This Can’t Be How It Ends

While sitting in my Florida Room in front of the fireplace three days after Christmas and two days before my 68th birthday, sipping on a glass of champagne, I thought, this can’t be how it ends. There still has to be more. Several weeks earlier, I had been diagnosed with a medical condition that caused me to have to abstain from alcohol mostly. One of my favorite activities over the last few years was sitting in the Florida Room drinking champagne on Saturday nights on cool winter evenings. Now, I cannot do that anymore.

Pinellas County has become so crowded and noisy during the week. The area calms down during the weekend. Saturday night was one of the few times I could sit in the Florida room and enjoy the fireplace and champagne without hearing loud trucks, garbage trucks, motorcycles, and almost constant ambulance sirens. I’d already given up on sitting in the Florida Room during the week. Now, if I had to give up my champagne on Saturday night, I felt I had no reason to stay here anymore.

As I approach 70, I feel I am becoming invisible and thrown away by society. When you turn 60, the corporate world throws you away. When you are seventy, society throws you away. When you are 80, your family throws you away. If you are fortunate enough to make it to 90, all you will have left is God, so it is important to cultivate that relationship—just saying.

When I moved to Pinellas County in 1979, I thought I had found paradise. I moved out of the frozen north in northwest Pennsylvania to sunshine, beaches, and palm trees. A year later, I moved into the home where I had lived for 45 years. Pinellas County was a good place to live until it wasn’t. Now, like many formerly lovely places, it’s way overcrowded. Driving is difficult and dangerous. Pinellas County reminds me of an angry beehive. And the bees are hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks, all trying to sting you. Helene and Milton’s back-to-back hurricanes whacked the beaches and the coastline will take years to recover. I know it is time to leave now, but I can’t figure out where to go.

I have decided to move into my RV indefinitely until I figure out what to do. First, I am heading to Virginia for my friend Erica and Chris’s wedding. I will stay there for a while while I look for a home there. If I find a place, that may be as far as I get. If not, I may head out to Colorado or California. In 2017, I set out on my first long cross-country trip, looking for a place to move to. After four months, I got homesick and came back to Florida. If I drive to California this summer, I will again keep my eyes open for a nice place to live. I am fortunate to have a home I can take anywhere in America with me. I am not going into this all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I have spent 850 nights in a RV over the last nine years and understand how much work is involved.

Loneliness is a concern for me on this trip. When I did all those long bicycle tours from 1996 to 2014, the excitement and challenge of the tours were enough to keep me going through the loneliness. Then, the adventure wasn’t enough to motivate me to keep taking tours. The same thing has happened with the RV. At first, the challenge and excitement of the open road was enough. Like the bicycle tours, the adventure is not enough to overcome my loneliness.

This past winter, I learned several good pieces of life advice: Choose love, not hate. Nobody cares, try harder. Go outside, keep moving. I still need to do something extraordinary with my life. This is not how it ends.

Save My Soul – Jonah Kagan