The Chevy Year

On losing everything and finding something lighter

The Hammock

My toes. The weave of the rope. A leaf turning slowly in the wind above me.

I had been lying there long enough that the rope had pressed its pattern into my back. A plane crossed the sky — unhurried, silent from that distance. I watched it until it disappeared. Then I watched the place where it had been.

Outside, sounds continued. A bird somewhere. Wind in the grass. The occasional car on the road beyond the trees. What stopped was the noise I had been generating myself for as long as I could remember: the planning, the calculating, the low-grade hum of wanting things to be different from how they were.

For a few minutes — or maybe longer, I had stopped tracking time — I was simply there. In the hammock. With my toes.

I didn't know what to call it. I still don't. What I know is that I had never felt it before, and that when it left, I spent a long time trying to find my way back to it.

You don't always choose the quiet. Sometimes the quiet chooses you.

What I Had Left

I had no job. No income. A mortgage on a house where my ex-wife now lived with our daughter and her new husband.

I still paid for the roof over a life that was no longer mine.

I had sold my Porsche, which needed repairs, and changed it for an old Chevy.

Every month, when the mortgage payment was due, I felt a brief contraction — not quite fear, more like a reminder that the world had not stopped spinning while I was lying in hammocks.

I sold things. Books I had read. Clothes that had accumulated during the years when I was buying clothes for other reasons. The sofa bar equipment. The sofas. I ate apples, buckwheat without seasoning, meat without marinade, and black bread with dark honey on the rare occasions I felt like sweetness. I slept on a thin mattress on the floor, close enough to the boards beneath that I could feel the house breathing.

I bought a backpack. Not a statement — just a bag. A laptop, a change of clothes, a book, a toothbrush. That was everything. When I put it on, I had the feeling I could go anywhere. Just start walking in some direction and keep going. When I needed to travel and had no money for a ticket, I walked to the highway and hitchhiked, or I drove the Chevy. Both felt like the same kind of journey. Like a proper vagabond. Like a pilgrim without a destination.

When the mortgage payment came up short, a phone call soon followed. I knew what I would say before that call.

I'm dealing with it.

That was all I had. Not a plan — a sentence. My ex-wife's worry came dressed as sarcasm, which I had stopped having the energy to unpick. Sometimes it arrived as a question: "So what exactly do I tell the bank?" She had her fears. I had mine — twenty-five years of mortgage payments, no income. The difference was that mine had finally gone quiet.

I was, by most measures, in trouble.

I had never been calmer.

The backpack is in a cupboard somewhere. I keep it, just in case.

The Chevy

The Porsche went first.

Not dramatically. I simply understood, one morning, that it and I were no longer telling the same story. A 1980s Porsche that needed work said something about a man I had been trying to be. I was tired of trying to be him.

What came back was a 1992 Chevrolet Blazer. Black. Plastic wheel arch covers. A metal-framed spare tyre bolted to the tailgate. The interior — cracked black leather, worn to the grain — smelled of somewhere that had been lived in. The automatic gearbox sat on the steering column. The dashboard glowed green in the dark, the kind of green I remembered from a television car in childhood that talked and saved people. I felt like a knight rider.

The V6 sounded like an older man who had decided not to explain himself anymore.

It had power windows. It had cruise control. It had no stereo. I didn't need one. When I wanted music, I had my phone and headphones. Most of the time I drove in silence — just the engine's low muttering, the road, the fields going by. That was the perfect sound.

On the highway, I could lift one foot onto the seat beside me, half-lotus, somewhere between a meditating monk and a man with nowhere to be, and steer with the other. I did this often. I don't know why it mattered. It just did.

I drove it into forests. I drove it onto meadows, killed the engine, and climbed onto the roof with a book. When I finished reading, I climbed back down, folded myself into the back seat, and slept. Some nights I slept outside in the hammock. Some nights in the car. The difference between them was only the weather.

That Chevy was me. Not the me I had been performing. The one underneath.

What I Was Learning

I walked barefoot on asphalt. Not as a practice, not as a philosophy — I had simply taken off my shoes and never quite put them back on. The road pushed back against my feet. Small stones registered individually. Heat from the surface moved up through the soles and into my legs.

People noticed. Bare feet on a beach are unremarkable. Bare feet on city asphalt in midsummer sometimes attract a particular kind of glance — the kind that asks whether you are enlightened or simply lost a few curves in your head. I was not sure myself. When I visited someone, I washed my feet at the tap outside before going in. This felt natural at the time.

I woke before five and made a cup of coffee and took a blanket outside and sat in an old wooden sun lounger in front of the house — the one where the first light arrived first. I paused before opening the book. Just looked at the sun. Greeted it, in my head. People gather at sunsets, I have noticed, drawn to the water in groups to watch the colours. I have always preferred sunrises. You get the sun to yourself.

I ate when I was hungry. I refused seasoning, sugar, flour. I wanted to need nothing I didn't have.

I was listening to Bob Dylan. Cat Stevens. Jack Johnson — especially Jack Johnson, whose music had the quality of someone who had also, at some point, decided to stop explaining himself. I listened on walks and on drives and lying in the hammock and sometimes I just let the album end and sat in the silence after. I borrowed most books from libraries. Occasionally I bought one — a book cost roughly as much as a meal, which made the decision feel significant. I was reading philosophy, biographies, Paulo Coelho. Sometimes an economics book found its way in. It sat oddly next to the buckwheat and the bare feet. I let it stay.

The thought that visited me, somewhere in this period, was quiet and arrived without drama.

I didn't know what to do with it. I wrote it in no notebook. I told no one. I simply kept walking on the hot asphalt with my feet, driving the Chevy into meadows, and lying on the roof with books.

The boy who wanted to belong somewhere, to be seen, to be loved, was still in there. He would make more mistakes. Some of them familiar ones.

The sun doesn't need an audience.
It rises anyway.

This is No-Mad Max. The Chevy is gone. The meadows are not.
I write about the things men carry but rarely say out loud. You can also find me on Substack and Medium