Week One with Dakota

from the weekly podcast show, conversation with strangers

How it all began

I could tell you I’ve wanted to do this for years, that I too worked a job that left me always feeling as if something was missing. I could tell you that somehow I always knew I would do this, even at a time when it was financially impossible (and it still was when I finally chose to do it). And all of it would be true. But there is more, always.

A few months ago, with the help of a stimulus check and some borrowed money, I bought a white 1999 ford van. I didn’t realize until after my rushed purchase just how bad the condition of it was. The roof was rusted, rain water was leaking into the van (which I only noticed after I installed the insulation and wood panels). The alignment had to be changed, and the van was turning off whenever it felt like it. And once, after taking it to get the tires replaced, I asked the mechanic to take a quick look at the breaks. He came back to me and asked me who was driving the van. I said I was. He took one step closer and said, “ I wouldn’t even let me ex-wife drive it.” I asked if it was that bad, and he replied, “You could make this van start, but there’s nothing guaranteeing you can make it stop.”

All together, I had to pay $2,500+ in repairs, more than the price of the van itself. It was exhausting, and the repairs it needed seemed endless. I started selling lemonade by the beach to afford all the costs I hadn't anticipated. I even applied to deliver groceries, but they weren’t taking anyone at the time.. Never mind the months it took to remodel it from the inside, the extreme heat we had to work in, the tight space, the short roof. It was a van that seemed to have no end.

It made me miserable, and I wanted to say that honestly. This was no romantic two-week repair, followed by months on the road. I am still stuck in Florida, in a city I am desperate to get out of, and still taking my van to the shop every few days for repairs.

But, in those brief weeks in between, when I could pretend like the van was finished, I would throw a tapestry over the parts that still needed work, park by the ocean, and sit in it for hours. Time became irrelevant, and I was suddenly standing knee-deep in a life I’d never dared believe would be anything more than a dream. Those moments reminded me why I had pursued this so desperately. It had nothing to do with the allure of that awful term “van life” (tempting as it was) but more to do with coming to terms with who I was as a writer, an artist, a traveler. This van was becoming the definition of who I am.

As I was growing older, I began to realize how difficult it would be to balance these opposing parts of myself. I wanted to write and move constantly, I wanted to paint and film but without any practical planning for the outcome of either. I wanted my work to be taken seriously while I remained stubbornly unserious.

And only someone who has had to be an adult far before their time could understand this need to hold onto this child that never had a chance to live. I was a woman when I had no choice. And now, with this freedom that still appears so foreign to me, I want to be, not a child, but not quite an adult either, at least not in its common terms.

The Van & I

I built this van more with the intention of having a mobile studio to work in whenever I felt the urge to travel. I was trying to tie the chords of play and work, travel and stability. There’s a small pull out bed, sink, and counter but what mattered most to me was the space I had to work in. There’s a desk by the door with a foldable extension that I made with Puerto Rican tiles. And on the other side, behind the driver’s seat is an easel, my photographs and camera gear. And it’s not perfect. It looks nothing like those beautiful vans I kept comparing my own to in the beginning. Of course, I wanted to install more windows, raise the roof, make it look something more permanent and habitable, but in the end, when I look at it, I know that this imperfect, moody van is more like me than any stunning conversation would have been. And I know that with time, and, more honestly, with more money, I could add onto it slowly. It will take a long time before it is exactly the way I want it to be, and I can either remain stuck and keep on fretting over money that doesn’t exist to make the additions I want to have, or I can love it for what it is now, and understand that she (like I) will, with time, grow into the ideal version of herself.

…waiting for the day when I’ll finally get a chair for the desk

But it is more than that. Despite years of traveling, this feeling of being stuck kept at it me wherever I went. All that I was keeping physically far from was living inside me, and I didn’t even know it. Every time the sadness crept up, I’d travel someplace else. It was that impulsive, that desperate.

It worked at first, at least as a distraction, but then traveling ceased to do for me what it did so well in the beginning. And, at the same time that traveling was failing me, so was my writing. I suddenly couldn't write anymore. I don’t like to say I am a poet because I believe it takes a lifetime to earn that sacred title, but I’ve written poetry since I was a little girl. I did it before painting, before traveling, before photography and filming. It is as much a part of me as my hand is. It’s the first thing I think of when I try to define for myself just who I am. Call it writer’s bloc, or a dry spell, whatever it was, it wasn’t going away.

A year passed, then another. In the second year, I enrolled in a masters program of poetry in Scotland. I dropped out exactly a month later. But I stayed on in Scotland, trying to write by this little desk I had by the window overlooking the train tracks that led in and out of Edinburgh. I thought the rain would help. I thought the silence and the solitude would bring it all back to my hands.

And on the morning after I dropped out, it suddenly came back, and I was writing frantically again, but the next morning, it was gone. And for the rest of that year, it became a tug, one day of writing, a week of panic in its absence.

But I’ve begun to feel that somehow, my writing, me, my van are all becoming one, and each one has fallen utterly dependent on the other. There is no other way to say this, but when one is malnourished and failing, so are the others.

I was writing about a white van in my poetry long before I bought it. And when I finally did, I realized that I was most myself when I was inside of it. Then, what it was almost finished, one of the first things I used it for was to have a quiet place to write poetry. It didn’t seem strange to me, the way it happened. It just felt like a soundless impulse I was answering. None of it felt planned or even sensible. It just happened.

Trials and Travels

After months of being indoors (months that I miss for their stillness and silence), I, like everyone else, was yearning for the road. I took a short trip up north to Hutchinson Island with a friend of mine hours before Hurricane Isaias hit our area. That week, I tried my first night in the van. I didn’t have anything to put over the wooden bed frame, so I borrowed an air mattress and slept on the floor. An hour in, all the air had leaked out of the mattress. I’d also forgotten a fan, and I was burning inside. So I walked out to the beach sometime near midnight. I sat under the red moon. There were a pair of lovers swimming under the moonlight. It made me remember moments from my life I was trying desperately to push to the margins of my mind, memories that were painful for their beauty, a beauty that had almost suddenly become impossible to replicate.

I drove back home.

Senibel Island

The van still shuts down anyplace it feels like it, and I was tired of dropping it off at the repair shop and waiting days to get it back only to hear they didn’t even have the chance to work on it. So after the shop closed on Friday, I went to pick up my van and drove it all the way to the other side of Florida. It shut down maybe twice, but I finally arrived after 4 hours at Senibel Island.

I got caught in a storm, and when it finally tapered off, I got out of the van and walked along the shore. There was lightening like I’d never seen before. And on the shore were groups of people with headlights tying bait on hooks and anchoring the fishing poles in the sand. They were fishing for sharks (I asked), and I seemed to be the only person there at that time of the night who wasn’t. They were getting ready to catch shark, and I, with a flashlight and a growing pocket, was gathering sea shells off the shore.

That night, I parked by the gulf, and when I woke up in the morning, some of the same people from last night were still there, quieter this time. I went into the water to cool off before the drive back to the east side.

Beginning a Podcast Show

One of things I yearned for most (even more than the traveling itself) were those fleeting, anonymous conversations I would have with passing strangers while I traveled. Some were travelers like me, others were residents of the towns I’d pass through, and I recall those conversations as some of the deepest, most memorable moments of my life. I can’t quite explain what it was, only that perhaps the near impossibility of crossing paths made it possible to reveal parts of myself that I wouldn’t have dared expose to those with a more permanent presence in my life. Strangers, I believe, undress the hidden voice inside us begging to be sounded. Almost without meaning to, that wordless, shapeless thing that has been tugging at our hearts for months, sometimes even years is suddenly given form.

In thinking about this recently, I thought, how incredible it would be to record these conversations, to be able to listen to them again, and to share them with others. I recorded my first conversation with a man who lived on a sailboat I’d watched from the shore for years. I’d never seen anyone on board. I thought whoever it was, he must have attained a level of freedom and self-sufficiency I could only dream of possessing. Of course, I imagined him as someone very odd and far removed from the obsessions that we, people of the land, carry, that somehow the sea, the solitude, the silence had done to him what perhaps only death can do to us. He would be so far removed from the physical world that silence and solitude were no longer things he was conscious of. They were, to him, simply a state of being and no longer rare instances of life.

I even believed he never ate, never left his boat.Of course, all of it was wrong. And I realized just before finally speaking with him that this also marked an end to all the imagined stories I had made of him. I was finally going to meet the real person, and, as always with strangers that I’m drawn to, I was scared he’d turn out to be ordinary. The same thing happens in love too. We make up images and dreams of something that’s often completely unlike that person. And maybe sometime the fantasy is better, but the reality, the real and not the imagined version of a person is what creates a lasting bond.

And only while I was recording our conversation did I realize that my grand idea wasn’t so grand anymore. I had to admit that it sounded nothing close to what these precious conversations, without a recorder, sounded like. But perhaps it is simply a matter of time, that the more I get used to being listened to, the more comfortable I will be with speaking.

Being Broke and Getting Ready for the Longer Road

As I prepare to travel with my van, Dakota, I am trying to trick myself into believing that I can, with one day on the road, undo 24 years of warnings seeded in my mind, that I can undo centuries of traditions and prove that an Arab woman can be a lady of the road without there being anything reckless about that. In being the first among those I know to break through this unspoken but nonetheless deeply oppressive tie of obedience masked in the name of love, I can perhaps make it easier on the ones who come second, third, and fourth so that finally, somewhere down the line, this departure, this yearning for the road ceases to feel something like a sin, something like a crusade fought in the name of freedom that wasn’t ours to fight for.

I realize that much of my fear comes from a lack of precedent, a lack of women from my community that I can point to and say, see? She did it, and so will I. Freedom and love shouldn’t be a choice Arab women have to choose between, to be loved and obliging, or free and hated for it. But if the choice remains, I would choose the latter, without hesitation.

Ask me to choose a year ago and I wouldn’t have been able to answer with much certainty.

I realized, too, that all this time, I’d been using references from my past to sketch in my mind some sort of a desirable future, something that was not an extension of the hell I was living through. That was my error, that I borrowed from the pool of my past images what I believed my future (which I was deeply uncertain I wanted) would look like. But no, I had to discard it, all of it, if I was to build something entirely new that was worth another morning.