“For the last two years, I’ve been on this road,” Roger Howell says, pausing his horse-drawn home along Butler’s Main Street just before the rain resumed Thursday afternoon. A lengthy trip is just one of the side effects of choosing to travel 5,000 miles at, give or take, 3 mph with little more than the clothes on your back and a border collie named Banjo. You also meet an awful lot of nice people, get a chance to clear your thoughts and make your peace. And your faith grows. “You cannot conquer all things, but you can make it through just about anything,” says the one time small-town police chief from Tennessee. Howell says he chose to shake off all his material possessions and take to the road in 2013, after receiving bad news from his doctor. “Agent orange,” he says. “My life was on the down hill, and I was told that if I didn’t change anything I had five weeks to live. So I changed everything.” Howell joined the military at age 17 to escape some family woes and community tension. And within just three years, he was in Vietnam and exposed to the notorious herbicide used by the U.S. military. “We knew we were exposed,” Howell says. “They just told us it wouldn’t hurt us.” In 1972, Howell left the military without ever having gotten so much as a scratch on him from conflict. Seven years later, he got shot in the face. A run-in with a drunk ended badly, says Howell who already was a divorced father of two by the time he was shot. Due to the injury he took a break from his job training horses for law enforcement agencies around Michigan. Then the city of Erin, population 1,319, asked him to take over the police department. He did that for 18 years, during that time raising his children and foster children accumulating cars and mortgages and motorcycles. He, at one point had 54 horses. And spent most of his time working to pay for it all. “I loved my job. But work, work, work ... never taking a vacation,” says Howell, who now passes out business cards identifying him as the “Hardtimes Riden” farrier. “We had motorcycles we never even got to ride.” Howell already was retired from the police department when he had his first heart attack. Then, there was another and the doctors put some stents in his heart. In 2013, his kidneys that began to fail and Howell was given the poor prognosis. “I quit,” he says. “I quit everything.” Howell travels city-to-city, relative-to-relative, south to north and back again, with Sunny, a male cross Arabian Percheron, and Dancer a female full-blooded Percheron. “I have no business driving a car. I’m on medications,” he explains of the transportation choice he’s taken through tornadoes, blizzards, a flood and even a parade or two. There’s some creature comforts in his wagon, including a cell phone and a ‘cowboy shower.” But mostly he just travels with his thoughts. In October, his wagon, which is adorned with the J.R.R. Tolkien quote, “Not all who wander are lost,” was hit by a tractor-trailer in North Carolina and he started fresh with new possessions. “I started this trip as a self pity thing but I wasn’t even 60 or 70 miles into it when I realized I got it pretty good,” Howell says. “There’s a lot of people out there who have it worse than me.”