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@@ -1,8 +1,8 @@ ## Prologue -I've been waiting for this night all my life, this is the last night. Tomorrow it's the road. +I've been waiting for this night all my life, this is the last night. -As of tomorrow my family, my wife, me and our three children live in a 26-foot-long 7-foot-wide psychedelic blue fiberglass jellybean of an RV built in 1969. +Tomorrow my wife, our three children and I will climb in a 26-foot-long, 7-foot-wide psychedelic blue fiberglass jellybean of an RV built in 1969 and head off into the wilds of the American road. I've thought this night, about what it would feel like a thousand times, but I never got it right. @@ -139,45 +139,31 @@ I watched her walk up from the beach on the thin spit of sand that split the dun 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. +I swirled the warm yellow beer in bottom of my bottle 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. There is nothing so American as the road trip. From those Ice Age explorers setting out from Siberia in their seal skin kayaks to 20th century American literature -- Jack London, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, and yes, Jack Kerouac -- there is nothing so American as setting out into the unknown. In many ways the road trip is America. America is an endless road, a becoming, not a thing become. -I decided we should get some kind of travel trailer and drive around the country for a few months, a year, some time anyway, and live on the road. My wife was, in the beginning, less convinced of this plan. Our original conversation ended without a real plan, just my idea floating out there. Until she came up off the beach that day and said, okay, I can live like this. +It was also a way to shelter the kids a little bit. If got some kind of travel trailer and drove around the country for a few months, a year, some time anyway, they could get used to traveling, but still have a familiar space to call home, something of their own. My wife was, in the beginning, less convinced of this plan. Our original conversation ended without a real plan, just my idea floating out there. And a picture of a Dodge Travco. -Two days later she was who found the Travco that was to become our home on the road. +Generally speaking, I don't like new things. American's worship of the new and shiny, the religion of progress you might say, is utterly lost on me. As far as I can tell most goods made since I was born have steady declined in quality to the point where the notion that goods used to be of a certain quality, used to be worth fixing, worth understanding, worth keeping around smacks of ignorance and outright foolishness. Which is a long way of saying that if it was build recently, I probably don't own it. -One symptom of my least American Americaness that my Irish friend pointed out to me is that, generally speaking, I don't like new things. American's worship of the new and shiny, the religion of progress you might say, is utterly lost on me. As far as I can tell most goods made since I was born have steady declined in quality to the point where the notion that goods used to be of a certain quality, used to be worth fixing, worth understanding, worth keeping around smacks of ignorance and outright foolishness. +At the time our car was a 1969 truck I'd inherited from my father. When not driving that I rode around on 1974 heavy-as-a-boulder Schwinn bike, typed a good number of words on a pre-war Underwood typewriter, and still lugged around a film Nikon. Before we had kids my wife and I used drive around the Georgia countryside hunting down out of the way "junk shops" looking for old things, things made of metal and hardwoods, things made with care, made with skill, made with pride. The way everything used to be made. -Which is a long way of saying that if it was build recently, I probably don't own it. +It wasn't that I particularly loved old things simply because they were old (that would be my wife), rather just that they were better made, accomplished the tasks I wanted to accomplish in a simpler way, and were easier to repair. I could crawl under the hood of my Ford and figure out what was going on. I opened the hood of my wife's minivan and was confronted by an inscrutable, sealed up sea of plastic. I wasn't about to try to live full time in a sea of plastic. -At the time our car was a 1969 truck I'd inherited from my father. When not driving that I rode around on 1974 heavy-as-a-boulder Schwinn bike, typed a good number of words on a pre-war Underwood typewriter, and still lugged around a film Nikon. It wasn't that I particularly loved old things simply because they were old, rather they were better made, the accomplished tasks in a simpler way and were easier to repair. I could crawl under the hood of my Ford and figure out what was going on. I opened the hood and my wife's minivan and was confronted by an inscrutable, sealed up sea of plastic. +Somewhere along way we lost that care, skill and pride. We let our culture take a turn, traded quality for quantity. We developed an insatiable need for stuff that could only be satisfied by cheap imitations of what we once had, now made of plastic and imported from overseas. And mind you it's not junk because it was imported from overseas, it'd be junk if we made it, but I don't think we'd make it. I see people making things in America and it isn't plastic junk. Whether its computers made in Denver, pipe organs made in Virginia, or a thousand other cottage industry efforts to reclaim the mantel of quality over quantity, when we put our hearts into it, America makes wonderful things. Things we need rather than things we want. We can get back to what we once had, but it isn't going to be easy. We've got some serious addictions to kick. I know that now, at the time I just thought the Travco had soul in a way not other RV did. -Before we had kids my wife and I used drive around the Georgia countryside hunting down out of the way "junk shops" looking for old things, things made of metal and hardwoods, things made with care, made with skill, made with pride. The way everything used to be made. +I knew from the beginning we weren't going to travel around the country in some plastic RV made yesterday and likely to fall apart tomorrow. I started to research vintage travel trailers. I learned the names of things I recognized from a childhood full of nights around the campfire in campgrounds throughout the west. I discovered Shastas. I learned about things with the most wonderful names, Silver Streaks, Spartans, Aristocrats, DeVilles, Scottys, Silver Queens. I was hooked, I wanted one. I bought one. I brought it home. I had buyer's remorse. The dopamine was no longer there. I sold it. I mostly gave up. Then one day I was searching for something else entirely when I came across my first Travco. People often name their Travcos, this one was called Myrtle. It was everything I wanted in an RV. Once I had the name Travco I plugged it in and everything else disappeared. There was only one. -Somewhere along way we lost that care, skill and pride. We let our culture take a turn, traded quality for quantity. We developed an insatiable need for stuff that could only be satisfied by cheap imitations of what we once had, now made of plastic and imported from overseas. And mind you it's not junk because it was imported from overseas, it'd be junk if we made it, but I don't think we'd make it. I see people making things in America and it isn't plastic junk. Whether its computers made in Denver or tk or a thousand other cottage industry efforts to reclaim the mantel of quality over quantity, when we put our hearts into it, America makes wonderful things. Things we need rather than things we want. We can get back to what we once had, but it isn't going to be easy. We've got some serious addictions to kick. +When my wife came up off the beach that day and said, okay, I could live like this, one the road in a Travco, we were dug in deep. We had a house in the suburbs, picket fence, kids, lawn mowers, cars, two week vacations, stuff. All that stuff. All that stuff stood between us and a Travco. We decided we would not rush. Our twin daughters were two, we had a boy due to arrive in a few months. We decided that night. 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 knew from the beginning we weren't going to travel around the country in some plastic RV made yesterday and likely to fall apart tomorrow. I started to research vintage travel trailers. I learned the names of things I recognized from a childhood full of nights around the campfire in campgrounds throughout the west. I discovered Shastas. I learned about things with the most wonderful names, Silver Streaks, Spartans, Aristocrats, DeVilles, Scottys, Silver Queens. I was hooked, I wanted one. I bought one. I brought it home. I had buyer's remorse. The dopamine was no longer there. I sold it. I mostly gave up. Then one day I was searching for something else entirely when I came across my first Travco. People often name their Travcos, this one was called Myrtle. It was everything I wanted in an RV. Once I had the name Travco I plugged it in and everything else disappeared. There was only one. +The problem is that there aren't many Travcos left in the world. I've been active in the Travco community for years and to this day I have only seen four others like ours -- blue and white. And for us, there is really only one color a Travco should be -- blue and white. Which is to say, the likelihood of finding a blue and white Travco just a couple days after deciding that yes you want do this, that you are ready to go, is slim to say the least. -The problem is that there aren't many Travcos left in the world. I've been active in the Travco community for years and to this day I have only seen four others like ours -- blue and white. And for us, there is really only one color a Travco should be, blue and white. Which is to say, the likelihood of finding a blue and white Travco just a couple days after deciding that yes you want do this, that you are ready to go, is slim to say the least. But that's what my wife manage to do. I still don't know how she found it, but a couple weeks later it was in our driveway. +But that's what my wife manage to do. Two days later she found the Travco that was to become our home on the road. I still don't know how she found it, but clearly it was meant to be. Not two couple weeks after we decided we wanted one it was sitting in our driveway. -It quickly became the neighborhood attraction. People gave directions based on it -- on the right you'll see a big blue bus thing, keep going another half a block and our house is on the left -- and, for the next eighteen months I spent gutting it and rebuilding it into something that was livable for a family of five, the parade of visitors never stopped. Everyone wanted to talk about it, whether it was to talk about how great the '60s were or how much better made things used to be, the Travco seemed to inspire something in nearly everyone. +That was when I slowly began to realize what I'd gotten myself into it. Suddenly two years did not feel like a long time, starring at the water damage and broken paneling and corroded wires and missing isulation and two years from now suddenly felt alarmingly soon. + +The Travco quickly became the neighborhood attraction. People gave directions based on it -- on the right you'll see a big blue bus thing, keep going another half a block and our house is on the left -- and, for the next eighteen months I spent gutting it and rebuilding it into something that was livable for a family of five, the parade of visitors never stopped. Everyone wanted to talk about it, whether it was to talk about how great the '60s were or how much better made things used to be, the Travco seemed to inspire something in nearly everyone. Lots of people asked what I was planning to do with it, which was the hardest question for me to answer. I didn't really know. All I had was vision in my head of what it would look like when it was done. This vision was, fortunately, enough to sustain me even when I ran out of time, money and self-confidence, which I did. @@ -191,9 +177,7 @@ Not everything was easy though. I knew nothing about engines and unfortunately I The practical part of building a home turns out to be rather easy, but to live on the road at all requires reconfiguring your life in significant ways. 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. 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." +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. @@ -201,9 +185,9 @@ For most of human existence how you lived, what you called home, was dictated by 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 hand, 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. +Corrinne and I spent a lot of time designing the bus. Once you start to realize that you can express yourself through the things you create, 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 have to get every detail right the first time though. In fact you can't. Especially if you're building a home. You have 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, whatever that might mean to me at that moment. +That doesn't mean you have to get every detail right the first time. In fact you can't. Especially if you're building a home. You have 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, whatever that might mean to me at 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. @@ -213,6 +197,9 @@ But I can't, it isn't me. And so it goes. ## Chapter 2 +"Travel is a returned to the simplicity of being a hunter-gatherer. + +"You need to find food, shelter, the sorting of bad omens from good, and the appreciation of the miracle of being alive. |