October 7, 2004

Replogle starts new life on the road

Clyde Replogle with his dog, Hallie, in his van, which he is driving around America. Replogle sold his home and gave away his belongings and hit the road last March.

By Diane Chiddister

When Clyde Replogle wakes most mornings, his day stretches before him like a country road, full of twists and turns and surprises.

Actual country roads stretch before him as well, and each day Replogle chooses whether to take them, to go north or south, east or west, to stop here or there or not at all. Whichever he chooses, he knows each road leads to a place he’s never seen, a person he’s yet to meet.

Replogle is living his life on the road, tooling along America’s back roads with only his dog, Hallie, and most of his worldly goods stashed in his van. Half the people he meets, he said, tell him he’s living their dream and the other half think he’s nuts. But that’s fine with Replogle. At 70, he has no need for others’ approval. And he’s having the time of his life.

When he first left Yellow Springs for points west, he said, “I felt increasing joy as each day went by. I couldn’t get this smile off my face.”

Since beginning his new life last March, Replogle has followed back roads to Texas, through the Southwest and Colorado to California and back again. He’s also aimed his van north and traveled to Michigan and Canada. Along the way, he’s taken more than 1,000 photos, witnessed breathtaking desert sunsets, met a bagpiper in Phoenix, stopped in countless roadside cafes to chat with strangers and spent four days in the desert sun digging out his van after it sank in the sand. He’s learned many things about the people he met, he said, and even more about himself.

Before he hit the road Replogle had to change his life, and to say he downsized gives new meaning to the word. He went from living in one of Yellow Springs’ largest homes — “somewhere short of 5,000 square feet with a 50-foot pool,” he said — to a 19-foot-long converted Chevy van, with a living space of about 18 square feet and a bed.

But the bed is quite comfortable, he said, and his Roadtrek van also comes with a two-burner stove, microwave, refrigerator, tiny bathroom and shower, and enough storage space for his clothes and computer equipment. Two solar panels give him all the power he needs to run his computers.

As RVs go, his is tiny, but that’s just the way he wants it, Replogle said. An avid fly fisherman, he wanted a vehicle small enough to drive up to a river bank when he wants to dig out his pole and cast around for dinner.

“I don’t need anything bigger,” he said. “My dog and I do just fine.”

He always tried to live a simple life, Replogle said, and “complexity snuck up on me.” In the past several years he surveyed his large home and realized that he resented it, that he spent way too much of his time maintaining the house. He looked around at the things filling its rooms and decided they could go, too. So Replogle sold his home and gave his stuff away.

“I furnished three houses in Yellow Springs and still had some to give to my son,” he said.

He’s sometimes asked which was the hardest item to part with, Replogle said, and his answer remains the same: “Absolutely nothing. There was nothing that left that I wasn’t glad to see go. It wasn’t difficult. It was joyous.”

Downsizing provides the “how” of Replogle’s life change, but the “why” seems more elusive. Though he’s an articulate man, he searched for words when he tried to explain what motivated him to start a new life.

“I don’t know why,” he said. “I know I felt driven. I felt I had to get out.”

Something nagged at him, he said, a sense of time passing. Quoting his friend Richard Cook, he said, “For those of us who can see the dark at the end of the tunnel, any month in which I don’t do what I want is a noticeable part of my life.”

He doesn’t feel that he’s escaping his old life, Replogle said, and after more than 40 years in the area — he lived on a farm near Clifton before moving to Yellow Springs four years ago — he has many friends here he cherishes, and he comes back to see them. But he has friends all over the country as well, and now he can see them, too.

A physiologist who spent many years directing a medical research division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Replogle had spent his life holding responsible positions and doing responsible things. “I’ve been accommodating other people’s agendas since my childhood,” he said.

Now, it’s time to pay attention to his own.

What he wanted, Replogle said, is to wake up each morning and find serendipity greeting him with the sun.

“What I find exciting,” he said, “is something I don’t expect.”

He has found those unexpected things on the road. In addition to encountering countless new places, Replogle has gained new perspectives. In his many chats in truck stops and roadside cafes, he’s been surprised by the amount of support he finds for the U.S.-led war in Iraq and has grown to better understand people whose political views differ from his own. He’s been surprised at the number of homeless people he’s met who are looking for work, people who live in their vans but, unlike him, not out of choice. And he’s been surprised by how gracious strangers have been to him — he expected friendliness, he said, but has encountered it beyond his best hopes.

Replogle has been surprised by himself as well. At the end of May, he found himself stranded 20 miles in the desert in Death Valley, Calif., when his van sank into the sand. For four days he worked when the hot sun allowed, searching for stones, then jacking up his van and piling the stones beneath the tires. Three times he had to start over. On the fourth day, covered with dirt and sand and with a sore shoulder that only recently began to heal, he succeeded in rescuing himself and his dog from a situation that could have turned life-threatening.

“I was overjoyed,” he said of the experience. “I didn’t know a 70-year-old diabetic could do something like that.”

Replogle is back now in Yellow Springs, where he stays in a friend’s backyard on West Center College Street. But he plans to leave at the end of this week and head north again, visiting Michigan, where he has a small cabin on the Manistee River. After that, when the weather turns cold, he’ll travel west, maybe to South Padre Island in Texas.

Of course, Clyde Replogle isn’t entirely sure where he’s going or when he’s going to get there. And that uncertainty suits him just fine. What he knows for sure is that, wherever he goes, it will be just where he wants to go and when he gets there, he’ll wake each morning eager to start the day.