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@@ -70,7 +70,7 @@ It was a monumental trip, months on the road, but eventually the money ran out. One day that was no longer enough. I got rid of the house. I got a plane ticket. I was gone for over a year. The money ran out. I came back. I did all the things they said I should do. Most of them turned out to be empty and false. I got a family, but we had too much baggage. I began to plot an escape something that would get my family on the road as well. I began to study nomads, to wonder not why they crossed the ice sheets, but how. The practical details. Moving through the world with a family is different than doing it alone. How did nomads do it, where did they go, how did they got there and how could those strategies might be applied to modern America? I settled on the idea of a mobile home, an RV or van. I could never afford an RV, it would take years to save the money to buy one. I turned to used used RVs, but RVs turn out to be poorly made and fall apart quickly. Reasoning that things used to be made much better than they are now, I added the word vintage to my research. That is when I came across the thing that would change everything. I stumbled upon the Dodge Travco. -## Chapter 1 +## Soul Power "What you call home, your country, the place where you come from, you're probably not going to describe a house. You may describe a tree, the weather, the lighting, the food, maybe the music, not a house." - Takis Yalelis, Greek Architect @@ -82,51 +82,78 @@ The engine makes a guttural roar every time I press down on the gas pedal. It's After looking it over for about twenty minutes, I pulled out a wad of cash, handed it to the now previous owner and it was mine. -I was now the proud, if clueless, owner of a 27-foot-long bright blue fiberglass tube with the swept back windows and curved lines that make it look like something straight out of a future that never happened. I had no idea what I was doing and no idea how I was going to do it. I knew restoring a vintage motorhome would be a big project, but I did not anticipate that it would change my life forever. All I knew was I was ready to go. +I was now the proud, if clueless, owner of a 27-foot-long bright blue fiberglass tube with swept back windows and curved lines that make it look like something straight out of a future that never happened. I had no idea what I was doing and no idea how I was going to do it. I knew restoring a vintage motorhome would be a big project, but I did not anticipate that it would change my life forever. All I knew was I was ready to go. -It had been sitting for two years before I showed up to rescue it from backyard irrelevance. I should have perhaps been a little more conservative in my faith in it, but I wasn't. The Travco would gradually cure my arrogance, but my confidence was total in the beginning. As it should be. Whatever hand wringing I'd do later in the diner, on the day it arrived in my life I had no doubts. +It had been sitting for two years before I showed up to rescue it from backyard irrelevance. I should have perhaps been a little more conservative in my faith in it, but I wasn't. The Travco would gradually cure my arrogance, but my confidence was total in the beginning. As it should be. Whatever hand wringing I'd do two years later in the diner, on the day it arrived in my life I had no doubts. I fired it up, pointed it downhill, and we were on our way. -The first few corners are nerve-wracking, the kind of white knuckled terror-inducing driving I haven't done since the very first time I sat down behind the wheel. Or the time in Thailand that I claimed I could ride a motorcycle when I actually had no clue. Or the time I said I could climb a 5.9 crack up the side of sheer slab of granite in California's San Jacinto mountains despite never having been on a roped climb in my life. +The first few corners are nerve-wracking, the kind of white knuckled terror-inducing driving I haven't done since the very first time I sat down behind the wheel. Or the time in Thailand that I claimed I could ride a motorcycle when I actually had no clue. Or the time I said I could climb a 5.9 crack up the side of a sheer slab of granite in California's San Jacinto mountains despite never having been on a roped climb in my life. Hmm. The prudent man would have done some sort of test drive I suppose. But screw it, let's go. -It's not until I get out of the previous owner's driveway (which sloped uphill relative to where the bus was parked) and turned onto the main street, which headed sharply downhill, that it occurs to me I never tested the brakes. There's one big hairpin turn at the bottom of the hill that I noted on the way up and it's the main thing that has my palms sweating. If I miss it I'll fly off the road, plunge through some Kudzu and, I think, crash into the small university offices that make up most of the sum total economy of Mars Hill, North Carolina, a college town I'd first heard of just three days ago. +It's not until I get out of the previous owner's driveway (which sloped uphill relative to where the bus was parked) and turn onto the main street, which heads sharply downhill, that it occurs to me I never tested the brakes. There's one big hairpin turn at the bottom of the hill that I noted on the way up and it's the main thing that has my palms sweating. If I miss it I'll fly off the road, plunge through some Kudzu and, I think, crash into the small university offices that make up most of the sum total economy of Mars Hill, North Carolina, a college town I'd first heard of just three days ago. I don't want to disrupt the quiet world of of Mars Hill, so I give the brakes a little push and... nothing happens. Oh shit. Then I do what I think comes naturally to anyone who grew up in the days before disc brakes, I panic and start frantically pumping the brake pedal. The second pump has a bit more tension in it and by the third she's responding, slowing slightly, and I'm well on my way to reabsorbing the massive dose of adrenaline that flooded my brain in that first split second I pushed and felt nothing. -The big hairpin turn turns out to be nothing. I pump the brakes a bit, take it nice and slow and slice around the corner like it's not even there. After that the road straightens out as it heads through downtown Mars Hill. +The big hairpin turn turns out to be nothing. I pump the brakes a bit, take it nice and slow and slice around the corner like it's not even there. After that the road straightens out as it heads through downtown Mars Hill. At the first stop light I pull up close enough to the car in front of me that the entire facade of the Travco is visible in the back window. I start laughing because it is quite simply the coolest thing I've ever seen. -At the first stop light I pull up close enough to the car in front of me that the entire facade of the Travco is visible in the back window. I start laughing because it is quite simply the coolest thing I've ever seen. Over the course of the next 18,000 or so miles this will happen over and over again whenever I stop and catch a glimpse of this thing in some window or mirror. It's that thing about the Travco that captivates, delights. I am quit confident that the Spanish poet Lorca, would say the Travco *tener duende*. +Over the course of the next 18,000 or so miles this will happen over and over again whenever I stop and catch a glimpse of this thing in some window or mirror. There's something about the Travco that captivates, delights. I am quit confident that the Spanish poet Lorca, would say the Travco *tener duende*. -The Spanish word Duende is mostly untranslatable, though English dictionaries try with phrases like "a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity". I think it's that last word that matters. To have Duende a thing, a work of art like the Travco, must have come from somewhere, whoever made it must have reached deep into those vast uncharted, unchartable spaces that we cannot name, but recognize. You cannot fake a journey to these places. Everyone recognizes a fake. You cannot fake duende. +The Spanish word Duende is mostly untranslatable. Literally it means devil, which hints at it's darker nature, but really it has everything to do with process and little to do with product. English dictionaries try phrases like "a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity", and I think it's that last word that's perhaps most important to understand. To have Duende a thing, a work of art like the Travco, must have come from somewhere, whoever first imagined it and brought it into the world must have reached deep into those vast uncharted, unchartable spaces that we cannot name, but we recognize. You cannot fake a journey to these places, you must really go. Everyone recognizes a fake even if they cannot put their finger on what is wrong. You cannot fake duende. -Duende what gives you chills when you hear Beethoven's ninth symphony, what makes you smile when tk or cry standing in front of a painting. I think the closest we have in English is the word soul. Not soul as in religion, but as in James Brown. Soul as something that is becoming, not something become. Soul is not out there or in you, it’s the place where you meet the out there. +Lorca, who took the word from the Andalusian's, who at the time used it mainly for music and dance, particularly flamenco, writes, "duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: 'The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it's of the most ancient culture of immediate creation." -Some times duende is very individual, a personal encounter with something at the right moment, where everything come together at once. Sometimes the duende is broader, affecting us all to whatever degree we're capable of feeling. With the Travco it seems to happen to just about everyone. On the way from Mars Hill back to Athens Ga, where we were living at the time we purchased the bus, I got 180 miles of smiles, waves, thumbs up, and cheering fists raised. +I think American has a word that works quite well for duende, though it is saddled with other potential meanings as well -- soul. Not soul as in religion, soul as in James Brown. If you have a record player, go get a vinyl copy of *Funk Power* and good set of headphones. Turn off all the lights and lie down. Turn the volume to 11. The twelve minute rendition of Soul Power on that record is still probably the hardest, most mind bending funk music I've ever heard and if it doesn't left your body off the ground in some fashion, lying there in the dark, then I cannot help you. This is soul, both literally and figuratively. Soul as something is becoming, not something become. Soul is not out there or in you, it’s the place where you meet the out there and come alive, truly alive. -The first time I stop, at a rest area on I-85, a man is up at the window asking if he can take a picture before I've even taken off my seatbelt. "What is this thing," he asks excitedly, "it's the coolest thing I've ever seen". This will happen hundreds of times more over the years and eventually I realized no one really wants me to tell them what it is, the name doesn't matter, it simply exists and people want to acknowledge that it exists. +Soul, or duende, is what gives you chills when you hear Beethoven's ninth symphony or cry standing in front of a painting. -The Travco cuts across some normally pretty rigid race, age, class and social lines in America. I get smiles and waves from the kids lounging on skateboards, smoking cigarettes behind a gas station, a well dressed middle age couple coming out of an antique store in Fletcher, NC, an old man walking through Anderson, SC tips a baseball cap to me, and driving though the predominently black neighborhoods of tk everyone I see looking my way is smiling and waving. I may be cheating a little, this is the south after all, we really are friendly, but with a couple of notable exceptions, the Travco is remarked upon, loved and irresistibly draws people in across the country. +George Frazier, an American Journalist of the 1960s who became obsessed with Lorca's idea of duende wrote, "it was what Ted Williams had even when striking out, but Stan Musial lacked when hitting a home run." Sox will fans understand that. -Pulling into Athens I stop at a light downtown and everyone waves. A man making a left comes around the corner and I watch his eyes widen as he takes in the Dodge grill and then he breaks into a smile and starts laughing. I completely relate to him. +"Seeking the duende," writes Lorca, "there is neither map nor discipline. We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand." That last bit perfectly captures the strangely, seemingly unnecessarily, curved windows of the Travco from 1966 to 1970, the windows that don't just randomly curve, but curve because they must curve, because their soul demands they curve. When the curved windows of the Travco die in the 1970s, quite a lot of the soul of the Travco dies with them. -Usually wanting is better than having. We call this buyers remorse, but it's basic evolutionary biology -- wanting, that is, imagining having, releases more dopamine than having. Those of us with all those D4 receptors around have dopamine issues to begin with so perhaps we feel this more acutely than most. But even without extra D4 you have all this dopamine associated with the thing you want, but then when you actually get the thing, no more dopamine. And you experience what we call buyer's remorse. +Some times duende is very individual, a personal encounter with something at the right moment, where everything comes together just so. Sometimes the experience of duende is broader, affecting us all to whatever degree we're capable of feeling. With the Travco it seems to happen to most everyone. On that first drive, from Mars Hill back to Athens Ga, where we were living at the time, it seemed like 180 miles of smiles, waves, thumbs up, and cheering fists raised. -Unless the thing is a Travco. I get a huge hit of dopamine every time I see it. To this day I still smile every time I come around the corner and it's there. Yesterday my wife and I sat on a picnic table where we were camped just staring at it and giggling like children. +The first time I stopped, at a rest area on I-85, a man was up at the driver's window asking if he could take a picture before I'd even taken off my seatbelt. "What is this thing," he asked excitedly, "it's the coolest thing I've ever seen". This will happen hundreds of times more over the years and eventually I realized no one really wants me to tell them what it is, the name doesn't matter, it simply exists and people want to acknowledge that it exists. -### The Big Blue Bus +Love for the Travco cuts across some normally pretty rigid race, age, class and social lines in America. I get smiles and waves from the kids lounging on skateboards, smoking cigarettes behind a gas station, a well dressed middle age couple coming out of an antique store in Fletcher, NC, an old man walking through Anderson, SC tips a baseball cap to me, and driving though the predominantly black neighborhoods north of Athens everyone I see looking my way is smiling and waving. Pulling into Athens I stop at a light downtown and everyone waves. A man making a left comes around the corner and I watch his eyes widen as he takes in the Dodge grill and then he breaks into a smile and starts laughing. I completely relate to him. -It became the big blue bus the minute our kids saw it. None of us remember who gave it that name, but it stuck, for us at least. +I may be cheating a little, this is the south after all, we really are friendly, but with a couple of notable exceptions in our travels, the Travco is remarked upon, loved and irresistibly draws people in, all across the United States. -About three months before that first drive my wife and I were in Florida, staying at a friend's beach house. Our twin daughters were two, we had a boy on the way. I was sitting on the porch of the house, watching a shrimping boat motor slowly from one side of the horizen to the other when my wife came walking back up from the beach in front of us. "Okay," she said. "I could live like this." +The first people it drew in though, was us. -Couldn't we all, I thought? Except for the part where we have to pay for it for more than a week. My wife has over the years adopted my habit of continuing conversations hours or even days later without any reference to the earlier conversation, just dropping the answer to a question from two days ago on her way inside to shower and get ready for dinner. It took me a minute to remember that earlier conversation in which I'd said we should try living on the road full time. +Some people have clever names for their Travcos, we do not. Ours is simply "the big blue bus", a name it got the minute our kids saw it. It was so far out of their experience of vehicles up to that point that the only thing to compare it to was one of the city buses they loved to ride. None of us remember who gave it that name, but it stuck, though admittedly we often shorten it to just "the bus". -We had a house, suburbs, kids, cars, stuff, but we'd decided some time ago that this life, it's not for us. It could have been that we'd had one too many beers, but we convinced ourselves we should go somewhere, do something. What was unclear, but something. We'd been to Nicaragua, we liked it, we decided to look into going back. A friend of ours was down there at the time, she seemed to love it. Our twin daughters were two, we had a boy due to arrive in a few weeks. We decided, we'll stay put until he's walking, then we'll go. It was a plan anyway. We like plans, we just never follow them. +Usually wanting is better than having. We call this buyers remorse, but it's basic evolutionary biology -- wanting, that is, imagining having, releases more dopamine than having. -I had a nagging thought at the back of my head from the beginning, the thought was America. +Those of us with all those D4 receptors around have dopamine issues to begin with so perhaps we feel this more acutely than most. But even without extra D4, you have all this dopamine associated with the thing you want, but then when you actually get the thing, no more dopamine. And you experience what we call buyer's remorse and find yourself craving something new that you don't yet have. + +Unless the thing in question is a Travco. I get a huge hit of dopamine every time I see it. To this day I still smile every time I come around the corner and it's there. Yesterday my wife and I sat on a picnic table where we were camped just staring at it and giggling like children. I try to maintain a certain detachment from objects, to not become to invested in things, but the Travco makes that nearly impossible. + +### I could live like this + + +About three months before that first drive I was sitting on the raised porch of a Florida beach house, watching a shrimping boat motor lazily from one side of the horizon to the other. It wobbled from side to side, long thin booms dipping toward the water and then pulling up and away, toward the sun. It was our friend's house, we'd rented it for a week. Our twin daughters were napping in the house behind me, my pregnant wife enjoying some alone time on the beach. I saw her stand and pick up her towel, shimmering through waves of Florida humidity. + +I watched her walk up from the beach on the thin spit of sand that split the dunes in front of the house, sea oats towering on both sides. She crossed the road and stepped gingerly over the sharp and blinding-white oyster shells of the driveway, before climbing the stairs to the porch where I sat. She paused for a moment in front of me, blocking the sun, and said "Okay, I could live like this." And then she disappeared inside the house. + +Couldn't we all? I thought. Except for the part where we have to pay for it for more than a week. + +I swirled the warm yellow beer in bottom of my bottom and watched it foam. Then it hit me that she wasn't talking about the beach house we'd never be able to afford. + +She was answering a question I'd asked two days ago. Over the years my wife has adopted my habit of continuing conversations hours or even days later without any reference to the earlier conversation, just dropping the answer to a question from two days ago on her way inside to shower and get ready for dinner. I never realized how jarring this habit of mine was until it started being done to me, which I suspect was part of the plan. It took me a minute to remember the earlier conversation in which I'd said we should try living on the road full time. + +Okay, I could live like this. Without that. That for this. This without that. Is that possible with all this? + +We had a house, suburbs, kids, cars, stuff. That stuff. We'd decided some time ago that that, it wasn't for us. That life felt like costume we'd tried on. It was fun for a while, but now we were ready to take it off. Set that aside, move on. Try something new. + +It could have been that we'd had one too many beers, but we convinced ourselves we should go somewhere else, do something else... anything really. What we should do was unclear, but something other than that. + +This. I could live like this? This out there? This ocean in front of me suddenly seemed bigger, seemed like it was pulling me out into it, over the horizon toward something I couldn't see, but was there. What was over there? Somewhere the Yucatan, then beyond that Nicaragua, where we'd been for a month a few years before. We'd liked it, so we had decided to look into going back. A friend of ours was living down there at the time, she seemed to love it, and her already being there would make it a little easier, or so we figured. Our twin daughters were two, we had a boy due to arrive in a few weeks. We decided, we'll stay put until he's walking on his own, then we'll go. It was a plan. We like plans. We never follow them, but we like to make them. + +I had a nagging doubt about this plan from the beginning though, there was a voice in the back of my head telling me not to go so quickly. What is kept saying was, "What about America?" + +In 2014 when we were making plans It's not a perfect, in fact it has a lot of problems, but I've traveled enough to know that I am American. The least American American, as my Irish friend Keith once said, but American nonetheless. And something about that, somewhere in that, I felt the need to show my kids the country that shaped me, even if it might not end up shaping them. @@ -184,33 +211,10 @@ It helps to reinforce this lesson when you home breaks down and leaves you sitti But I can't, it isn't me. And so it goes. - -## Chapter on Building home - -Quote from https://faircompanies.com/videos/meden-agan-small-island-getaway-seeks-old-greek-simplicity/ - -To really live this way you have to strip things back, not just reducing what you have, but stripping back your definitions of what it means to live on this planet, how do you want to do that? What you want out of a home? You have to question everything all the way back to the beginning -- what is a home? - -I ran across an interview with the Greek architect Takis Yalelis many years after I had been thinking about these things that nicely summarizes the idea: - -"home is your surroundings," says Yalelis, "it's not a house, it doesn't mean that it has four walls and a door and window and air conditioning and all that. It's where you live." For most of human existence how you lived, what you called home, was dictated by the natural world -- the building materials you could obtain, what you needed shelter from (cold? heat? rain? snow? etc) and then within those limits people expressed themselves. We no longer express ourselves through our homes and I think that's emblematic of so many of our problems, we have trouble expressing ourselves in so many places because we don't have the opportunity to do it in so many others. - -"Four walls makes a shelter," continues Yalelis, "and then you start making choices about that shelter, whether you want to enter and exit, do you want to stay in there forever, whether you want to get rained in, whether you want to have a view of the outside and what kind of view and why." - -Until I started working on the bus I had never made any real choices about my homes. I had rented what I could afford, purchased what seemed like a good investment (it was) and was reasonably nice, but I had never sat down and though about how I wanted to enter and exit my home (through a door?), but then when I started to think about these things I realized that all these choices I had not made, had consequences. To pick a very simple example, I have always had solid doors with very little, if any, window to the outside world. That has a set of consequences and affects how I'm going to view the world. If I had a glass door, that would have a different set of consequences and so on. - -Arguably even the bus is not really me expressing myself, at least on the outside. On the inside though we did get to express ourselves, my wife and I agonized over quite a few details in the way that I've noticed fanatics tend to do. Two years into our life in the bus, I flew into Denver to meet with company that had started to build computers in Denver. Yes, computers, built by had, in the United States. Their story comes later in this book, but as I sat at the initial meeting listening to the owner of the company talk about how they had spent years designing these computer cases, agonizing over the way the power button clicked, how the wood veneer fit into the metal and all the other details they sweated, I recognized that same fanaticism Corrinne and I had when we designed the bus. Once you start to realize that you can express yourself through the things you create, that you are in fact expressing yourself this way all the time, but once you take charge of that, once you start to bend it to your will, to express your will through the things you make you have make sure you get every detail right. - -That doesn't mean you hve to get every detail right the first time. In fact you can't. Expecially if you're building a home,. You hve to first build it the way you think you want it, then you have to go live in it and learn how you actually use it. I've never heard of anyone getting it right the first time. Even now, after years in the bus I still have a running list of improvements I want to make to make our home both more functional and better at expressing what I see when I close my eyes and imagine perfection, whateverthat might mean to me a that moment. - -That is perhaps the great lesson in building your home, realizing that your home is never done, it is not a thing, it is a process, and that process never ends. It helps to reinforce this lesson when you home breaks down and leaves you sitting at the side of the road, covered in transmission fuild and oil and grease, fumbling in the gravel for a wrench, seating and swearing and wondering what the hell is wrong with you that you can't just rent an apartment like everyone else and get on with the business of living. - -But I can't, it isn't me. And so it goes. +## Chapter 2 -Quote from https://faircompanies.com/videos/meden-agan-small-island-getaway-seeks-old-greek-simplicity/: -"What you call home, your country, the place where you come from, you're probably not going to describe a house. You may describe a tree, the weather, the lighting, the food, maybe the music." - Takis Yalelis ## Bibliography ### Prologue |