live. work. dream.

When you’re camped out in the middle of a wild desolate landscape, without a cell signal and a silence so deafening that its roar squeezes your brain like a vise, it’s tempting to believe that you’ve fallen off the radar. You look around for miles and see nothing but desert landscape, imagining that there are no rules, laws or entities that have power over you.

But the truth is, you can’t escape. Ever. Because it doesn’t matter if you hightail it to Patagonia, or just hide out in the woods; the Man will find you.

In our case, the Man was the California Department of Motor Vehicles, and the Houston Police Department.

As we sat around the campfire and soaked in the rugged scenery last week in New Mexico, it occurred to me that we will be workamping in Colorado this August, when my driver’s license will expire. I called the DMV, and they told me I’d have to appear in person to renew it. No exceptions.

As much as I wanted to convince myself that Jim and I are freewheelin’ hippie nomad vagabonds, I accept the fact that I still need to maintain some kind of “legal” identity. I looked into getting a New Mexico license, but guess what? You need to prove you live there. And what address would I use?

So, because the start of our next workamping gig in Truth or Consequences New Mexico got delayed by a couple of weeks, we grabbed this opportunity to hightail it 800 miles west, renew my license and hang out with my family for a couple of weeks. It was great fun to surprise the heck out of everyone. My Mom just flipped when she saw us.

What’s The Houston PD Got to do with This?

A few days after arriving in L.A., we received a letter from the HPD. Apparently, someone is saying we pulled a Hit and Run on them, in solid bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway in February. Funny that we never once heard or saw anything indicating a collision, or that there isn’t a single dent or damage to our rig.

Nonetheless, someone is saying we hit their lovely Crown Victoria, and took off. The nice Texan officer we spoke with said we don’t have to appear in court, and we aren’t fugitives in the eyes of the law, but that he will be in contact with us once he hears from the accuser. Oh joy.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how much you try to get away from rules, regulations and the powers that be. We are born into the System, live in the System, and die by the System. Unless you want to live like a fugitive at the ends of the earth, you just gotta play the game, fulltime RVer or not.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 12:30 am and is filed under Dream, Full-Timing Tips, Live, Local Flavor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.