Bauerschmidt Norma - Driving Miss Norma: one familys journey saying yes to living

F or nomads like us, home is a relative term, and ours is far off the grid on a slip of beach that separates jagged volcanic rock from the azure waters of the Sea of Cortez in Baja California, Mexico. Each winter, on this special slice of planet Earth, we unhitch our nineteen-foot Airstream trailer and temporarily come to rest.

One beautiful late February morning we hit the water early. Ringo, our seventy-three-pound Standard Poodle, sat perched at the front of my wife Ramies paddleboard as dolphins teased him to jump off. The mist from their blowholes was backlit by the dawning sun, filling the air with a rhythm that took my breath away. I could taste the salt water on my lips from their exhalations. Ospreys and blue-footed boobies dove for their breakfasts while a whale shark filtered plankton as it passed below our boards. The sun finally revealed itself over the mountains, turning the Bay of Conception a bright, glassy gold.

Later, as we bobbed in the water with some fellow beach dwellers also taking a break from paddling, our muscles and spirits loosened and the conversation turned philosophical. The topic of aging came up, particularly the aging of our parents. We all hypothesized what we would do and how we would handle it, making plans, imagining some future way, way off.

What would Ramie and I do if her mother, Jan, in western Pennsylvania, or my parents, Leo and Norma, in northern Michigan, could no longer care for themselves? When was it time to intercede on our parents behalf, and how? What kind of care facility was appropriate? What were their medical directives? Their hopes, their fears? Ramies mother, so social and an avid bridge player, would probably thrive in an assisted-living situation. But my parentswho practically lived outdoors in their garden and whose lives were so predictable and so entrenchedwould suffer in such a place.

In general, open roads and aging parents do not mix, which is why I had always assumed my younger sister, Stacy, would be the one who cared for them in the end. But Stacy, my only sibling, had died of cancer eight years before. Well, Ramie said, we dont need to figure it all out, not today. We have time. Everyone is still healthy. For now, lets just enjoy the moment. I put my fears and questions aside in favor of enjoying the moment, trusting that I had that time. Hoping that I had that time.

We had not always lived on the road, although I think in one way or another this simpler, unattached lifestyle had always called out to us. When Ramie and I first met we figured out that we collectively had lived in fourteen different states. It was just synchronicity, we said, that we had wandered into the same place at the same time on the day we met.

I was a self-taught builder driving an old Ford pickup truck around the country and remodeling homes; Ramie was a nonprofit consultant and had previously worked on cruise ships and at resorts in order to support her wanderlust. We had both lost close family members at an early age. Having experienced our share of grief, we were conscious of wanting to live in search of meaning rather than a paycheck. We yearned for a life lived off the beaten path, free from material things, financial burden, and even family demands.

Our lives changed forever the day Ramies sister, Sandy, called from Maryland to offer us an old Airstream travel trailer. We were nearly two thousand miles away in Colorado and did not own a tow vehicle, but we were definitely interested. With a borrowed Chevy pickup, we drove east to see our prize. I was forty-five years old, and both Ramie and I were getting tired of tent camping and sleeping on the ground. The prospect of laying down our heads in the comfort of something with wheels was a dream come true.

The trailer was old, but it had new upholstery, a small kitchen, and a functioning toilet. I ran my hand along its weather-beaten aluminum exterior, hot from sitting out in the July sun; its iconic curves stirred a sense of anticipation in me. This is going to be great, I told Ramie. We used the drive back to Colorado as a shakedown cruise. Our biggest decision of each day was where to park and spend the night. We felt ourselves stretching and expanding into new freedoms.

Upon our return, Ramie traded in her beloved convertible for a shiny red pickup truck with a tow package, and we were on our way to discovering a new lifestyle. We used the trailer every chance we got.

It took only one bad winter as nomads to convince us to head for warmer climes during those dark months of short days and extended nights. We had been fixing up an old fishermans cabin in northern Michigan near my parents house that was only intended for summer use. No matter how much hardwood we stuffed into the rusty, timeworn stove, the cabin lost the heat in a matter of hoursthere was no insulation in the walls or ceiling. At night, the two of us and our dog at the time, a German shepherd named Jack, shivered together in our communal bed. I found myself dreaming of the beautiful, sunny beach where I had tent camped a few times since the mid-1990s. It was then that we settled on Mexicos Baja California Peninsula as our winter destination.

During our first season in the Baja together, we educated ourselves about the off-the-grid recreational vehicle (RV) lifestyle. We relied on a small solar panel to keep our battery lively while also conserving power use. Amps and watts and other electrical terms suddenly had relevance in our lives, a lesson we learned the hard way when our lights flickered one night and we realized we were almost out of juice.

Water conservation, too, became more important than ever since fresh water had to be hauled in from a small fishing village half an hour to the north. There was no dump station for our wastewater, so we depended on the hand-dug latrines that dotted the beach. We took showers out of a solar bag in a makeshift outdoor stall we created with a Hula-Hoop and a shower curtain balanced over an open truck door.

Despite its lack of amenities, the Baja was a magnet for a multitude of personalities from around the worldfolks like Jelle and Deb, sailors and folksingers from Canada. For them, home in the summer is a sailboat anchored in Maple Bay off Vancouver Island. Winters are spent on Baja California beaches in a thirteen-foot vintage travel trailer with no bathroom. Chris and Bessy, retired computer programmers who once lived in South Africa, now split time between upstate New York, San Francisco, and the Baja. There was Santa Wayne, British Columbias best-loved Santa Claus impersonator. He did not arrive at the beach until after Christmas, for obvious reasons. And who could forget Pedro and Janet, the colorful international ringmaster for equestrian show-jumping events and his Dutch-born horse-trainer wife? Pedro did not leave his flamboyant style behind just because he was at the beach. These regulars, the ones who came back year after year, were mainly North Americans, but many other foreign travelers passed through on their way to mainland Mexico via the ferry in La Paz, located farther south.

Our days always started with an early kayak paddle around the nearest island, located one mile offshore. We would float and wait for the sun to rise over the mountainous peninsula that formed the bay, rejoicing in the stillness of the morning before returning to shore. We would grab a quick breakfast of locally grown strawberries over yogurt before joining a group for our three-mile walk up the hill and then down a windy desert trail back to the bay. After getting the local beach gossip on the way to our trailer, we would decide what else to do that daypaddleboarding, swimming, a longer hike, or perhaps visiting friends new and old.