“DON’T BE ALARMED, JOHN,” SHERAB SAID. “THIS IS JUST THE START-UP.”
With that, she cranked the key on board her bus and it gasped to life, its old diesel engine grinding a dozen times before finally catching and settling into a deep-throated idle, like a dragon with a smoker’s cough.
The idea of living on a bus has always fascinated me. When I was ten, a friend and I used to play in an old camper van that was parked in the back of a local gas station. In that dusty little enclosed space, we imagined ourselves to be explorers, living on our own, everything within reach. I’m not sure exactly why, but having our beds, our kitchen, our bathroom, and our action figures all in one place—and on wheels!—excited us so much, we naïvely asked the gas station owner if we could have the van. Not just play in it, actually own it. The fact that he basically laughed in our hopeful little faces did nothing to lessen the pull that van has held on me ever since.
Naturally, I liked Sherab’s bus the moment I saw it. Whether you would consider it a work of art I cannot say, but it was definitely a work of imagination. From the outside, it looked much too tall; it was essentially two buses welded together. Painted the color of old parchment, it had a hand-carved Balinese door in the back and the promise of lush pink velvet visible through the windows. On the inside, there was a large common area with burgundy cushions on crates for sitting, a woodstove for warmth, and a small kitchen for meals. In the back, there was a typical RV bathroom, as well as an all-purpose space with supplies for art, medical emergencies, homework, flat tires … and a loft above with two beds for the kids. There was also a double bed at the front of the bus known as the Princess Loft, which belonged to Sherab. Tutira, Sherab’s youngest son, called the whole affair the Brown Potato, but Sherab called it the Gypsy Dancer, and it was our home for three days in April.
As we climbed aboard the bus, our plan was to drive three hours north to Whangarei (pronounced FUNG-ga-ray) and meet up with a traveling gypsy fair, a routine Sherab knew all too well.
Shortly after her second son was born, Sherab’s long-term partner and the father of her children just up and left. How the birth of a new baby translates into a good time to break up the family is beyond me, but the fact remained: He was gone. After she processed the initial shock and landed on her feet, Sherab made a bold choice. Wanting above all else to spend time with her kids, she bought a bus, spent two years building it out, learned as much about bus maintenance as possible, then hit the road. For the next seven years, she and her kids traveled with a modern-day band of gypsies; no permanent address, no mortgage, no schools, no roots … just her boys, the bus, the open road, and a weekly fair to make some money. Though she’s been off the road for many years, Sherab still sleeps in the Gypsy Dancer every night, gave birth to Tutira in the bus bathroom, and seemed totally in command behind the large steering wheel—fingerless driving gloves on—as we lumbered out of the parking lot.
Down the first steep hill, everything groaned and creaked. Cabinets rolled forward. Wind chimes and baskets swirled overhead. The woodstove door slammed open. A jar of kitchen utensils smashed over. The whole contraption seemed ready to tip … but it didn’t, and I was loving it. We all were.
Before I get too wrapped up in the magic of being on board, I will say two practical things. First: The Gypsy Dancer was slow. At times, as we struggled in first gear to climb the steep New Zealand grades, we had a line of traffic backed up behind us that looked like a funeral procession for the prime minister. Five miles per hour is being generous, and that is no joke. Second: The Gypsy Dancer was loud. Everything vibrated, rattled, the diesel dragon hacked up a lung. We were conspicuous, to say the least. As we drove through towns or stopped at intersections, every face looking back at us had a smile on it. Every kid waved and wanted to be on board. We were a parade of one. A giant brown potato on wheels!
In her glory days as a gypsy, Sherab said it was quite a show. Everyone involved tricked out their buses and lived on them full-time. There were artists and craftspeople, jugglers, fire-eaters, dancers, stilt walkers, and tons of kids. Forty families in all, each choosing a life on the road over a house in the suburbs—just a loud, slow, raucous tribe wandering the whole of New Zealand. At the time, they were famous. The press wrote articles about them. TV crews followed them around. It was a wild ride, I’m sure. But no dance lasts forever.
The gypsy fair we took part in seemed like more of a weekend activity for most participants, a retirement hobby by the looks of the other wrinkled “gypsies” who turned up. Most buses were simply camper vans with awnings out front. No psychedelic paint jobs. No fire-eaters, unfortunately. The flash of the production was long gone, replaced by a few flags flapping in the wind and a single Maori lounge singer cheesing his way through the entire late-seventies sing-along book to attract shoppers.
“I like dreaming. ’Cause dreaming can make you mine.”
He sang this song a dozen times over the two-day event.
Lame karaoke and unadorned RVs aside, the trip felt like a grand adventure. We pounded stakes like circus roustabouts, slept on makeshift beds like stowaways on a steamer, and stayed up late talking in the dark like kids at camp.
At the end of the first day, Traca fell asleep early, Tutira and our kids were out cold, and the Gypsy Dancer was dark and quiet. In the Princess Loft, Sherab looked down at me, her eyes sparkling in the moonlight. Fire sticks and stilts were strapped to the roof over her head. Fairy bells tinkled with every movement on board. In this way, we talked for an hour or more, trading stories.…
Sherab left home when she was just thirteen. Three years later, she met a man and they got married, staying together for nine years. Her life was different then. She and her husband were reps for a New Zealand company similar to Amway, selling products in a network marketing operation, building their down lines, racking up their residual incomes. Far from the dynamic, independent woman she would become, Sherab swallowed the hook of this life and followed her husband’s lead. She had two children with him. She was fully on board. Right up until the day Deadbeat Dad left her and the kids and the house without even offering a reason.
On her own with a two-year-old and a newborn, Sherab needed to reclaim the power she’d given away. She felt weak and lost, unsure of herself, overwhelmed. She ended up in Indonesia, in Bali, floundering in a sea of doubt. How was she going to provide for her children? She had no money. She had no direction.
But hope can be found in the most unlikely places.
On a dirty, bustling street, Sherab ran across a destitute Balinese woman. This woman was beyond poor, filthy, begging for coins. In her arms she held a thin, sickly baby, clearly malnourished, probably dying. And for a few connected heartbeats, the woman and Sherab looked into each other’s eyes. Though she had no money of her own, no financial help to offer this woman, Sherab suddenly recognized a wealth within herself that cried out to be shared.
Without pity or shame, without any self-consciousness, Sherab sat with this woman on the street, took this stranger’s baby boy into her arms, and fed him from her own breast. “It was an act of connection that changed my life,” she said. “I didn’t feel powerless anymore. I felt strong and somehow I knew I was going to be all right.”
Beside me, Traca rolled over, filling the Gypsy Dancer with the nervous laughter of the fairy bells. She was fast asleep, but I wondered if she was responding on some level to the “reclaim your power” message in Sherab’s story. It had been Traca’s mantra for years, what all the yoga and meditation and shamanism were really all about: living authentically, finding her voice.
“You two look beautiful,” Sherab said softly, smiling down like the Cheshire cat. “Inspiring to me, actually.” Then her smile faded. Her face looked almost worried.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Sherab whispered. “It’s just a feeling.”
“About what?” I whispered back.
Sherab thought about her answer for a while, as if weighing her words, even though the idea in her mind was a very simple one. When she was ready, she said it. “Is she happy?” she wondered, her words barely audible.
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
Sherab forced a smile. “It’s probably nothing,” she said. “I don’t know. Sometimes, she just … looks like a little bird with a shadow over her heart.”
Sherab’s words hung in the air long after she’d said goodnight and disappeared into the Princess Loft like a cat in a cave. When the Gypsy Dancer was perfectly still, I watched Traca sleep and thought about it: Was she happy? Were we? I knew without a doubt that we loved each other. I could feel it, but … something was different. This trip was different. We were not being swept away by any short-term passion this time. We were moving slowly as if working something out, changing in ways we probably wouldn’t fully realize until later. Then who would we be? I honestly didn’t know. When Traca rolled away from me and the fairies laughed in every corner of the bus, I closed my eyes and let it all rest for the night.
In the end, the trip was more or less a bust from a financial point of view. The Gypsy Dancer gulped fuel the way a whale eats krill, and after chugging up and back over the steep North Island terrain, Sherab’s meager fair sale profits barely covered the gas bill. Even so, it was fun. We hit a skateboard park for Tutira, climbed to the top of Whangarei Lookout, and stopped at a hot spring on our way home for some therapeutic water from the center of the earth.
But the highlight for me was a simple thing, a non-moment that inched by, loud, slow, and unnoticed by anyone else. We were passing through the spectacular New Zealand countryside, the huge windows of the Gypsy Dancer filled with rolling green hills and distant blue mountains and the sea and the sky and a million sheep. I was sitting beside Jackson, sharing her iPod headset, listening to a song we both knew, singing loud, shouting above the roar of the diesel engine like bad karaoke singers:
I’m walking on sunshine. Whoa-oh.
And don’t it feel good!
In that moment, on that bus, looking at my daughter’s singing, smiling face, I realized something … I was happy. In a way that I hadn’t been in a long time. I felt light and free. Honestly, I felt like the ten-year-old boy I once was, only this time, the owner of the RV I used to play in said, “Yeah, sure, kid. Take the van. It’s yours.”