Shedding Our Stuff While Living as Nomads Was Easier Said Than Done

How a year-long road trip helped me sort out what matters most

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

It was time to hang the vision board and figure out our next move. My partner Lee and I spent most of a Saturday afternoon with a whiteboard and marker laying out some ideas and finally came to an agreement. We’d decided we would leave the Bay Area on a road trip and sell or chuck all of our belongings, maybe store a few things with my sister, if we could. The thought of subletting our apartment came up but we both decided on a clean break, even though that would make the logistics more complicated.

Lee kept repeating this Sufi phrase, “You only possess what you cannot lose in a shipwreck” as some sort of inspirational thing to keep us motivated and on track. I still don’t really understand what it means, even though Lee wrote it out on a three by five card and placed it on the fireplace mantel for me to see every day. Unloading our gear was a slow process, so we started four months ahead of departure, chipping away at letting go of things in due time.

Lee was more of a packrat than me—moldy, scholarly tomes, weird little tchotchkes and family heirlooms, boxes and boxes of slides from previous travels and a projector were unburied from our hallway closet. Things that hadn’t been used or cracked open in years. I, on the other hand, had mostly clothes and some large artworks to contend with. I found temporary homes for most things I knew I’d want again one day but the other stuff was pretty easy for me to say goodbye to.

Friends were called to come over and take possession of things—books, plants, a few blank canvases I’d yet to cover in paint, ideas never manifested. There was a grassy area down the corner from our house in front of a big apartment building, a designated repository for used goods people in the neighborhood unloaded in hopes that those with lesser means might find them useful. Much of our stuff landed there. Our street, set between a city park and a main connector road through town, was a walkable corridor, and goods appeared and disappeared quite easily from that spot. We were grateful for that option, which was a time saver, to say the least.

On the day before we would drive away for good, we had a yard sale with the last of the trappings of a settled life, and I’ll tell you, I don’t recommend doing that on your last day in town. People will bargain you down to the bone in humiliating fashion and make you continually wonder what the value of anything really is. You discover attachment where you didn’t know there was any, as things reluctantly pass from your hands to a stranger’s. Neighbors we had never spoken to in the ten years of our residence there came out of the woodwork, suddenly holding a keen interest in us.

“Where are you going?”

“Why are you leaving?”

 “What brought you here to begin with?”

I imagined all the missed potlucks and backyard happy hours we could have had with some of these fine people, had we previously been more of a curiosity to them in our day-to-day lives, when it might have mattered. Our last night, having nothing in the house left but what we would pack in our van the next morning, Lee and I slept on the floor on our camping pads with a comforter over us, spooning and giggling over our lack of stuff and how weird it all felt.

We spent all of 2019 driving across the country, visiting friends and family, checking out new cities for the potential of eventually establishing roots, and exploring natural beauty in far-flung locales we’d always wanted to visit. We sadly attended a memorial service for Lee’s mom in Boston when she died unexpectedly.

All of our belongings, in its new definition, were reduced to the space of the rear of our van. We camped all over, including three weeks in Big Bend National Park, sharing our campsite every night with a curious, and earthy smelling, Javelina family. We graciously accepted invitations to stay in friends’ guestrooms, rented compact spaces on Airbnb, and found the occasional hotel room when we were left in the lurch. We scored housesitting gigs, taking care of people’s pets while they traveled. The beauty of having so little to keep track of was the epitome of freedom for us and every day was a new adventure, albeit days with many questions and choices in front of us to crack like a puzzle with many pieces.

We were in Mexico when Covid started rearing its ugly head. When Lee became ill all of a sudden, we got in the van and drove back across the border to Arizona. We had two housesitting assignments lined up, but it became clear from a news report on the TV in our rental in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that those would not happen after all. Everyone was canceling travel plans and staying put. Lee turned to me on a neighborhood walk and said, “We might as well just stay here and ride this thing out for a couple weeks,” but within days, we were on the hunt for a long-term rental that turned into a year habitation. We were still living with so little that was ours. Furnished rentals provided everything we needed and more. Our freedom was defined differently but it was still a life unburdened with excess.

Eventually, we were faced with a decision about what was next for us. A housesitting gig in Savannah, Georgia fell through and the one we had been covering was coming to an end. In a panic, we signed a lease on a house in a city we were not totally sure felt like home. But there was some part of us that had tired of using everyone else’s stuff. Tired of looking at their particular décor, sitting in their specific furniture, sleeping in their idea of a comfortable bed. We were absent our own signature in the dwellings we took up space in, even though they had provided a unique lifestyle with constant change and variation on the theme of necessary versus frivolous. Why did one person decide that ping-pong table was an important thing to provide but not a coffee maker, for example.

The day we moved into our new house in a new town, we wondered if we’d made a mistake. Faced with an abundance of empty space we would now have to fill up with all manner of things to make a home function, all from scratch, our stomachs took a flip. Forget pots and pans and kitchen gadgets, shower curtains and bathmats and towels, pillows and sheets and comforters—we had big furniture to buy. Oh, the horror of it all, not to mention the shock of the sudden expense. Had we thought this through? A bedframe and a mattress, living room furniture, a kitchen table set, a television, a washer and dryer, a lawn mower. Where do you start? How did we become such consumers?

We did our best to find used goods through locals on the move and thrift stores, but it still felt over-consumptive, a practice we had been so recently thrilled to have become no part of. Because it was still the tail end of an era where shipped goods were bogged down and yearlong delays were common, the stuff we ordered took months to arrive, trickling in at a random pace. Every other day, we’d return home to find a package on our doorstep. One of us would look at the label while the other guessed the contents of our latest arrival, what perceived hole this shiny new object would fill.

On month number three, Lee and I sat in our living room one night with a bottle of wine. A wooden tray from Bed Bath and Beyond sat between us. Ensconced in our collapsible travel chairs in an otherwise empty room, I turned to Lee. “You know we’re essentially camping, don’t you? We hardly need a house to do this!” We talked about how we might be setting ourselves up for comfort or simply setting ourselves up for a repeat of the past. “What if we want to go live abroad for a year or go back to being nomads?” Lee asked me. I shrugged my shoulders. The stuff of life should be simple pleasures like watching a sunset, having a riveting conversation with a friend, a beautiful meal with family. We sat silent for a moment, wondering what it was we actually possessed in that moment, in our new “shipwreck.” We had shelter. And a set of digits for UPS trucks and delivery people to bring us all our new stuff, one package at a time.

Mary Corbin is a writer and artist based in San Francisco and a graduate of California College of the Arts. An arts columnist for 48 Hills, she is also a content contributor to publications around the Bay Area. She published her first nonfiction book in 2021 and a debut short story collection, Life Lines, was published in September 2023. marycorbinwrites.com