Roads From the Ashes. Megan Edwards
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by overwhelming demand and that ended abruptly with the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Twain also described the Pony Express, another short-lived phenomenon rendered obsolete by the transcontinental telegraph.
As I look back now, the years I traveled the country were a little like the short span of years when a stagecoach was required to travel from Missouri to California, and messengers on horseback relayed mail across the continent. In 1994, people were just beginning to grasp the enormous potential of the Internet and wireless communication, and technology had only just begun to deliver on the promise. When I struggled to use an acoustic coupler with a pay phone, it reminded me of Mark Twain getting hit on the head with an unabridged dictionary every time the Overland Stage lurched across a stream.
As much as this book is about the beginning of the Internet revolution, it is equally about STUFF. Everything began with a great and sudden loss of stuff and a desire to enjoy the vacuum for as long as possible. But as anyone who has ever lived in a motorhome can tell you, stuff is a big issue. Too much won’t fit, and even if it does, you have to make sure it won’t break an axle. Looking back, I realize that Mark and I worried about our stuff just about every day we were on the road.
Even digital possessions took up quite a bit of room. When we hit the road in 1994, computer stuff was, for the most part, stored on floppy discs. Later on, it was ZIP discs, followed by CDs. Because we were fully aware that disaster could happen, we kept backups in places other than our motorhome. We didn’t need a storage locker for household belongings, but we did need a repository for boxes of discs and CDs. What stands out as I reflect on the progression from floppies to ZIP discs to CDs is that as storage got smaller and smaller, it also got cheaper and cheaper. A floppy disc back in 1994 cost about a dollar and held as much as a megabyte. ZIP discs held 250 megs and cost maybe $12. CDs were a huge breakthrough, offering capacities three times as large as ZIPs and costing a fraction. And the trend has continued. If the price and size of storage had remained constant, a 5-gigabyte thumb drive would cost $5000 and outstrip an elephant. But the price went down along with size until we got to the point where it all evaporated into a cloud. Which brings me circuitously to a realization that occurred to me recently. I lost all my stuff in a cloud back in 1993. Now all my stuff lives in a cloud. It’s a full circle of a sort I never could have predicted.
Some might say the revolution is only just getting started. I’m one of those, too. In years to come, it will be easier to gain perspective on the profound changes the birth and growth of the Internet have wrought. For now, we’re still in the trenches, still connecting dots, still surprised by the physical effects of invisible phenomena. Who would have guessed that smart phones would have an effect on the car-buying habits of a new generation? Who could have predicted that an app could challenge the very existence of the taxi industry, or that a guy named Craig could wipe out classified advertising with a single website?
As fascinating as it was to observe the Internet hatch and grow during my years on the road, it is the travel itself I am most grateful for. Thanks to my years on the road, when I look at a flat political map of North America, I no longer see just a vast expanse bookended by two oceans. Even if the map is just an outline, my mind automatically supplies the mountains and rivers and cities and towns. I see canola fields in Alberta and potato fields in Maine. I remember a sculptor in Idaho, a singer in Big Bend, a juggler in Seattle. I see the dogwoods in Yosemite and the eagles in Minnesota and the alligators in the Everglades. I do hope you enjoy a trip down Internet history lane, but my sincerest wish is that reading about the journey makes you want to hit the road.
Megan Edwards
Las Vegas, Nevada
December, 2018
Chapter 1
Life’s Ballast Lost
A Suitcase, An Arrowhead, and A Set of Red Underwear
You don’t keep extra clothes when you live in 200 square feet. It’s a question of being able to put your plate down when you eat dinner or owning an evening purse. I haven’t owned an evening purse since 1993, and the one time I needed one since then, I found a perfectly good pearled specimen at a thrift store in New York. It cost a dollar, and I gave it to a bag lady in Grand Central Station after a dinner party at the Knickerbocker Club.
Okay, I confess. If you were to find yourself looking through my underwear box (yes, box— there aren’t many drawers in motor homes), you’d find a red bra and pair of red panties at the bottom. They never move. I haven’t worn them since before I owned an evening purse, but there they are. I can’t throw them away. They’re survivors.
That red underwear, one suitcase, one husband and one dog are the only things I have that antedate the fire that ended Phase One of my life. It arrived with perfect timing. I was 40 years old, and I’d just been wondering if this—a nice house in a nice neighborhood full of nice stuff— was all there was. Just like a jillion baby boomers on the exact cusp of middle age, I was sick of exercise videos and women’s magazines and nylon stockings. I was having a hard time believing that the road to serenity lay in losing ten pounds, highlighting my hair, or giving my kitchen a country look.
And then, only a couple of months before I turned 41, Los Angeles caught on fire and didn’t stop burning for seventeen days. My house was one of the first to go. One day, I had an answering machine and high heels and an eyelash curler. The next day, well, the next day things were different.
The fires were headline news for weeks, as Altadena, Laguna, and Malibu each hosted a conflagration bigger than the last. In dollars, a billion went up in smoke. Over 1,100 houses burned to the ground, and 4 people died. My loss seems minuscule in comparison: just one average middle class woman’s stuff.
Yes, just stuff. That’s all it was: high school yearbooks, photographs, wedding presents, diplomas, my grandmother’s piano. I’d had ten minutes to pack ahead of the firestorm. I’d grabbed a suitcase. I’d grabbed—only God knows why— my red underwear.
I did take one other thing as I left the house. I paused in front of a cabinet filled with silver and wedding china and keepsakes. I opened the door and took out an Indian arrowhead I’d found in Wyoming on Mark’s family’s ranch.
I guess that’s how you pack when you’re off on a new life. You get ten minutes, and there’s no second chance. I can’t tell you why, as the flames roared nearer, I chose red underwear and an arrowhead that would have survived the fire anyway. I can only say this. Where I was headed, I was overpacked.
One Crystal Clear Autumn Morning
The fire started before dawn on October 27, 1993, and like most blazes near populated areas, it was set by a human, a homeless man named Andres Huang. He had hiked into the Altadena foothills during the night. He’d fallen asleep, and when he awoke before dawn, he was cold and shivering. He lit a little camp fire to warm himself up. It was a windy night, and the fire immediately got away from him. Frightened, he fled. Unable to see in the darkness, he fell over a cliff.
At 3:48 a.m., someone called Fire Station 66 at the foot of Eaton Canyon and reported “fire on the hillside.” It was impossible to know it at the time, but that call mobilized the first unit of a force that would grow to include nearly three thousand firefighters from 62 different agencies, 200 fire engines, fifteen water tenders, four bulldozers, eight helicopters, and fifteen airplanes.
Andres Huang was found, arrested and taken to a hospital. He was later charged with “reckless setting of a fire.”
Mark and I were sleeping at home, a couple of ridge lines to the east. The telephone rang a little after four. It was Mark’s mother, calling from her house, a couple more ridge lines to the east. She had awakened early and seen a tiny bright spot on the mountain. “There’s a fire above Eaton Canyon,” she said.
Mark and I got up and slid open the glass door that led from our bedroom to an outdoor patio. We could see a tiny, brilliant feather of flame on the dark slope.
We’d seen fires on the mountainside before. We’d grown up here. There were fires every year. Even though we lived in the hills, there were houses and streets between us and the native brush. Our house was nearly a hundred years old, nestled on