## Prologue

I've been waiting for this night all my life, this is the last night. Tomorrow it's the road.

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.

I've thought this night, about what it would feel like a thousand times, but I never got it right. 

I imagined a deep feeling of freedom, an ever-expanding sense of the world and self where anything seemed possible. I imagined it would feel like coming home. I imagined I would want to spend it alone, which why I am sitting in this diner, well past midnight, watching rivulets of water trace patterns down the frosty window pane. I can hear the hiss of a broom on the sidewalk outside, the barman next door, cleaning up before locking the doors for the night.   

I have a few more hours before my sleeping family will miss me. I pull out my notebook and try to think of something profound to write, but nothing comes.

I don't feel anything. I've already left long ago. This is just my body catching up.

I had already been through the profound sense of panic and self doubt that always accompanies any big trip. Perhaps the most marvelous thing about travel is the feeling of detachment, you carve a space where you can think with a clarity you can seldom muster otherwise. You're in a world that's all your own and there's a feeling of absolute relaxation that comes from removal, from the distance between you and the world that renders commitment and obligation moot. It's the most wonderful feeling in the world, but right after it comes the panic. I imagine it's like floating in space, complete relaxation. Until you realize you're floating away into space. You never get something for nothing. 

I've done a few trips at this point in my life. None this big, but enough to expect the panic. There is no other way, you simply have to ride it out. If you ever do this you'll start feeling the panic rise as you get closer to departure. But don't panic about the panic. It's natural. You'll get through it. If it's your first time it helps to find someone to talk to about it. You can call me if you want.

The broom outside falls silent. The world has been swept away. A squeak escapes the kitchen. I look around. I'm alone in this place. The white tile floors echo. I can hear the cook and waiter talking in the alley out back, hear the silence of inhaled cigarettes, the bored wiling away a long, slow night shift.

Once I spent the night before I left on a big trip trying to find a rational reason for doing what I was doing. I never could. You'll chase your tail for years rationalizing it all. There's no rational reason to travel. Rational traveling is called fleeing. 

Don't try to rationalize it. Better to stay in your room, stare in the mirror and see if you can sense the personality behind the personality that's staring in the mirror. That personality might know why, might have a reason. It won't be a reason that helps stave off the panic, but if you can find that other personality it'll make the panic you have pale in comparison to the panic you feel once you pull that off. 

Perhaps it's because I was a nomad in the former life. You were too. We all were. Sedentary living is new. Even long after the advent of agriculture and cities, nomads were the rule. Staying in one place is evolutionarily unwise. Sedentary cultures have a smaller world and ruin it faster. Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, Chaco Canyon. Environmental collapse is easy when your environment never changes. Nomads move around, disperse their impact, avoiding strain on any one part of the system.  

From its earliest days America has been home to the greatest of nomads. The early mariners who likely arrived in skin boats, tracing their way along the Aleutian coastline, were probably the first, though little trace of them remains. The remants of fires in coastal caves, napped knives and other stone tools found alongside the bones of animals. We know they were here, can guess at how they might have come, what can't rationally explain is why.

Writer and fellow adventurer, Craig Childs has devoted a whole book to finding the answer. He calls it the *Atlas of a Lost World*. Childs wants to know why anyone who had a reasonably content life, as it seems safe to suppose an Ice Age era human probably had, with plenty of game around, the relative safety of the tribe, a family to provide for and so on, why would such a person leave that behind and set off into the unknown?

Childs never comes up with an answer that's very satisfying. Science offers the D4 dopamine receptor, a part of your brain that craves dopamine, which is often released by novel experiences. The further into North America you go, the more D4 receptors you find. "Among Native American genomes and those of their ancestors," writes Childs, "the presence of D4 is correlated with an individual’s distance from the land bridge." In South America the presence of D4 is more than double what you find in North. 

What we really can't know is if that extra D4 drove them further, or if perhaps they have that extra D4 because something else drove them further. Is D4 a cause or effect? Short of time travel, there's no way to know.

Perhaps it really is as simple as Sir Edmund Hillary's famous quip about why he wanted to climb mount Everest: "because it's there." 

Watching the water run down the window I try to come up with something more profound than Hillary, but I can't. Why sell our house, get rid of the vast majority of our possessions, and pack our three young children, along with what few possessions would fit, into the RV I'd restored in the past year and venture into the unknown? We aren't following mammoths, we aren't running from environmental pressures. Or are we? Has the pressure to be part of a complex culture that increasingly fails to meet the needs of the people within it a kind of environmental pressure? Is that why we're going/ Are we traveling or are we fleeing? Is the difference visible before the journey is over? 

To see the world as it is, perhaps that's why anyone goes. Simply to see. What's on the other side of the land bridge? What's on the other side of the ocean? What's on the other side of town? Scale doesn't seem to matter much.

I became conscious of how quite a diner is at 2 AM. The sound of my pen scratching on the pages of my notebook seemed an unnecessary disturbance. I ordered another cup of coffee to give the waiter something to do. I watch the steam trace arcs into the air. I should go home, but I don't know where that is just now. The vintage RV we're picking up from the mechanic tomorrow? The hotel room where my wife and children are asleep? The house we sold two days ago? The city I was born in? 

The truth is I have never really felt at home anywhere. Except when I was traveling. Moving. Becoming rather than become.

As a child I desperately wanted to be moving, all the time. I was assured by many, living and dead, that this was not normal. That I would need to settle down. That I would stop becoming and become. What was I running from, they asked, seconds before answering for me, myself. I was running from myself they told me. They said that it was me, that it was curse, that I could never escape this feeling of out-of-placeness because it was something inside me. I listened and observed these little loops of logic from a distance. I ignored them out of a stubbornness born of the nagging feeling that I was right about me. I wasn't sure at all about anyone else, but I was pretty sure about me and I found it odd that everyone else seemed so sure about me as well. 

I grew older. I began to move. I began to wander. I began to explore. First on foot. I walked three blocks to a friends house, then four to get mint chocolate chip ice cream from Sav-on, then five, all the way to the castaways, the wildest place I could get on foot. 

The world never felt so large, me never more a part of it, finally in it, finally free to be part of it than when I slipped under that faded gray pine fence, the cracked and splintered last outpost of civilization in my seven-year-old mind, and stepped out into the field of sagebrush and buckwheat as tall as me. Here I disappeared into in a network of BMX bike trails and discarded tires, watched brown and tan gopher snakes and blue throated fence lizards dart under my feet as I made my way down to the edge of the bluff where a cluster of Eucalyptus trees and ice plant held out against the ravages of erosion, trying to keep themselves and us from slipping in to marshy islands of cordgrass below. It was here we came to ride bikes, smoke our first cigarettes and drink our first warm, foamy beers stolen from dad's stash in the back of the garage. It was here, traveling, on the road, however short it might have been, that we first found freedom. 

I caught a taste of that freedom and never wanted anything else. I looked for more places to go in the suburbs where I grew up and, to my own surprise, found them. Across the street was a drainage ditch. I scaled the fence and followed it for miles, lost in my own private explorations of a world that was new, full of algal growth, darting song sparrows and looping, bouncing flight of Monarchs and Swallowtails. It was here that I first met a local who did not like my presence in his world, a mockingbird attacked me, going so far as to beat my head with its wings before I took off running. But that mockingbird was right, it was not my world. It was surrounded by but cut off from the everyday world I inhabited, hidden by a mere two feet of hedge, but hidden nonetheless. 

I discovered I wasn't trying to outrun myself, I wasn't running from myself, I was just running to feel wind rushing past me, to make sure the planet was still moving, to try to feel connected to it in some small way by reaching out to it, seeing all that it was offering, as much of it and as many of the people sharing it with me as I possibly could.

I found other places, Again and again I found freedom in moving, freedom in exploration. Everywhere I went there was something to discover, so long as I went.

It wasn't long before I convinced my parents to let me go farther. First down off the bluffs and into the marshes around the bay. Then to the other side of the bay. Then all the way to where the bay emptied into the sea, and at that point, the bonds were effectively loosed. I roamed where I liked. 

I went everywhere I could every time I could. Farther and farther afield, each trip longer than the last, until I noticed something -- they were right, I was not normal. But they were wrong as well, there was a place I felt at home, a place I felt I belonged, an observer within a system that otherwise seemed to have no use for me. I felt something when I was traveling that I have never felt anywhere else -- I felt at home. Which is to say I felt relaxed, at ease, like I belonged. It was a good feeling, I wanted more. Probably it released some dopamine in my brain. Whatever it was there was just something about the light, something about the smell, the touch the texture of the world... I began to chase that feeling.

I started ditching school to explore the bay in fourth grade. By high school I was leaving at lunch and not returning until the next day. Once at the age of eleven, my friend Josh and I managed to convince each of our parents that we were going to the other's house. Instead we stealthily slipped out with our surfboards on our bikes and met up half way between our houses, hid our bikes in the unused drainage ditch, the same one the mockingbird had driven me out of, and caught a local bus for San Clemente. I'll never forget the way I felt, my head pressed up against the window, watching the world slip by, but also watching the reflections of it in the window as we slipped down the coast, the feeling of being a part of and watching the reflections of the world at the same time. This is still my favorite part of life on the road, the way glass shows the world and you, together, riding along, slipping into the future as it becomes the present, the ever present future of boundless possibility. We were still twelve when we stepped off the bus a good 40 miles from home, but for my part, I was much, much older already. We spent the morning surfing, and out in the water, waiting on a wave was the first time I ever recall thinking, *I wonder if I could live like this forever?*.

The older I got the farther I went. I became (and remain) a huge fan of bus systems. The bus down the coast to surf offered me a way to get where I wanted and asked no questions. You got on, paid your fare and you could get off when you wanted. I became a consummate bus rider in a world obsessed with personal cars. I took the bus up the coast to see punk rock shows in Long Beach. I took it inland to hobby shops to buy model airplanes. I took it everywhere I could until enough of my friends had cars that I began to see a new way to extend my horizons even further. 

By senior year of high school I had all but dropped out, and spent as much time as I could zipping around the state. I thought nothing of throwing a couple cans of Dentimore Stew (a quick and easy travel meal I picked up from trips with my father), along with some Sterno to heat it, in a bag with a jacket and fresh pair of socks -- to this day I refuse to put on yesterday's socks. Douglas Adams and I part company in our packing lists, I've never needed a towel, that's what yesterday's t-shirt is for, but fresh socks are a necessity -- and heading out for a weekend trip of several hundred miles per day. I made day trips to San Francisco, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Death Valley, I didn't care when I got there, I didn't care when I left, as long as I was going and going and going.

As you might imagine this did not mix well with education. I did manage to graduate from high school and I even briefly went to college, partly for a girl, partly because I found a college at the edge of Los Angeles that was just far enough beyond the traffic that it made a good home base for weekend trips. Eventually though it turned out my girlfriend wanted to spend time with me, not with me on the road, and the advantage of missing traffic paled next to the horrors of the Inland Empire. I dropped out of college and -- what else? -- went traveling around the country with a friend of mine who was, if not perhaps quite as enthusiastic about travel, at least willing to tag along.

It was a monumental trip, months on the road, but eventually the money ran out. It always does. I moved back into a house and searched for ways around the vague but persistent despair that would overtake me starring at the plaster walls late a night. I took to sleeping on the couch below the window, cracking it open enough to feel the night wrap around me to the sound of tires hissing on wet pavement, the sound of someone going somewhere, the sound of the road taking me home. I lived for years with a bedroom I rarely entered, it was too permanent, too settled. I moved from one end of the country to another to another. As long as I slept on couches I felt free. 

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.

## 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

A screaming roar comes down the hill. It has probably happened before. But not for me. Nothing like this has ever happened for me before. Nothing I've ever done compares to now.

To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it's a 27 foot long fiberglass container full of magic and joy. I have no idea what it is about it, I've owned it for four years now, lived in it for over two, and I still can't put my finger on it, some objects transcend themselves. The Travco has that thing not one can put their finger on, but everyone feels it. 

The engine makes a guttural roar every time I press down on the gas pedal. It's an addictive sound. Not really a good one, but I didn't know that at the time, and it's satisfying anyway. It's the kind of roar that makes you say, screw it, let's go. And that was definitely what we wanted to do -- screw it, let's go.

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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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.

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."

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.

Soul, or duende, is what gives you chills when you hear Beethoven's ninth symphony or cry standing in front of a painting. 

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.

"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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

The first people it drew in though, was us. 

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".

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 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. 

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.

Two days later she was who found the Travco that was to become our home on the road.

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.

Which is a long way of saying that if it was build recently, I probably don't own it. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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. 

I never wanted to quit, in fact quitting or giving up on the goal of building a livable home out of it never entered my mind. I knew when I started that on the other side of this massive undertaking lay a totally different life that was going to be much better than the one we had before it, and I never considered not getting to it. There were times when it took an immense effort of will to keep going, and my blood sweat and tears are figuratively and very literally in the Big Blue Bus, but I never once thought of stopping.

I have, thus far in my life, found that there are very few things that you can't do given sufficient time and money with which to work on them, *provided you have the will to do them at all*. If you have that will you tend to find at least the time, and once you find the time you often find you don't need nearly so much money as you thought, though often you need much, much more time than you thought. 

You also need to know the right people. If you don't you'll need to seek them out. I knew nothing about electricity when I started, but one of my good friends was an electrician. I knew nothing about plumbing when I started, but I did know a plumber. 

Not everything was easy though. I knew nothing about engines and unfortunately I didn't know a good mechanic to teach me. I mainly ignored the engine in the beginning. Focus on what you can do, do it and when it's done move on to the next thing.

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." 

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 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. 

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 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 fluid and oil and grease, fumbling in the gravel for a wrench, sweating 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




## Bibliography
### Prologue
1) Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America, Craig Childs, New York : Pantheon, 2018.
2) Natural Behavior Polymorphism Due to a cGMP-Dependent Protein Kinase of Drosophila Science Vol 277, Issue 5327, August 1997
3) Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology David Sloan Wilson, 2006, co-edited with E. O. Wilson
### Ch 1
1) Takis Yalelis on homes comes from the video: https://faircompanies.com/videos/meden-agan-small-island-getaway-seeks-old-greek-simplicity/:

## Footnotes