{"id":485,"date":"2013-07-07T20:25:18","date_gmt":"2013-07-07T20:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/?p=485"},"modified":"2020-07-02T07:46:26","modified_gmt":"2020-07-02T07:46:26","slug":"485","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/?p=485","title":{"rendered":"Happiness in a Yellow School Bus: Postmark Pink Mountain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"625\" height=\"352\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/vXsH1QB6IGE?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/IMG_6827.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"489\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/?attachment_id=489\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/IMG_6827.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"2816,2112\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;2.8&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;Canon DIGITAL IXUS 60&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;1372787475&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;5.8&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0.0015625&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"IMG_6827\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-medium-file=\"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/IMG_6827.jpg\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/IMG_6827.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-489\" src=\"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/IMG_6827.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_6827\" width=\"2816\" height=\"2112\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Leonard Nietupski was a farmer before he had the courage to live the life he dreamed of when he was a kid on a yellow school bus. He now lives in a yellow school bus in the shadow of Pink Mountain, British Columbia.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><em><strong>\u201cHappiness is a butterfly, which when pursued is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><strong><br \/>\nNathaniel Hawthorne<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">It&#8217;s been hours hitchhiking at the lonely 147 mile mark of the Alaska Highway in British Columbia and I spend my time watching Arctic butterflies flying by me on a hot light wind.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">To one side is an abandoned restaurant, Mom&#8217;s Kitchen, and a young chestnut quarter horse tied up outside grazing and flapping its tail against the flies.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">To the other side is Pink Mountain. which lights up a bright pink during the fireweed bloom.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I wondered how a dazzling pink mountain would appear in the thick green, forested eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I squinted to see jaw-dropping yellow and black wing patterns on the Arctic butterflies. I&#8217;m always struck by how butterflies whirl and flip with the wind yet are able to travel long distances.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">This area of the highway is known for big wildlife sightings but I keep seeing varieties of butterflies.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I&#8217;m hitchhiking from my Chicago traveling carnival to another in Anchorage, as part of my year spent working in carnivals. I&#8217;m living on carnival wages, thus the hitchhiking.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The Arctic butterflies made me think of my last driver on my San Francisco to New Jersey hitchhike. I had a lot of fun with Anthony Aardeme, a lepidopterologist getting his Ph.D at Princeton University.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I asked him what words or concepts I could use if I wanted to impress beautiful women that I&#8217;m a butterfly scientist.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">He studies Tiger Swallowtails so he told me to talk diapause, ZW sex determination, the Xerces Society and hunting with nets not guns.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Remember that fellas.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">He also said that when lepidopterologists get together to party they don&#8217;t:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">1-Substitute the F-bomb for the word \u201cvery\u201d in sentences as in \u201cHave a F***ing nice day.\u201d<br \/>\n2-Fight at the drop of the hat<br \/>\n3-Regularly get drunk and high.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I said maybe that&#8217;s why there aren&#8217;t many of his types in traveling carnivals.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">No fun.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Eccentric or just happy man<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=vXsH1QB6IGE&amp;feature=youtu.be\">http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=vXsH1QB6IGE&amp;feature=youtu.be<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Then a beat-up 1992 Ford F150 pick-up comes driving slowly toward me and I look in the front window but can only see a worn-out felt hat tipped back and those eyes blazing through the cracked windshield.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Those eyes belong to Leonard Nietupski. He doesn&#8217;t flash his look all the time, but sometimes his eyes open wide and remind me of a crazy gold miner living alone in the mountains.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">He took me down the road then veered off into the woods without first telling me that we were taking a side trip, to see him happy home.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The gravel access road in unmarked and at some point I thought this would be a great place to drive me if you wanted to kill me and leave me in the woods.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u201cHope not,\u201d I thought.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>To the Good Life<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Around a corner appeared a burned out corpse of a school bus.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Behind that, another 1979 yellow school bus with a white tent to the left.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Leonard doesn&#8217;t know where the ironic, charred bus came from but the yellow school bus is \u201cthe school bus couple&#8217;s\u201d home.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A one-eyed, black Belgian Shepard mix named Zena came leaping and hopping out of the bushes to greet us.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Leonard, 63, and wife Stephanie, 34, have been living in this bus since he bought it for $1,000 in 2003 and he couldn&#8217;t be prouder.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">She works in a convenience store on Pink Mountain and locals call them the \u201cschool bus couple,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">However, what strikes me is the remote, hidden, almost hermit-like setting.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The school bus is almost gutted, it still has a driver&#8217;s seat and one original seat row but the rest was built or installed by the couple.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">There&#8217;s a bed in back; kitchen counter and sink; dining table; a propane oven; a refrigerator; and an iron wood-burning stove with a chimney protruding from the bus roof.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">There&#8217;s a TV for videos, paperback novels in shelves and the dining table is the centerpiece of the room.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u201cMy wife likes to say, &#8216;There&#8217;s the bedroom. There&#8217;s the kitchen. There&#8217;s our living room.&#8217;\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Leonard is pointing out the bus window at the nearby forest and his tent, which also has a couch, a TV for videos and wood working tools. He likes to use <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ironcore.com.au\/categories.php?cat=6\">pyrography tools<\/a> to decorate wood, leather and other materials with his tools.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u201cWe get all sorts of wildlife walking through our living room \u2013 moose, deer, elk, bear, bobcats, links.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">There&#8217;s a separate woodworking shop at the back of the bus too, with heaving saws and other equipment. Leonard makes jewelry boxes to make hard currency, something the two of them don&#8217;t make much of. He sells them mostly online. <a href=\"https:\/\/adinasjewels.com\">visit adinasjewels.com today<\/a> if you want to help him out!<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Leonard hunts the mountains for big game and has a open pit grill on the cement slab where the bus is parked.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The bus is on the site of a former communications tower so the cement flooring keeps the bus level.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">They both collect \u201craspberries, strawberries, gooseberries and loganberries\u201d for breakfast, lunch and dinner.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Their expenses are small. They have no cell phone, television reception or real estate taxes. They barter for much of what they need.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u201cIf I can&#8217;t pay for it in cash,\u201d he said. \u201cI don&#8217;t need it. I don&#8217;t want it \u2026 When you barter and trade, you don&#8217;t use cash so there&#8217;s no taxes. When the government says to you you have to pay taxes on that, I can say, &#8216;Kiss my A**, I traded for that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Still, his isolation means, he said, \u201c80 percent of the time I don&#8217;t know what day of the week it is.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Leonard raised cows on a farm most of his adult life but says he knew he wanted to live on a bus \u201csince I was this tall,\u201d he said, indicating he was in grade school.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I imagined a grade school kid, shoulder to shoulder on the bus to school, thinking, \u201cSomeday I&#8217;m going to live on a bus.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The bus still works and they intend to pick-up and drive it to another spot somewhere in Canada in the coming years.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I asked if he won the lottery, what would he do with the money. Buy a big mansion? Travel in four-star hotels?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">He said he&#8217;d buy solar panels to help with the electricity, currently supplied by a gas-powered generator.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Still, Leonard didn&#8217;t laugh like a crazy prospector or say anything more outrageous than he loves living a minimalist lifestyle with his young wife.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Leonard is so proud of his school bus home and lifestyle he had to pick-up a random stranger beside the road and drive him to see how great life is to him.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">When it came time to get back to hitchhiking beside the road, his truck tire went flat so I helped change the tire.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">As we talked, he noticed I love to travel and writing is a hard way to make a living so he suggested that I too buy a school bus and live on the road. From forest to forest. From town to town.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Chrysalis to Mountain Butterfly<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Little did I know that a couple days later I&#8217;d be picked up in the Northern Rockies by Venessa Run and Robert \u201cShacky\u201d Schakelford, an ultra-marathoning and blogging couple living out of their RV.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">They have every intention of living out of vehicles for the rest of their foreseeable lives.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">They too had chucked their normal day jobs and were going to live life on the road, running ultra-marathons and blogging at local WiFi hotspots.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Here&#8217;s their blog about their day with a hitchhiker \u2013 me.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">http:\/\/vanessaruns.com\/2013\/07\/06\/our-second-hitchhiker\/<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Their dream lives suit them. Where others might see a lack of money, they can&#8217;t see why people live any other way.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">They aren&#8217;t homeless, their home is the road, the outdoors, wherever they drive next.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Leonard is living in his vehicle too but in some of the most beautiful mountain forests in the world and it&#8217;s a place he finds his happiness.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">&#8220;It&#8217;s the cheapest way of living you can find,&#8221; Leonard said. &#8220;If you don&#8217;t care for too many people around you. This is the way to live because you&#8217;ll be left alone. That&#8217;s what I like about it, it&#8217;s peaceful. Tranquil.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Leonard drove me to the steep grade of a nameless mountain, at a brake-check turn-off. I got my backpack and sleeping bag out, this was a good spot for hitchhiking, I thought.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u201cI like to live good,\u201d he said, as I exited.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">As he drove away happy in his old Ford, leaving a cloud of mountain dust, I saw another Arctic butterfly cross my path.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;<br \/>\n<em>This story is being filed from Fast Eddie&#8217;s in Tok, Alaska, on the border of the Yukon.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Leonard Nietupski was a farmer before he had the courage to live the life he dreamed of when he was a kid on a yellow school bus. He now lives in a yellow school bus in the shadow of Pink Mountain, British Columbia. \u201cHappiness is a butterfly, which when pursued is always just beyond your [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s4qqmC-485","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1969,"href":"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions\/1969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyeslikecarnivals.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}