I have been in remote areas without Internet or cell service for the past two days. Rather than try to catch up, I’ll continue to post a day at a time, lagging my actual travels.

My trip entails a delicate balance of being and doing, and we’ve been doing quite a lot over the last three days. We decide to take a rest day.

We spend the morning in the usual coffee shop. We enjoy this morning ritual. Hannah likes slow starts, and this is my time to write. I’m supposed to be relaxing, but I’m churning out words at a crazy rate. I’m normally a ruthless editor of my own work. I whittle successive drafts down to sparse, pure essence of my original idea. My final drafts are usually half the length of the first. Now I’m barely editing at all—an experiment in letting go. Hannah tells me she prefers this style. It’s freer, looser, more approachable.

Afterwards, we seek out a deli where I have faint memories of eating the best sandwich of my life. I find a familiar photo on Yelp: the Full Belly Deli. We drive there and order sandwiches (the sandwich is the Dirka Dirka on jalapeno cheddar bread, and yes, it’s still good). Our plan is to find a quiet lakeside, eat our lunch, and spend the afternoon reading and talking.

As we head out to the van, I freeze. Something is wrong. Liquid is dripping out the bottom.

Plumbing problems are one of my triggers. The original wound came one night in Jordan, when on a whim I decided to fix a dripping cap in my radiating heater. I rotated it a quarter turn, righty-tighty. The slow drip turned into a rapid drip. Oh no! Was it threaded backwards? Was this a Jordanian thing? I turned the valve a quarter turn back to the left. The drip turned into a steady stream. Then the whole thing came apart in my hands, and water gushed across the marble floor of my fifth-floor apartment. It was late at night, in a foreign country. I had no idea how to find a plumber.

My wife and I raced to find every pot in the apartment. We rotated pots under the gushing water, while I made frantic phone calls in babbling, broken Arabic to our building manager.

A plumber eventually arrived. He worked quickly and deftly. In minutes, he’d fixed everything. He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants.

“I spent several years working with the Americans in Iraq,” he seethed. “You Americans think you can fix everything.”

According to the Enneagram, my greatest fear is being “being useless, helpless, or incapable.” Nothing does this more than plumbing.

On another occasion, I cracked a toilet tank while making an easy ten-minute replacement of toilet hardware. We had to replace the entire toilet.

Recently, compounding problems under my kitchen sink threw me into an abyss of rumination. I knew I should be able to fix this myself, but all I could think of was that day in Jordan, turning the cap the correct direction and watching a slow drip explode into a midnight crisis. It upended the orderly rules of the world, reversed logic. I was in a maze-like world where cause no longer matched effect. If I couldn’t trust myself tighten a cap, how could I fix anything?

I called a plumber. He charged $250 to tell me that he could fix it next week for $1200. Even I have my limits. I threw the plumber out (nicely) and started watching YouTube. A week-long saga ensued, with multiple Home Depot runs to buy armfuls of fittings I didn’t quite understand, and later putty, trying to make mismatched parts fit without dripping. Turning my curbside water off and on—what I thought was a sensible precaution—caused hammering that blew an underground valve and turned my front yard into a marsh.

And now this: my van, my escape pod, my portal into mountain life.

Plumbing has followed me here.

A frenzy of troubleshooting ensues. I call my dad. I’m 44 years old, but dad still knows everything. I send him photos and videos. A cap is leaking under the the vehicle, below the shower. Back in the van, I find half an inch of water pooled in the bathroom. That’s frightening, indicative of a more serious problem. Where is the water coming from? We run some experiments and conclude the toilet is leaking, although we’re not sure if it’s the fresh water supply or the outflow.

My calm, cool persona cracks. I fall into the pit of self-loathing. I didn’t come out here for plumbing. I hate vans. I hate travel. I want to be in a tent—a fantasy of escape, nested like a stacking doll within the escape fantasy I’m already living.

My dad thinks I can fix this. I’d rather pay someone than spend an afternoon dealing with this, but the nearest RV servicer I can find is 30 miles away. This is supposed to be our day.

“Let’s take a break,” Hannah says.

We make a stressful drive north on Highway 89, deep into Tahoe National Forest, away from RV service shops and from cell reception. We spend twenty minutes trying to find a quiet lakeside spot along Prosser Reservoir, but can’t public access. We return to the highway and keep driving, but no spot looks appealing. My phone indicates that we’ll cross the Little Truckee River in seven miles. I’m not comfortable driving that far into the forest with a malfunctioning van, but we do it anyway. My last bar of cell phone service vanishes.

We finally cross the river, and the spot is indeed heavenly: a convenient gravel turnoff, with secluded copses of trees along the banks of a shallow, babbling river. We set up camp chairs in the shade and eat our sandwiches. I listen to the silence. Gradually, the dark emotions drain away.

We run a few more experiments. The leak seems minor, it isn’t continuous, and it only manifests when the van is parked at certain angles. We can probably live with it. We’ll stay here for the night, broken plumbing and all.

A delightful afternoon ensues. Time slows down. I plow through another pages of Macfarlane. Hannah alternates between Love & Will and climber Beth Rodden’s new memoir, about which I will write soon. We have leisurely conversations. The goodness of the day washes over me.

A phrase keeps surfacing in my mind: the earned life. It’s the title of a book by Marshall Goldsmith.

The earned life. I want life to be easy. I’m continually searching for ways to simplify, to eliminate complexities, to carve out time and space to live in a state of permanent fulfillment. It will never be that easy. Life never ceases presenting challenges, twists, and turns. There will always be plumbing.

A well-lived life has to be continually earned, over and over again, moment by moment.

As the sun goes down and Hannah and I button up the van for the night, I feel content. We have earned this afternoon together.