path: root/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt

That unmistakable vtwin sound of a harley davidson motorcycle climbing the grade.

# Main

There's no temperature gauge. It broke several thousand desert miles ago. But you can smell it coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slip in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know, it's time to stop. It doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000 pound RV on your back will eventually make any small block engine overheat.

I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east as far as I can see the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way toward the desert floor, dust swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow Rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. Without a pullout. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on Highway 168 somewhere in Nevada between the ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road. 

When the engine shuts off a silence descends. No wind. No birds. No talking. We—my wife, three children, and me—just listen to the quiet hissing of steam escaping the radiator cap, and then a gentle gurgle of coolant in the engine. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade, the Nevada sun casts a harsh light on the road. After a minute my wife turns to the kids and says, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" 

As a child of the 70s, I've spent a fair share of time at the side of the road next to broken down vehicles. This is what vehicles of those days did. The 1967 VW fastback, which managed to get me home safely from the hospital after I was born, was replaced with a 1976 mustard yellow Volkswagen Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma, AZ on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents' home in Tucson. To this day my father curses that car. There was also a 1969 Ford F-150 pickup that was reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. 

I was no stranger to dealing with the sweat, the cursing, the money, and the occasional blood, required to keep old cars running. It used to be a necessity. These days it's a labor of love. There is something in the shape of these vehicles, something in the way they move, the way they were built, that is unlike anything on the road today. People connect to it in a way they don't with modern vehicles. 

The labor of maintenance is the price of admission to the world of old vehicles, that's all. If you love the design of those vehicles, the aesthetics, the limits, of that era then you don’t hesitate to pay the admission. 

I'll freely admit most people don't dive in as deep as we have. In June of 2016 my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome that, at the time, was just shy of its 50th birthday. We bought it to make it our full time home. We were tired of the suburbs and we wanted our kids to see the United States, to have a better sense of the place they were born. I didn’t want them to read about the deserts and mountains and forests, I wanted them to be in them. And what better way to do that than in a 50-year-old motorhome?

My kids called it the bus. Which was apt. When you say motorhome most people picture something that looks nothing like our old Dodge. 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 of beauty and joy. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. It is bright and bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. It hails from a very different era, one when the Right to Repair was the Need to Repair, and when the need to repair was an unspoken, accepted part of using technology. 


--

The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. I wanted one from the first moment I ran across a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. 

There aren't many Travcos left in the world, but after a few months of haunting Craigslist, in June of 2016, I found one for sale in the mountains of North Carolina, in the sleepy college town of Mars Hill. A couple who restored vintage trailers found the bus somewhere in Tennessee and tried their hand at fixing it up. For some reason, they changed their mind and sold it.

I could have picked up where they left off, but I decided to gut it instead. I wanted to understand it, to design and build out everything in it exactly the way we would need it. Wood, sealant, metal, fiberglass, and all the things RV interiors are made out of are static. They just sit there, which makes them relatively easy to restore. I grew up around repair and restoration projects. My grandfather worked for the telephone company and had a shed full of tools behind his house in Tucson. When he retired he spent his weekends buying broken things at the swap meet and his weekdays fixing them to resell the next weekend. 

In the summer it was blazing hot in Grandpa’s shed, but my cousins and I didn't notice the heat, we were too excited watching him tear things apart and put them back together again. It was miraculous to take these discarded things—phones, televisions, radios, blenders—and breathe life back into them.

My father had a garage full of tools as well. I was playing with hammers and tape measures from the time I could walk, graduating to model airplanes in grade school, when I also started using more tools, taking things apart and trying to put them back together. I gravitated toward wood, which I found more forgiving than radios and blenders. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then went and built them as best I could. I managed to come out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly, and somewhat misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools, anything was fixable. 

So standing there in the hills of North Carolina, looking over the bus for about an hour, I was unfazed. There was some obvious water damage. I knew I’d have to tear out walls and replace them with new wood. And if you’ve got the walls off you might as well re-wire, re-plumb, and re-insulate. But looking around the interior I saw what I saw when I was sketching projects—the finished result. The only thing to do was do the work to make it look the way it already looked in my head. The engine I was blissfully ignorant about. It was hard to start, but once it got running it seemed good enough to my untrained ear. I handed over the money and climbed into the cockpit.

That first drive was nerve wracking. According to the odometers of my past cars, I've driven near 250,000 miles. But driving a car is nothing like strapping yourself to a 27-foot long monstrosity in unknown condition and pointing it downhill. A prudent man would have done a test drive. A couple of hairpin turns had my palms sweating—I made a note to myself to buy my next vehicle in Kansas—but I finally managed to get her out on a four lane road where she felt more manageable. After I had been driving, tensely, for a couple of hours I pulled over at a rest area to take a break.

The engine wasn't even off before two people came running up to the bus to see it, take pictures, and talk about it: What year is it? Where did you get it. Then they asked a question I would come to realize everyone who loves old cars wanted to know: what engine is in it? 

The Travco is driven by a Chrysler 318 LA, a 5.2L small-block V8 engine. The LA stands for lightweight A series engine. This is the same engine you'll find in most things Dodge made in 1969, from the Dart to the D100 truck. Larger engines like the 440 are more sought after in vintage racing circles, but the 318, as most enthusiasts call it, is the unsung hero of the muscle car era. Some people claim the cylinder bore size in my 318 is bigger than what you find in a Dart, which would give the bus's 318 more power. I've done a little research, but still can’t confirm or deny this;  that said, on the side of a long mountain climb in the desert hills of Nevada for instance, it can feel like I have the power of a Dodge Dart, with 8000 extra pounds of weight on top.

On that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, I knew next to nothing about engines. I knew that the modern ones looked complex and intimidating and involved a lot of computer chips and automation via sensors. But I'm a former computer programmer; part of what I was after, when we decided to live in a vintage RV, was less computers. 

I spent most of my free time that year completely rebuilding the interior. For most of 2016 it sat in our driveway, with me inside, sweating through the southern summer, freezing through the winter. Our neighbors begin to give directions based on it “we’re two houses after the big blue bus.” I gutted the interior down to the bare fiberglass walls. I redid all the electrical, propane, and water systems before insulating it and sealing it back up. I deliberately kept everything low tech. There's only one computer chip in the bus. There's no backup cameras, no motorized awnings, no automated systems at all. I had to go out of my way to find a hot water heater with a non-electric pilot light system. I have to get out and light it by hand every time we reach camp, but the system will never fail. 

A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Gallactica, who famously would let no networked computers on his ship because they introduced a vulnerability he considered unacceptable. It wasn't that he was opposed to technology, his character commands a spaceship after all, it was a particular kind of technology, perhaps even a direction of technology, that Adama opposed. In his case networked technology opened to door to murderous robots bent on destroying humanity. Our case is a little less dramatic. We just didn't want to have to have something break when we're miles from the nearest place that could fix it.

No one is perfect though, and we do have one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. On the surface it doesn't seem so bad. Even Adama would approve of the solar panels; they have been our primary source of power for years. But he would not approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. The Bluetooth network is an unnecessary potential point of failure. Sure, it’s nice to be able to check our solar and battery status from my phone, but it’s not necessary. To mitigate that point of failure, I installed a shunt with a hardwired gauge. Should the Bluetooth fail, or, more likely, should I lose my phone, I can just look at the gauge. Like Adama, I am not opposed to technology. I’m opposed to unnecessary technology and single points of failure.

The comedian Mitch Hedburg tells a joke about how an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. In web design this is referred to as graceful degradation. How good your technology is depends on how elegantly it handles failures. This is a design principle I, and perhaps even Adama, can get behind. Unfortunately, a lot of modern design has taken exactly the opposite approach. In the name of convenience complex systems are hidden behind deceptively simple user interfaces. But no matter how simple these things might seem when you use them, the complexity behind them is inherently fragile. 

It's is hard to argue against such systems—certainly it is more convenient to flip a switch and have hot water, or to be able to check solar battery status from my phone—but the trade off in potential for catastrophic failure isn't worth the small gain in convenience, especially not when the nearest repair shop is hundreds of miles away.

What's more, sometimes inconvenience can even end up providing benefits. Inconvenience has a way of forcing you off autopilot and gets you paying attention, and engines this old need you to pay attention to them. It's part of the cost of admission. 

Modern user interfaces have hidden this from you, but the first time you start your car every morning the engine is cold, making it difficult to start. There are two important components in an internal combustion engine: air and fuel. When your engine is cold it needs more fuel than air. A computer chip controls this mixture in modern cars, but in older, aspirated engines like the 318 in our bus, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver with the choke cable. It's a cable attached to the carburetor flap at one end, and a knob on the dashboard at the other. Pull out the knob and the flap in the carburetor closes, limiting the air coming in, and allowing the cold engine to start up.

Manual choke is archaic. But since ours was broken when we got it, I went even more archaic. Every time I start the engine I lift up the engine cover, unscrew the air filter, and close the carburetor flap with my finger. At first this was just expedient. Fixing the choke was on my list of things to do, but finding a long enough choke cable, with a period-correct Dodge dashboard knob took years of scouring eBay. By the time I did find one, well I was used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The choke cable I bought has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for over a year now; and I still haven't installed it. I've had a choke cable for over a year now; I still haven't installed it.

The truth is, I like opening the engine, I like making sure everything looks right, I like watching it come to life. If something is wrong, I know right away. Once a wire came off the ignition coil and instead of wondering why the engine wasn't starting—which it wasn't—I was startled to watch electricity arcing out of the ignition coil. That's not right. But it was also very simple to fix. I found the wire and plugged it back in. The engine started right up.

Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the engine, connecting with it. It's a ritual, somewhere between making coffee and invoking the gods, a small part of my morning that's dedicated to making sure the rest of our day goes smoothly. For a long time I really was looking over the engine before every drive, but these days I am often just spending time with it.

Car enthusiasts often get this way. It might seem irrational to be attached to a particular set of nuts and bolts and cast iron, but it happens. Now, driving around the country, when I see broken down cars in someone's yard I don't see junk, I see failed relationships.

---

The bus is very much a relationship. The five of us moved in and hit the road on April 1, 2017. My wife said that if it didn't work out we’d just pass it off as a bad April Fools joke. It worked out. Though like any relationship, me and the bus have had some rocky moments.

April 2nd, less than 100 miles from home, we had our first problem. I had just finished backing into our first campsite at Raysville campground, still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I laid down in dirt and slide myself under the engine. A thin, warm read liquid splashed on my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission cooler cooler lines running into the bottom of the radiator where transmission fluid is cooled before being sent back to the transmission.

I didn't know exactly how to fix it, but I knew enough about engines to know that this wasn't too serious. As long at I kept the fluid level topped off, it should be too much of a problem. I didn't want to disrupt our new life on the road by taking the bus in for repairs on our third day out. Instead I added a transmission fluid refill to my morning ritual of starting the engine. 

I went through a lot of transmission fluid those first three weeks. I topped it off every morning before we hit the road and every time we stopped for gas. Treating symptoms works for a while, but inevitably the underlying cause gets worse. We made it down to the South Carolina coast, and then swung south, through the windswept marshes of the Georgia coast, and then we headed inland, across the swampy pine flats of south Georgia and into the Florida panhandle.

Part of the reason I put off dealing with the leak is that we were staying at a friends beach house on St. Georgia Island. But then the day we were due to arrive the leak got worse. I pulled into the driveway with barely any transmission fluid left and I had just filled the reservoir two hours before. We unpacked for a week out of the bus and I made spent an hour on the phone searching for a mechanic willing to work on such and old, huge vehicle. I found one that was game and a few days later, with my wallet a bit lighter, we had the problem solved. 

We continued on our way, tracing a route along the white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast, west through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, right into New Orleans where people cheered the bus from the sidewalks as I drove through town. For those two months the bus ran perfectly. After New Orleans though, as we headed into the June heat of Texas, the temperature gauge began to climb. And climb. All the way into the red. We took to driving in the early mornings, which helped, but I knew something needed to be done. 

We stopped to visit relatives in Dallas and had the radiator re-cored, which would eliminate the radiator as the source of the problem. Not an hour outside of Dallas though the temperature gauge shot right back up to the red. We stopped at another repair ship. They replaced the water pump and thermostat, more possible causes of running hot. We headed out of town early again, before it got too hot. That worked. Until it got hot. And then, temperature gauge climbed again. 

That, combined with the brutal West Texas heat was getting to us. I punted. We got a hotel for the night and I called my uncle. He listened to me for a bit and then told me to go get a temperature gun and take readings around the engine when it was running. I ran out that night and paid way too much for temperature gun at a local hardware store and we hit the road again early the next morning. I stopped every half hour and got out and took temp readings on the top and bottom of the engine. Everything was well within the operating parameters. I drove on into the mid day heat and watched the temperature gauge climb. But the readings from the gun never changed. I called my uncle back. If I were you he said, I'd pull out that temperature sensor and chuck it out in the desert somewhere." I hung up thinking that the main problem with the bus was me. I didn't even know how to find the problems, let alone fix them. 

I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong, and I unhooked the temperature gauge from the sensor so it wouldn't stress me out, but I wasn't happy thinking about the 1000s of dollars I'd spent trying to fix what turned out to be faulty $15 sensor. How did my uncle know what to do without even being there? How did I learn to do that? I didn't realize it at the time, but I was on my way to learning these things the same way my uncle did, the same way everyone does: the hard way, by bashing my head against the problem until I gave up and turned to someone with more experience.

Two months later, near the end of a summer spent in cool pine forests the rocky mountains, we decided to attempt a 10,000 foot pass near Ridgway Colorado. We'd made it to about 9,600 feet previously, and this pass was not a steep climb as Rocky Mountain passes go, so I thought we should be able to do it. We started early, but we didn't get more than a mile out of town before I smelled that familiar grapefruit smell of transmission fluid. I pulled over and crawled under the bus only to see the same transmission cooler line leaking again. 

We turned around and limped back to Ridgway. I found a side street to park on, in front of a mechanic's shop as it turned out. I got under the bus to see what I could. This time I knew what I was looking for, and sure enough, once I got the nut off the flare was not just cracked but missing a whole chunk. The transmission cooler lines are fitted enough that I couldn't just cut them off, put in a new flare and reattach them. They were too short for that, and even if I could have made it work they would have been nearly touching the exhaust, which would heat them far more that the transmission cooler ever cooled them.

I was forced to punt again. I called around for a shop that had big enough bays to work on the us and eventually found one in nearby Montrose. I put the existing line back on as best I could and limped back to the campground. That night we repacked and loaded what we needed for a few days of tent camping in a rental car. 

That evening, I was sitting outside the laundry room at Ridgway State Park, watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, when a fellow camper came to do his laundry. After he stuffed his laundry in the machine, we started talking. Eventually the conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked which engine was in it, he took a different tack than most people. He asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard and has haunted me ever since. He said, "do you turn your own wrenches?" I told him I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches." 

This I realized that night is an absolute truth. You can't have a vehicle like this if you don't turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both. We spent a couple weeks in a tent while the mechanics Montrose tried to find new transmission cooler lines for the bus. Eventually they did and we were on our way again, but not for long. A couple weeks later, coming down western Utah, bound for Zion National Park, I stopped for gas and guess what I saw pooling under the bus? 

It was a Sunday in Utah. We tried to find a mechanic, but there was no one open. Nothing happens on a Sunday in Utah. In the end we just pulled over on a back street, across from a mechanic's shop that was closed. I crawled under the bus and started poking around. This time the leak was from the back of the transmission line rather than the front. I unscrewed it and sure enough, the flare was cracked. I knew what to do, but I didn't have to tools and the hardware stores weren't open. 

I climbed out from under and sat down on the step, wiping the grease from my hands. My wife had just asked what we were going to do when the rolling metal door of the shop across the street, rattled and then came flying up and open with a clang. A man about my age came walking over and asked if I needed help. I told him my problem. It turned out it was his shop. He didn't work Sundays, but he was still at the shop working on his own projects. Together we pulled off the transmission line and took it inside and cut off the cracked flare and re-flared it. We put it back on and he showed me where the previous mechanic had gone wrong. He'd overtightened it and cracked the metal. We tightened it. Gently. The mechanic wouldn't take any money. Help someone else out someday he told me.

This is part of what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it five years later—because we haven't stopped needing to fix things. In the course of writing this article I had to rebuild the vacuum booster that powers our brakes system, replace two belts, change the spark plugs, and half a dozen other projects. The bus will never not need fixing. But the relationship has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. I know what all the parts do now. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does, but I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with our fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. They are what keeps me doing this. It isn't just me turning my own wrenches, it's everyone who turns their own wrenches. 

---

Sitting at the side of the road in Nevada though that community feels far away. It wouldn't do me much good even it was here though. The engine overheating isn't really a thing that can be fixed. It's what happens when a small engine tries climb a big hill. Whether its fixing it, or just deal with it's limitations, old cars will teach you patience.

Even within the community of repair enthusiasts we get some strange looks when we say we actually live in a 1969 RV. It makes me smile a little, sitting out here in the middle of the Nevada desert foothills, waiting for the engine to cool enough to keep plodding up the hill. 

I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though, I keep walking but can never more than the next few hundred yards. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decided to make another push up the mountains. The problem is that now we're starting from zero. On this kind of incline, starting from a full stop I give us a mile before we overheat again. I will never know of course because the odometer is broken, but we don't get far. But we get on down the road. After about what I'd guess is a mile I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the pull out. 

My wife and I discuss turning back. There's a strange college back in the valley behind us called Deep Springs. They have a sign out front that says no phone and not to bother them, but something tells me they'd be okay with bus. We could get a fresh start in the morning. It's been a long day of driving and the kids are tired and hot. 

Then we here that unmistakable sound that always makes me smile. A loud engine, probably a Harley Davidson, is rumbling up the hill. In a few minutes the bike is too us and the rider pulls over. He checks to see if we're okay. I tell him we are. We go through the usual talk about the bus, but he tells us we're only about a mile from the top. 

That changes everything. Suddenly we're not quite so tired. The prospect of making it over the mountains feels possible again. We thank the rider and he continues on up. We decide to give the engine another bit to cool before we try again. I am thinking about a conversation I had with some construction workers earlier in the day. We had stopped at the top of the first pass and had a snack. A road work crew we’d passed coming up the mountain pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the next pass, the one we're sitting on now. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, "there's one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there." I stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.”

This conversation comes back to me now and I mention it, as casually as I can, to my wife. She does not seem thrilled, but we agree to try for the top. It's a long mile, we never get above twenty miles an hour, but about half an hour later we are at the top. A spectacular view of the Owens Valley in California opens up below. I can see the Sierra Nevada mountains rising up out the hazy valley. I have just a second to enjoy it before we go flying past a sign that says, "Caution, One Lane Road Ahead."

The narrows come up so fast we don't really have time to even plan for it. We're just in it. Fortunately, nothing is coming the other way, but it is very much a one lane road. To this day I have no idea what happens if you meet another car coming the opposite way, especially if its one of the empty hay trucks that drive the rest of highway 168 at about 70 miles an hour. 

Coming down the mountain is easier than coming up, but we do still stop to rest the brakes a few times. We have a vacuum brake system that works extremely well, but long continuous down grades of 6-8 percent do require taking breaks. A few hours later though we pull into a campground outside of Bishop California. It's empty this time of year and the road in is full of ruts that have the bus lurching and creaking around. There's a loud clang at one point and my wife and I look at each other, but I keep going and pull into the first campsite. I shut off the engine for the final time with a sense of deep relief.

---











The community of people repairing things is an interesting group, perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is very hierarchical one, which means those us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us, which isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is a big part of what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of these predicaments is connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are.


That's part of why we were at the side of the road that day in Nevada. We were on our way to visit my uncle. I didn't know it yet that day, but he would end up saving us just couple of days later. He would keep the bus going when it almost broke completely, in an irreparable way. But more than that, he would show me how to turn my own wrenches. He helped me rebuild my carburetor and exhaust system, and he showed me that there was no mystery to it. It's all just nuts and bolts he would tell me every time I got frustrated. Remember it's all just nuts and bolts. 

Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. Most of the work I do in keeping this engine running happens in my head. A mechanic isn't someone who blindly turns wrenches, anyone can do that. A mechanic, professional or otherwise, is someone who can listen to an engine and figure out, based on experience, which nuts and bolts need turning. It's the problem solving that happens in your head that separates those who can fix an engine from those who cannot. This is a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still very early on this journey, but it is infectious and exhilarating when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.

It also takes asking many questions of many people. I've been fortunate to have my uncle who knows more about engines than I ever will to help me out, but there have been plenty of others as well. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos in the past, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of it put together and you have perhaps the most important part of repairing anything: the community.


---

Even within the community of repair enthusiasts we get some strange looks when we say we actually live in a 1969 RV. It makes me smile a little, sitting out here in the middle of the Nevada desert foothills, waiting for the engine to cool enough to keep plodding up the hill. 

I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though, I keep walking but can never more than the next few hundred yards. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decided to make another push up the mountains. The problem is that now we're starting from zero. On this kind of incline, starting from a full stop I give us a mile before we overheat again. I will never know of course because the odometer is broken, but we don't get far. But we get on down the road. After about what I'd guess is a mile I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the pull out. Sure enough when we stop the engine is overheating it's just low enough on fluid that it hasn't flooded. 

I shut her down and this time the initial silence is broken by the sound of an engine off in the distance. People. 

Nevada is a lonely place. The so-called loneliest road in America runs across it. I think the road we’re on is far lonelier, but it's not as long, so I guess it doesn't rate. We'd had a good drive until we turned onto this road and got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. We'll take it slow, stop when we need too. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in Nevada, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that.

Up and over the first pass was not too bad, though it was the windiest road we'd been on. We stopped at the pass and had a snack. A road work crew we’d passed up the mountain came down and pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the next pass. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, "there's one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there." I just stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.”







The bus is all mechanical and easy enough to understand, which is why so many people do. Take the thermostat, part of the coolant system that had us at the side of the road climbing up the White Mountains. The thermostat is controlled by a piece of wax that melts when it's hot, releasing a spring that lets coolant into the engine. As the engine cools the wax hardens, closing the spring so that coolant stops flowing and the engine heats up again. 

The engine temperature system is controlled by a piece of wax. The carburetor jets, which control how much gas and air are pulled into the carburetor and sent on to the combustion chambers are just metal cones you tighten or loosen with a screw driver. There are almost no special tools required to fix anything in the bus. I carry a lot of wrenches, a few screwdrivers, and a wide array of spare parts. That's about all I need to keep it going.




This has become my guiding design principle, my philosophy of technology if you will, the technology must connect me with the machine in a meaningful way. It doesn't have to be rational, it doesn't have to make sense even, but it must create that connection. There is no technology for its own sake, no technology that abstracts function for convenience, no technology that removes the human interaction for "simplicity" or "ease of use". Ease of use means I can use it, as well as repair it and rebuild it if need be.

Eventually I was able to track down reprints of the original shop manuals for the Dodge M300 chassis, which is the basis for the Travco, as well as many other motorhomes of the era. From reading this in the evenings around the campfire, I know that the designers of the bus meant for it to be maintained by anyone. It's written in simple language, with clear instructions, and explanations of why you need to do something as well has how to do it. 

I used the same guiding principle when upgrading things to make it livable for a family of five.Limiting complexity was a concious decision by me, just as it was a conscious decision by the Dodge and Travco engineers in 1969. 

The bus is all mechanical and easy enough to understand, which is why so many people do. Take the thermostat, part of the coolant system that had us at the side of the road climbing up the White Mountains. The thermostat is controlled by a piece of wax that melts when it's hot, releasing a spring that lets coolant into the engine. As the engine cools the wax hardens, closing the spring so that coolant stops flowing and the engine heats up again. 

The engine temperature system is controlled by a piece of wax. The carburetor jets, which control how much gas and air are pulled into the carburetor and sent on to the combustion chambers are just metal cones you tighten or loosen with a screw driver. There are almost no special tools required to fix anything in the bus. I carry a lot of wrenches, a few screwdrivers, and a wide array of spare parts. That's about all I need to keep it going.

---

I haven't always kept it going though. That's not where I started. For a long time I was happy to understand how it worked, but still let others do the actual work. A mechanic in Florida flared new transmission cooler lines for us. Another in Colorado did the shocks. Another in Utah fixed the transmission cooler lines (again). Everything on the inside I rebuilt and repaired myself, but the engine, for all its apparent simplicity, was still intimidating to me.

One evening in the laundry room at Ridgway State Park just outside of Ridgway Colorado, while watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, another man came in and, after he stuffed his laundry in the machine, we started talking. Eventually the conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked which engine was in it, he took a different tack than most people. He asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard and has haunted me ever since. He said, "do you turn your own wrenches?" I told him I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches." 

I knew he was right. I knew he was right before he said anything because I had come to realize that knowing is not enough. Knowing only becomes useful when you apply it by doing. I knew it was time for me to start doing more, to start doing everything. Sometimes I get sick of crawling under the bus to fix things. Sometimes I want to make it all go away, just tow it to a mechanic and make it all better, leave me free to spend time with my kids. But that's not how it works. If I wanted to really be in control, if I wanted to be responsible for my own home, I had to take ownership of it, all of it. I had to turn my own wrenches. I realized that evening that I was not living up to the goals I claimed I had. I had to do the work myself. The knowledge was nothing without the know-how and the know-how took getting in there and getting dirty.

That's part of why we were at the side of the road that day in Nevada. We were on our way to visit my uncle. I didn't know it yet that day, but he would end up saving us just couple of days later. He would keep the bus going when it almost broke completely, in an irreparable way. But more than that, he would show me how to turn my own wrenches. He helped me rebuild my carburetor and exhaust system, and he showed me that there was no mystery to it. It's all just nuts and bolts he would tell me every time I got frustrated. Remember it's all just nuts and bolts. 

Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. Most of the work I do in keeping this engine running happens in my head. A mechanic isn't someone who blindly turns wrenches, anyone can do that. A mechanic, professional or otherwise, is someone who can listen to an engine and figure out, based on experience, which nuts and bolts need turning. It's the problem solving that happens in your head that separates those who can fix an engine from those who cannot. This is a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still very early on this journey, but it is infectious and exhilarating when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.

It also takes asking many questions of many people. I've been fortunate to have my uncle who knows more about engines than I ever will to help me out, but there have been plenty of others as well. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos in the past, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of it put together and you have perhaps the most important part of repairing anything: the community.

The community of people repairing things is an interesting group, perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is very hierarchical one, which means those us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us, which isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is a big part of what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of these predicaments is connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are.

---

Even within the community of repair enthusiasts we get some strange looks when we say we actually live in a 1969 RV. It makes me smile a little, sitting out here in the middle of the Nevada desert foothills, waiting for the engine to cool enough to keep plodding up the hill. 

I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though, I keep walking but can never more than the next few hundred yards. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decided to make another push up the mountains. The problem is that now we're starting from well, zero. On this kind of incline, starting from a full stop I give up a mile before we overheat again. I will never know of course because the odometer is broken, but we don't get far. But we get on down the road. After about what I'd guess is a mile I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decide to take advantage of the pull out. Sure enough when we stop the engine is overheating it's just low enough on fluid that it hasn't flooded. 

I shut her down and this time the initial silence is broken by the sound of an engine off in the distance. People. 

Nevada is a lonely place. The so-called loneliest road in America runs across it. I think the road were on is far lonelier, but it's not as long, so I guess it doesn't rate. We'd had a good drive until we turned onto this road and got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. We'll take it slow, stop when we need too. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in Nevada, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that.

Up and over the first pass was not too bad, though it was the windiest road we'd been on. We stopped at the pass and had snack. A road work crew we’d passed up the mountain came down and pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the next pass. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, "there's one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there." I just stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.”










Down the back side despite my best efforts at downshifting the brakes started to smell. We took a break to let them rest and enjoy the view. Of absolute nothing. Excepting perhaps some portions of route 50 (the so-called loneliest highway) route 168 is the most remote road I’ve ever been on. There’s no civilization for its entire run over the White Mountains. Just empty desert and one lone building set way back from the road with a huge sign that says “no telephone available.” The only other vehicles we saw were a few empty hay trucks driving way too fast for the road.


We said goodbye and hit the road again. Climbing the third pass I started to smell that sweet smell of radiator fluid and pulled into the next turn out. The bus sat boiling over for a bit, maybe a quart, and then it stopped. We climbed out to sit for a while and consider our options. Except that there weren’t any really. With no cell reception to call a tow truck, no real way to turn around, and no where else to go even if we did, we had to get over the pass. At one point an older gentleman on a Harley stopped at see if we were okay. We chatted for a bit and he told us the top of the pass was only about four or five miles ahead, which was encouraging.





This is something Matthew Crawford explores extensively in his 2010 book, Shop Class as Soul Craft. Crawford's book is an extended meditation on what it means to work with your hands and abide by the rules of mechanics. There are hard limits, hard realities in the bus's engine that don't exist in the rest of my life. If a few words in this essay are slightly off that's on me to be sure, and I don't look good, but, well, life goes on. If the cam shaft lobes in the 318 are mere millimeters off the entire engine will be nothing but a hunk of useless metal in short order. 


"As a group, they have quite varied educational backgrounds and careers. What stands out is how smart they are and how much they enjoy what they do. Most of them were fortunate to find a mentor who encouraged them early on, but they are also largely self-taught, picking up new skills wherever they can. They challenge themselves with new ideas for projects and often share the results via the Internet. Makers are practical, clever, and creative. - https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/correspondence-fall-2006









Problem solving seems fun after the problem is solved. During the actual solving it’s less fun. Food, sleep, these things seem unimportant when I have a problem that needs solving stuck in my head. I tend to get obsessed about things. Even when I don’t want to. It’s one of the reasons I don’t do much programming anymore. I never let things go until I solve the problem to my satisfaction. Of course breaking a web server doesn't cost much relative to damaging an engine, so with the bus the stakes are much higher, which means the sullen thinking phase I pass through is correspondingly more sullen and requires more concentration.



Something here about the exhilaration of figuring things out. Example with the fuel pump and then later with the exhaust manifolds

---

Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. 

These are the first three [philosophical "rules" of the Python programming language](https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonPhilosophy), which happens to be the thing that allows me to live in a Travco, traveling full time. 

After finding out about bus, the engine, and that we live in it "full time" as RVers say, the inevitable next question is—how? The American version of this is *what do you do?*. The European version (about half the people we met in National Parks and other public lands between 2017-2018 were visitors from abroad) is *what is your job?*. I prefer the European version for its specificity. 

The answer is that, since I walked out of the last restaurant kitchen I ran in 2005, I have been a writer and programmer, working from home. For a long time, thanks to demand, I was able to limit my programming to Python (even more specifically, the Django web framework). 



After years of working at home it occurred to me that I didn't actually need a house to work (yes, I am a slow learner). 

I pointed this out to my wife one day and somewhere over some beers while on vacation in Florida we decided to try living in an RV. Two months later we had the Travco, 9 months after that we were on the road. 

Lest you think programming from an RV is somehow glamorous... well, it's not. The project that sustained our early travels involved building an inventory tracking system. We're not talking about building cool apps for hot startups that were going to IPO. I prefer to work for small, family-run businesses even if that means building inventory tracking systems, which, trust me, is not glamorous. 

There is one aspect of work though that very much informed  

---

Later when I knew enough to know what questions to ask, I went to YouTube where dozens of total strangers walked me through how to repair everything from faulty wires to brake adjuster screws. But the biggest single step after my uncle set me on the path to turning my own wrenches was to buy a reprint of the original shop manual. Here were the words of the engineers who made the bus. How to test systems, what to do when different problems arise. Even how to tune things just the way you want them.

There are still things I can't fix. I don't travel with an engine lift so I can't do a complete rebuild. But since that afternoon in the laundromat I've replaced or rebuilt the carburetor, the radiator (twice), the water pump, the alternator, the power steering pump, the fuel pump (twice), the brakes, the shocks, the transmission cooler lines, and a host of other little things I've long since forgotten about. Far more important than any single thing I've fixed though is that I know it's all just nuts and bolts. I given the right tools and the enough time, anyone can fix anything in this bus, including me. Which is exactly where I wanted to be when I bought it.

And yet, despite all that, despite all the wrench turning, here we are, at the side of the road in Nevada. Because older vehicles might be repairable, but they have other limitations most of us aren't used to facing anymore. This is another part of what I love about the bus. It's an adventure every time I drive it. Nothing has failed in the buses systems to leave us at the side of the road. There is nothing for me to fix. Nothing is broken. The bus is just overworked. It may not have the power to get over the mountain. That's a limitation we've pushed a few times and each time we've made it what gets us over the top isn't technical skills, spare parts, or engine savvy, it's patience.


---

This is just one moment. This is another one. They pass by whether we use them or not. This is what I tell myself while I sit idly throwing gravel down into a dry ravine, waiting. Patience. This is just one moment. The rest of the day has been amazing. 

We woke that morning in the ghost town of Gold Point. We headed west because for nine months of that's a much of plan as we'd come up with, let's go west. West today started on Highway 266, a little climb up into the hills, through another ghost town and down some more hills into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on highway 168 that we got some hints of our future. There was an ominous collection of road signs indicating steep, winding roads ahead. There was even a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a three digit state highway in Nevada, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I figured it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that.

Up and over the second pass was not too bad. It was the windiest road we'd driven in the bus, but we made it over the second pass into a valley with nothing. Not even phone service. There was one lone building set way back from the road with a huge sign that read “no telephone available."

We stopped for lunch and a road work crew we’d passed up the mountain came down and pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the final pass. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, "there’s one part we call the narrows, it's only one lane through there." I just stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" "Seriously." "Don’t tell my wife that."

---

The kids are headed back up. They have gNo fossils were found, though 


and pulled into the next turn out. The bus sat boiling over for a bit, maybe a quart, and then it stopped. We climbed out to sit for a while and consider our options. Except that there weren’t any really. With no cell reception to call a tow truck, no real way to turn around, and no where else to go even if we did, we had to get over the pass. At one point an older gentleman on a Harley stopped at see if we were okay. We chatted for a bit and he told us the top of the pass was only about four or five miles ahead, which was encouraging.

---

Programming is a relatively new discipline and still believes that the ideal can exist in the real world. Mechanics know better. Programmers, Python programmers anyway, invent things like virtual environments and attempt to sandbox their programs from outside influence, they try to ignore the real world and it keeps failing. Programmers call these failures bugs and pretend they'll all be fixed one day. They won't. Ask any mechanic. That's not how it goes in the real world, and you can't mitigate or abstract away the real world. Eventually programming will figure this out and become a mature discipline that realizes perfection only exists on paper. 






Behind that question I've come to think there are several others worth asking, the first is, how did this thing last so long when so little else has? The answer to that is a long and twisting tale, but the short version is that the Chrysler 318 LA engine was made for a long time, and used in a lot of vehicles, which is to say a lot of these engines are out there in the world. That created a huge market for parts and so far, that market continues to exist though I have to imagine it's shrinking every year. For now though, I can walk into any parts store in America and have whatever part I need in a couple of days.[^1]

There is, however, I think another question the people who've asked me about the bus engine have in mind though when they say, what engine does it have in it, they are, almost universally, people from the time when many people could and did repair their own engines.


[^1]: This is still true even with post pandemic shortages, though I, and many others, have noticed a significant drop in the quality of part available.












Somewhere far up the road there are cool pinyon-juniper woodlands with sagebrush meadows and bristlecone pine forests. 


Highway 266 was uneventful, a little climb up into the White Mountains, through a ghost town and down into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on 168 that we got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in California, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that.






Of course they do. They barely notice when we break down. They half like it. It's a chance to get out stretch their legs, explore the desert. This is part of why we live this way, to do impromptu things like exploring the desert.

I unbuckle the lap belt and lean over to open the doghouse and make sure it's just the radiator overheating. We live in a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. Now almost no one besides us seem to want one. Ours is electric blue with a wide white stripe wrapped around it. 


Highway 266 was uneventful, a little climb up into the White Mountains, through a ghost town and down into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on 168 that we got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in California, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that.

Up and over the second pass was not too bad either, though it was the windiest road we’ve been on. Down the back side despite my best efforts at downshifting the brakes started to smell. We took a break to let them rest and enjoy the view. Of absolute nothing. Excepting perhaps some portions of route 50 (the so-called loneliest highway) route 168 is the most remote road I’ve ever been on. There’s no civilization for its entire run over the White Mountains. Just empty desert and one lone building set way back from the road with a huge sign that says “no telephone available.” The only other vehicles we saw were a few empty hay trucks driving way too fast for the road.

We had snack and a road work crew we’d passed up the mountain came down and pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the next pass. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, “there’s one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there.” I just stared at him for a minute. “Seriously?” “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.”

We said goodbye and hit the road again. Climbing the third pass I started to smell that sweet smell of radiator fluid and pulled into the next turn out. The bus sat boiling over for a bit, maybe a quart, and then it stopped. We climbed out to sit for a while and consider our options. Except that there weren’t any really. With no cell reception to call a tow truck, no real way to turn around, and no where else to go even if we did, we had to get over the pass. At one point an older gentleman on a Harley stopped at see if we were okay. We chatted for a bit and he told us the top of the pass was only about four or five miles ahead, which was encouraging.
































Before it explodes you can smell it coming. A whiff of tk slips in through the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. 

That's when I start looking for a place to pull over. Not that I need one really. I haven't seen another car in four hours of driving. Most of the population of Nevada lives in Las Vegas, and we are not in Las Vegas anymore.

We are on highway 168 somewhere between a ghost town and the top of the White Mountains. 

I stop right in the middle of the road. Why not? 

No one speaks. We all, my wife, three children, and myself, listen to the hiss of the radiator boiling over. Then my wife turns around and says to kids, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" Of course they do. They barely notice when we break down. They half like it. It's a chance to get out stretch their legs, explore the desert. This is part of why we live this way, to do impromptu things like exploring the desert.

I unbuckle the lap belt and lean over to open the doghouse and make sure it's just the radiator overheating. We live in a 1969 Dodge Travco, 















The view under the doghouse is benign. The engine is fine. The Dodge 318 LA series motor is one of the most indestructible engines ever made. I could with a few simple tools pull the entire thing apart right here at the side of the road and fix anything in it. There are some parts in this beast that can't be replaced, but they aren't in the engine. I would like to avoid doing that of course. It's doubtful I'd get it back together in running shape anyway. When we left a year ago I knew next to nothing about engines. I've been slowly learning as I go, learning the hard way, by breaking down and then figuring out how to get it going again. One thing I have learned, it's damn near indestructible. A few mountains in Nevada aren't going to kill it, it just needs to rest every now and then. Catch its breath. The world of 1969 didn't have always-on technology. You took breaks. You rested.

The radiator has already stopped overflowing. In half an hour it'll be cool enough that I can open it and top it off with some water to maybe get us the rest of the way over the mountain. I head outside to see what the kids are up to. 

It's late September in the high foothills of the White Mountains. There's not much around. Tufts of creosote dot a moonscape of rock. There's a cluster of cottonwoods at the bottom of a dry arroyo just down the slope from us. It's the only shade we've seen in a day of driving. My wife and kids head down to play in the shade. 













get out to survey the scene. 



This isn't the first time we've overheated, it won't be the last. If you want to resurrect and live in a piece of 1960's Americana like the Dodge Travco, you have to be okay with overheating. You have to be okay with stepping back in time to an era when travel was more open ended. 


A thin thread of a smell, like bacon frying downstairs when you were a kid and it was too cold to get up until that bacon was ready. You know it's coming though, old RV engines overheat climbing mountains. It is what it is. 

We're bound for California and all we've got are paper maps. Which is good because there hasn't been phone service for days. 

More description of the Nevada desert. The kids go off to play. Corrinne looks for pottery and fossils, rocks.

Something about Henry Miller driving into LA. 


"optional sewage incinerator system, the “Destroilet,” a gas incinerator-type toilet that almost eliminated the need to empty holding tanks. There were problems to be sure: the 318-cubic-inch engine in the early models had to work very hard to go up any significant incline; there were stability issues because of the lack of anti-sway bars, and its low-slung body hampered tire changing"

Highway 266 was uneventful, a little climb up into the White Mountains, through a ghost town and down into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on 168 that we got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in California, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I assumed it meant no passing lane.