path: root/book.txt

## Prologue

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 it 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 just transcend. The Travco has that thing not one can put their finger on, but everyone feel it. 

The engine makes a gutteral 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, but it's satisfying. It's the kind of roar that makes you say, screw it, let's go. 

After looking it over for about twenty minutes, I pulled out of 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, I did not anticipate that it would change my life forever in ways I could not have even conceived of on that first drive down the hill from where it had been sitting for two years before I showed up to rescue it from backyard irrelevance.

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 prudent man would have done some sort of test drive I suppose. Meh, screw that, let's go.

It's not until I get out of the previous owner's driveway (which was uphill) and turned onto the main street 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 of Mars Hill, north Carolina, a college town I'd only heard of 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 start frantically pumping the brake pedal. The second pump has a bit more tension in it and by the third she's responding to me, 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 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. 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*. 

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, must have come from somewhere, whoever had it must have reached deep within or far out into those vast uncharted, unchartable spaces that we cannot name, but recognize. You cannot fake a journey these places. Everyone recognized a fake. You cannot fake duende.

Duende what gives you chills when you hear Beethoven's ninth symphony, why 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.

Some times duende is very individual. Sometimes it's broader. 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, I get 180 miles of smiles, waves, thumbs up and cheering fists raised. 

The first time I stop, at a rest area on I85, 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, "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 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 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, it is the south after all, we really are friendly.

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.

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. So you have all this dopamine associated with the thing you want, but then when you actually get the thing, well, no more dopamine. 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 see it. Yesterday my wife and I stood sat on a picnic table where we were camped just staring at it and giggling like children.

tk


## The Mooring of Starting Out

About six months before that first drive my wife and I had one of those epiphanies of boredom that are common in America these days. We looked around and thought, is this it? We had a house, suburbs, kids, cars, stuff. My wife wanted something else. Somewhere else actually. This life, I don't think it's for us. We should go somewhere, do something. We'd been to Nicaragua, we like 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.

I had a nagging thought at the back of my head though, the thought was America. It's not 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 did not end up shaping them. And there is nothing so American as the road trip, Jack London, Henry Miller, John Stienbeck, and yes, Jack Kerouac. 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. 

One symptom of my least American Americaness is that I don't like new things. At the time my car was a 1969 truck I'd inherited from my father. tk tk tk exampels of loving old things, things made of metal, made with care, made with pride. We traded all that for a bunch of junk imported from overseas. And ming 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. It's computers from Denver or tk from tk form tk. and so on. When we put our hearts into it, America makes wonderful things. Things we need, not things we want. Fuck stuff.

I turned to the internet. As you do. I searched for vintage travel trailer or something of that sort. I found out about Shastas, I learned about airstreams, I learned about a lot of things like that and then one day, I don't remamber the specific terms I plugged in, but I came across my first Travco. People often name their Travcos, this one was called Myrtle. Once I had the name I plugged it in and, to put it cheaply, I fell in love. 

I also found the Bumfuzzles. 


## The Big Blue Bus

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. It also became the neighborhood attraction, which it would remain for the next eighteen months I spent gutting it, rewiring, replumbing, repaneling, and rebuilding it into something that was livable for a family of five.

How exactly I was going to do that I didn't really know. All I had was vision in my head of what it would look like when it was done. This was, fortunately, enough to sustain me even when I ran out of time, money and self confidence. I never wanted to quit, in fact quitting or giving up on 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 immense 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. It also helps 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.

There will no doubt be plenty of things you think you are absolutely no good at -- I can't learn a foreign language to save my life -- but the truth is, assuming you're of sound body and mind, the things you are not good at turn out to really be things you lack the will to do. We beat ourselves up about these things sometimes, at least I do. I spent years thinking I was somehow an idiot about languages, and I am, but not because I'm an idiot about languages, everyone is an idiot about languages, but because I lack the will to change that. 

This conversation requires that we define some terms though. Like will.

I will. That's the opposite of waiting. Will is action. Will is getting up off the couch for no reason and walking to the wall opposite you and touching it for no reason other than you willed your body to do it. You did not wait until you felt like it, until it was convenient, until it was right, until it was perfect, until you wanted to. You will it and it is done.

I used to wait for things to be right, to be perfect, to be easy. Slowly though I realized that waiting is a kind of will, it's just a lack of will. I know from experience that nothing good ever comes of waiting. The question is what happens between this realization and the point where you actually get off the couch and walk over to wall. Some of it is purely practical. We don't own a television, which means we don't spend our time watching it, which free up a trememdous amount of time in our lives. this is the single biggest, easiest thing you can do to reclaim your life and develop your will -- throw away your television.

The other practical way to get off the couch and over to the wall is to make a plan. It might be a terrible plan, it will probably be a terrible plan, mostly likely you will go do whatever it may be in a way that's nothing like the plan. The plan is irrelevant, but the planning is very important. There are only two ways to beat the fear you feel inside. And the thing stopping your will from making its way in the world is mainly fear. 

One way past the fear is to sit around waiting for it to pass. That way does not work. The other way is distract yourself sufficiently until you are able to move yourself forward without noticing that you have done so. I was able to get in the Travco that first day and go barroling down the hill into the unknown because I had a very simple plan: drive up in the morning, pay for the thing, drive it back. I was simply doing what I had planned to do. 

A good plan takes your mind off the fear, off the unknown unknoable future. It frees your mind from fear so you can catch your breath and think. That's why armies plan, it's why sailors carry charts, it's why everyone writes things down on a calendar. We all love a good plan, the real trick of planning though is actually start doing the first steps of the plan so that you move forward without realizing that you've done so.





## Cuts

I pull into a gas station, but it proves too small (the tank is in rear and these pumps were not 27 feet from the door of the building) so I leave. My parents, who were in town to visit their grandkids and graciously agreed to give me a ride to Mars Hill, stop at the gas station and go inside and later report that the entire gas station is talking about the Travco, speculating on the year.

On reflection, I am perhaps prone to doing things with an unjustified amount of confidence. This far I've been lucky. Silly brave me pointing that beast down the hill with such brazen confidence doesn't realize 




I had no idea that all that fiberglass was encasing a rather small, underpowered Dodge 318 engine bolted to a solid steel, 1969 steel, frame, I did not know at all what it was capable of, even less what I was capable of. Neither of us had any idea what I was doing. 


How I end up here





That's how you find yourself five feet in the air, strapped to a 27 foot long 1969 motorhome with no clue if the brakes even work. I have driven somewhere in the neighborhood of 250,000 miles, that's what you might call, planning, but this is the first time I've strapped myself to a 27 foot long monstrosity in unknown condition and promptly set off into unknown roads, barreling down a mountain on narrow streets through a town I arrived in a scant 2 hours ago. 



## 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.


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