“We live a different path,” he says, “I don’t think we’ll ever have to get into all that.”

He stands there, drinking an IPA and smoking a yellow American Spirit like he was born to stand here in this mountain night sky. It hasn’t snowed yet, but it will soon, and he makes it seem like we’re surrounded by 10 feet of the crispy white powder. His hair is akin to Wolverine’s, just barely making it out of his black beanie, a red flannel jacket covered in a ripped denim jean jacket that’s covered in 80’s punk symbols and slogans. That piece of clothing is a joke, but again, only half-joke, half-somehow serious. We grew up together, skateboarding manholes, the flat streets, stairways and grass hills of our nearby hometowns. He moved out here to Lake Tahoe and I did something else with my life, we parted ways for years but some friendships will work out over the long years and on my first crosscountry roadtrip I stopped here, already changed by the desert expanse of Texas to Arizona, the beachy paradise of San Diego, when I arrived on the East Shore of Lake Tahoe I knew that life would never be the same. I continued visiting him, once a year, maybe less, lately much more.

He tells me of his dream, his dreams, how they’ve changed. “I wanted to go pro, move out here, be a pro snowboarder. It was hard, crazy, because you get there, right on the edge like you’re one of those ‘maybe’ dudes, and then you get injured, and then get surgery, and then you’re back and you think you’re a ‘maybe’ guy again. And then you get hurt.”

He laughs a little, kicks around on his feet like he can’t hold still even to think back over the beginnings of a career. I think of how insane it is that his goal was to be a pro snowboarder, and how set he really is. He’s not pro, no, but he gets boards for free, gear for free, rides a good deal for free and gets paid money to test jumps. Sounds like he’s made it to me, and even as I think that he continues. “That’s not what I’m all about anymore. Now I know I just want to ride, and the way I want to ride. Just keep pushing my limits, be humbled. I think when you’re humbled in life that’s when you really look around and realize, ‘This is just crazy.’”

We talk about similar situations for a few more hours. I’ll be out of Tahoe, out of California, by noon tomorrow, but it’s been so good living here.

I like that no one really knows about Tahoe. You don’t hear about it like you do the Grand Canyon or the Everglades or Mt. Rushmore. You probably know the name, but the place? It’s a spectacular little secret tucked far enough away from Reno and Sacramento to really keep out the riff raff. I like being some of the only riff raff in town.

The bus keeps warm though, plenty of blankets, body heat. In the morning the million star gazer sky and tree fur silhouettes were replaced by a calm still lake, perfect for sipping coffee, smoking a morning cigarette and watching a punk rock blue bird of some type hop around stealing whatever breakfast scraps made it onto the forest floor.

Before making it to the coast there would be hitchhikers in the bus, showers taken at a random park and sitting on the Trinidad River a massive 3 foot salmon would leap out of the water in homage of this spectacular roadtrip. I had been to California before, but never this way, it had never seemed like this before. I was desperate to live it more and simultaneously never wanting it to end.

Or so I think. Every opportunity that arises should be evaluated for danger, but short of life threatening, any experience entertained is one more piece of soul stuffed into you. I believe that if you embrace the universe for all it puts in front of you, it will reward you with happiness seemingly far more than your fair share.

November will be a good month for thanks giving.

When the repairs had been explained, the credit card details exchanged, and the bus fired up beautifully purring I asked the mechanic his name.

“Jesus,” he said. I smiled, as this bus has given me so much over the short time I’ve lived with her, wandering random friends, a warm place to live, steady transportation around Colorado and now so far beyond. It only made sense that Jesus would fix my bus.

We climbed fast and hard out of Carson City, never really looking back and a guy passed us beeping his horn and waving his hands. A fellow Pennsylvanian, representing the Steeler Nation all over the back of his little Subaru. The mountains went up and up and soon we were overlooking the forest cliffsides that we would then disappear into the canopies of, but nothing beats the feeling of first seeing the great big blue Lake Tahoe peeking through those conifers.

To say that Lake Tahoe is crystal clear would be a horrible understatement. You can see the shimmering reflection of the sun, for certain, but the depths of which you can look down through the water and see the giant tan boulders, the smaller gray stones, fish swimming, sands replacing other sands; this lake is clearer than transparent, it’s almost telescopic in it’s visuals.

My dear friend Matthew has lived as a snowboarder on the lake’s various shores for nearly a decade now and he showed us back into the mountain forests to a hidden lake where the snow was still clinging from a dumping the previous week, where eagle’s nests sat at the top of beautywoods and a broken raft, unsunk but not quite floating, hovered in the water. We talked of camping here for a summer, how easy it would be to live off the land or even just the beauty of the land and I thought, for the first time, about moving here for a minute.

But that was the previous night and in the aftermath dear Champ, that old VW bus cruiser so dedicated to making this trip, began the long stretch to Lake Tahoe, through Ely – an old west casino town, mining town and frequent cowboy movie set – through Austin – a half-horse town at the bottom of a corkscrew winder of a stretch of the highway – through Carson City – where the poor good bus died, after choosing not to do so in a dozen quaint small towns that would have been a joy to explore while waiting for her to get reworked – and on to Lake Tahoe.

The Carson City setback proved less painful than perhaps it could have been. Though stuck in what might be Nevada’s most horrible city, a small capital wrapped in the expansion of modern suburbia mixed with strip mall America, the sun poured a perfect purple set and a bike trail lead from the garage where she so conveniently died to the Gold Dust Casino which would serve as home for the night. Lake Tahoe taunted just over the mountain skyline, promising the glory of that crystal blue lake in the morning.

I disappeared into my own head and watched all of the gorgeous sites, inside and out of the old metal mother girl, snacking on grapes and peanut butter M&Ms.

Salt Lake City was drab, a nearly lifeless city even on a weekday downtown, and when ordering mimosas for an afternoon happy hour the waitress made it known that no fewer than two of the tall, pulpy drinks could be ordered per customer. Luckily Utah waters down their alcohol bigtime and so we remained roadworthy as our route went more southerly to connect with my favorite highway in all of America: The Loneliest Highway, Route 50 through Nevada and Western Utah. The sun set for hours over the mountains dividing the Silver State from the Beehive State and I’ve never melted over the sun’s dipping descent more than that day.

What better time to head for the coast?

Thank you everyone for reading along with us, watching our videos, commenting, and being so damned supportive. This is a difficult and sad time in our lives but we all have many more adventures in us, best of luck to everyone involved in this site.

P.S. For those of you interested in continuing along with Nathan & Tristan, your profiles have been imported to that site, so you can login over there with the same username & password as you did here. Also, the RSS feed for Tumblewagon will automatically begin populating with the new MoseyHo.me feed, but you might want to head over there and subscribe anyway if you’d like to have the proper title, etc.

Every small town, sparsely dotted along highways like silver hairs on a young soldier and free of the clutter of strip mall America, is a welcome break from full throttle climbs and wheel wobbling downhills. Walmart, Subway, Days Inn, McDonalds, gas stations that take credit cards; these are invisible to me now, the mountain people won’t tolerate them and the desert is too empty to support them.

Long mullets fly from passing Harleys, crotch rocketeers whiz by like spacemen and the vast majority of bikers these days, the retired couple, all extending hands to signal a unity of two wheeled respect. I’m no speed demon and the baby blue wrapped around this 150cc engine neither screams trouble nor tough, but the tent and pack on my rack signal my long haul, that this is no joy ride to the lake, but an adventure, and as epic, solo and free as I’ve ever undertaken.

My stomach is satisfied on one meal a day, I drink only water and smoke countless cigarettes that can never kill me. Evenings outside of the clutchy grip of cell towers leave me reading paper books, sewing patched holes in my clothes and studying this atlas until there’s nothing left to do but situps to pass the remaining midnight hours.

There is nothing between me and heaven but a helmet and my thoughts, ample hours of the day to work through what is and what might have been, how I’ll live outside of time and all the weights of land ownership, fiscal responsibility and the trappings of politics, religion and small talk about the unstoppable weather. My eyes are filled with canyon vistas, countless antique cars trashed in personal junkyards and the olive green brush of desert flats. They dart from pothole to mirrors to treeline, cautious of split second danger, wide eyed in the wind to suck in all of the exhilaration of motorized movement sans the big protective boxes of cars and rigs and RVs.

On these back roads all the locals, rare a stranger do they see, wave or nod, touring bicyclists pant heavy up hills and barking dogs defend their homelands. The tank runs dry, I reserve tank it to the next station, barely making it. Three Mexican fellows, each twenty years older than the next, ask me about speed, distance, clutch works, miles per gallon, smile at all my replies and intermittently exchange Spanish with one another.

There is no disappointment on this road, nothing begging for attention, no criticism. The mountains don’t cry out, look at me!, anymore than they deserve to be, the valleys don’t cast blame for feeling so low. GPS and cable television, police officers, and the weight of satisfying the society around me are all irrelevant.

I head home, laughing at the idea. THIS is my home, wherever I am and though our transient life gave way to sedentary, desperately clutching at a place to fill the soil with roots, I can’t deny that only in the uncertainty of unhindered, uncompromised motion do I truly feel like a human being. Not merely a person, as we as people seem to be puzzle pieces seeking out our correct place in the bigger picture, rubix cubes looking to shuffle all around until we match up our sides, all too often shuffled again by another color wanting to do the same. No, I feel the “being” in human being. These 80 short years or so we have to make every ounce count, to show the universe thanks for making us as close to gods as they come in this solar system, until we’re devoured again back into the big cycle to become trees and soil and worm food, just as we were before.

My hotel morning room is smokey, my pack nearly empty, and the sun is beating out its desert welcome cry. Today is my most desolate of stretches and the chances of that golden oldie of a sun being my only companion for 150 miles is good, and well and good with me.