Scotty on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Thanksgiving Day, 2011

It was Thanksgiving.

I’d been hoping to reach New Orleans by mid-afternoon, ideally in time for an open-to-the-public turkey dinner at a neighborhood church — but we arrived too late in the day.

Turning off the highway near the Superdome, I pulled over in the dusk to consider Plan B — and realized I didn’t have a Plan B.

Not only was I sorely missing my family just then, I’d now missed my substitute soup-kitchen dinner as well. The least I could do, I decided, was mingle in a crowd. But where? Maybe I could just follow the flow of traffic. Maybe it would lead to someplace busy or interesting.

And guess what? It did.

About a mile down the street, in the heart of Downtown New Orleans, the traffic slowed to a standstill near a roadblock. People on the sidewalks were all walking in same direction, as if there was something there to do or see.  So I parked Harley in a space too small for a car (thank you, little motorcycle!) and grabbed my camera to join them.

Which is how I got to watch the last 15 minutes of the annual New Orleans Thanksgiving Day Parade – and caught a beaded necklace when someone on a parade float passed by and threw it into the crowd in my direction.

Striking up a conversation with another spectator, I learned that the restaurant and nightclub district in the fun-loving French Quarter was located just a few blocks away across the street. So that’s where Harley and I went next.

Parking next to a few other motorcycles just off Bourbon Street, I grabbed my camera and walked off down the street to take a few pictures. When I got back, a big, tattooed guy with a head scarf noticed me and said: “There’s someone looking for you.”

This sounded ominous, until he added: “He saw your Alaska license plate. He just wants to talk to you…. There he is. Hey, Scotty!…”

Then a smaller middle-aged man with grey hair and a black jacket walked over without any expression and gestured toward Harley.

“Is that you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He was standing next to an old Harley-Davidson Road King, loaded down with camping gear.

“And is that you?” I asked.

“It is,” he said.

Such are the polite formalities between strangers on the road.

Over the next 15 minutes we chatted about our travels and our gear.

“This is how I live,” Scotty said, gesturing at his bike. “I’ve been on the road for 18 years. I never stay in one place more than three months.”

It impressed him, I think, that I live in Alaska. He’d biked there once, partly on the ferry. He always heads north in the summer – to Oregon or Canada usually. In winters he turns around and searches out someplace south — like New Mexico or even “Deep Mexico” in Acapulco — where he can still sleep warmly under the stars.

I mentioned I’d been camping out, too, mostly in the West — but I’d found it much harder to do in the East, at least in the fall, when most campgrounds have closed for the season.

“You stay in campgrounds?” he said, sounding disappointed. “You don’t have to do that. There’s always somewhere you can sleep outside for free. Even here in New Orleans.”

Sometimes he sleeps next to a local cemetery, Scotty said. Right now he was camping under the Huey P. Long Bridge with no hassles at all.

“Well, you know,” I said, feeling a little defensive, “part of what you’re paying for in a campground is a chance to take a warm shower.”

“You know how to get a free shower, don’t you?”

No, I said. How?

“Do you really want to know?”

Yes, I said. I did.

And it donned on me about then that his story might be interesting, so I asked if he’d mind if I recorded him.

Nah, he didn’t mind, Scotty said.

“OK, you know those highway truck stops that have showers? When a trucker buys 50 gallons of fuel or more they give him a free shower ticket.  So all you have to do is ride your bike out to the fuel island, where they’re  fueling up — so the truckers can see your bike, so they know you’re not some kind of bum – and ask if any of  them has an extra shower ticket.”

Sometimes it’s even easier. Sometimes he’ll nonchalantly park his bike between the fuel islands and sit down with a cup of coffee, kind of indifferent to the truckers, Scotty said. And they’ll approach him just out of curiosity.

“It’s kind of important that they see the bike,” he said. “You know, sometimes these truck stops get these real losers hanging around. They get homeless out there, you know.”

Suddenly I had a dozen other questions I wanted to ask Scotty. How did he support himself on the road money-wise? What kind of work did he do? Did he have any family? And where exactly was this free campsite underneath the bridge?

I’ll never know the answers.

Because just about then, some kind of Bourbon Street flash mob thing got going, and it got too hard to hear. Then the dancers showed up — and the police on horseback — and Scotty’s attention got diverted.

So ended my conversation with the Road King.

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