Travels with Starlink

I hit the road, unsure if I'm off to look for America or hide from it.

Auto-camping while writing/reporting online is a splendid off-the-grid option now.

I recently read Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley in Search of America”. I would have been celebrating my first un-birthday when Steinbeck and his poodle Charley launched their camper truck “Rocinante” northward from Long Island just after Labor Day in 1960 on up the Maine coast and further onward to orbit the lower forty-eight over the course of a few months. It had been barely three years since the Soviet Union launched their first Sputnik and the first human to orbit the Earth, Yuri Gagarin, would not go aloft for another seven months. One month into his trip, news would come, by newspaper and radio, to Steinbeck that Kruschev had famously banged his shoe on his table at the U.N.

It is all too easy for us to forget how uncertain those times were and imagine that only our times are filled with chaos unrenderable by Norman Rockwell, the painter whose images of Americana became the mythology of American wholesomeness and empathy for a generation or two.

Big changes were in progress in Steinbeck’s reportage. More Americans were choosing to own mobile homes to gain a kind of nomadic security by being able to follow careers and business wherever opportunity might migrate to in its fickle meandering around the country (would that the the dust-bowl refugees in Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” could have pulled up stakes and moved to California so easily). Eisenhower’s re-invention of America with the interstate superhighway system was going full speed making it a choice, rather than a necessity, to travel the back-roads and stop at various roadside attractions to experience local customs, dialects, accents, hardships, styles, racism, etcetera, etcetera. Steinbeck chose the backroads fairly consistently.

Big changes are in progress in our times too, but they are not yet enshrined in LIFE magazine retrospectives or history books or History channel episodes. They will be, we hope, although a great deal disappears down the memory hole of news-cycled, recycled, planned obsolescent culture.

We are living in critical times. We are important. What happens now matters. A lot. To hell with anyone who says otherwise.

I bought a Starlink base station during an ice storm in Febrary. The community where I lived was cut off from electricity (and therefore water, sewer and heat), cable internet, telephone and cell phone for nearly ten days. Having internet allowed us to monitor progress on repairs, check in with friends and relatives and check on road conditions before venturing out on the rural roads. The community included about thirty people on a medium-sized acreage with an assortment of cabins, classrooms, apartments and a central lodge. Many people weathered the outage with friends in town. Others of us kept the lodge woodstove going with bucket-hauled water pots boiling for tea on top.

I had already envisioned taking a trip with a Starlink unit this Summer and figured the storm just made me move up my purchase date a few months. Unfortunately, in June, I had a bicycle accident that kind of sidetracked me for a few months, so the cross-country trip hasn’t begun yet but I’ve assemble my equipment and made preparations.

Because… what the fuck is going on with America? The best presidential candidates our glorious two-party system could come up with were two relics, one of who avoided unscripted events like the plague to hide his cognitive decline and had to be replaced. We’re embroiled in a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and closer to an all out nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. And I’m not so sure we aren’t closer than that right now.

So, I want to go see the country before we get nuked or slips into fascism, be it a blueberry or cherry flavored fascism.

I don’t have a home on Long Island or a wife to leave behind for a few months, nor do I have a camper. I probably couldn’t afford to gas up a Rocinante-size pick-up truck camper for a 10,000 mile orbit of the U.S. anyway. I don’t have a dog either. That simplifies things quite a bit.

What I do have is a Prius hybrid that gets close to fifty miles per gallon, an iPhone and… did I mention the Starlink… and… well, some basic camping gear and a $100 refurbished Linux Mint laptop. And a small pension. Life is good!

Today I’m on the second day of a short camping trip to try things out and see if I’m really ready or not. I have a folding table and chair that both fit into my tent next to my inflatable mattress. I bought an extension cord and power strip today because, duh, the inverter in my Prius is about thirty feet from my tent site.

If I’m sure to bring tent stakes to hold the rainfly away from the netting of my tent, I can get enough cross-breeze that it doesn’t overheat in the sun and I can work in the shade without having to buy a pop-up in addition to my tent.

My camping buddy is off rock climbing for the day while I’m putting my new remote writing rig through its paces. Cornell Labs’ “Merlin” app says the birds chirping at my camp site include black-capped and Mountain Chickadees, a House Finch and a White-crowned Sparrow. My weather app says it is about 70 degrees. Though it is mostly cloudy in the valley I call home, here, on the other side of the Cascades, it is sunny.

I think I can get by indefinitely with an ice-chilled cooler and a simple propane burner. Maybe I’ll add a blender and a rechargeable power supply to handle the surge a blender motor needs without burning out the 15 amp fuse that supplies the 12V plug-in where my 600 watt inverter draws its juice from. Yes, it takes juice to run a juicer. I learned that during February’s ice storm.

Most of the time all I need to power is my laptop and the Starlink. The Prius is a great portable generator and only needs to run its engine about two minutes every half hour to power these two essentials. Eight hours of writing, therefore, only requires about a half hour of engine running time, so the gas is conserved fairly well.

I’d like to see a Space-X Starship launch and a few other touristy things like 9/11 ground zero in NYC, Mt. Palomar observatory, Washington D.C. and the usual cross-country respites from driving, but I also have a notion I’d like to meet some of my social media friends in person and see what they have to say about WTF is up with America from their perspectives in their locations.

Will social media be enough to compensate for not having a dog to break the ice with strangers? If not, maybe I’ll put some google-eyes on my Starlink dish, call it Charlemagne and see if people walk up and say, “My what a cute satellite dish you have! Can I maybe get the password for your WiFi?”

But again, Plan A is social media. If you’ve read this far, maybe there’s a coffee stop in our future.