A 60-foot RV is their only home. Life on the road suits this explorer and his family
He grew up in woodsy northwest Arkansas, in a bare-bones house with no insulation, without even interior sheetrock on walls or ceilings. He and his two siblings climbed an open stairway to the loft where they slept.
His hard-working dad, Paul, was my cousin, which makes his son, Tracy Archer — not my “second cousin,” as I had long thought — but my “first cousin once removed.” And what a guy Tracy is, as I only fully discovered during his visit here last month. He with his wife, Myra, and their adopted son, Zachary, arrived in a 60-foot recreational vehicle rig that is their only home, for as long as they want it to be.
Not that Tracy, who may seem only my distant relative, is unfamiliar to me. His grandmother, Lyda, was my aunt. His other grandmother moved into his parents’ stark family home to live out her final years. Turned out that she willed money to her three grandchildren. With his share Tracy bought a monster Peterbilt truck and spent seven years zooming from coast to coast, Canada to Mexico, getting good money hauling products.
That financed his college degrees, both for teaching and engineering. He met Myra, a bright medical assistant, and married her. They adopted three special-needs children from the same distressed birth family, home-schooled and reared them. The two oldest now live independently. Only Zachary is still with them, living life on the road while building computer skills, dabbling in 3-D printing and blacksmithing.
Tracy became expert in designing outdoor play equipment for PlayPower, Inc., his creations by now delighting people at schools and parks across the country. His favorite of them all, priced at $14,535, is Interaxion Alpha, the shape of which is driven by the mathematical equation for a catenary arch. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a flattened catenary.
Tracy and Myra’s bright life today — and my own long life — arise in part from the same miserable little farm in the Missouri Ozarks, depicted in a grim old photo on my bedroom wall. My grandparents and Tracy’s great grandparents were John Marion and Mattie Bragg Andrews. Flanked by their seven children, they squint out at us on a sunny afternoon some 117 years ago. My mother, 4-year-old Cora, and her 6-year-old sister, Lyda (destined to be Tracy’s grandma), gaze timidly into the camera’s lens.
Mattie and John Marion homesteaded that sorry 160 acres of steep, rocky wilderness. After five years and their construction of a one-room log house (part of it visible in that photo), they “proved up” to become owners in a July 17, 1890, parchment document now framed on my bathroom wall. Out of that pathetic acreage they farmed a living and a future for all those kids, and their kids’ kids, including Tracy and me, and even our children in a version of what is called today the passing forward of “generational wealth.” Tracy and I stand higher because of their gift.
I was 5 years old in 1939 when John Marion died in my parents’ Tulsa home. My mother sat weeping at his bedside on a battered, paint-streaked aluminum stool. A worse tragedy hit Lyda, whose young husband, William, was trying to save white leghorn chicks from sudden frost in a brooder house when he died of a heart attack. Afterward, Lyda cheered herself as cafeteria cook in an Arkansas elementary school, always proud of her light bread.
“I would put four or five loaves out on the counter,” she once told me. “Kids came by, grabbed a big handful and ate it on their way to class.” My favorite memory of Aunt Lyda is her as an old lady filling syrup feeders at two windows of her home-in-the-woods, hummingbirds by the dozen buzzing around her head.
So, with the help of my friend Pat, I served our guests a sumptuous meal of butterflied leg of lamb, potatoes, carrots, and bell peppers in rich lamb gravy. Dessert was the world’s best chocolate-almond ice cream bars from the Costco freezer.
Then Tracy, Myra and Zachary had to get moving. Because three years ago they sold their Missouri home to become digital nomads and now live entirely on the road. They drive a recreational vehicle, pulling behind it a camper trailer. They stay in RV parks often for $60 a night, or they can stop anywhere attractive for three to five days, relying on tankage to supply fresh water and contain sewage.
Myra runs their daily life while Tracy, through computer magic, designs apparatus and solves problems of faraway workers setting it up. They go south in winter, north in summer: Florida to Montana, the Pacific Northwest to Yuma, Arizona. Tracy relishes this life. I asked Myra whether she agrees.
“I love it,” she said.
They left Shawnee headed for nature’s delights on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I called them two days later as they sat down to Myra’s supper of brisket, Brussels sprouts and shiitake mushrooms, cooked in a dark garlic sauce. Sounds bearable.
Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com
