By Keegan Otwell
In 2017 I left my hometown for what would end up being three years spent broke and wandering the US. My friends were fellow vagrants who aged out of foster care, got kicked out of homes, and were queer. Or, like me, people who were fed up with what felt like a meaningless life spent working and paying to stay stuck in the same place. People desperate for something real. Crust-punks, dirty kids, hobos, whatever the name, that was my community for three years. People traveled by freight train, hitch-hiking, school bus, jalopy, by any means necessary. You do a lot of walking.
Freedom is the main pull, but even being homeless by choice isn’t much of a choice for people. It is freedom compared to the alternative. It’s the same kind of choice someone makes when leaping from a burning building. This, or that.
Almost all of my friends were alcoholics, if not also heroin addicts. For me, by the time it all became less about traveling and more about the drugs, I had already lost myself, after losing several friends. I barely made it out alive.
But the times I did have, the connections I made, I wouldn’t trade for anything. The beauty of this amazing country with all of its diversity was really just the backdrop to these relationships, to the small family I made and the people I called home.
In a life where your surroundings are constantly changing, the one thing that stands out among the passing of time, places, and possessions is the love that you have for one another. That is what kept me going, what has propelled me across the entire country at times to meet up with certain people, no distance ever too long. You have no idea how you’ll make it there, you just know you’ll figure it out.
The idea of the material world and concepts of success in this grand scheme of things seem alien. That’s why it can be so hard to get off the road and attempt to live a somewhat normal lifestyle. It’s an entirely different reality. It would take me three years of grief and addiction after getting off the road to even begin to get my shit together, so to speak.
Going back to New Orleans this past Halloween for a dirty kid memorial felt like something I needed to do. I would cover it for my podcast, but I was also there to mourn my own losses. One of which was Grant, who I loved deeply and spent most of that three years with. He was like a soulmate of sorts.
As Lolo, who started the Nola memorial six years ago, said, “Your friends are scattered all across the country and all you want is to have your friends there with you so you can grieve together. And it is a really lonely, lonely, deeply lonely feeling to not have your friends around you … why don’t we do a fucking memorial?”
Grant’s death happened during Covid, and there was no funeral.
Death is no stranger to travelers. Fentanyl, heroin, violence (sometimes by police), infection, accidents, it ravages the traveler community. If you’ve made it into your 30’s, you’re an elder in the community. The memorial in New Orleans is a chance for dirty kids to collectively mourn and share stories of those we lost.
The night of the memorial, we had a bonfire on the shore of the Mississippi, at the place they call “the end of the world,” a tiny peninsula of grass with a giant abandoned building complex looming in the background. It’s where the levies broke during Katrina. We had cardboard gravestones with names of people, along with their tags, which still linger out there in the world, on dumpsters, freight trains, under bridges across the nation. They’re written and drawn and then tossed into the fire as we take turns talking about each one. I heard names of friends I had lost, some years ago.
Amidst the yelling and speeches people are giving, I hear Lolo say “everyone is dead.”
NOLA is the first place I’ve been back to, where Grant and I lived for a couple months. It was flooded with memories, it felt like I might run into him. Looking around the fire, I see kids in their early twenties, Carharts, patched out, already probably on the road for a year or more. They’re drinking, laughing, playing music, yelling at their dogs. Everyone isn’t dead, but almost everyone I knew, which made this chaotic world a familiar one to me, is dead. Around the fire, there are some people who will be gone by next year’s memorial.
Just up the embankment between the fire and the abandoned building complex is an area with physical memorials that travelers have built over time. There is an entire mini cathedral made with metal, stone, and stained glass. There is a mini Airstream trailer someone made, surrounded by pictures and candles and things people have left. Some of the names on the memorials are ones I hear by the fire. There’s an old rotary phone on a wooden box labeled “wind phone,” that says “give your dead friend a call.”
We’ll never have a graveyard, no statues, no monuments remembering us. This memorial gathering and these art pieces are a refusal to let loved ones fade away just like everything else does in this world, defiant amid a vast national backdrop of truck stops, Walmarts, gas stations, dumpsters, alleyways, skyscrapers, in a world where everything is blending into the same thing.
We’ll all learn the same lessons over and over, lose our closest friends, generation by generation, and there’s just no stopping it. As much as you want to be able to reach out, say something, grab onto someone, there’s really nothing to be said. All you can do is love people while they’re still here.
Keegan works doing street outreach back in his hometown, and also has a podcast called “Nowhere,” where you can hear a full episode with audio from the memorial, pieces of his own story, and interviews about homelessness.
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