close proximity to Tracy.

I am worried Tracy is dead. I really have no reason to think this way other than the fact that he has always emailed me back and this time he didn't. Five or six years ago a friend and I picked Tracy up from the side of the road in Southern California. Tracy told us he needed to get east. We were headed to Tennessee and so we said we could take him with us until the day's end. He was wearing a well-worn set of overalls, the straps pulled up over a thin tan t-shirt, the grey hair on his chest like a fringe of silver around the collar. When Tracy settled into the front passenger’s seat, his big left knee surfaced through a hole in his overalls--like a whale’s back does when coming up for air.

Tracy was a drifter in his sixties, traveling north in the summer, south in the winter, working here and there, sleeping in barns or under bridges until either his welcome or his patience in a place had worn out. We asked Tracy all of our questions about living on the road and having no home and Tracy showed us his large collection of cardboard signs on which he'd penned messages asking for the things he often needed—food, a lift, work. He gifted me one of the signs as a souvenir—it read, “Stranded on Hostile Planet, Anything Helps.”

We hadn’t planned on Tracy riding with us past dark but by the time the night came, we liked him and trusted him more than we had expected to. Finally, at nine ‘o clock, after traveling all day with our new friend, we left him off in a city at the edge of New Mexico. It had just begun raining and I felt bad that we were leaving him with no shelter, just as the weather was starting to spit. But to Tracy, that was nothing.  To Tracy, that was everything. That was Tracy's life.

Before he got out of the car, Tracy and I exchanged email addresses and agreed to keep in touch.

Our correspondence surprised me with its consistency. Every six months or so, and sometimes more frequently, we'd exchange updates about the various places we were living. Tracy's first email came the following June when he’d finally made it all the way east. He had “settled” in Front Royal, Virginia where he said there were a couple of communes he was going to check out. He didn’t like the muggy heat that was coming with summer and although he'd only been there a week, he was already threatening to hit the road again and head back to the northwest.

The following Christmas he wrote from Woodland Park, Colorado. He had worked for a week herding sheep in Del Norte, but the boss didn’t pay him and so he left. He ended his letter with the melancholy line, “Still wandering kinda aimlessly. Take care."

His next letter came from New Mexico where he said he was living in and old man’s barn in exchange for doing some manual labor. He seemed to like it there.  It was the happiest he'd sounded yet, even though he said that earlier that year he’d been in a bad accident. “Dude was drinking whiskey and driving like a maniac—rolled his truck and got killed. I put my seat belt on and I survived.”

Updates from Tracy came like those moments you are awakened from a dream--you only really know a few details and yet you get a certain feeling about the story out of that very limited amount of information. I was always on the edge of my seat to know where he’d be next. Something about his life was so exciting. And yet sometimes I felt like Tracy was as interested in my updates as I was in his, which made me think that perhaps the degree of excitement with which I credited his life was only a result of its novelty to me.

The last time I heard from Tracy, he was in the public library in Salida, Colorado.  He came onto Gmail chat and we chatted live which made him feel like a real person again. He was working at a thrift store and living in the Arkansas Valley, "surrounded by mountains!" he said. He seemed really happy and I asked him, "Are you settling down?" to which he responded, “Tryin.”

Knowing Tracy made me rethink homelessness. I had a swooping set of assumptions about the lifestyle--some romantic, some negative, some judgmental, some naive, some probably right, a lot probably wrong...And I guess I wouldn't say that knowing Tracy changed my opinions so much as it did elevate my curiosity. Having a friend who was homeless set me closer to homelessness. And this here, I think I'm finally at my point: I am always amazed how proximity does that--makes you care more and ask more questions.

Let's see if I can say this another way. (I admit a kind of silly example--but go with me!) Let's say that before you go to bed you go into your kitchen and take a dinner plate down out of the cupboard. You keep it on your pillow all night as you sleep and wake up to it right where you left it. You put it in your bag in the morning and take it work where you show your friends. You have conversations about the plate and you find that there were aspects of the plate that you had never considered! The plate is no longer "just a dinner plate." I know that is a silly example, but I really believe that if you physically spend time close to something that you develop a completely different relationship to it. You ask better questions about it. And one thing my job has taught me is that if you don't ask good questions, you won't end up knowing much at all.

I wrote to Tracy a few weeks back to ask him for some input on my immersion journalism project which happens to be looking at people who don't have homes. He usually always gets back to me, and maybe he still will. Maybe he is on the road. I wouldn't doubt it.