Nomadic Proud

Nomadic Proud

Apartheid is not the same as Segregation

and other lessons

I never expected to learn in San Francisco

by

Ramona Mayon

Ramona Mayon © 2016

Every word is written under the power of

My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the living God

Who loves the nomad & chose to walk

as One on earth

For my Father and late Mother, Ben & Blanche Robertson, who blessed me with a nomadic childhood

and deep roots within myself instead of

to a piece of ground

For my beloved Husband, Greg Adam Mayon, who took me to Wife the minute he saw me, because I am a Traveller, not in spite of it

he warned me society would never let me be free

when he was proven right, he has stood his ground in my honour

For my Children, Serenity Anne, Zachary Bleu,

Morgan Isaiah, Victoria Zoë Robertson

and Merlin Augustus Mayon who paid the heaviest price possible for the winds in my gypsy skirts

For my grandchildren that new nomadic blood just arrived, along with those yet to be born,

and we’re doing this for your children,

because their feet will itch too, and by their generation, at the rate civil liberties are eroding,

the right to travel will be history

Table of Contents

An Introduction to My Wandering Ancestors

Segregation, San Francisco-style

a Real Traveller's Wedding

Letter from my Unborn Daughter

Coping with Mother Nature's Fury

The Half Life of Fear

How Tom Petty’s Tour Bus

Sparked this Résistance

Life on the Dark Side of the Street

Politics and the Nomadic

Nomadic Manifesto

Xenophobia

On Begging and Almsgiving

633 Years of GRT (gypsy-Roma-Traveller)

Laws, Acts & Consequences

A Place in the Sun

Introduction to My Wandering Ancestors

I received a new Bible from my husband, an Oxford Study Bible with the Apocrypha. To my shock, I read something I had never read before in the Bible. A footnote for Genesis 4: 1-26 about Cain killing his brother over the sacrifice they have each brought God. Old story, right? Except we have been missing something all along according to this footnote: "The First Offspring,

Cain and Abel, may personify a culture conflict between the settled farmer and the semi-nomadic shepherd." This one-sentence footnote has introduced a radical realignment in my thought process as to just what I am up against, trying to legitimize my perceived right to express myself by being a nomad in a settled world.

It’s not just my DNA, although I am an American-born Scottish Traveller. But rather, I have lived it all my life. I have always traveled. Roots versus horizons that was my childhood motto, oft-quoted to those unpleasant adults who criticized my unusual upbringing. I have always been nomadic. And since my father was in the oil business, we spent a lot of my childhood in Scotland. That's where I began to realize I was different.

Wanderlust is a serious matter to those with nomadic DNA. Imagine being an African-American or a Jew being told,Try as hard as you can to be like the rest of us. Otherwise, we will charge you with a crime. My entire life I’ve traveled like they do in magazines. Or wish they did. By the time I was seventeen I’d lived in seventeen countries and 28 of these United States, thanks to a pipelining daddy and my late mother who wouldn’t stay home like the other oilfield wives.

Then there was my brief, disastrous first marriage in the 70’s to a Mexican man 15 years my senior, from a family made extremely wealthy by oil. He was a member of Mexico’s highly popular speedboat racing team, Coatzymoto, which gave me a lifestyle that could only be described as a rustic but opulent in the back waters of Latin America. We divorced in 1985 when I returned to Houston, with an unhappy 4 year-old who adored her father and to this day, hates me for leaving him. She and I lived unhappily in a series of boxes called apartments.

However, in 1992, I returned to the road, because the (American) father of my three middle children took it into his head that he could take custody of our two toddler boys without the benefit of a judge. I took the children on a late autumn trip throughout the semi-luxurious state campgrounds of Texas until the matter was settled and my father had returned from Africa. The younger children were 4, 3 and 11 months old. My oldest daughter from my 1st marriage was 11. It was a blissful, wonderful time when it could have been traumatizing. Nature is healing that way.

My maternal great-grandmother was a young Cherokee girl snatched off an Oklahoma reservation by my great-grandfather when he passed through on his way to the Mississippi. As a child I knew about her only through whispers of my red-neck relatives who were obviously ashamed of having her blood beat through our veins. I immediately recognized how within my mother’s family an unspoken disdain for this woman, who was somehow less because of her blood; she was someone no one ever mentioned and if we younger children did, we were hushed. She became a romantic, tragic figure in my imagination. What I didn’t realize at that young age what a pull blood has for blood, how it calls out through the ages and whispers to those who listen. You can hear things in the woods you can’t hear on a city street.

All I ever wanted to was to live true to my heritage, that is to say, actually on wheels full-time. So naturally when a crisis came along, without any further ado, I started out on the road in Texas, in 1992, as a single mother of four in an old purple Cadillac with two white wolves for protection.

Nine months later, Greg and I met. Love at first sight, but we married on the condition he would join my lifestyle. We continued to live a truly alternative lifestyle: primitive camping in tents, two or three weeks at a time in the National Forests from Florida to the Ozarks. Followed by a weekend in a motel, with pool and cable TV, then we would be off to explore the next National Forest region. We could have filmed a National Geographic documentary if we'd have had the time or inclination.

In 1996, for the birth of our son, Merlin, my birthing gift was a 1979 Bluebird school bus. Which is how we came from a tiny bayou in Louisiana, to be travelling up Highway 1, Malibu to Seattle, planning our quiet wedding in Golden Gate Park, a wedding that the police stopped at the altar (which was just a tree at Hippie Hill) because we lived in the schoolbus and the homeless weren't allowed to congregate in the park after dark. It was just past dusk. That night, November 14, 1997, under a full moon, in my hand-sewn black tulle wedding dress, I hysterically threw a gypsy curse on this place ~ and that it has trapped me here ever since.

In truth, that decade-and-a-half on San Francisco's Ocean Beach, although a prime piece of real estate in America's most costly city, and yes, beautiful in a lush, over-done way, but compared to the adventure we were on? Oh, it's been a sad, bitter little existence compared to the life we had before we arrived May 31, 1997, our anniversary co-incidentally.

When I was 7, my father took off time from work to take me to see a cave when we lived in Scotland. Still remember him leading me across the rope & wood bridge, telling me about king who was on the run for his life, who he claimed was our ancestor as our name is Robertson and our family’s DNA hails from a land that created the most famous guerrilla king in the world, who fought in the 1300’s, Robert the Bruce, Scotland’s anointed king who had to live on the run, battle after battle, for eight years before chasing the British out of his kingdom against all odds. I was thrilled my father was leading me into a cave, just that alone was enough, even the rushing river hundreds of feet below us was pee-in-my-pants terrifying.

Enthralled, I imagined this King Robert – maybe even my great-great-great-great-great-great grand sire - making his way across the thrilling river, then climbing in the snow up the side of the cliff. Once in the cave, my dad told me the full importance of this cave, probably right there sparking my deep lifelong though amateur scholarship of medieval history. Here, he said, Scotland – our ancestral land because our name is Robertson – Scotland was saved by a spider!

How could a country be saved by a spider? My father is a wonderful story teller and even 45 years later, I remember him in his glory that day, just the two of us in that cave, high above rushing water and that bridge waiting to be crossed, he made the world fall away with that story of a king sat shivering, cold, discouraged, until he noticed a spider on the roof of the cave.

All night long, as he watched for the approach of his enemies, whom he’d barely escaped, Robert the Bruce pondered the determination of that spider that couldn’t get a grip on the icy walls. Over and over, she failed to get the first strands of her web to stick. It matched how he felt, as he pondered the fate of his kingdom. He was particularly desolate, recently burdened by several of his close relatives’ brave deaths. He couldn’t understand why that spider didn’t give up. He certainly felt like doing it, knowing his beloved wife, Elizabeth (my middle name as my father interjected) had spent her eight years of war as prisoner of the king of England. Somewhere near dawn, the spider finally got her foundational strands to stick. She then wove her web and was soon eating breakfast. Robert the Bruce looked out over Scotland, whose people years before had anointed him as king of their country, no matter what England thought about it, and he decided if a spider could stick to her task, by God’s grace, then so could he. That spider saved him and he saved Scotland.

As my father was in the pipelining end of the oil business, our stays would start at the coast and work their way inland, and as I grew older and we stayed longer and longer and went further into the harshly beautiful Scottish countryside, I was immensely proud to have the same DNA as those who could survive such a place, fight for it and demand it back from England. Because we spent more time there (although also other places in Great Britain and Europe), I longed for our jobs by the Northern Sea and began to self-identify as Scottish more than American.

So it was an odd irony that the following incident was accompanied by the sound of Scottish bagpipes blasting at near-full volume on the man’s stereo. The encounter happened just before Easter this year. We were parked on the beach, I was just finishing my tea and nagging Merlin into another layer of sunscreen before he got into his wetsuit and we went out for his daily skim board session. Suddenly a white open-top jeep started to circle the bus at a high speed, the sound of Scottish bagpipes blaring (bagpipes, of all things). He slams on his brakes with obvious fury, stopping right at the front door. As soon as I open it, he bellows at me, I am sick of seeing you # @**% hippies on my beach. I was born here. All my family was born here. I want you off my # @**% beach. He had a shaved head and the vein stood out in his thick neck. I told him that there was a ten-year-old boy listening to him. He turned purple and screamed loud as he could, I hate all you # @**% hippies. Go back to Louisiana (our license plates are from Louisiana). I’ve got a 45 under my seat if you need any help understanding me.

I could smell the liquor on his breath all the way into the bus. I quickly closed the door to make myself less of a target. I’m not ashamed to say my knees were weak as I sank into the co-pilot’s seat and watched him speed out of the parking lot, almost colliding with an S.U.V. Merlin came with the cell phone in his hand saying, Mama, that guy was crazy, call the police! I look into his eyes and wonder if he will understand what I am about to do. All I can think of is how much this child has seen of the underhanded prejudice that people so freely unload on someone they perceive being of a lower-standing. No, I reply, taking the phone and slipping it into my boot in case I ended up needing it after all, The only one for us is God. He’ll send angels to take care of all these haters. You know that. You’ve been seeing it your entire life. Merlin is a natural child who has adored God since he could walk & talk, who has always had His praise on his lips, a child who near-daily brings his father one of the children’s Bibles for him to be read to. We prayed and then went about our day.

A few days later, as we walked to the 7-11 to get ice cream, Merlin & I were stopped by the local beat cop on his bike. A very nice and pleasant officer. He tells me how he know the children from the Sunset Youth Center where they like to hang out and go on the Internet and be within a group of teenagers in a safe haven that plays music unbelievably loud and has regulation pool tables.

I replied that they love the place and it was actually the reason we stayed in the Sunset neighborhood, even though the police kept telling us how the neighbors don’t want us here. Besides, I told him, my older boy is really happy in his 1st job as a bagger at the Ocean Beach Safeway. I’m not willing to move them to the Bayview like you police officers often suggest. Out there are gangs with guns, drugs, barbed wire & cement. Here the children not only have a nicer neighborhood, in terms of street crime, they have the beach, the park, the Youth Center, school, all their friends. He tells me effusively how great the kids are. Articulate. Intelligent. Very open and friendly, just really neat kids. His exact words. Yeah, I reply gingerly. I mean, excuse me, but he’s in a cop’s uniform. Sure he’s probably one of the back-up cops who stands off in the shadows feeling sorry for me when I cry in the middle of the night while his boss goes into my house because he can and there’s nothing I can do about it. No doubt he’s participated in the monster sweeps that clean up a whole neighborhood of people like me and my children.

All I care about is the family staying in a stable situation. My husband has advanced liver disease from Hep C and doesn’t need the stress. I admit my nerves were taut because it was only an hour before dark. He keeps going, oblivious to There’s nothing wrong, really, with living in a bus. I mean, obviously you’re doing something. I mean, Merlin is even home-schooled. Okay, I confess, he is home schooled BUT thru a supervising teacher of SFUSD. I mean, he keeps gushing, they are obviously thriving, look at them. Merlin is dribbling his basketball in circles around the cop on his bicycle.

Yeah, I mutter to myself, thinking of the regular home invasions they are subjected to, while having to listen to yet another bloody lecture delivered to their parents, barefooted out in the dark, damp fog. Merlin sometimes sees so much oppression. I don’t want him to feel unsafe (even though I know he does) but I do truly think it’s important that, occasionally, he sees some résistance. And really, more than anything else, for a split second, I looked into his eyes and saw that this cop was as open as he’d ever be and just maybe I could forever alter how this one participated in these Gestapo-like activities. Subversion at it’s best. I let him babble on, waiting until he turns a single sentence into ground zero. He did, saying, Really, if all the campers were like you and your husband, then it would be okay. I mean, you don’t even talk like the rest of the campers do. Oh I knew it would come. Ground Zero.

You’re certainly right on both counts, I said, if everyone else was like us, then this lifestyle would have been legitimized by a class action suit. It’s all very un-Constitutional of course you know that. In many ways, the anti-gypsy law is similar to the old Jim Crow laws in the deep South where I am from. Those laws were enforcing inferiority too.

Merlin has quit dribbling and is listening. But, I continue, still smiling, "think about it historically. Hitler hated the gypsy and did his level best to get rid of them. Even before that, the Roma – you know, the gypsy – was