The first four days

What state do you live in?

Aug 14, 2026

Where does this story begin? Seven years ago when I was homeless and living on the road? Or was it when I eventually decided to stay in New Mexico that year? Maybe this story begins three years ago, when I left the desert, or five days ago when I left Maryland to finally go back to the desert after four previous attempts had failed. Is there ever really a concrete beginning or only small clues along the way, experiences that can be pieced together in retrospect to see the full constellation of a thing?

The trip—and I was thinking of it as such—started slowly and unremarkable, as most cross-country trips do. It was raining that morning, a Wednesday, when I drove into the office. I worked until lunchtime, then headed to Best Buy to pick up a phone mount for my van. I ran into a guy I know through the local art scene who was looking for a phone charger, so we talked briefly—about his upcoming art show and my upcoming trip—and when we ended up checking out at the same time and walking out together, I figured, “Do you wanna see the van?”

I showed him my modest desk and sleep space, the battery pack, the toilet. “I hope I can figure out this phone mount because I’m gonna be using the map app nonstop.”

“O wait—you mean, like, you’re leaving right now for the desert?”

“Yeh, right from this parking lot.”

We hugged and I plopped the phone mount in a cupholder to deal with later, then slowly exited Frederick, one stoplight at a time, and headed toward the interstate, toward my long-awaited desert reunion and the storage unit holding my tangible life, while drizzling rain in Maryland gave way to scattered thunderstorms down I-81 south.

This trip had been postponed four times, as life repeatedly intervened—my dad died, I fell in love, an apartment buyout that dragged out longer than expected, then pneumonia. Every time I made a plan, the trip was overtaken by enormous life events.

That first day, I headed for a campground in the hills of Virginia and arrived in a storm, but the rain pounding on my van was peaceful, creating a little cocoon where I could organize my workspace and bedding for the night and settle in. When the rain let up a couple hours later, I ventured outside to find the bathhouse and cook some soup on my campstove, which I hadn’t fired up in years. I slept good and woke to the sound of crows talking to each other (or maybe me) and swam in a lake before getting back on the road.

The next night was pleasant as well, as if my story wasn’t picking up much pace but leisurely making its way across the country. Day two brought my first animal medicine: a turtle looking to cross a very busy interstate in Tennessee. The last time I saw a turtle (honestly) was 2023, when I’d put everything in storage and had gone fully nomadic again. I dreamt of an albino sea turtle then, and turtle imagery and literal turtles seemed to be cropping up everywhere, homes on their backs.

I stopped at a diner mid-afternoon and felt like I was farther south, overhearing a woman in a thick Southern accent talking to the waitress about dyeing her hair: “Nothing wrong with a little chemical help, my mamma always said.” I stayed with a friend of a friend that night, also named Lauren, who I’d gotten to know in an online artist group. A tacos and talking kind of night, a back porch kind of morning.

So far, smooth.

Then I watched the temperature climb past 100 in Arkansas, eventually hitting its peak at 103—and this was not dry heat. The heat took hold and didn’t release its grip for days.

And I was not expecting it. I’d driven this route in summer and had never hit heat like this.

The sun shines down into my van cabin and hits everything. You can’t hide from it. You can’t shield electronics from it. I couldn’t even charge my phone because it was overheating. un beams in through both windows and the huge windshield that gives me those panoramic views I love, hitting my arms, legs and chest, the big black dash and black leather seats. Despite running the AC nonstop, I was sweating and getting a little nervous about camping in Oklahoma that night, where the high was supposed to be 99 and the low in the 70s wouldn’t hit till sunrise.

I’d survive, I figured.

I finally exited the highway toward Eufaula Lake, drove down a small state road and looked to be going to the middle of nowhere. I eventually found the campground and my campsite overlooking the lake. I walked to the bathhouse, peed, and headed back for my campsite, wondering how there could even be any pee in me as I’d been sweating all day in the van and now profusely since getting to the campground and setting up.

I was too hot to make dinner, so I just ate some more trail mix—a huge bag I’d made before leaving Maryland that was slowly shrinking. I tried to journal. Hands and pages too sticky. I couldn’t imagine how I would survive once I closed the van doors. I have no ventilation system in the van, and the van, as I quickly learned, absorbs a lot of highway heat and is very slow to release it.

I took refuge in the natural world and shot photos of sunset over the lake. After dark, I hung my head out the van door for a while, as there was an ever-so-slight breeze, but then I thought, what if a raccoon or something jumps in on my face? So I shut the door and tried to lie perfectly still, because every movement would cause more sweating. I pointed a small fan at me, checked my phone and the “Severe Weather Alert: Possible threat to life or property. Heat index values up to 109 expected.” Put the phone down, then picked it up again, somewhat desperately, asking AI what the odds were that I could die in my van in the night. (From what you described, this does not sound like an emergency right now …)

I continued to lie still, hour after hour, unable to fall asleep, still sweating, then drinking more water and electrolytes—which made me have to get up and pee—which made me sweat more. Eventually: sleep. I woke only once around 4:30 a.m. to pull a light sheet over me and drift back until sunrise.

The next morning, I opened the van door and saw a jogger listening to honky-tonk harmonica. I opened my phone to see an email from my next campground in Texas: “BURN BAN is currently in effect … Heat Advisory in effect.”

I was camping in a big metal box in the middle of a heatwave.

Back on the highway, the temperature started climbing again, and then jumped in leaps and bounds—111 by the time I crossed into Texas. The van started heating up again as soon as the sun was high in the sky, and again everything—including me—was overheating.

I stopped at Cross Ministries, where a huge cross visible from I-40 towers over bronze sculptures of the Stations of the Cross. I wandered into a gift shop, always thinking about souvenirs and Christmas gifts while traveling, and the woman working immediately said, “There are no restrooms—don’t even ask” (I hadn’t asked, but I could see she was distraught, sitting in front of a fan and looking defeated).

She told me everyone had left today—all the employees, even the plumber, so when there was an issue, she simply had to close the bathroom. Everyone had fled town because of the heat.

I told her that I was just making a quick stop to see the cross and had to jump back on the road to get to a campground before the gates closed at 5:30.

She seemed a little taken aback. “Where are you camping?”

“Palo Duro Canyon, just south of Amarillo.”

“It’s gonna be hotter in the canyon,” she warned me, with a look that told me she knew exactly what she was talking about.

“Really? I thought it would be cooler.”

She shook her head.

Back on the interstate, I started to smell the sagebrush coming into my van, even with the windows closed (although the wind was so loud, I wondered if I’d left a van door open). As I exited and began taking smaller roads toward the state park, the temperature was at 109 and I began to worry.

“Extreme fire danger, no campfires,” was really all the ranger at the entrance booth told me as she handed me a map and waved me through. I’d chosen the campsite farthest down the park road when I’d looked at photos online a week prior and it looked like the one with the best views.

My van crept down a winding switchback road until it reached the canyon floor—and then kept going, past red-rock cliffs and cactus and hoodoos until I finally got to Mesquite Campground and my site, eight miles from the park entrance. I had no cell service and no shade.

I stepped out of the van onto desert—finally desert—and did a double take at my feet. They were swollen, the right one extremely so. My sandal had left an indentation, and my ankle had disappeared. An elephant’s foot. It was so alarming, I sat in the back of the van and took photos from every angle, though no one would want to see that (except maybe my doctor) and I couldn’t send them to anyone anyway. My mind flashed back to my dad lying in bed years ago when we lived in Hagerstown, both feet and ankles swollen. It was related to the heart and kidneys, he’d told me. Were his feet elevated or his head? I wish I could remember.

While my mind ran through possibilities (is this heart failure? is this just from two days of extreme heat and sweating?), I tried to rig up the van to diffuse heat. There was about three feet of shade from a juniper tree that I backed my van toward, as close as I could get before hitting a boulder. I velcroed my blackout curtain across my driver’s side window where more sun was coming in, opened the sliding doors and back doors, and sat there, sweating, drinking more water and electrolytes. It was so hot, I didn’t even have an appetite.

The campsite view at Palo Duro Canyon in Texas.

That’s when it sank in that I was eight miles into a canyon with extreme fire danger, a swollen foot, no cell service to look up what might be medically wrong with me, and no way to cool my van. With no one to talk to, not even AI, my mind started running wild, and I fought it. Had I seen the steep, winding road leading to the campsite or my swollen feet before getting there, I would’ve gotten a motel.

Instead, I took a cold shower, stood under the water, washed my hair with soap, stayed there until I felt cold.

When it was still extremely hot at dusk, I quickly pitched my tent, if a bit haphazardly. I suddenly realized I had a bunch of things to do before it got dark, because if I was going to leave doors and windows open in my van, I couldn’t be throwing on all the lights and attracting bugs. I also tried to put up a screen across the van’s sliding door, clipping it to the walls and tying it around bungee cords as best I could.

But the smallest bit of physical exertion also meant I was pouring sweat again. And when I finally lay down: do I elevate my head or my feet? Because neither the van nor tent was level.

As the sky grew dark, I heard my first yipping of coyotes, somewhere down in the canyon, and smiled. I sat inside my dark van, still sweating, trying different positions, trying the five-inch fan again and a dampened towel around my neck. I kept the front windows cracked but closed the doors, trying to drift to sleep. I was so tired. Then I started hearing something against the sliding door—an animal? No. It was my tent. The winds had picked up. I hadn’t staked the tent down, and now it was butting against the van door beside my head. I dug out some rope in the dark and quickly tied the tent to the van side mirror so at least it wouldn’t blow away down the canyon in the night.

An hour or so later, I decided to move myself and everything essential into the tent where it must be cooler. No moon, no interior lights, just a red headlamp in my hand out of necessity. But once in the tent—on a tilted, rocky ground—the winds were so strong, the loud, billowing tent smacked me in the face, then came in and hit me from the back, every couple minutes or so another whoosh of tent fabric.

So I gathered my bit of stuff in the dark again—sheet, pillow, phone, keys, headlamp, water—and moved back into the van. I lay there for more hours, more sweat, more anxieties about my swollen feet.

But sometime around 1 a.m., maybe from sheer exhaustion, I just let go. The heat simply never broke; I did. I don’t know how else to describe it. Everything was so far out of my control, I had to allow myself to break open to receive it, whatever it was.

I remembered the etymology of the word crisis, which I’d just discovered a few weeks ago: from the Greek krisis: a turning point; a decisive moment when change must come, for better or worse. Originally, the change in an illness that indicated recovery or death. Literally: judgment, decision, choice.

I had been looking at this as a trip back to my beloved desert after years away. But the road did not agree to be recreational just because I framed it that way. I may have a home to return to now, but apparently that does not make me immune to road medicine.

I opened the back van door that had been closed for hours and leaned out to look up at the night sky, and then I stepped out into it.

I let myself be enveloped by the movement of that warm air. I took photos of the sky, mesmerized. I could see the Milky Way, saw a shooting star, and heard coyotes somewhere in the black night. I relaxed, somehow, into this perfect moment. Nothing had changed. It was still hot, my feet were still swollen, and I still didn’t know whether I would sleep. But I had stopped fighting it all.

It was 90 degrees when I drove out of that canyon at 9 a.m. As I approached the New Mexico border that afternoon, I started to see those small sunflowers along the highway, which I’d completely forgotten about, and then whole fields of sage.

When I saw the yellow WELCOME TO NEW MEXICO banner above the highway and my van drove through as if crossing a finish line, I immediately started sobbing and had to take the next exit.

I walked inside the New Mexico Welcome Center to use the restroom and was still crying while peeing, washing my hands, using the blow dryer, and wandering into the big lobby to see if they might have a New Mexico road map, when a woman behind the counter greeted me.

“Hi, would you like a New Mexico recreation guide?”

“I was actually hoping for a state road map.”

“Here you are,” she said, handing one to me. With pen in hand and hovering over a large notebook, she then asked, “What state do you live in?”

I had to pause to figure out the correct answer, run through a mental list: Pennsylvania apartment, Maryland license and plates, New Mexico still feels like home—I don’t know the answer.

“I used to live here but haven’t been back in three years,” I said. “I’m just a little emotional.”

“Well, welcome to New Mexico,” she said. “Or welcome back.”

I clutched the road map as I went back outside to my van, the New Mexico flag waving in the wind high above me.