A Living Magazine - Tap Root: Days 219 to 270 - Booking It, Losing My Family, and How to Survive on Chicken Pea Soup

So many things have changed over this long and brutal Maine winter. I gave up the reliability of weekly donations to focus on writing my first full length book, MODERN NOMADICS - A MANUAL AND GUIDE. Now it is done and ready to go! I feel great about it in so many ways. It is so impressive to me, that I don't even feel like I was the author. 

During these last two months, whenever I wallked, I thought about the text. When I slept, I thought about the stories it relates and the deeper purpose enfolded within. I don't seek to bore the reader with details about the composition. I will discuss much more about that after publication. I just love the book in a way that only compares with my love of this blog's adventures, because it addresses so many aspects of all that I have sought to promote and discuss in the last seven years. 

View of one of our 12 snow storms.

My "snow-white board" window for working out concepts of a future book.

But, after completion, my enthusiasm for the book was quickly tempered in the last couple weeks by the lukewarm-to-cold reception from my regular readers when I announced it at Facebook. This was combined with the final and apparent absolute rejection of all that I have done by my dad's side of the family; made more prominent only by their cowardly silence: Messages go unreturned, emails are ignored, the 20th time of my trying to bring us back together is met with utter indifference, bordering on contempt.  

Still, practicality beckons. Because of the 400 hours of writing, I am monetarily poorer than I have been since quitting my bankruptcy counseling job way back in 2009. As we will see, I resorted to the cheapest possible means of survival--pea soup, once a day, each week. While that might seem humorous to most folks, just think what it is like to not be able to eat your 3 meals a day. No, not even 2 meals a day... This is not a complaint geared up for sympathy, but a report designed to elicit empathy from those who are capable of such rare understanding. It is not about emotion, it is about the starkness of fact--borne out of my escape from the American Game. Physical hardship (for me) is much preferable to spiritual hypocrisy. But, I have already covered that here at the blog ad infinitum.

But, as you know, I know an awful lot about hunger and what is necessary to combat it when funds are so limited. It takes filling the stomach with as much volume as possible, combined with the maximum nutrition for the minimum cost. We'll get back to this a little further down...

Writing a good book was far more challenging than I'd assumed. It requires the author to get up and avoid all other distractions in order to sit and compose effectively. Stephen King once told me that he made himself write 2,000 words per day--every day. He also said that "your good writing will not come until after the millionth word." Just before returning to Maine in 2016 I had written that millionth word. Anyhow, I tried to keep up with his daily prescription, but honestly did not have the fortitude to follow it 7 days per week. A nice book advance would have solved that problem...ah...but I digress...

All the while, I did have periods where I wrote significantly more in a day, and somehow that made up for my lack of routine. For prospective future writers, if this is any solace, the motivation gleaned from seeing the work develop, can be significant enough to guide and inspire you through the rest of the entire project; that is, if you let it do so. At about 60% of completing the composition, I was fired up to keep going. 

That kind of momentum pulled me straight through the rest of it. Yes, it was monotonous. But, my walking 7 days (about 50 miles) a week and other solitary activities, served to enhance the quality of what I was writing, along with many rereads. This is a feedback loop that worked for me. By experiencing such a positive spin on the project I now know what to look for in my own habits and enhance them whenever I become involved in the next book.

When I got to places where I needed an illustration to punctuate my points, to also give the reader a rest from text, especially in the sections about gear and rough camping, I simply grabbed a pad of paper and began to draw. This subsequently led to refined illustrations that I then digitized and included as inserted pictures. There aren't many, but I found this to be an effective means of adding graphics. 

I suppose it was the catharsis of reliving my many adventures on the road (as so detailed in this blog) - memories that so often made me sit back and smile - that helped so much as well. It was nice to have hundreds of these posts upon which to draw in describing a thousand strange and unique perspectives that could only be referenced from my own recorded and documented adventures. I know that being self-referential can be seen as a cop out in research papers, but this work was something else. There was a damned good reason why I was so detailed all along the way of the Journeys. And, I always knew such attention to detail would be useful in the future. Now those details stand as legitimate and quantitatively proven aspects (along with their associated pictures, videos, audio and commentary) of an almost unbelievable achievement--something that has never been done in such a way before. It is rare for me to be proud of anything. Yet, I am extremely proud of what I thought, wrote about, and did, during those two crossings of America.

Nevertheless - and with no offense meant to anyone who casually tagged along side me - I have found that very few people (including my most ardent supporters) hold any interest beyond the attention-deficit-laden thrill of my day to day experiences, as written from the road, even if that interest was purely vicarious. In fact, nearly all of my readership was living vicariously through these struggles. This is understandable. For the occasional cubicle-class of middle management salary earners who checked in irregularly too I suppose it must have been a passing curiosity. However, it does more fully account for the satisfaction of a half a dozen folks on the other side of the spectrum, who were hospitalized or otherwise recovering from physiological distress. These latter readers told me how much it meant to them. 

These folks were going to this blog every single day, in between chemotherapy or physical therapy, or just before sleep, and were able to be transported away from their pain and suffering to the roadside camps and unusual situations that I faced; complete with my mistakes and revelries. They knew they could rely on my blog as an escape mechanism for their current situation. THEY are the ones I thought about whenever I posted a new day's adventures.

Seems odd now, in the solitude of the cabin, while writing up this experience in book form, to imagine that it all actually took place in a time before I ever returned to my home state of Maine. Nevermind that I starved for another full year after that return, then tried to make up for not being able to eat, wearing myself out by doing the only thing people would donate for: marching up the Maine Coast in the same vein as the cross country treks, only to almost die from a heart attack halfway through the project. This abruptly ended my long distance Journeying. Even after the hospital stay, I was made painfully aware of just how I had made all of that effort, only to end up living in the "Second Class," as a piece of social detritus.

When I realized that my many years of travel had precluded any ability to show "legitimate society" "rent," or official "work," history (and, as mentioned, I was twice now subjected to the medieval circumstances of medical science), I found a way to buy my land in Farmington (the Tap Root namesake of this current series of blog posts). 

As you know well by now, the land is a very modest three acres of beautiful Western Maine that I am now obligated to pay for until July of 2020. But, that isn't bad! The first year is already almost paid for. So many other people I know are locked into 30 years of mortgage enslavement.

Since leaving the conventional, soul-killing and hypocritical life of my $1,000 per month apartment, and socially acceptable car (complete with obligatory insurance, inspection, taxes, maintenance and gas costs, etc.) and the general socialized pretension required by a middle class white male back in 2011, I have grown more wise than I'd ever thought possible, all within less than a decade of one human lifetime. My wisdom is not necessarily useful for other people. Yet, it has moved me beyond the horizon of the dumbassed expectations of a family willing to throw me away for their own arrogant stubbornness; the people who thought they knew what was better for me than I supposedly knew for myself.

Whether we believe in Jesus or not, I can fully relate to these prescient and paraphrased words attributed to him...

"A prophet is not without honor, except among his own family."

I am no prophet, by I have been rejected by my family (and many of my hometown friends), and it stings me every single day of my existence. Because I followed the Golden Rule with them and they betrayed me with a fucking kiss. People say "just let it go." Frankly, I cannot think of stupider unasked for advice profered to anyone, prophet or regular old guy like me. 

We cannot help feeling what we feel. There is no such thing as "not taking it personally." I was betrayed by my own flesh and blood. And, despite it being an inferior reaction on my part, I cannot forgive nor forget that those who abused me as they raised me, won't take the initiative to make things right. My hell may be of my own making--due to my stewing in the juices of a million terrible memories, but the fact that they could care less about this torment, is steadily extinguishing the last glowing embers of love that I so many times continued hoping would reignite again. I hope they are very proud. Only then will they be able to fall.

Through their "tough love," I have learned what is the most poisonous hatred a family can dish out. Through their silence and indifference, I have learned how to speak as if I may never get another chance. Through their nay-saying and discouragement of my (and many other people's) ideas and aspirations, I have learned to trumpet the causes of those who have remained loyal. I utterly despise their weak, impotence and hypocrisy, willful ignorance and caustic dismissal. Those who have not been abused by a parent will never ever understand just how necessary it is to express how ruinous family betrayal can be. A father is supposed to be a reflection of THE Father. Instead, what is an abuser? Or, a neglector? Maybe this is my bully pulpit. But wearing my soul is not about blinging it, it is about BRINGING IT.

Ask me to forgive without a mea culpa from my tormentor(s)? Never! Legend has it that even God's love found its end in the contemptuous rejection of that holy mercy offered to Lucifer and his brethren. There is no difference for me, except that my "ruling" is purely material and will last only until they slide my lifeless body into the cremation chamber. Then, it will no longer matter. I will finally...finally, be free.

* * *

With that unpleasantness temporarily off my chest, I now offer the following lighthearted way to survive as a Modern Nomad whose principles disallow giving up. I have found a culinary savior! Pea soup! If you enjoy this ugly duckling of joyous deliciousness, pea soup is one way to treat the pains of the soul and the deficits of the wallet, while trying to maintain the strength of the body...

Pea Soup - The staple of the writing class Nomad, temporarily housed in poverty for the winter.

And when eggs are available? The omelet with a pea soup sauce. Ha!

Alright, so I promised something about this "pea soup for survival" idea. Here is the basic concept. I'm sorry not to get into quantities of ingredients. Just know that this pot of soup can last about a week--at one meal per day. In a gallon sized pot, add...

Butter.

Salt.

Two chicken thighs (with skin!). I can buy 4 for under $2.00 at Trantens in Farmington.

Carrots.

Onions.

Chili pepper.

Ground cilantro.

Whole caraway seeds (very important--this is what makes it awesome)!

Add a bit of melted snow water. Then cover and boil hard, until the meat separates from the bones.

Remove bones and trim off extra meat, adding it to the pot.

Add three quarts of water.

Add split peas.

Boiling became too vigorous, so I added some snow to slow it down.

After cooking for one hour--with softened peas, I separated it into containers for the coming week.

It was a very long winter; brutal, even by all Maine standards. I did the above cooking four or five times in order to survive those last two months. It costs about $5 per pot. And, I have to tell you, I LOVE pea soup even more now! I had to stop myself each night from having seconds and (if self control broke down) thirds!

* * *

I leave you with all these disparate emotions and far-flung ideas to bounce around in your head, hopefully in a more positive way than they have occupied mine.

I really am desperate to normalize my blogging again, in order to get a few dollars. I have gone off my heart meds, because my former PCP doctor refuses to refill the prescriptions (after promising he would "no matter what"). But, hey? What else could possibly go wrong? HA!