The story of how Rocinante and I got together is a good one, if you like serendipity.

3-minute read

Last fall I needed an escape-from-NYC option. I wasn’t in the market for a truck, I was looking for a van. But a Craigslist ad for a 1994 Toyota pickup with a quarter-million miles on it that had been driven to Brooklyn from Ojai less than two months earlier was too wild a coincidence not to investigate (I am from Ojai).

After the test drive, the owner, Jesse, and I spent the afternoon in his ceramics studio in Red Hook. I learned his partner’s cousin had wayfared across the country in the truck less than two months earlier—that is, a cousin in the family that lived on the very same sliver of land I grew up on in Upper Ojai decades before my parents moved there in 1989.

I paid in cash the next day.

In December, I saddled Ro with my belongings and stashed her at my aunt and uncle’s house on Long Island. I flew to San Francisco to report from the last big earth sciences conference and from there hitch-hiked my way to Ojai. I had intended to return for Rocinante in spring and spend the 2020 summer rambling westward, but three seasons would pass before I could get back to New York to retrieve her.

Resuscitating Rocinante’s vital organs took six hundred dollars and a mechanic named John (along the way a tow truck company misplaced her—along with all my worldly possessions—for a full 24 hours). Rocinante and I covered 1,000 miles visiting loved ones in the northeast before making any westward progress. That was when I named her.

One of my favorite writers, John Steinbeck, drove a camper around America in 1960. He called his Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s little horse, who is awkward, past her prime, and engaged in a task beyond her capacities. Rocín in Spanish means a workhorse or low-quality horse but can also mean an illiterate or rough man, the perfect double entendre for us.  

Ro and I have slept in Wal-Mart parking lots and trucker rest stops. We’ve climbed the Whites, the Greens, and the Adirondacks, the Catskills, the Poconos, and the San Juan’s. We’ve run out of gas in Maine and racked up parking tickets in Manhattan. We average 55 on the highway and holding her clutch in has stressed my hamstring. We stick to the slow lane and add 10 percent to any travel time estimate.

Each time I turn her on I feel her pistons press miles into carbon dioxide molecules, which get excited and dance around when the Earth’s beams of long-wave light hit them, warming the air. I imagine the little triangles of condensed atoms joining the other waste gases of our society, settling in for a multi-thousand-year residence time in our atmosphere.

I’ve exhausted more than one metric ton of carbon so far just on this trip (by comparison, my carbon footprint was calcul-estimated to be six metric tons for all of 2019), the impact of which we’ll feel about three decades from now—warming the Earth is experiencing today is primarily from our 1990’s emissions. I rationalize my driving a combustion engine in different ways—aside from fuel and food, my current carbon footprint is close to negligible. Still, selfishly, this trip feels something like last chance journeyism. She’ll likely be my last fossil fuel-powered vehicle.

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