0 ... Gabriel MorrisThe final and decisive reason I saw that it was time to leave was
that the lease for our house was going to run out at the end of Sep-
tember, and my housemates had decided to look for another place
together. Due to the $10 I owed for the traffic ticket, plus the fact
that I hadn’t put down a rental deposit when I’d initially moved into
the house, I wasn’t sure if I could afford to go in on another place
with my housemates. And I didn’t feel much like trying to find a
cheaper room in another household with another group of new peo-
ple to get to know.
What I most wanted at that point was just to sell everything I
owned, including the pickup, pay off all my bills, hit the road, and
hike far out into the desert somewhere, alone, with no distractions,
no expectations, nothing to do but simply be for a while—and hope-
fully figure out, to some extent, what was really going on with all
these events swirling around me. I decided to work through the end
of September, to save up some money to keep me going for a while,
then sell my truck and hit the road. Although it had been a while
since I’d done any hitchhiking, I looked forward to it. I’d been driving
around town for my two delivery jobs for the past year and welcomed
the thought of just being a passenger going along for the ride.
After a four-day backpacking trip in the Oregon Cascades with my
brother, at the end of that summer, he left Eugene himself to head
back down to Santa Cruz for another year of school. He took along
with him a few of my few boxes of unnecessary belongings to store
in my mom’s garage—while I was gone to wherever it was that I was
going next. The appropriateness of leaving began to feel more and
more certain, despite the profound unknown that lay ahead of me.
After the four of us moved out of our house at the end of September,
I stayed for two weeks on the floor of my old housemates’ new house,
working and wrapping up final business as well as formulating a plan
for where I would go once I left Eugene. My plan involved a number of
mini-adventures within the larger adventure of making my way pro-
gressively east to visit “Amy back in Austin” (there’s a country song
with that very title). I had no clue as to what might happen from there.