path: root/essays/wired-piece-v6.txt

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 Eastern California, between the Nevada 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. 

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 I wanted them to also know the frustration and the joy of fixing something, of continuing down the road by the sweat and effort of, if not them, then at least me.

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 bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. 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 time I saw a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. It looked awesome and it had one of the most common engines of the era, which meant we could figure out how to fix it on the road. We wouldn’t need to rely on anyone else to keep us going and safe.

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 as I looked it over, I decided I wanted to gut it instead. I wanted to understand the Travco, 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. 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—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. As I got older, I started using more tools, taking more things apart and trying to put them back together. I gravitated toward working with wood, which I found more forgiving than radios and blenders. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then built them as best I could. I managed to come out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly, perhaps misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools, anything was fixable. 

Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft captures this feeling well. Crawford defines this need to be capable of repair as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence. What he calls the Spirited Man, who is capable of repair, becomes the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance."

In the years since Shop Class was published in my own head I have seen the convergence of two worlds, the collision of the spirit of book inquiry with the spirit of real world inquiry. The former seeks to learn, that latter seeks to make and between then I have found a balance that seems to work. It’s not just me either. I see this in the work of Van Neistat, who explicitly took the Spirited Man mantle and ran with it. But also in the thousand people without filmmaking skills who are quietly working in their yards, in their garages, at the side of the road. Shade tree mechanics. Tinkerers. Spirited men and women who want first and foremost to understand, to expand their understanding of the world around them, to know how to use the tools we toolmakers have created for ourselves.

I think this goes the heart of the question of existence... why are we here? Are we here to optimize our days in service to some unknown thing? Are we here to be entertained? Or are we here to understand the world around us, to take part in the co-creation of our world? Are we along for the ride or are we standing at the helm, trimming the sails and pointing the bow into uncharted territory? 

Crawford writes that the spirited man "hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging." 

This was the spirit in which I set off in the bus. I had no idea how the engine worked or if I would be able to keep it running, but I intended to go down swinging. Which was why, 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 with the interior, I could see 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 breather.

The engine wasn't even off before two people came up to the bus to take pictures, ask about it: What year is it? Where did you get it. Then they asked the 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. Still, on that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, all I knew was it had a 318 Chystler engine. Beyond that I knew almost 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. 

[[break?]]

The first year with the Travco, I spent most of my free time completely rebuilding the interior. For the bulk 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 rebuilt 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 wouldn’t let 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 far from the nearest place that could fix it.

No one is perfect though, and the bus does include one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. I think even Adama would approve of the solar panels; they have been our primary source of power for years. But he wouldn’t approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. That 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 we don’t have to. To mitigate that vulnerability, 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 bet even Adama could get behind.) 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. 

Sometimes inconvenience can even be a benefit. It has a way of forcing you off autopilot and getting you paying attention. With an engine as old as the Travco’s, you need to pay attention. It's part of the cost of admission. 

[[break]]

Modern user interfaces have hidden this fact from you, but the first time you start your car every morning the engine is cold, which makes it hard to start. There are three important components in an internal combustion engine: air, fuel, and spark. The spark is a constant, but 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, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver via the choke cable—a steel wire 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 found one I was simply used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The eBay choke cable has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for more than a year.  

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. I might not be able to fix it, but often I can. 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 318, 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;  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 a campsite at Raysville campground, still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I laid down in dirt and slid myself under the engine. A thin, warm red liquid splashed on my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission lines running into the bottom of the radiator where 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 as I kept the fluid level topped off, it wouldn’t 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.

In the first three weeks, I went through a lot of transmission fluid. 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 heading to a friend's beach house on St. Georgia Island. State and National Parks frown on people working on their rigs in campgrounds. Frien


























































tk broken axle story and fixing the bus with my uncle.

The next morning we watched the sun come up on the high peaks of the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. After the previous day we were taking it easy.  We had a leisurely breakfast and sipped our coffee well into the morning. We found a train museum up the road and thought we'd take the kids. 

It was around 10 when I started up the engine and then made my customary walk around the bus to make sure all the windows and hatches and vents were closed and properly secured while the engine warmed up. Everything looked good until I came around to the driver's side where I noticed the rear wheels were oddly far back in the wheel well. But wheels don't just move around... that would mean the entire axle had moved. Oh shit. 

I knelt down and peered under at the frame. The rear axle, which supports about 5000 pounds, is held in place by two mounts, one to the front of the axle, one to the rear of the axle. These hold the leaf springs in place. The mounts are secured by four welded steel pins, one at each corners, which hold the axle mount to the chassis. On the driver's side, the forward axle mount, three of the four pins were gone. It was hanging by one pin and had swung down and backward, shifting the entire rear axle about six inches backward.

If that pin gave out while we were moving, the axle would come free and most likely tear the back end of the bus off before dropping it on the ground. It was clear we weren't going anywhere. All the things that had happened until now, all the leaking fluids, excess oil, even overheating, seemed pretty mild in comparison to this. At the same time, I thought of something my uncle had said to me several times, "it's really not that hard, it's all just nuts and bolts."

Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. It's the problem solving that happens in your head. That’s a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still early on this journey, but it is infectious 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 met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of them helped me in some way, even if it was just an encouraging word, a congratulations on keeping it on the road.

As I sat there staring at the axle dangling by a single pin, I had no idea what to do. When I am confronted with a problem that I can't solve in my head, I turn to my uncle. I texted him a quick version of the problem. I sent him a picture. A few minutes later my phone rang. It so happens that my uncle lives about two hours from Big Pine, back over the state line in Nevada. He told us to sit tight, he was loading up some tools and would be there that afternoon. 

We took the kids hiking down to a nearby river while we waited. I try as hard as I can to make sure the our adventures don't get in the way of letting our children be children. Making the bus "work" for us is as much about making sure they have space to run and play as it is turning wrenches. 

Around three that afternoon my Uncle pulled into our campsite with a truck full of floor lifts, jacks, and tools. He crawled under the bus with me and surveyed the situation. He didn't say anything, just lay there studying the situation, but when he climbed back out he said, "I think we can fix that." We made a run to a hardware store in Bishop, about an hour up the road, where we bought some grade 8 steel bolts, which are strong enough to hold. We also went to the store  and grabbed some steaks and potatoes for dinner. Perhaps the biggest lesson I've learned from my uncle is, "relax, and make sure you're having fun while you do this."

That night after dinner, while we sat around the campfire, he told me the plan. We'd use two jacks, one to hold up the bus, should that last pin give out, and another to maneuver the axle mount back in place. Once it was close we'd use flange alignment tool to line up the hole in the axle mount with the hole in the chassis. Then we'd slip in the grade 8 bolts. Once he laid it out is seemed simple enough, obvious even. But I never would have thought of it on my own. I'd never even heard of a flange alignment tool and I had no idea there were bolts strong enough to replace forged steel pins. No matter how spirited I wanted to be, I didn't have the knowledge or tools.

This is why the right to repair is a useless fight if there isn't a community of people who have experience to hand down to newcomers. The repair community is 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 the spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is a very hierarchical one, which means those of us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us. That isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is 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 either of those states of mind is to 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.

This is, in part, of what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it five years later. It's the people that keep me going. It's all the people I've met, the people who've helped, some professionals, most not. Because we haven't stopped needing to fix things in the bus. In the course of writing this article I had to rebuild the vacuum booster that powers our brakes system, replace the head gasket, several worn belts, a failed alternator, a fuel pump, and all the routine maintenance like changing spark plugs.

The bus will never not need fixing. But my relationship with it has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. I know what all the parts do. 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 my 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.



































things I’ve cut:


[[TKTk like:]] But it wasn't the look that got me. [[Then something like]] I felt that it was important to be able to repair our home, on the road, TKTK keep me and my family safe. [[then]]


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


--

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 time I sawran across a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco.