Writer in a Born Free RV

It was March, if I remember correctly, that I made my decision. Well, truth be told, I didn't really make the decision. It was made for me, not by my boss, but by what was happening around me. I suppose I could have gone on for another thirty years or so, but when you begin to hate getting out of bed to go to work, it's time to move on to another job.

I'd wanted to be a teacher since I could remember. My mother taught elementary school and my father taught biology, chemistry, and physics. Both had always told me that teaching was the most rewarding job in the world. At the dinner table, they'd often say something like, "Remember when you said Jimmy Rogers was the smartest kid in your sixth grade class? Well, today in chemistry, he wrote the best experiment report I've ever read."

I was pretty good at the sciences and I always made straight A's in English and history, but math was my real love. It fascinated me how numbers work and the deeper into math I got, the more I loved it. It was the logic of math that intrigued me.

I went to Southern Illinois University and graduated with a degree in Education with a minor in math and a teaching certificate that said I could teach grades 8 through 12, exactly what I needed to become a math teacher. My college GPA was a 3.8 out of 4 so I figured finding a job wouldn't be all that difficult.

I found several openings in huge school systems, but that's not what I wanted. I wanted a smaller school system for a couple of reasons. The first was I wanted to get to know the parents of my students because parents are a key to teaching anything. One of the things I'd learned in my methods classes was if parents don't support the teacher, it just doesn't work. A kid's attitude will usually be the same as the parents' so if the parents don't have confidence in the teacher, neither will the kids. If I was teaching hundreds of kids every day, it would be impossible to meet and know all the parents.

The other reason I wanted a smaller school system was this belief I had that kids from smaller school systems don't get as good an education as kids in larger school systems. The reasons are many, and since I went to high school in a small school, I thought I knew the main reason. Small school systems don't usually have the resources to pay the same teacher's salaries the large school systems do, so they sometimes don't attract the very best teachers. I was going to be the knight in shining armor who would save the kids in some small school system...in math anyway.

I know, that sounds pretty egotistic and it was, but that's how you think when you're fresh out of college with a degree and a drive to change the world. I was more fortunate than a lot of my classmates in college. It only took me two years to figure out that I wasn't going to change much of anything. Most of them are still teaching and consoling themselves with the fact that they at least have a lot of holidays off and a couple months a year to recharge. A few hate every second of every day they're in the classroom.

What did it for me was realizing I wasn't really teaching math like I wanted to teach math. My goal wasn't to turn out kids who all majored in math in college. I knew I'd have a range of aptitudes in my classes. What I wanted to do was challenge the students with high math aptitude and teach the rest at least enough to give them a good background for life or the next math class in the series.

What I hadn't counted on was that unlike when I went to high school, there was no longer any distinction between students with abilities and aptitudes to go to college and become professionals, and those who would end their education with high school and end up in the so-called blue collar jobs.

There was no "Practical Math" class that taught the math encountered in everyday life like figuring interest and calculating areas and volumes. Every freshman at Traver's High School was enrolled in Algebra 1 as a freshman, Plane Geometry as a sophomore, and Trigonometry as a junior. The math for the senior year was optional, and most college bound students enrolled in Algebra 2.

That first year, about a fourth of my Algebra 1 class was confused as hell and falling behind after the first month and about a fourth were bored as hell, but it wasn't my teaching skills that were the major problem. My problem was the bored fourth of my class understood algebra and did all their homework in class while I was trying to explain some concept to the confused fourth of my class. The middle half was doing all right, but I could have taught them more.

After the first year, I suggested to the superintendent that we start a practical math class to give the low performing kids a chance to succeed, and also to drop Algebra 2 and to straight to Analytic Geometry and Calculus. He smiled at me like he was going to explain something I should have already known.

"Jerry, state law says in order to graduate from a high school in Illinois, a student has to have three credits in math, two of which must be Algebra and geometry. I understand your request about more advanced math classes for seniors, but only a few of our students, maybe five percent at the most, would be able to understand the class. What would you suggest we do with the other ninety-five percent -- let them fail the class and ruin their grade point average? That might keep them from getting into a good college."

It was Marsha Wiggins who made the decision for me. She was a freshman in my Algebra 1 class the second year I taught. She was a beautiful girl with long, brunette hair, a very pretty face, and she looked and acted more mature than most freshman girls. Her eyes though, well, there was nothing there, no sparkle, not even much of a change when the class ended and she could stop being laughed at by the other students for asking a question about something I'd just spent fifteen minutes explaining.

It wasn't Marsha's fault. It's sad to me even now when I remember her. The poor girl just didn't have much to work with. When I asked the guidance counselor about Marsha, Wendy sighed.

"I don't know what to do with her. Her IQ is about sixty so her future prospects are pretty grim. She repeated three elementary grades before they figured out she doesn't have the ability to learn very much. They've been just passing her on since then. My guess is she'll drop out of school after this year because she's already sixteen. I don't know what she'll do then. Most people with an IQ that low can't hold even low-skill jobs. Maybe she could clean hotel rooms or wash dishes, but that's about it and she'd find that to be a challenge."

The reason I said it was March is because that's the month Marsha turned seventeen and dropped out of school. When I left school that day, I found Marsha standing by my car. I walked up and said, "Hi, Marsha. I missed you in class today."

Marsha gave me the first smile I'd seen from her all year.

"Mister Robinson, yesterday was my birthday and I quit school today. I'm here because I just wanted to tell you something. I know I'm not very smart but you tried real hard to help me. I just wanted to say you're the best teacher I ever had."

Marsha hesitated for a couple of seconds, then gave me a quick hug before she smiled, turned around, and walked away.

I did a lot of thinking about my future that night. What Marsha had told me should have made me feel really good about myself. Instead, it made me feel like I'd picked the wrong career. I'd wanted to help kids do as well as they could do, but the system was geared toward putting as many kids into college as possible and forgetting about the kids who didn't have the ability to take that next step.

At about one in the morning, I sat down and wrote my letter of resignation effective the last day of school. The next morning, I handed it to the superintendent. It didn't seem to phase him one bit. He just looked up and asked what school I was going to next. When I said I wasn't going to teach anymore, he just smiled and said some people were meant to be teachers and some weren't. I wanted to tell him that some superintendents cared about all their students and some didn't, but I knew it wouldn't change anything.

I still had a little over two months to teach so I did the best I could, but I was looking at what I was going to do next as well. By the end of the school year, I was still deciding. I had some time yet. I'd opted to have my teacher's salary paid over twelve months instead of the months I was teaching, so the school system still owed me a little over eight grand. That would pay the bills for about four months if I didn't get carried away. I did have to decide before July though. That was when the lease on my apartment was up. If I hadn't decided, I'd have to either renew the lease or start sleeping in a tent.

Teaching wasn't something I really wanted to do anymore because I didn't figure teaching math would be any different anywhere I went. My hobbies were also probably not going to help me. Nobody would pay me to sit at a desk and read about history or to travel around and visit national parks and landmarks.

It was then I remembered something my high school English teacher had written at the top of an essay I'd submitted as my homework for that week. Her statement was that if I wanted to make a living as a writer, I'd probably do well. I'd sort of smiled and then forgotten it at the time. I was going to be a math teacher, not a writer.

I'd enjoyed my two English composition classes in college, and thanks to my teaching methods classes, I knew how to present topics in an easily understood manner. I'd also taken a basic psychology course in college. That didn't qualify me to analyze people for a living, but it did give me some insight into how people think. Maybe I could be a writer.

I did some research and found out the average annual earnings of a free-lance writer would be about as much as I'd earned teaching if I could sell what I wrote. To do that, I'd have to write about things that interested people and that meant I couldn't just stay in Illinois. I'd have to travel around, meet different people and see different things. Surely people would like to read about a museum or a park before they went to the expense of going there.

I was single so I didn't need a lot of room, and if I was traveling a lot I really wouldn't need a fixed address. What I needed was a home on wheels. The next day I started looking for small RV's.

I found a lot of new RV's priced at sixty thousand and up that were really nice inside. I couldn't afford them, but it was fun to walk through them to see what was inside. After I'd looked at about twenty used RV's I found what I was looking for. It was a 1996 Born Free President 24 and it had only eighty thousand miles on it. It was being sold by a woman whose husband had recently passed away and she was willing to sell it for eighteen thousand.

I really liked everything about it. It was only a little bigger than a full size van, so driving it wouldn't be a problem nor would parking it. It also had one thing I'd decided was a must that a lot of small RV's didn't have. It had as close to a full bath as you could fit into something that small and that was important to me. I don't like using public restrooms and I didn't want to have to rent a hotel room in order to take a shower.

It had a kitchen with a small refrigerator that ran on both twelve-volt and normal electricity as well as propane, a two-burner propane stove, and a sink. The other things that were really nice were the on-board generator for electricity if I couldn't plug it in somewhere, and the electronics the former owner had installed. It had both front and rear cameras connected to a DVR on the dash, and a nearly new GPS unit. There was a small TV with a DVD player as well.

Since I was single and hadn't done much in the way of buying a lot of stuff since I started teaching, I had saved almost twenty thousand over the two years. I also had my contribution to my teacher's retirement fund coming and that was almost ten thousand more. Since I wouldn't need a car, I figured that was another five thousand and I could get at least another thousand for my furniture. I could buy the Born Free and have money left to tide me over until I could sell my writing.

I paid the woman with a check, and while I was waiting for the check to clear so she'd give me the title, I sold my car and my furniture and moved into a cheap motel room. When the woman called and said she had the title ready, I took a cab to her house and drove the Born Free to a local RV park so I'd have a place to sleep. That first night, I was thinking that Born Free was a great name for my new home. It was like I was being born again, free from the aggravation of teaching in a way I didn't enjoy, and being free to do what I wanted. I did feel free.

That first summer was both enjoyable and painful. I started driving North and toured part of Wisconsin and Minnesota. I saw a lot of beautiful country, met a lot of great people, and wrote eighteen articles that I sent to travel magazines about what people would see if they visited those places. By the end of the summer, I had hundreds of digital photos of state parks, cities, small towns, and people, and eighteen rejection emails from those travel magazines.

I'd also bought a decent bicycle and a rack for the Born Free. It wasn't hard to connect the water, electricity, and sanitary drains at an RV park, but I had to do it every time I wanted to go somewhere other than the park. The bicycle fixed that. Unless it was raining, I could just hop on my bike for short runs to the grocery store or to see some local sight.

I was still doing OK, money-wise, but I wouldn't be if I didn't change something. I headed South to winter over in someplace warmer and figure out what that change was going to be. I also wanted to see some of the sights in the South, especially the Civil War battlegrounds. I was still thinking about travel stories and thought some tours of the battlefields might sell.

My goal was Georgia. It doesn't get very cold in Georgia so I wouldn't have to spend a lot of money on propane to heat the Born Free. Georgia is also the location of the most infamous prisoner of war camp during the American Civil War, that being Andersonville. My plan was to visit Andersonville and then do some research in order to write an article about the prison camp as seen by one of the prisoners and then what I saw.

It was getting on toward six when I crossed the Kentucky/Tennessee line on I-24. I hadn't seen any RV parks advertised on any signs, but I knew there was one place I could park the Born Free for the night and it wouldn't cost me anything except for some gas for the generator. That was the parking lot of the Wal-Mart that was just off Exit 4 to Clarksville.

I took that exit, found the Wal-Mart, and parked at the very side of the parking lot, then went inside to do a little shopping. When I came back out, I was going to make dinner, but decided a burger and fries would be better. I'd seen a Burger King just before I turned off on the street that led to Wal-Mart, so I drove there, parked and went inside.

On my way in, I saw a sign that said they were hiring, and that set me to thinking. Like I said, I was doing OK for money, but if I spent the winter doing nothing, things were going to get pretty tight come spring. I probably would be better off finding some sort of job that would let me travel around and still write and would give me some income to spend. I was a college graduate, so I figured I could handle anything a job at Burger King would require.

I thought Clarksville would be a good location too. I'd be close to Nashville and within a few hours drive of Georgia, and it would be cheaper to live in Clarksville than either of those places.

When I ordered my cheeseburger, fries, and chocolate shake, I asked the teenage girl at the register how it was to work there. She just shrugged and said, "It's a job. It doesn't pay much, but it gives me some money of my own."

I looked back at the preparation area, and the people seemed to be happy. There was a lot of talking and laughing going on, so I figured it couldn't be too bad a place to work. When I got back to the Born Free, I looked to see if there was a wi-fi hotspot close by. I found one at the Krystal burger place next to the Wal-Mart parking lot. It took me only a few minutes to find the Clarksville Burger King and put in an application.

I also did some looking to see if there was an RV park close by. The next day I drove to the Clarksville RV park to see what they had to offer.

It looked like a nice place. Several of the camping trailers looked like they'd been there for a while, but that didn't bother me. They had electrical, water, and sanitary hookups and the rate was probably less than I'd find in Nashville or any other large city. They even had free wi-fi if you paid for a campsite. I paid for a week and hoped Burger King would call me for an interview before that.

Three days later, I rode my bike to the same Burger King for an interview with the manager. I didn't think I'd have a problem getting hired, but I did have a little problem. The manager asked me why a college graduate was applying for a low-wage job.

I didn't go into the real reason. What I told him was I'd decided to become a writer and need a job that didn't take all my time. He sort of wrinkled up his brow at that answer, but he seemed to be satisfied. At the end of the interview, he told me I was going to be a team member working the shift that started at five PM and ended at one AM. I was to start on that Monday, but my first day would be for orientation from eight AM to five PM.

Orientation was boring, but informative. I learned what would be expected of me and what I should wear. Other than that, it was a lot of company propaganda about how well the team members were treated and the opportunities for advancement.

I went home that night rather pleased with myself. I tend to be a night owl anyway, so the hours would work for me. I could get eight hours of sleep and still have half the morning and most of the afternoon to write or do whatever I wanted to do. I would have to work some weekends, but that meant I'd have days off during the week.

My first night was interesting. I parked my bike in the back and locked it to the dumpster there, then went inside and asked to see the shift manager to report for work.

I was surprised the shift manager was a woman about my age. I guessed her at about twenty-six or seven. Her name was Melissa Woods, and she made it clear she liked to be addressed as just Mel. She seemed to be pretty strict about things like customer service and cleanliness.

"If customers aren't happy when they leave, they won't come back, so always be polite and respectful, no matter what they say to you. The other thing that will drive customers away is if the place isn't clean, so if things get slow, grab a mop or a sponge and clean.

"I'll start you out cooking fries. The fryers have timers, so all you have to do is put the fries in the basket, put the basket in the fryer, and start the timer. When the timer rings, take the basket out, let it drain for a minute or so, and then dump it on the fry table. Any questions?"

The only question I could think of was how would I know when it was time to cook more fries. Mel said it depended upon the time of the shift, but she'd help me.

The way the shift worked was sort of fun. From about five until seven, it was controlled chaos because so many people either came inside or used the drive-up window to order. After that, the traffic slowed down a lot, so I had time to get to know the other team members.

Several were students at APSU or the local junior college and were working to help pay their way through school. A couple were adults who'd retired and needed the extra income because social security wasn't enough to live on. Then there was Mel.