit Ears Pass I’d spend days when I couldn’t book the show keeping the act sharp while at the same time pinching every cent I had to my name. I’d load up on groceries and fill the gas tank then get away from the Front Range where too much temptation was likely to separate what little money I had and threaten to bring this one-man enterprise to crisis and insolvency. Up there in the high country I would write new material for the show, practice the tricks I did in the show, and most afternoons takeoff on a high elevation long distance run. I felt like a millionaire up there in all that mountain air.

I’d figured out that you’d want to be putting away your dishes before the sun dipped below the horizon. Up on Rabbit Ears Pass stinking hot days were followed by bitter cold nights. As dusk settled in, I’d build a fire. As temperatures dropped, I’d stoke the fire until it was as big and wide as needed to warm my sense of solitude. Sitting out by the fire didn’t just burn wood it killed time too. Most nights after a good fire I’d crawl in the bunk switch on my reading light. Wallace Stegner, John Steinbeck and Edward Abbey helped me understand this western landscape where I toiled for my supper. Eventually all my touring was limited to the lands west of the Mississippi. Here was where my heart and home belonged.

Over time I made progress. I learned how to go south in the winter. I figured out how to put away a little of what I earned. After so many years of traveling by pickup truck I had finally saved up enough to buy a travel trailer. There would be three trailers in my life that I would own.

The second was a 16-foot trailer. It was a favorite and had hot and cold running water. There was a sink and shower. There was a toilet. The galley included a stovetop as well as an oven. Best of all the trailer was equipped with a heater. I was suddenly living my road life in the lap of luxury.

I worked Yuma, Arizona’s festivals. I was in and out of this border town five or six times every winter. County fair manager in Yuma was a friend, and he provided me a free place to park with water and electricity. County fair managers keep a soft spot in their hearts for the small-time entertainers rolling through their fairgrounds.

Springtime I’d begin my northward tour. This circuit was always a messier affair. I’d be in Afton, Montana then jump to Portland for a show, then up to British Columbia for a month, across to Alberta then back down to Sidney, Montana. By the end of September, I’d be settling in for a run of county fairs in Texas. 

Other entertainers I knew were doing much the same kind of road shows. We all started out working out of station wagons, pickup trucks or vans. Those of us that stayed in the business bought travel trailers. Some acts I knew, Hillbilly Willy and Magical Mystical Michael preferred to use a refurbished school bus. Others that specialized in city life shows remained scaled down and continued to live in their vans. 

I’d blown a transmission one spring and was stuck in what most folk would describe as to hell and gone. In this case my hell was located on the northernmost outskirts of Phoenix. Took a space in a RV park. My fancy neighbor with a monster 35-foot triple axel trailer wandered over to my two folding chair happy hour operation. I gave my retired rancher a tour of my 16-footer, I was mighty proud of this full time home I’d found. This rancher/cowboy/Romeo type had a sharp eye and keen sense of self-sufficiency surveyed the interior of my place and I could see his curiosity showing in his eyes— so where’s the tv— he asked— don’t have one— I replied— well, what do you do with your nights— he asked. 

Solitude and travel trailer life can stir up all manner of worries over how to fend off all this quiet and emptiness.

My neighbor was just as amazed to learn I didn’t travel with a microwave oven. By now the modern world was catching up with this one-man and one dog small-time entertainer. When I first started out there was no such thing as automated teller machines and there were no wireless telephones. Correspondence was done by envelope, postage stamp and type written correspondence to future clients. If need be, you’d take a sack of coins and plug away at a pay phone to firm up a date. If contracts had to be exchanged, you’d have to get the document forwarded general delivery to a post office nearest to the next date on your calendar. 

I built friendships over these years. I fell into relationships. Somewhere along the way I started renting my own place. Had a fine first floor garden apartment in one of San Francisco’s finest neighborhoods. This was a neighborhood known as Cow Hollow. It set at the foot of Pacific Heights. Committing to this apartment was a big decision on my part. I remember being worried sick to death about the risk I was running. If things didn’t work out being stuck doing my show in one place might weaken my resolve and make it too hard a transition to remount my touring life out there on all those blue highways I had come to regard as a circulatory system to what I’d come to see as a way of life.

The time frame for all this opulence and transition from touring troubadour to landlocked and city limited entertainer was the 1980’s. I thought I’d seen everything and for some spell of time I had come to see this life in San Francisco to be both good for my show and an easier path for my domestic life. And that was for some years true enough. 

Then one day you wake up and drinking coffee you gaze off and your imagination is seized by the distant horizon and your mind begins tumbling like a super-secret combination to the vault where you store all those hopes and dreams. Pretty soon you’re stuffing a file folder full of contracts and there you are pulling away from all those creature comforts you’ve come to appreciate and you are heading back out, heading east on another blue highway journey of long hops and short stops where you may take measure one more time of how much appetite you still have to go down a road you’ve never had the fortune of traveling before. 

The small-time entertainer’s life on the road delivers a fresh baked loaf of rural community, you finding it waiting just over the next ridge-line, it is a place scattered across landscape, it is for some handful of us where we find our heart and soul.