Certified organic H2O

On the right is a jug of water fresh from the store shelf. On the left is a jug I refilled a few weeks ago from Lou's charcoal-filtered tap at Coyote Howls East RV park. It has spent time in the sun and we can see something other than pairs of hydrogen atoms bonded with oxygen atoms. Some kind of greenish stuff. Algae, maybe. Or Martian urine. (Hey, weird things happen in the desert, so you never know.) Whatever it is hasn't hurt me. Yet.

Maybe I should decant it into designer bottles and sell it as extra special, all-healing, organic super water. I could sprinkle a little sand in it for authenticity. Extra minerals, dudes. Exceeds your daily requirement for quartz, basalt and feldspar. You'll live to a hundred and twenty.

Test fire

A little dusty and dented, but still working

It's that time of year when van dweller forum discussions turn to heaters, the pros and cons of various types, dangers real and imagined, and so on.

After my disappointing test of a second-hand Coleman Sport Cat heater, and after all the handwringing on the forums, I figured I'd drag my Mr. Heater Portable Buddy from under the bed and see if it still functioned—before I really needed it.

It fired right up, first try, and the Rolling Steel Tent was toasty in less than a minute. I love it when things go right.

West is best

To all the people who keep hyping winters in Florida, "Nope. Not in the near future, anyway."

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh

I changed the bedding this morning. Doing that requires me to access one end of the bed through the back door, which lets in plenty of cool, fresh desert air. It’s a nice way to jump start the day. Whoo, brisk. It also makes the bedding seem cleaner, crisper. I like it so much I think I’ll take a nap.

Unsealed beam

Well dang. A rock chip in one of my headlights. It's not much of a problem, though. It can keep on working for a long time as long as water doesn't get in and damage the filament. The chances of that happening are very low in the desert.

I rarely drive at night anymore anyway. Not out of any discomfort about driving in the dark. I just haven't need to.

All the same, I'll pick up a new light the next time I make a supply run. It's just another van dweller maintenance item. But I'd rather deal with things like this than maintain a house.

Heat-ish

My friend Forrest was cleaning out his shop this summer and asked if I wanted this Coleman Sport Cat catalytic propane heater. It was missing the base, but…

Sure, I thought. My Mr. Heater Portable Buddy is kind of overkill for me because I’m seldom in really cold places. A small heater might do the trick. All I had to do was get a bottle of propane and wait for chilly weather so I could test it. The opportunity came last night.

The knob on the Sport Cat has curious markings. Light bulbs? Turn the knob clockwise and it moves out. Turn it counterclockwise and it moves in, which is backwards of screws and seems to have no relation to the markings. So I winged it, held the lighter to the mesh, and whoosh. Okay, it was lit.

I waited.

The specs say the output of the Sport Cat is 1,500 BTUs. For comparison, the low setting on the Portable Buddy is 4,000 BTUs. So I knew the Sport Cat wouldn’t be a blast furnace.

I held my hand over the heater. Mmmm, it seemed to be putting out heat. I moved my had closer. Yup, heat.

I waited some more.

How long would it take to warm more than the column of air directly above it when the van was (let me check) 56°F?

I waited some more.

I did some reading.

After about a half hour there was no noticeable change in the van’s interior temperature. This might explain why Forrest was willing to part with it. Hey, it was free.

I originally thought I’d pass the Sport Cat along if I met another van dweller who needed heat, but now I think it would be kind of cruel giving someone false hope.

Of course, a sample of only one unit isn't scientific. This heater might have been bad while all the others work great. Still, this one is going to the big landfill in the sky with all the other discontinued Coleman propane products.

21st century ruins

Stone structures like this dot the desert Southwest. The people who constructed them date to the early 21st century or possibly the middle-to-late 20th century and probably had cultural—if not biological—connections to the builders of nearly identical stone rings in other parts of North America. We know from artifacts scattered at these sites that the stonework was associated with the consumption of manufactured food and alcoholic beverages. Ashes inside the masonry rings might be from cooking fires, though it is believed actual cooking had fallen out of fashion by the time of these ruins. Others believe the fires were used primarily for ceremonial and social purposes instead. A third hypothesis suggests the ashes are from roofs that once covered the structures. Some sites are littered with spent ammunition which may be from battles over territorial rights. Such battles might explain the burned roofs.

Another day, another desert

Well, it's actually the same place I was last week and several other times the past four years.

Someone messed with the stone spiral. I think they "borrowed" stones from it to make fire rings. I know the spiral isn't official art, just something someone took the time to make and others appreciated enough to leave alone. I guess I'll be doing some restoration tomorrow.

Proper spacing

My closest neighbor here at the Hi Jolly dispersed camping area is about twenty-five yards to the west. And there’s a guy tent camping about thirty yards to the east. Nice and roomy. No encroachment. Enough vegetation between us to maintain a little privacy. Excellent boondocking etiquette.


Then a couple in a 40-foot RV, towing a car, cruised through looking for a spot. They stopped with their “towd” right in front of my neighbor’s tent.

Granted, it’s a small tent, and green like the bushes, so it wasn’t as easy to see as the yellow four-person tent on the other side of the camping area. But it wasn’t invisible—if one was paying attention.

The tent guy was away, so I walked over to explain the situation to the RV driver before he could deploy his levelers and slide outs.

“This area is already taken. There’s a tent back there.”

“Huh?”

“Next to that bush. Your car is right in front of it.”

“It’s okay, I’ll move the car.”

“He still needs to get his car in there. Besides, you’re really crowding him. Why not move about half way down to the next rig so everyone has some privacy?”

Mr. RV was far from happy, but he moved—running over a waist-high creosote bush in the process.

The other people here with large rigs are observing etiquette. Lots of space, except when they’re clustered with friends in micro-villages. So this guy’s behavior isn’t universal with big RV owners.

See, proper spacing

Maybe no one has ever explained things to him. Maybe his concept of “space” has been grossly distorted by campgrounds and RV parks so cramped your slide outs nearly touch your neighbors’ and you can hear each other pee. Or maybe he’s just too self-absorbed to see beyond his own desires. I can give slack to cluelessness, but narcissism gets my hackles up.

Who knows. Maybe he’s blogging about the self-important jerk who chased him from a perfectly good camping spot.

Local flora

Minimalism is a luxury

I was a middle-class guy with a college education and a decent income. I had a house, a car, a truck, two motorcycles, foreign vacations, original art on the walls and a newly renovated kitchen. I ate well. I slept well. I was sufficiently healthy. I had good credit. I paid all my bills. I had security, safety and very few significant worries.

And I gave it up.

Because it was one of the perks of being a middle-class guy. I had options. I could choose.

Meanwhile, there are millions of people who have none of that. They aren’t poor by choice. They aren’t minimalists. They aren’t rebelling against a consumerist culture. They want to be part of it. They dream of having disposable income. They think I’m insane.

So I’m going to stop talking about minimalism as if it’s a superior way to live. In fact, I think I’ll stop talking about it all together. It’s insulting to those struggling to survive.

Super-ish moon

Yay for telephoto lenses

Speaking of material things to worry about

I have a Dometic CF-25 refrigerator/freezer. I know, if I were more of a minimalist I would make do without it, eating and drinking things that didn’t require refrigeration. But cold beverages and not needing to replace ice are things that really matter to me.

The fridge is my biggest consumer of electricity. Since there’s less sunlight in winter to charge my house batteries, and therefore less power to run anything other than the fridge, I tried an experiment.

Other van dwellers with setups similar to mine turn the fridge off at night. True, it’s cooler at night so a well insulated fridge should be able to hold temperature fairly well. But well enough? Let’s find out.

The temperature raised degree overnight. No problem.

When I turned the fridge back on at about 10:00AM the error light started blinking. Uh-oh. What did that mean? I turned the fridge off and on again. Still the blinking light. I disconnected and reconnected the power. Still blinking.

The manual is in a box under the bed but I didn’t feel like digging it out, so I found the manual online. It told me:

Um, okay, but what is it symptomatic of? Do I need to do something or will it get ready on its own? Is it the manufacturer’s translated-from-Swedish way of saying, “You Americans are always in a hurry. Relax, have some gravlax. These things will sort themselves out.” Or does it mean it’s time to give the fridge a Viking funeral?

I searched online for deals on replacements, just in case. Yikes, prices have gone up.

I checked the fridge again, in case it had decided it was ready. The light was still blinking.

I distracted myself with some puttering around and straightening up.

Then the error light was off and all was once again right with my world. My Dometic CF-25 just isn’t a morning person. I can live with that.

The other minimalism

I’m not a hardcore minimalist. I’ve simply come to the realization I need less stuff than I thought I did in order to be happy and contented. And I’ve learned less stuff equals fewer things to care for, to make room for, to carry from place to place. And that makes me a little more free.

But my flavor of minimalism goes beyond material goods. It’s also about mental and emotional decluttering. It’s about deciding what really matters to me.

The world is filled with people eager to tell us what matters. Yes, some of it is very important. Some of it is worth fighting and dying for. But way too much of it is trivial.

If we aren’t mindful we can get mired in things that don’t really matter to us. When we do, we give power to those trivialities. We spend more of our limited lives anxious, upset, offended, hateful… over what, really?

I’m not proposing you stop caring about things that really do matter to you. I’m suggesting you do an inventory and ranking. Are there things in the It Matters pile that don’t really serve a purpose in your life? Anything that’s counterproductive? Anything you realize you get way too worked up about?

Sure, it gets complicated when the things that matter to us conflict with the things that matter to people who matter to us. (Follow that?) Does it matter that you disagree? Does it matter that you pretend, for the sake of the relationship, that something that matters to you doesn’t matter, or that something that doesn’t matter does matter? Does the relationship matter more? (This is why I’m not good at relationships.)

Do I care whether you become more selective about what matters to you? Mmmmm, not enough that it matters.

Pet sharing

Buster takes the driver's seat