What I Did This Summer (and so far this fall)

Hello from downtown Mancos, Colorado, where a large crow (or maybe it’s a raven, I can’t tell the difference at a glance) is cawing from atop the baseball backstop at the park, the wind is scattering cottonwood leaves, and the windows of the pizza parlor are decorated with large images of anthropomorphized candy corns.

It’s a perfect time to talk about summer.

From late May through mid-August I was in Maryland, and a lot of the time, I was focused on this:

… which was bunion surgery on my left foot. I’d had surgery on my right foot in 2017, which was a bunionectomy plus two osteotomies (cutting bones and putting them back together) plus a plantar plate repair (cutting ligaments and sewing them back together) plus removal of a big Morton’s neuroma (a non-cancerous growth on the nerve).

Fortunately, my left foot pre-surgery wasn’t nearly as bad as my right, so a lot less needed to be done to it. But it was also crazy how less painful and debilitating of an experience it was. I had surgery in mid-July, and 37 days later, I was back in the van and on my way to Maine, where I was able to walk a mile or two on trails and gravelly sandbars. I’m pretty sure that 37 days after my 2017 surgery, I was still limping around in a protective boot, unable to go anywhere except my desk job and physical therapy.

The thing was that this year’s surgery was not only to correct a less severe issue, but it was a whole different type of surgery, involving three tiny incisions rather than one big one. In a bunionectomy, the bone is cut apart and then screwed back together in a better position. Even though the screws in my left foot are actually much bigger than the ones in my right (think deck screws vs. laptop screws), the pain in my left foot was only a fraction of the pain in my right… like 1/10th.

This time I also took advantage of my one-week post-surgery hydrocodone prescription to quit all caffeine (I’d been drinking a LOT of tea) and start a new diet — and I think that quitting caffeine may have been a more painful experience than the foot surgery, overall.

Coco, my parents’ cat, was very helpful in the recovery process. She came to my parents last winter but had spent most of her life in a barn, where she’d somehow managed to survive despite being totally deaf and having bad eyesight. She was an older cat, though no one knows how old. This summer she started weakening quickly, and she died in September. She is missed, but she seemed to enjoy the ten or so months at the end of her life that she got to spend in a safe, comfortable place with lots of affection.

I stayed in my parents’ guest room until mid-August because a) I had some surgery follow-ups and physical therapy, so I needed to stay in the area and b) it was absolutely disgusting outside and way too hot for me in the van, even at night.

Then in mid-August, it was time to head north.

This doesn’t look like much, but it’s actually the NYC skyline just before sunrise.

On this northern trip, I was accompanying my friends Melissa and Dave and their two kids. When the kids were young, Melissa and Dave decided to visit all the country’s national parks, and they’ve made impressive headway, including some more remote spots like the Dry Tortugas and less impressive-sounding ones like Cuyahoga Falls. Just recently, they got their own campervan. (I am thrilled about this, and also please note and consider that I want all my friends and people I like to get livable vehicles so we can hang out in the woods/mountains/desert/park/wherever.)

I stopped to do some work in a small city in the Hudson Valley (which was really appealing and which I’ll have to check out later), then drove up to our rendezvous point in southern Vermont.

First time I’ve ever seen a porcupine in the wild — it was actually in an old graveyard inside the national forest!

Once Melissa and Dave and their family made it up north, we explored two sets of mountains: Vermont’s Green and New Hampshire’s White. The Green are softer, with denser woods; the White are more rocky and rugged, with some more dramatic dimensions and geology. I’d love to go back to the White Mountains just for hiking at some point.

But one of my biggest motives for writing this blog post is: I need you to know that off Route 11 in rural southern Vermont, there is a hair salon. The name of the hair salon is I’ll Cut You.

That is all.

We drove to Acadia National Park in Maine. Because I’m a lucky asshole, I’d been there twice before. Melissa and Dave had been there once before, but it was the first time for the kids.

There was a snail race.

And we did Maine Things, like eat seafood at a restaurant on a pier.

Sometimes people are surprised when I tell them I don’t go to national parks very often. They’re amazing places, but they’re generally not super livable for nomadic folks. Cell phone/data coverage for work can be nonexistent or spotty. The campgrounds are often full, they can feel quite busy compared to a middle-of-nowhere dispersed spot in a national forest, and they require reservations and advance planning. Plus, they’re expensive by my standards ($30+ per night), and then there’s a park entrance fee on top of that. (This year, since I knew I was going to several national parks, I got the annual pass to cover entrance fees, which at $80 is a pretty good deal — and the same price, I think, as when I took my first cross-country road trip in 2002!)

So when I do go to a national park, it definitely feels like I’m on vacation. And I really liked the campground at Acadia, which felt a little more spacious and relaxed despite being absolutely huge with hundreds of spots. But probably the best thing about staying inside the national park is that it gives you night access. Melissa came up with a brilliant idea for seeing Thunder Hole, a narrow crevice in the rocks where the waves go BOOM about an hour before high tide if the wind and waves are intense enough. Thunder Hole is wonderful but it’s one of the most heavily visited spots in the park, with crowds of people jostling around so you can barely see the Thunder Hole itself. Often, during the time/tide window when the Thunder Hole might be thundering, the parking lot is full.

So we just went at night! For something like Thunder Hole, where so much of the experience is sensory but not necessarily visual, this was awesome. We turned our headlamps off to stand there with the waves and the dark for a minute, then turned them on to spotlight Thunder Hole as the water sucked back and crashed over the rocks. And there was absolutely no one else there — no pressure to move over, move on.

It does sadden me to report that one of my favorite ever road signs, the one that said “THUNDER HOLE RESTROOMS,” has been removed. It has been replaced with a sign that simply has the restroom graphic and is thus much less satisfying to make stupid jokes about. R.I.P., Thunder Hole Restrooms sign.

Normally, on a trip like this, I would’ve wanted to do a Big Hike, but since my foot still wasn’t ready for that, we went sea kayaking instead. This was wonderful. We didn’t go super far, only a few miles, but I really loved being out there on a beautiful day, especially when we got into the channel between the islands, where there were some gentle but large swells. I’ve paddled in Chesapeake Bay rivers when they were kind of choppy, but never in any actual waves, and I liked the feeling of it.

On our last morning in the park, we drove up Cadillac Mountain to watch the sun rise. Melissa and Dave had to go back to Maryland so the kids could start school the following week, but I was able to stay in Maine for a couple more days. So I drove up the coast to Machias. This was the farthest north I’ve ever been in Maine, and I really liked the area. It’s less trafficky, less busy, but the coast is still absolutely beautiful. Plus the town of Machias itself seems pretty nomad-friendly, with two town-owned parking lots that are set next to a lovely river and where overnight parking is explicitly allowed. I’d taken time off of work for the Acadia trip, so in Machias I did just work a lot, but I’d love to revisit this area and stay longer.

This is Jasper Beach. It’s known for its pebbles that make a wonderful sizzling noise as the waves roll in and recede. These pebbles are not actually jasper, but rhyolite.

Rock lobster!

On my last morning in Machias I went to this coastal preserve on the beach to do some work. When I got there, it was low tide, and folks were digging for clams on the exposed muddy flats, hundreds of feet below the high tide line. After a couple hours, it was time for me to go. I’d driven onto the beach, just below the highest high-tide line, on what looked like a strip of well-used, hard-packed sand and gravel. I’d had no problems getting onto the beach, but instead of putting the van in reverse for a hundred or so feet, I went to turn around — and backed off the hard-packed strip and into sandy gravel that was much softer than it looked.

Yes, I got my dumb ass stuck. Very stuck.

This was quite stressful since by this time the tide was coming in. Of course it was a Sunday and all the towing places were closed. My insurance’s roadside assistance was sending someone, but they were about an hour and a half away, maybe two.

There were two lines of seaweed on the shore, and I was in between them. A couple passing locals told me that the highest line represented a storm tide, and I would probably be out of the reach of the normal high tide, but this still did not feel reassuring. I tried to dig myself out, and I used the traction strips that I’d ordered for just this situation… but each time I tried to get out, the van just went in deeper. I couldn’t quite see what was going underneath, but I suspected the rear differential and/or the spare tire were actually resting on the ground, which would be… very not good.

Despite Machias’s frequent appearances in Stephen King novels, where the scariest thing is not actually the monster but the people, my experience with the people of Machias was bizarrely positive. Everyone who passed by seemed to offer help of some kind — they’d call their husband, who was probably out in the garden right now, but if he did answer the phone, might know someone who could help. Or they could call their friend not too far away who had a farm tractor, and maybe the tractor could lift the van out of its hole. With the tide rising quickly and the tow company still hours away, I did take someone up on their offer — a young couple who’d come to the beach to walk their dogs. The guy’s father lived a few minutes up the road and had a big truck.

Even with the big truck, it took a while (and a couple of calls to the guy’s high school buddy’s dad Timmy, who owned a towing company) to figure out how to get me out. There actually aren’t any good points on the front end of my van to attach a tow hook (which seems like a big oversight), and I was worried that if they tried to pull me out backwards, it would just pull the rear axle/spare tire/exhaust system/bumper into the gravel. Plus if that towing attempt failed, it would put me much closer to the incoming water.

Finally I got desperate enough to say OK to being pulled out backwards. And… it worked. There were a couple of scuff marks on the rear differential and a bunch on the spare tire, but the van seemed undamaged. There were high fives all around, and even though I will never willingly repeat this experience, I’ve gotta say that the adrenaline rush of having your home threatened by an inexorably incoming tide, and then getting away from it, is really something else.

Once I was safely above the highest high tide line, my rescuers and I (native Mainers whose names are Riley and Joelle; Riley is an actual lobster fisherman) stood around and chatted for a while. Then I filled in the big holes I’d made in the beach and was on my way. I plan never to drive onto a beach again.

This pic was taken from about the same spot as the earlier photo on the beach; note how much closer the water is!

I had a doctor’s appointment in Maryland and a bunch of work to do, so I made my way south over two days: the first evening I stopped at my friend Sarah’s in the Finger Lakes region of New York, and the next at my friend Sasha’s in South Jersey. I wish I could’ve stayed longer in both cases, but it was great to be able to catch up a little bit.

I spent another week in Maryland, full of logistics, medical appointments, and way too much dental work. (One of my old root canals failed, which cost over $2300 to fix and my dental insurance covered none of it. The fact that dental work is so expensive and that teeth are considered luxury bones that are not covered by insurance in any meaningful way is very upsetting to me, and I think that the next time I need a root canal or re-root canal or new crown or anything like that, I’ll just have the tooth pulled and then go to Mexico and get it replaced with an implant.)

It was a stressful week, but I did get to do some Maryland Things: make air fryer crab cakes, hang out in my friend Meg’s hot tub/on her porch, and go paddling with my mom on the bay.

In early September, I got on the road again, this time headed south. I met up with my friend Ron in South Carolina and we visited Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist monastery.

Ron stayed at the abbey for the full residential retreat experience, while I camped nearby with his dog Puck and just came to the monastery in the daytime.

The live oaks at this monastery are some of the most incredible trees I have ever seen.

After Mepkin, Ron headed back south to Florida and I turned west, where I got to spend a couple nights with my brother and his family at Lake Oconee in north Georgia and at their home in Atlanta.

Then, I headed west…

And now I’m in the San Juans, in southwestern Colorado. I missed being out here this summer, and it’s been a busy October so far, with tons of work — but I’m glad I’ve gotten to spend at least a couple weeks out here before it gets too cold. Already I’ve had one below-freezing night, up at about 9,200 feet in the West Dolores River valley.

But it was absolutely worth getting up in the cold to be able to go out hiking and watch the sun hit the peaks.

And the trees… I just can’t even deal with it.

How is this real???

1917, 1947, or 1941?

And yes, my phone is about 90% photos of trees and mountains.

I need to head back into the woods now, but sometime soon I hope to post about staying warm when living in a van — a topic that I’ll need to give more thought to in just the next couple of weeks!

The Island

In the river by my parents’ house in Maryland there is an island. It’s not big, only about fifteen hundred feet long and a couple hundred feet wide at its widest point. But it’s dramatic: on its south side, sandy cliffs rise out of the water. It’s topped with tall, twisted loblolly pines and tangles of climbing vegetation. On the north side, there’s a long, sandy beach where the water deepens gradually, a perfect swimming spot.

Growing up, I knew this island as a wild place. My parents would take me and my brothers there and beach the boat, and when each of us got old enough, we were allowed to wander around the island on our own. There was only one way up off the beach to the island’s raised interior: a scramble up a steep, sandy, eroding hill. Once I was up there, I felt as if I’d left the world I knew behind and stepped into a much more expansive one. This could be what it looked like just after the dinosaurs went extinct: golden light slanting through pines, cicadas buzzing in the jungly vines, and ospreys calling — which basically sound like longing made audible. I spent hours up there, standing just far enough back from/close enough to the cliff that I felt the exact right amount of danger, or following the trail (there was only one trail, really, on such a narrow island) until I lost it in the vines.

And then a group of other people in bathing suits and flip-flops would tromp past, the adults talking loud and the kids sticky-mouthed, and for a minute it would break my illusion of being the only person for a hundred miles.

Despite feeling so primeval while I was up there, this island, Dobbins Island, was and is totally enmeshed in our human times. It’s been a party spot for well over a century, since the time when the sandbar was still close enough to the river’s surface to drive a horse-drawn carriage from the mainland to the island at low tide. At one point, someone had built a stone house on the island, which lasted for a while and then crumbled away. (One summer, in the most viney part of the island, a friend and I found a round stone cistern set into the ground, with some scummy green water at the bottom, and part of what could be a foundation. We could never find it again.) Just a little before my childhood, the island was apparently an exchange point for cocaine smugglers: the cargo was landed in float planes and transferred to waiting boats. And since my childhood, summer weekends mean that the island’s shallow anchorage is full of boats. People everywhere, with pool floats and super-soakers and coolers full of soda and beer. Sandwiches, boomboxes, cigarettes, sunscreen.

When I was growing up, I understood that the island was owned by a family who had held it for a few generations. There was some kind of complicated legal structure involved, and family members who did not get along. They could, if they wanted to, put up “No Trespassing” signs, or a fence, or houses, at any moment. The only reason I was able to enjoy this place was because the owners lacked the motivation or unity of will to kick people, the public, off of it. By the time I was in middle school, I was aware that the island as I knew it might not last forever.

It lasted through my high school years, and my brothers’. But in the early 2000s it was sold, and soon after, the new owner put up the “No Trespassing” signs. It was rumored that he wanted to build a house.

Each step of the process was marked by some kind of controversy or resistance: people called for the county/the state/a local conservation group to buy it and make it into a park, or better yet, just keep it as it was. At one point, a fence went up to keep boaters off; there was a legal dispute, and the fence was removed.

In most states, including Maryland, the rule is that the public has a right to be on any beach or shoreline as long as they stay below the mean high tide line. Below that line, landowners have no legal right to bar people from beaching a boat, building a sandcastle, or sitting in a chair with their feet in the water. Even if there just so happen to be a few dozen people, or a few dozen boats full of people, or, as reported in 2011, over 800 boats full of people at the annual “bumper bash” party.

About a decade ago, the island’s new owners finally built the house and a long pier. Fortunately and unlike what happened in the case of a smaller island nearby, the owners at least obeyed zoning and environmental restrictions, so from the water, aside from the pier, the island hasn’t changed too much. In the summer, the trees mostly screen the house from view.

I paddled around the island a few weeks ago in a friend’s kayak. Four or five ospreys circled or roosted in the trees, and kingfishers — a beautiful bird I never saw on the river growing up — have dug holes in the cliff to nest in. It’s still beautiful, and there’s still a sense of wildness about it, and also a sense of accessibility — at least below the mean high tide line. It could still be a magical place for a kid, or an adult.

But of course I felt a sense of loss. Without access to the island’s interior — the scramble up the steep hill that marked one’s palms with clay, the breeze coming up from the river — I can’t get inside that wildness, either, not as fully as I once could.

And the time I’ve spent in the west recently heightens that contrast. This spring, I spent a little time in Utah and more time in Colorado, with a trip to Death Valley and Canyonlands national parks in there as well, and these are all places where the dynamics of wild places and public land are very different. There’s public land in the county where I grew up, and some of it is still just trees with crisscrossing trails, but they’re smallish pockets of land, relatively, and the gates close at dark. There’s noplace within a two-hour drive where you could walk for a day without coming to the end of the trail, and of course there’s no public land where I can park my van and stay for free.

I was recently talking to a friend about the difference between wilderness and wildness. Wilderness is pristine, preserved; wildness just hasn’t been touched for a while. It could be an old clear-cut where the trees are growing back — not the irreplaceable old growth, but whatever species are up for the task — or an island with vines growing over the foundations of an old house. Maybe wildness could even be a very overgrown backyard, or any other space where human attention is mostly turned the other way and natural forces are dominant.

Wilderness — like Colorado’s 44 designated wilderness areas that I’m trying to hike — is something I only encountered as an adult. And I love it, obviously. But wildness is what I grew up with. Like the island, or like the woods next to my parents’ house. (This woods, too, is now fenced off and built up with boring and oversized houses, but before that, it was glorious.) These kinds of wild places — the marsh by the road,the yard where saplings grow around the wrecks of old boats and cars — feel charged with a unique kind of energy. They’re scrappy, the natural order fighting hard to stay or to make a comeback. As long as those places last, it feels like they’re getting away with something.

Another thing about wildness: it can be anywhere. Vacant lots, slips of suburbia too boggy or difficult to build on, or next to Cherry Creek in Denver where herons pluck fish out of the water in the shade of an overpass. When I took a train through Eastern Europe in 2006 I saw people picnicking on the slope above the train tracks, and I bet they were there for the wildness.

Right now I’m in Maryland, and to be honest, I’d rather not be. But I need foot surgery — nothing as big as the one I had in 2017, which involved two incisions, four cuts through the bone, four titanium screws, and a bunch of toe ligaments cut and then sewn back together — but still significant enough that I’ll need to stay in a normal house, not a van, for a few weeks. (I was trying to make this surgery happen in Colorado: I talked to a couple of surgeons there, who gave me two different surgical plans and I felt uncomfortable with both. But the surgeon here in Maryland who did my other foot five years ago came up with a plan I feel pretty good about.)

I’m not excited about having foot surgery. I’m not excited about going for the whole summer without hiking or stand-up paddleboarding, and I’m not excited about being unable to do normal life things, like lugging a forty-pound jug of water from the spigot to the van or even taking a shower, without caution and deliberate thought. I’m not excited about all the rehab I’ll have to do on my foot, because that involves a lot of stretching and stretching is boring and I hate it. I’m not excited about being unable to exercise like I’m used to and losing whatever fitness I’ve gained in the last year. But all of this had to happen sometime, and now’s the time.

So I’m looking for the silver linings. For one, I’m grateful that I have option of being able to stay in my parents’ nice guest room while I recuperate, with my mom to make sure I take the appropriate dose of painkillers and bring me food and water. For another, I’ve been able to see some friends and family members in person for the first time since before the pandemic. And though this part of Maryland lacks mountains, it makes up for it with water, and I’ve been able to paddle and swim. I’ve spotted horseshoe crabs from my parents’ pier, a deer eating the old lettuce my mom threw out, a bluebird feeding its baby with a seed from the bird feeder. So right now I miss being in the wilderness — but I have wildness.

44 Wildernesses

I’m a sucker for maps.

Maps are mystery. Maps are potential.

Looking at a map, planning where I might go, what areas I think might be beautiful or interesting or might simply fill in the blank spots in my own mental map, is weirdly satisfying to me. I find looking at maps of places I might go hiking almost as good as actually being out there — or even better than being out there, if it’s chilly outside and I’m wrapped in blankets, daydreaming.

So check out this one.

This is a map of all the wilderness areas in Colorado, shown in darkest green.

There are a lot of them. Forty-four, to be exact. And last summer, when I was making loops all over the state, hyped up on the novelty of being able to go wherever I wanted, I decided: I’m going to hike in all of them.

It doesn’t have to be anything crazy, like an overnight backpacking trip or even an all-day thing. Just a mile or so past the wilderness boundary, enough to give me a taste of the place, will do.

Not only would this be fun, I figured, but it could be a helpful organizing principle. Sometimes having an enormous amount of options makes it paradoxically harder to make decisions. And trying to set foot in each of the wildernesses could get me thinking outside the scope of what I already know. So I figure that if I ever want to go someplace in Colorado that’s new to me but am not quite sure how to narrow it down, I can take a look at the list of wildernesses and go where I haven’t been yet.

So, you may wonder, since I spent like five whole months in Colorado last summer, and there are 44 wildernesses, and I just wrote in my last blog post about how I’ve been doing too much driving, I must have been to what, half of them by now? A third?

Nope! I’ve been to seven. (So that’s a tiny 6.29%!)

I’m not in a big hurry on this. I want to try to avoid the urge to rush from one place to another, and I want to drive less, like I mentioned. Also, I want to make sure that I don’t, just to give a totally hypothetical example that absolutely isn’t taken from my actual life at all, nope no sir not me, procrastinate from difficult good things like writing fiction by focusing on easier good things like hiking.

So here’s my list as it stands:

WILDERNESSES HIKED IN

Sangre de Cristo

- Venable Trail

Lizard Head

- Navajo Lake

- probably Lizard Head Trail crossed wilderness boundary

Holy Cross

- Timberline Lake

- St. Kevin Lake

Mt. Massive

- Windsor Lake

Flat Tops

- Chinese Wall

- Devils Causeway

Raggeds

- Raspberry Creek

Hermosa Creek

- Ryman Trail to Highline/CO Trail

Let me tell you about the one I added to my list yesterday, Hermosa Creek.

This wilderness is in one of my favorite areas of the state: the San Juan range in southwestern Colorado. I’ve written before, I think, about the San Juans. They get a bit more summer moisture than some other ranges, so by Colorado standards, they’re very green, and the rocks and soil can be very red. They used to be volcanoes, and there’s something about the mud that is extra silty and sticky, so each of your boots end up weighing like five pounds. The western region of the San Juans, which is where I’ve spent the most time, also has some really sudden transitions from farmland to mountains or mountains to desert, and I am all about that drama.

I spent the first couple weeks of May in the national forest north of Mancos, so I wasn’t too far from the Hermosa Creek Wilderness, which is one I was very curious about. But it’s not easy to access. There are no roads close by on the east or north, and while there’s a road going towards it from the south, I went a little bit up that road last fall, and I suspect that the last few miles of it wouldn’t be navigable with my van. So I’d be walking a few miles along a 4wd road, possibly eating the dust of passing ATVs, which does not seem fun.

I opted instead to hike into the wilderness from Route 145 just south of Rico, one of my favorite mountain towns. (And where I’m parked now as I’m writing this blog.)

I’d take the Ryman Creek trail. As I headed east, I’d stay left at the fork to go on Upper Ryman, then turn right/south for just a teeny tiny bit until I got to the wilderness boundary. (Which is the line made up of a bunch of green dots in the lower-right corner of the second photo.)

This plan was a little tentative. There’s still some snow in patches high up, and I’d tried hiking Lower Ryman last fall and it was pretty overgrown. Also, a couple people on the Alltrails app mentioned that Upper Ryman was “steep” (which really could mean anything, from “a sphere placed on this surface would roll downhill” to “you will need to use your hands to climb up it”). I figured that if things got too tricky before I got to the wilderness boundary, I’d just turn around and at least I’d have a nice hike anyway.

I started out at the ass-crack of dawn, around 6 a.m., because even though I’m a natural sunrise-waker-upper and it takes some effort for me to get up before sunrise, once I’m out there and it’s still so early that the light is gray, I adore it. About a mile or so up, I came to my first obstacle.

Uh oh! It’s a spiky log!

The water in the creek was pretty high due to the snowmelt higher up. Last fall, I think I just stepped across the creek where it went between the two evergreens (upper left of photo) on some raised logs or sticks or hummocks of grass. But this time, it was either spiky log or get my feet wet. I opted for spiky log, and I did it!

Soon afterwards, I passed this sign.

I never did see any trail construction, but I did periodically wonder what the sign meant by “and even worse.” Did they mean that those who failed to obey the sign would be punished by a fate worse than death? Or just that a person could cause a rockslide and kill someone else, which might be worse for the rockslide-causer than if they themselves died? Or did whoever wrote this sign just want to keep us on our toes?

Then the steep part started. And it was steep. I didn’t have to use my hands, but I was hauling myself up using my hiking poles. And I did think, “this particular angle is the limit at which a human foot can maintain traction on this particular surface.” The trail surface was just dirt, which was sometimes loose and slidey. I would’ve had a much better grip if it was solid rock, or it would’ve been an easier climb if there were rock steps or switchbacks. But the trail went up a relatively narrow ridge, so in many spots there wasn’t even room for switchbacks. So the trail just went straight up the spine.

I didn’t take many photos because I was busy cursing and being out of breath and trying not to slip. It was really beautiful, though.

Once the steep section was done, I found myself in a magical aspen grove.

I took a break here to drink a bunch of tea and eat a snack. The birds had woken up in earnest when the sunlight hit the ridge, so I was using this new app that I am obsessed with that identifies birds by sound. There were some sweet little warblers, a northern flicker, and a flock of at least half a dozen violet-green swallows. These swallows were wonderful to watch, darting and banking and diving and soaring out over the creek valley. I don’t think they were catching bugs, not as early and chilly as it was. I’m sure that a bird behaviorist could explain why they were doing that and that it must have a survival function—reinforcing group roles and hierarchy, or competing for mates, something like that—but it looked like exuberance, like play.

Definitely not my photo, but just so you can see how gorgeous these birds are:

The top of the ridge was mostly aspen (with a few stands of evergreens) for miles. It was just beautiful up there, and I had some interesting wildlife moments. Tons more birds, for starters. Then I heard a snap or crash and in the distance between the trees saw something large and brown running down the hill. It was either a deer, elk, or bear—all of which had left tracks on the trail at some point—but it was clearly aware of me long before I was aware of it. Later on, a hummingbird came out of nowhere and arrowed towards me. I thought it was going to pass over my head but it stopped, going sixty to zero, about two feet in front of my face, and stared at me, flaring its tail. Then it zipped away. For the Aztecs, hummingbirds and warriors were connected, and this makes total sense.

The aspen trees were heavily marked, and most of those markings were so old they were no longer legible. I get the sense that decades ago, this trail saw heavier use than it did today. I’m not keen on people carving their names into trees, but it is pretty impressive how old some of these trees are!

I kept going gradually up, passing the turnoff for the Lower Ryman trail, and then there was another, shorter section of steep climbing. More of the surrounding ridges and mountains came into view—off to the south, I could even see Dibe’Nitsaa (aka Mt. Hesperus), which is a few miles away from my last campsite north of Mancos.

Then I came to the next obstacle:

There was snow covering the trail. I thought, if it’s like this the whole way, I won’t be able to slog through it all. I might have to turn back. Fortunately, the snow was just a few patches, 10-20-30 feet long, and it was still frozen solid enough at that point that I mostly just walked over it.

Then it all happened very quickly: I got to the forest service road that led to the Highline Trail/Colorado Trail. Then I was at the Hermosa Creek Wilderness boundary!

I know I said that I liked to walk about a mile past the boundary. But the trail here never actually crosses it, and it was a fairly long hike to even reach the boundary. So in this case I was content with just walking around the sign.

But the big thing happening here was the views.

Enhance!

I mean, why? Why is it like this??

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[inward shouting of incomprehension and delight]

But because language gives us a tool to make sense of things, I can say that part of what boggles me about a mountain range like this one is that there’s both incredible scope and incredible intricacy. Like nature should be exhausted after making *one* mountain that complex and that huge, but there’s another and another and another and…

And there’s also the time scale: the knowledge that in the deep past, if you could sit where I was sitting and watch that specific sector of the horizon for ten years, twenty, a whole lifetime, probably nothing visibly dramatic would happen. And yet, the drama! It looks like they just popped out of the ground last week, all crowding together in their eagerness to start being mountains and do an EMPHATICALLY good job of it.

And because one way we engage with mystery is to make maps, and measure things, and give the mountains names, even when there are so many and they are so big, I can tell you that the mountain range in the distance was about 20 miles from where I was sitting, that on the map it’s called the Needles range, and that these are some big honking mountains.

Even though I could’ve stayed there for hours, after about 45 minutes of sitting and looking and eating a couple of tortillas with peanut butter, I had to start back. I picked up a couple pieces of litter (yes, even all the way up there), tried talking to a raven, and it was literally all downhill from there.

Also literally, it was a very enjoyable walk downhill. I did encounter a few obstacles:

The snow had softened, so it didn’t hold my weight so well and I postholed through it thigh-deep a few times. Totally worth it.

I slipped crossing a tiny stream and landed on my ass in the San Juan mud. Also totally worth it.

Going down the steep sections of the trail was trickier and more dangerous than going up, and my feet went out from under me once or twice. Fortunately I didn’t hurt myself, and still totally worth it.

I’m a slow hiker, I stop often to stare at things, and I take long breaks, so about 12 hours after I left the van, I came back to it tired, hungry, muddy, exhilarated, and content.

So that’s how I hiked into my seventh Colorado wilderness. Here’s to 37 more.

By the Numbers: One-Year Retrospective

This past Sunday (May 8) was Mother’s Day this year, but it also happened to be my one year (v)anniversary of living full-time and continuously in van v2.0. Counting the time I lived in v1.0 (September–December 2020), it’s been 16 months. So it seems like a good time for a very math-y perspective on how it’s going so far.

I had to start by thinking about miles traveled. Since I bought the van with (I think) about 298,000 miles on the odometer, I’ve put about 31,000 miles on it, averaging 1,937.5 miles per month. Given that the average driver covers a little over 1,100 per month, that’s a lot.

It also means I’m generating about 2,700 lbs of CO2 emissions each month, which—well, I’d really rather not. (I’m paying a shockingly low amount ($23) per month to offset 5,000 lbs of CO2 through Terrapass, though I’m not sure how effective this carbon offset program or any other program is at compensating for the damage I’m doing.)

I tried to use Google Maps and then Mapquest to draw my approximate route since May 2021, but Google Maps wouldn’t let me add enough stops and Mapquest failed to compute the route past November 2021. So you’ll just have to imagine it:

I’ve been as far northwest as Seattle; as far southwest as Death Valley, CA; as far southeast as metro Tampa, FL; and as far northeast as South Jersey. Colorado would end up looking like a hub: and I’ve looped around the mountain ranges in the north and south of the state. I’ve also made sort of a Y-shape in New Mexico and visited Capitol Reef and Arches National Parks in Utah.

Am I Better Off?

When I decided to move into a van, I was hoping for a couple of things: a) that it would help me save money, or at least break even, and b) improve my quality of life.

So it’s time for some van-cost calculations that I’ve put off for a year, simply out of dread of what I’ll see when I look through my old credit card statements: the fast-food breakfasts; the four single-serve kombuchas in a two-week period when a large bottle would have been cheaper and buying none at all would have been more responsible; all the orders from mega-retailers that are destroying individual lives and the world in general and profiting space billionaires; and my general moral decline from my financially-disciplined, I-know-where-every-cent-is-going teens and twenties into my weak-willed, effete, flabby middle age.

But deep breath. Here goes.

Did I Save Money on Housing?

Base cost of van (purchase, registration, initial repairs): $2,801.17

Professional help with build (solar, removing rear AC/heat units): $1,898.72

Build supplies (including lumber, battery, fan, insulation, hardware, mattress, etc.): $6,764.54

Repairs, maintenance (not counting oil changes), upgrades (fancy tires): $3,685.39

TOTAL: $15,149.82

Honestly, despite my initial hope of keeping the whole van under $10k, $15k is about what I was suspecting. And I’m guessing it’s more than I’ve spent, total, on all the other cars I’ve ever owned in my life. (Which were all compact sedans or hatchbacks that I bought used and drove until the wheels fell off, metaphorically speaking.)

So to me, $15k sounds pretty cheap for a house… but a LOT for a car… but cheap for a house! I don’t know what to think!

But I still need to factor in travel costs. Some Googling and some very loose math tells me that the average cost of gas since September 2020 has been $3.50.

Doing another calculation I’ve been dreading, I find that the van gets an average of 13.24 miles per gallon, which is not as bad as I was afraid of, but not great.

31,000 miles @ 13.24 per gallon = 2,341 gallons x $3.50 = $8,193.50

So here’s the grand total cost of living in a van since September 2020:

Van total: $15,149.82

Driving all over the place: $8,193.50

Campgrounds (estimate): $520

—————————————————————

TOTAL: $23,863.32

Now let’s compare that to what it would’ve cost me if I stayed in my Denver condo. I’m assuming that I’m spending about the same on food, entertainment, healthcare, laundry, car insurance (the van is a little more than my old car, but not that much), etc.

Condo mortgage + HOA fees + average electric, September 2020-present: $715 x 16 = $11,440

OK, so that sucks. Living in a van has not saved me money on housing.

In fact, it’s cost me $12,423.32 more.

But the van had some big initial costs that I hopefully won’t encounter again, like the initial purchase price and all the stuff for the interior build. So is there ever a point where I’ll break even financially?

Yes, there is. But—assuming that I continue to drive an average of 1,937 miles/month, that the price of gas stays the same as it is right now ($4.10), and that my condo HOA fees would not have gone up—the break-even point won’t be until 2031.

:/

But what if I drove less? Say I could reduce driving by 1/3. That moves the break-even point to 2026. Which is better than 2031… but still not super.

Things become slightly better if I reduce driving by 1/2: I’d break even in early 2025. The same could happen if I reduce driving by 1/3 but gas goes down to $3.50/gallon.

So the news here is not great: If I ever want to break even, I need to start driving less.

Did My Quality of Life Improve?

So all my cost estimates assume that nothing major will go wrong with the van (knock on wood) and that nothing major would have gone wrong with my condo. It also assumes that if I’d stayed in the condo, I wouldn’t have traveled beyond some occasional day trips or camping trips into the Colorado mountains.

Which brings me to the next question: has living in a van been better, in other ways, than living in a condo?

I wish I could do math for this too. (And if you know of a more rigorous way to measure quality of life, message me!) But all I know to do is make an old-fashioned pros and cons list:

Living in Condo

Living in Van

It’s tough to make a meaningful comparison here without the ability to see into a parallel universe where I’d stayed in the condo. Maybe, in the last year-plus, I would’ve found some ways to alleviate the negatives of staying in the condo: maybe an amazing career opportunity would have opened up, quieter neighbors would have moved in, or something totally unexpected and great would happen.

Also, it wasn’t a binary choice between van and condo. I was considering some other options, like moving onto a boat in Baltimore or a small house somewhere in the desert or the rural midwest. Maybe those options would’ve been much better than the van… or much worse.

All I know is that even though I’m pretty disappointed that I’m not saving a ton of money over the condo, I feel like my quality of life is better than it would’ve been if I’d taken the other, obvious path of staying put. Even though the van has a ton of drawbacks, the positives have some heft to them. My stress level seems lower than it was when I lived in more “normal” places. I think I’ve gotten healthier and am in better shape. And I enjoy being “at home” more. (And if I decide that I need to make cutting costs more of a priority, I can quit at any time! Really! (Do I sound convincing? I’m not so sure that I do.))

I’ll end with a caveat, if anyone is reading this out of curiosity about what a nomadic life costs: this blog post uses a sample size of one to obtain its data. I imagine that some people spend much more every year; I know for a fact that many spend far less. The Homes on Wheels Alliance (HOWA) is a great resource for nomadic life on a budget. One of their videos features a guy whose total expenses (minus the initial cost of his RV) are under $4k/year, and other folks talk about how they live within their means on fixed incomes like social security. (The Glorious Life on Wheels channel also features folks on fixed incomes and talks about how that works.) So low-budget vanlife can be done… I’m just not doing it.

Big August

The US norm of only two weeks’ paid vacation — IF you’re lucky — is a scam and a scandal. It plays into the lie that there’s not nearly enough money to go around and only our nonstop toil can keep the feebly flickering economic flame from going out. There are plenty of other developed nations where regular people have access to functional and humane healthcare systems, paid family leave, and weeks or even a month of paid vacation, minimum, and those countries’ economies are doing fine. We’re the ones who have it backwards. We should take vacations. And as someone who is self-employed and works remotely, I have some flexibility to live according to how I think things should be, to normalize long vacations by taking one of my own. But it still felt very weird when I emailed my regular clients earlier this summer and told them I’d be unavailable most of August.

This plan started in the spring when my friend Melissa planned a big family trip to Glacier National Park in Montana — her husband and kids, parents on both sides, some in-laws and cousins, and me. When that big vacation was established, two smaller ones clicked into place on either side, like a set of magnets. Seattle was only a day or so out of the way — I could visit my friend Julie for a long weekend and do some paddleboarding. And then the Santa Fe opera season’s last week was the week after the Glacier trip, and my friend Ron had always wanted to see Eugene Onegin.

So I was planning to make a big loop around the west: Colorado to Seattle to Glacier to Santa Fe. The vaccines were out and available to everyone, covid rates were dropping, and it seemed like this trip would be a tripartite celebration with three groups of friends: a victory romp, a big shout of joy, now that we were finally on our way to beating the pandemic.

We could’ve beat the pandemic this year. But of course we know how that went. My friends and I kept our vacation plans, though with precautions, like N95s on planes and carryout in lieu of actually going out. But it was still a great trip(s), fully worthwhile and lovely.

If you (like many people, sometimes including me) get bored listening to people exhaustively describe their vacations, please feel free to skip this post. I’m planning to write about some more topical stuff this fall, like whether living in a van is actually cheaper than living in a regular house, whether it’s more sustainable, and which of my van design choices have worked out well and which are flopping. But if you want the vacation narration and/or photos, read on!

PART I: SEATTLE

Starting in southwestern Colorado, I drove through Boise and parked the van by some lava rocks near the highway. There were fires all over the west, so I kept checking fire and smoke maps on my phone, trying to figure out where I could stop to avoid the worst of it. The drive was hazy basically all the way to Washington, and the sunsets and sunrises were all pink and orange.

On my second day of driving, I made it all the way to western Washington. I’d given myself three days to get there and it was only Wednesday, so I was basically early for my weekend plans with Julie. I had work to finish up anyway, so I plopped myself down among some big, gorgeous trees in the Cascades west of Yakima and figured I’d stay there until Friday or Saturday.

The next morning I was working away in the van and realized the light was weird. It was very orangey, and something about it was just slightly off. Also, my eyes itched and my head hurt a little.

I checked the fire maps, and sure enough, at about the time I arrived the day before, a new fire had started directly north of me. The smoke was billowing overhead just to the east. On my phone screen, it was a plume of bright red pixels, expanding and darkening to purple as the 24-hour forecast map ticked into the future.

I really liked this campsite, so I tried to stick it out for a while, but I finally drove off to the west, where the smoke wouldn’t be as thick.

I ended up driving quite a distance. The smoke cleared. At one point, I rounded a bend and wondered, “Why do the clouds up ahead look weird?”

Then I realized that what I was looking not at clouds but at the side of a mountain with patches of snow, a mountain so big that at first I did not notice that it was a mountain.

When I realized it was a mountain, I yelled, “Holy shit!”

I think yelling is an appropriate response to seeing Mt. Rainier. The “other” Cascade peaks are pretty majestic in their own right, but Rainier dwarfs everything around it. It looks surreal, like a mountain out of a dream or a fantasy tale. Its shape is conical and iconic.

Hello, it says. I am a massive fucking volcano.

This photo was taken minutes after my initial view of Rainier, which was much higher up and where I could see much more of the mountain, so it doesn’t come anywhere close to doing it justice.

I found a decent campsite that night, and the night after that I moved closer to Seattle.

I got to Seattle on a Saturday and spent a few days with Julie and her husband Daniel. We did some walking and driving around, picked about half a gallon of blackberries, and went paddleboarding three times: once in Lake Union, near downtown; once in an inlet connected to Puget Sound; and once in Lake Washington, which is a huge lake with hillside neighborhoods, marshes with lily pads and turtles, and views of both the Cascades and the Olympics. In short, it was pretty great.

A really good Seattle tree.

Lake Washington is like a frickin’ Monet.

The water was cold and briny with crazy tidal swings. This was also the first time I’ve ever seen a seal in the wild — or maybe several seals. Every so often, one popped its head out of the water and followed us at a distance, just curious.

Dreamy volcano with ducks.

PART II: THE FIERY APOCALYPSE

When I left Seattle, I had a week before I was supposed to be in Glacier. My objectives were: 1. Do my work (since this week was not a vacation week); 2. Avoid the places that were on fire or covered in smoke; and 3. Avoid the intense heat wave that was coming, with temperatures predicted to be in the 90s or even hit 100 in eastern Washington. (The van starts to get uncomfortable when temperatures get into the low- to mid-80s.)

Objective 1 was not a problem, but Objectives 2 and 3 turned out to be harder than I expected. This was around the time when the big fires in Northern California were raging, and those fires generated a tremendous amount of smoke. The fire that had started just north of me near Yakima was still going strong. There were fires in eastern Washington, a thick dotting of them across the Idaho Panhandle and in western Montana, and even one burning near the western side of Glacier National Park itself.

I kept checking the smoke and fire maps, and then the heat maps, back and forth and back and forth trying to figure out where I could go. It was like a puzzle or an obstacle course: I’d find an area where there was plausible camping and where the temperature was below 90 degrees, but then it was on fire. Or here was an area that was both not too hot and not too smoky, but it was in some remote spot at some high elevation, so it would take me hours to get to and where it was very unlikely that there was enough cell reception for me to work.

Noplace was great: everywhere would be hot. Everywhere would be at least somewhat smoky. The western side of the Rockies just north of Glacier looked like the best bet.

So I drove through Idaho, which was on fire and covered in smoke.

This was intense. The light was weird and I could barely see Lake Pend Oreille.

My eyes itched. My head hurt. And I could smell the smoke now. I wasn’t wheezing or having actual trouble breathing, but I felt generally gross in the lungs and sinuses. Some animal part of my brain was saying, Get out of here.

For a few hours, I drove while wearing an N95. When I pulled off by the side of a forest road north of Libby, Montana, the air quality rating was red, according to the smoke map, “unhealthy” according to the weather app, which advised people to stay indoors.

Is a campervan indoors? It’s enclosed, sure. But the whole engine compartment is open to the air on the underside and only separated from the van’s interior by an aluminum shield. If I don’t close the side door firmly enough, I can see daylight through the cracks. Dust sneaks in through the back doors. The van is basically a metal tent that is insulated and (thank goodness, so far) waterproof. But I doubt it’s as well sealed as a house. It’s not the indoors that the weather app, public health advisories, scientists, doctors or anyone else means when they say “stay indoors.”

I slept with the N95 on, then woke up at first light and kept pushing east. The smoke got a little better, but I could still smell fire when I got to my intended spot. I kept going up, taking a forest service road that climbed a mountainside, over a thousand feet from the valley floor.

For a few days, this seemed to do the trick. I was high enough that I was above some of the smoke and it didn’t get uncomfortably hot in the van. But the smoke caught up with me, and again there was the weird light, and the itchy eyes, and the strong feeling that I Should Not Be There.

The thing was, there was noplace else I could go where it might be better. I felt what I imagined a non-human animal might feel when its habitat is being taken away: a new road over there, so you didn’t want to go there; houses over here, so you could no longer go here. So eventually you ended up clinging to one narrow band of trees high on a mountainside, where you hunkered down hoping it wouldn’t get worse, that you wouldn’t lose any more ground, because where could you go?

It’s a shitty feeling. This summer and last have been so remarkably hot, so remarkably fiery, that I think in the future we’ll remember these years as the first summers of a new and grimmer climate era. I’m writing this in early September, a week or so after the remnants of Hurricane Ida deluged the east coast. On Twitter, I saw a screenshot of a text message from the poster’s friend in New York City, saying that he’d gotten multiple emergency alerts: one told him to get underground because of tornadoes, and one told him to seek higher ground because of flash flooding. On the mountain in early August, I felt trapped by violent extremes of weather, but in September, dozens of people actually were trapped, and actually died.

On the mountain in early August, the wind shifted and blew the smoke away a couple days before I was supposed to be in Glacier.

I was working pretty intently, trying to meet some deadlines. But changes in weather also sometimes affect my cell phone reception. I lost the one or two flickering bars I’d had up until that point, so I headed for the national forest campground about a thousand feet down, where the signal was stronger.

This is where I had what a friend later said was an auditory hallucination. The site was lovely, right next to a clear river that flowed over multicolored rocks. So there was the river noise, the tree noise, and the noise of the two fans I had both running on high because it was still pretty hot. There was not another person in that campground the whole time I was there, but at one point, I was convinced that at least one adult and at least one child had set up camp one or two sites over and were talking excitedly.

I’ll go talk to them, I thought. I was going to offer to move sites — I was in the best one, and since I was just working, and very intently at that, trying to meet a couple of guidelines, I wasn’t taking advantage of the site’s awesomeness.

I went outside, mask on and everything, There was no one there. It was a bit creepy, but also weirdly fascinating: left on its own someplace very quiet with white noise, the brain will make voices out of things that are not voices. Maybe because the brain is always trying to make sense out of things, and for the brain, language is order?

And this is where I have another story about a dumb thing I did.

I worked into the evening. I worked into the night.

The brain, I thought, really was bizarre. For instance, right now I hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep and I’d spent all day in front of my laptop, so it looked like the lights in my van were flickering.

I focused on the lights. Maybe they really were flickering.

I opened the app that monitors the van’s house battery. But something was wrong with the app: it wasn’t giving me a reading for the battery charge, it just said zero. I closed the app and reopened it, then I restarted my whole phone. Still zero.

Then I noticed the voltage reading, which was usually over 13 but was now at 11-something.

As it turned out, this wasn’t a glitch with the app. For days, I’d been keeping the big fan running, mostly on high, all day and all night, plus a second fan when it got really hot, plus doing a lot of work on my laptop. I’d also been moving the van back and forth during the day so it stayed in the shade as much as possible, and the smoke had blocked the sun. So: I’d drained the battery, and the lights were flickering as the last of the charge trickled out and the voltage started dropping.

I turned all the lights off, started the van, and flipped the switch for alternator charging. The charge reading ticked from zero to one percent. This meant that I had to go for a little drive on the backroads of Montana at night, which cost me some work time and sleep time but was actually kind of fun. However, I’m going to try to keep a better eye on my battery charge from now on.

PART III: GLACIER

I’d been to Glacier two times before, both with Ron. The first was in 2002, when we’d come too early in the year to drive the famous Going to the Sun Road. But we did take a great hike to Avalanche Lake, which was about four miles round-trip with snow at the top, and which Ron did in flip-flops. The second time, we’d been able to drive Going to the Sun Road, and it was beautiful, but we’d made the mistake of hoping to just show up and find a campsite in the park at the last minute like we had in 2002. This was no longer possible, and our race to beat the oncoming night and find a place to stay resulted in Ron’s car becoming momentarily airborne on a rough gravel road.

Glacier is one of the biggest of the big-deal national parks, one of the most visited, and for good reason: it’s one of the most stunning places I’ve ever seen, and it’s incredibly biodiverse, more even than Rocky Mountain national Park or Banff and Jasper National park in Canada. A couple of the park’s employees put out a podcast about a year ago, which is great because it doesn’t skirt around some tough issues: the violent displacement of native people and coerced sale of ancestral lands, and the mistakes that park management has made in balancing conservation and public access. For instance: at one point they installed a new sewer system for public toilets at Logan Pass, the highest point on the parks’ main road and one of its most pristine landscapes. The new system was supposed to filter and treat the sewage and spritz more-or-less-harmless water onto the adjacent meadow, but instead it sprayed out gobs of raw shit and left toilet paper streamers on the alpine foliage. One fix proposed for this problem was saving up all the sewage til after dark, then having it gush out in fountains illuminated with multicolored lights, because in the dark the tourists wouldn’t notice that these fountains were sewage, and the park could make it a show, entertainment, a little bit of Vegas in the high Rockies.

Thank God, this idea did not go forward, and the sewage system was redone. Today it takes a 3,500-gallon sewage tanker seven (if I remember correctly) trips every day to haul all of the human waste down from the alpine tundra. The tundra is, hopefully, recovering. And park management seems way more conservation-minded now.

But it’s still strange to feel the push-pull of that balancing act, to be in such a pristine and incredible place where there are also so many people. Reservable campsites fill up months in advance, and even activities like horseback rides and bus tours, which feel like they should be spur of the moment, are booked weeks ahead. This is what had caused Ron and I so much stress a few years ago — but Melissa planned this trip like she was orchestrating the invasion of Normandy. I think she made a spreadsheet at one point. On this big family trip there were six groups of people: two in hotels, one in a big RV that stayed in RV parks outside the national park boundaries, and three in campervans. Everyone was arriving and departing at different times. A few days would be spent on the west side of the park and a few on the east, so everyone would move from their first campsites/hotels/RV parks to the second halfway through the trip. Some people were renting cars, and Melissa and her family were renting a pop-top, four-person, four-wheel-drive Sprinter van. There was a day-by-day itinerary with planned hikes and check-ins and who needed to go where and meet whom. It was incredible planning.

And the trip was a lot of fun. The weather was cool and a bit rainy, which limited the planned hikes a bit but also cleared out the lingering smoke. And we got to take some beautiful walks.

I also went paddleboarding twice in Lake MacDonald. The first paddle was remarkable for how glass-calm it was when I started out and how suddenly it turned windy and choppy, with waves breaking over the bow of my board. I was soaked by the time I got back, and it was completely worth it.

I did not take any photos after it got windy because I could not stop paddling or I’d be blown backwards, but here’s how calm it was, and how beautiful. I can’t get over the color of the water — we were told that these teals and turquoises and greens come from “glacier flour,” ultrafine dust scoured off the rocks by the glaciers that carved the landscape.

Like the landscapes, the wildlife in Glacier is extra. We saw a black bear strolling along the opposite shore of Avalanche Lake. We saw a deer, which came so close to Melissa’s kids that they could almost touch it — the kids moved away first, not the deer. And we were almost charged by a moose.

Moose are huge. They are not afraid of humans, cars, or dogs. They are magnificent and weird-looking and rather scary. And there was one that was said to frequent a pond about half a mile from our second campsite on the east side of the park.

We went to the pond and we saw the moose. The moose in the water up to his chest, fully submerging his head to graze on underwater plants. The moose did not seem to care about all the people on the shore watching him, some of whom had even set up camp chairs for a front row seat to watch him.

As we got back to the campground, we ran into Melissa’s brother-in-law and his girlfriend, who had just arrived. They wanted to see the moose too, so the whole larger group of us all walked back to the pond.

The moose was gone. There was a guy standing on the shore and taking a video or a photo of the pond, and after he left, we stood in the trees just above the shore, looking for the moose.

Moose, prior to Incident.

I was convinced that he had walked out of the pond onto the shore to our right, since there was a trail of stirred-up sediment in the water and it seemed to lead that way. But as everyone was looking over to the right based on my (wrong) idea, the bushes over to the left were moving, and then antlers appeared, and then the moose crashed out of the bushes at a rapid trot, headed straight for us.

The moose dodged. The people dodged. But the moose did not stop or turn around, and it’s very fortunate that everyone was able to get out of its way in time. I don’t think he wanted to run any of us over — but also, he really wanted to be in that pond and wasn’t about to let us stop him. After the moose plunged into the water, he stood looking sideways at us, huffing and snorting. We left quickly and quietly.

The trip went too quickly, and it was great to hang out with Melissa and her family. They really enjoyed their rental van, which could fit five people for dinner on chilly evenings.

It was definitely a weird time to visit Glacier, though. The park wasn’t doing a very good job with pandemic safety: on paper, visitors are required to wear masks in park buildings, on park transportation and tours, and in “crowded outdoor spaces” (i.e. popular trails), but I saw very few people actually doing that, and it seemed that there was no enforcement of anything. I’d assumed that park staff would be wearing masks, but that wasn’t the case at all, and the park doesn’t require staff to be vaccinated. I’m worried about the potential for long covid as a result of breakthrough infections, plus I don’t have paid sick time or disability insurance, so I stayed mostly out of buildings and opted out of the bus and boat tours (which I really wanted to take). I would’ve tried to do some more early-morning walks, too, but Glacier has a lot of grizzlies and everything I read warned against hiking alone.

For this trip, I was content with puttering around, taking in the view, and socializing at the campsite. No matter what you do or how weird the times, it’s an incredible place.

PART IV: SANTA FE

Next was the part of the big long August trip that in my mind, I had been thinking of as “the dash”: I left Glacier on the morning of the 23rd and planned to pick up Ron from the airport in Santa Fe on the afternoon of the 25th.

When I planned it, this didn’t seem like a lot of time to drive about 1,336 miles. I think I wanted to give myself a buffer in case of bad weather or van problems or detouring around fires. But as it turned out, I could’ve stayed in Glacier longer. I drove well into the night on the 23rd, took a nap, passed through metro Denver at around 4 a.m. so I wouldn’t hit morning rush hour, and pulled off behind a truck stop south of Colorado Springs after sunrise. I was basically already within striking distance of Santa Fe with a full day to spare.

This did mean, though, that I was able to catch up on sleep at a nice reservoir in northern New Mexico near I-25 and then take the van to the car wash the next day.

It really needed it.

After the sightseeing and hiking and moving around in Glacier, Santa Fe was a very different type of vacation. Ron and I had booked an Airbnb that had plenty of reading space, comfy-looking furniture, and good light. There was a backyard with lounge chairs, a cottonwood tree, and hummingbirds.

Most of the time, we just sat around and talked and read. We stocked up on peanut butter, jelly, and bread, but since Santa Fe has such good food, we ended up getting takeout most nights, and it was so good.

We went to two operas, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. They were both amazing. I’m not very knowledgeable about opera, and it’s a pretty slow-moving art form. Normally, I gravitate towards narrative and consume it voraciously — reading all of The Never-ending Story in one weekend as a kid, or bingeing all of The Sopranos in a week during grad school. It takes me a moment to sink into opera, to open up to a story that’s told through music as much as or more than through words, but once I do, I love it. Almost as much, I enjoy seeing what modern directors and designers have done with these very old scores and librettos. Why, for instance, were the (mostly male) backup dancers in Onegin wearing tutus and hoop skirts and animal-skull masks? (It was very weird and I was totally here for it.) Or what did it do for Figaro to have all the characters except for the Countess look like they stepped out of an early-1900s British manor and why was the garden full of gigantic clock numbers and springs?

Plus it’s always wonderful to be at the Santa Fe opera house, which is an incredible space, especially when thunderstorms roll through.

The operas were on Thursday and Friday, and on the weekend we got to meet up with our friend Kim from college and her husband and son and dogs. (Kim even cooked for us, which was extra lovely.) We hadn’t seen them in a couple of years and it was very, very good to catch up.

Aside from seeing Kim and going to the opera, we didn’t go out at all. This last and most restful vacation also went very quickly — we could’ve stayed in that airbnb another week, easy.

PART V

Even after Ron was flying back to Florida and I’d checked out of the Airbnb, I could have lingered in New Mexico for much, much longer. I did stay for a few days, which I just spent working. Fortunately none of my capitalism-based fears came to pass: my clients didn’t deem me a lazy slacker and dump me in favor of a harder-working, more talented, younger, lower-paid competitor. In fact, I came back to a beginning-of-the-school-year academic editing rush. Over Labor Day weekend, I hunkered down and worked in the forest north of Taos.

I wanted to stay, climb Wheeler Peak and do some other long hikes, maybe explore some spots in the desert that I’ve only driven through but haven’t really spent time in. But I also wanted to see a doctor about a weird mole on my face, so I had to go to Colorado. The mole turned out to be just weird and not dangerous, and now I’m in north central Colorado, in the Flat Tops range.

I didn’t keep exact records, but I drove at least 3,200 miles on this big August trip. I’m very happy with how the van did. It stalled out only once, when I braked hard and turned onto a side road from a fast highway (I don’t know why, so hopefully it’s not a sign of a bigger issue?). It started right up again, though, and overall, it still sounds and feels great.

And now I’m back to just living in the van, not traveling or touristing or road-tripping or vacationing. I’ve gotten through my initial rush of post-vacation work, and I’ve eaten most of the leftover peanut butter and jelly and bread. For the next couple of months, I’ll be moving a lot less. I may go south, perhaps to the San Juans, then follow the fall weather into New Mexico. And I’ll hopefully be writing more — both on this blog and in general.

I Got Stuck on a Rock

So this past week I was in one of my favorite mountain ranges: the San Juans. This is the southwestern corner of Colorado, and I had no idea what was out here until 2005, when I took a long road trip and ended up in Ridgway State Park, watching the moon rise over a mesa. Since then, this area has had a magnetic pull for me. Every mountain range or mountain-y area in Colorado feels at least a little different from each other — though maybe that’s just because of my associations with them — but the San Juans seem like one of the most unique. The mountains are big, steep, in some places even jagged, toothy: in a fairytale, a wizard would live in these mountains, a wizard who is probably very good but not entirely safe to be around. The San Juans were once volcanoes, though in some places the slopesides and cliffs can be so red they’re almost purple, or the color of red velvet cake.

This is also one of the wettest places in Colorado, with summer thunderstorms basically every afternoon, so it’s very lush. At my campsite south of Rico, the aspen leaves and evergreen branches were so green they were almost blue. I was working but kept getting distracted, standing up from my camp chair to wander around and look at — well, everything.

The only possible drawback to this campsite is that the cell reception is a little spotty. On Saturday night, I drove up to town to talk on the phone, and by the time I got back to my site, it was dark and I was tired. I pulled in headfirst. My plan was to get up early the next morning and go for a hike. It would take me a little maneuvering to get turned around and pull out of the site, but I would figure it out in the morning, I thought.

In the morning, I did not figure it out. There was a big rock in the site, as well as some trees and some mud, and in trying to maneuver around the mud and the trees at 5:45 a.m., I forgot about the rock for a moment and drove up onto it with the left rear tire. The tire slipped sideways off the side of the rock, and 1/4 the weight of the van came to rest on a sticky-downy metal thing that I later came to learn was the lower shock bracket.

The left rear tire was totally off the ground, so trying to drive forward or in reverse didn’t do anything except grind the side of the tire against the rock and make a horrible burning smell.

I was one hundred percent stuck.

So far, nothing looked broken, and the metal shock bracket looked like it was pretty sturdy and welded to the axle — still, I was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to support this much weight.

The best thing to do was probably to jack the left rear corner of the van up to lift the shock bracket off the rock, then push the van backwards so the tire dropped back onto solid ground. But I couldn’t get a jack under the left rear axle because that’s where the rock was.

Maybe, though, if I put the jack under the tire, that would work? I tried it — but the ground was soft, and as the jack started taking on weight, it slipped sideways. Plus it just made a dent in the tire without really lifting it.

I got out my square-bladed steel shovel and dug down into the ground next to the rock a few inches, then I found a smaller rock from the fire pit. I put the rock under the jack to stabilize it and put a piece of plywood between the jack and the tire. At first this seemed a little better, but then the plywood started cracking, and then the jack slipped sideways again.

This was the point when I started getting very concerned. I don’t think a tow truck could’ve gotten me out: there were trees in front of and behind me. Plus, pulling the van forward off the rock might have done further damage to the stuff under the van. Maybe there was some kind of special offroad recovery service that would have some sort of hydraulic wedge thingie that they could put under the tire… but that might not actually exist, and if it did, it would be expensive.

I was trying pretty hard not to panic, to remember that I wasn’t in any actual danger, that I could live in a van stuck on a rock for weeks if I had to, and that I needed to stay calm and exhaust every possible option for trying to get the van loose myself and if that didn’t work, then I would call … someone? A crane operator? Gnomes with tiny sticks of dynamite to blow up the rock?

I needed something more solid between the jack and the tire, and I needed to make sure the jack was at a good angle so it wouldn’t slip. I went back to the fire pit and made one of the luckiest finds of my life: the perfectly shaped rock. I don’t even know what word exists to describe the shape of it — kind of a wedge, but in two different directions? I can only say that it fit exactly right between the jack, the tire, and the big rock.

Here I’d also like to note that during all these attempts to use the jack to raise the tire, I was breaking a cardinal rule: I had the van in neutral. This is not exactly a safe thing to do, but I was hoping that as I put upwards/backwards pressure on the tire, the van would roll itself loose. If I had the parking brake on, it might not do that, and my climbing into the van to release the brake/shift into neutral might collapse the whole rock/jack/rock/tire situation. I was using a length of metal pipe to extend the jack handle, so my arms weren’t under the tire and I could stand back a little, and I had the driver’s door open and was ready to dash for it and catch the van if it rolled free.

It took a couple of attempts — the first try lifted the van and it rolled backwards about an inch, then dropped on top of the rock again. The second try started cracking the rock between the jack and the tire, dislodging two small flakes of former magma. But then it worked: the van rolled backwards, the left rear tire dropped to the ground, and I hopped in the cab and hit the brake.

It took another few minutes and a 17-point turn to get fully out of trouble: the rock was still under the van, and it would’ve hit the gas tank if I’d maneuvered in the wrong direction. But about an hour and a half after I drove onto that rock, I was finally free.

The fact that I was able to get loose at all was a very lucky break: if the geometry of the rock was just a little different, I may not have been able to get a jack under the tire. If the campsite was on a steeper hill, the van may have rolled backwards into a ditch after I got it free. If there weren’t rocks lying around that were exactly the right shape, I might still be stuck there.

This was a stressful experience — like “eat 1/3 of a block of Monterey Jack straight from the wrapper” stressful.

I did go for a hike after that, though not as far as I’d initially planned.

So here’s what I learned:

Never, ever do that again.

Anytime I park in a campsite, even if it’s late, even if I’m tired, I need to park such that I can get out while half-asleep and only using three brain cells.

Even if I rarely ever use them and think they’re taking up too much space, I need to hold on to that metal shovel and the length of pipe.

God bless rocks.

Surprises

It’s been a while. As many/all of you know, my plan was to insulate the van and finish the interior by around February, but I didn’t get done until May 7th. On May 8th I drove the winding backroads out through western Maryland and into West Virginia, then took a day to rest and go hiking in Dolly Sods Wilderness. My second day on the road, I drive the twisty-turny highway down through Charleston. West of that, sometime in the afternoon, the highway straightened out, and I hardly needed to steer anymore.

What am I going to do with my hands? I thought, astonished.

Since early January, I’d been either work-working or working on the van: typing, sawing, drilling, sanding, staining, sealing. I love my parents and am grateful to them for letting me stay at their place, for years while I paid off my grad school loans and for months while I worked on the van, but as the months went on, I felt like I had died and my time there was some kind of Tantalean afterlife. I was always about two weeks away from being done — then another two weeks, then another. And since the van isn’t an end in itself but a home in which I hope to live a different/better life, I felt like I was perpetually on the cusp of starting a new thing but would never actually start it. It was like I was watching myself at the event horizon of a black hole.

And like a black hole, it sucked.

Now that I was finally on the road in van v2, the possibility of stillness seemed overwhelmingly strange.

I should’ve taken up knitting, I thought.

Since May 8th, I’ve been working, readjusting, catching up, and figuring out how to live in the van here in Colorado, which is a little different than living in the van in Florida like I did last year. I took a week’s vacation. I’ve been writing a little. I’ve been walking a lot.

There are a lot of things I plan to write about in this space. But I’ll start with surprises.

I should not have been surprised that it took me four months to finish the van. But I was. Enough said about that.

I’ve been surprised by some of the things I’ve struggled with:

It’s hard to recycle. A Google Maps search for a coffeeshop turns up a hundred Starbucks, but a search for “recycling” gives you offices for the companies in charge of curbside pickup, old-car scrapyards, and county landfills. Public collection sites sometimes exist, but they’re not intuitive to find. In Leadville, where I stayed for a few weeks, I found the recycling dumpsters by sheer luck as I was driving by the high school football field.

I’d expected it to be a little difficult to find places to stay that have decent cell reception. The thing I didn’t expect (but should have) was how much time that process would take. Exploring backroads is pleasant to me, so until now, I’ve never thought of it as something that’s time-consuming. There have been a couple of times recently when I’ve spent two hours driving to a beautiful area with no cell reception, I need to drive another hour to try another spot, and the work that I need to do isn’t getting done.

I’ve also been surprised by the things that I haven’t struggled as much with:

I expected getting supplies to be an ongoing challenge. Planning and building van v1 last summer and not knowing how bad the pandemic would get or how long it would last, I was ready to carry a month’s worth of supplies: food, toilet paper, toothpaste, deodorant. I always had extra of everything just in case there were random shortages. I still have a gallon jug of hand sanitizer in my storage bench, plus about a year’s worth of tampons. Going to the grocery store still stresses me out, and I don’t go very often — maybe once a week or two — but everything I need is findable, at least so far.

I was expecting that I’d try to eat healthy and get more exercise once I was living in the van, but I wasn’t expecting it to actually have any noticeable effect. I’ve been in terrible shape the last few years, and it bums me out. But I’ve been trying to walk an hour or so every day, plus at least one short hike and one long hike during the week. I feel better and stronger than I did two months ago, and I’m slightly less flabby. A steep hill that left me gasping for breath when I first got to my campsite near Leadville was not all *that* difficult two weeks later. This is a very good surprise.

Surprise! The van stalled out on a bumpy forest service road, 20 miles from the main highway and 10 miles from any cell phone reception. Fortunately, most people who drive down these roads are really just there to camp/hike/fish and wouldn’t murder someone even if given the opportunity, so I was able to get rides down the road to make the necessary phone calls. After six hours of waiting and being super disappointed in AAA, I had the van towed 60 miles to a garage in Montrose. The tow truck driver was a super nice guy, and on the long drive he told me about how he found towing much more interesting than construction-material hauling, about the custom motorcycles that he was building for his friend and his son, about how we both enjoy the solitary rituals of waking up early, and about his struggles with PTSD and stress management after three tours in Iraq. I spent the night in the auto shop’s parking lot and was there when they opened the next day.

The problem was tricky to figure out, but one of the mechanics was really good at diagnostics and got it after several hours of process-of-elimination work. A wire connected to the ignition had a bit of bare metal sticking out of the connector, and as I bounced around on the road, the wire was swinging around under the dash, made contact with another piece of metal, shorted out, and blew the fuse to the van’s computer. The mechanics fixed the wire, replaced the fuse, and sent me on my way.

Three weeks later and 60 miles away from the site of my first breakdown, the van stalled out again. This time, I could re-start it, but it would stall out whenever I braked, so it probably wouldn’t be too safe to continue driving it through the mountains. I spent the night in a small trailhead parking lot by a river outside of Telluride, and in the morning I got towed back to the same garage in Montrose.

I also requested the same towing service, Ol’ Red’s, and was hoping I’d get the same driver again. But it was a different, much younger driver, who looked about eighteen and was accompanied by his girlfriend, who looked about sixteen. I watched as these two very young people worked together to raise my four-thousand-pound van onto a platform about four feet off the ground and secure it with chains for the sixty-mile ride. As we headed north, I told them about how I’d gotten a tow from their company a few weeks earlier with a very nice driver.

The girl in the front seat, who had been texting, paused. “That’s my dad,” she said.

Back at Performance Muffler, the brilliant diagnostic mechanic again spent a couple hours trying to figure out what the problem was. It turned out that the wiring to the van’s mass airflow sensor had sneakily worked itself half-unplugged, plus the fuel filter — something that should be changed every 30k miles or so — hadn’t been changed in about 300k miles, so it wasn’t working too well. Whoops.

The van has been running fine ever since, but I’ve discovered that electrical surprises are one of my least favorite kinds of surprises.

The national forest around McPhee Reservoir, just north of Dolores, isn’t a rugged landscape. It’s gently rolling hills, broken up by a few small canyons and covered in ponderosa pines and bushes. So it wasn’t surprising that the forest service allows ranchers to graze cattle there, but it was surprising that they allow full-grown bulls to wander around. Several times, when I was out for a morning walk, I encountered Trail Bulls. They were about six feet tall and ten feet long, with red eyes and muscles bulging beneath their hides. They did not seem inclined to move, and one time one growled at me. (Yes, I know it was technically a grunt, but it sounded like a growl.)

I can read horses well enough to know when one might act defensively or aggressively, and I can figure out when it’s safe to try and shoo that horse out of my way. But I don’t know cows (or bulls) at all. Would a bull move aside if I, say, yelled at it? Waved my hiking poles or my (red) backpack at it? I didn’t try it. Once I was able to circumnavigate a Trail Bull, but most of the time I just turned back.

This was before the second van breakdown, so I asked my young tow truck drivers if they had any experience with cattle (they did) and if it was possible to shoo a bull. They said the bulls should move out of your way if you yell or throw things at them, but I still don’t feel quite confident.

I’m not surprised to encounter people on the trails. But I am surprised that I’ve enjoyed some of these encounters. During the pandemic, I would get anxious when I saw other people out walking: were they wearing a mask? Would they keep their distance or try to pass too close? Probably half the people I passed seemed to share those concerns, so it wasn’t as if I was doing a lot of chatting on hiking trails. But now, especially as I push myself to go slightly longer distances, it’s interesting to encounter people. We both think: what are you doing out here?

A couple weeks ago, I met a man who had through-hiked the 160-mile Ozark trail and hoped to do the 300-mile Colorado Trail in a few years, when he’ll be in his early fifties. He warned me that he had spotted what he thought was a mountain lion near the trailhead, and had seen tracks. He told me about his woodworking hobby, how he liked to visit construction sites where the workers had cleared trees, find a good section of tree trunk and give it a second life. He turned off the trail to get back to the campsite where his wife and kids were making breakfast, and I kept going up towards a high pass between two mountains. The trail was on the steep side, and since I was a little tired and my legs were slightly sore, it was more than I’d bargained for.

As I was sagging, standing on the trail, a backpacker came up behind me. He was in his mid-sixties and dressed all in gray. We were moving at the same unspeedy pace — walk a little, rest a little, repeat — so he offered to walk with me up to the high point. I forget his name, which wasn’t memorable, but his trail nickname is the Cajun Turtle. He’s from Louisiana and works as a travel nurse, and he got addicted to hiking when he was working in an ER in New England. He’d hiked the whole Appalachian Trail and parts of the Pacific Crest Trail, and now he was doing the whole Colorado Trail. He told me about some of the many places he’d been and how his trip had been going so far, and about his wife, who didn’t know much about camping when they met but was genuinely interested, enough to backpack 300 miles of the Appalachian Trail with him, but not as obsessed as he was, and how they’ve made that work. We walked together for about an hour and a half, and at the pass we stopped for a snack, keeping an eye on the pair of marmots who probably would have taken the food right out of our hands. I turned around and the Cajun Turtle kept going south, and he is out there still.

Another thing that should not be a surprise but always is: my bad habits and patterns are still with me. Living in the middle of the woods makes me feel calmer, but I’m not any kinder, more inwardly free, more ethical, or even more functional. I make terrible use of my time, procrastinating on things that I should do or actually enjoy doing, things that aren’t even that hard, until I’m an anxious, enervated mess. At least half of my thinking is overthinking. I eat slabs of cheese on a tortilla instead of making the vegetarian chili I have in my pantry.

It feels like it should be possible to travel to meet a different and better version of oneself, just like it feels like you should be able to drive back in time. The possibility of a different reality is so close, but for some reason, we can’t get to it directly. There’s only the slow work of trying to address my own bullshit: push forward and then rest, call out and then let go.

I’m lucky to be able to do it in a beautiful place.

Accidental Snowbirding (12/21/20)

So I went to Florida and accidentally became a snowbird. I drove south in September with no real timeframe for anything in mind, and I ended up staying on the Gulf coast north of Tampa (Pasco County) for almost three months, minus a couple of weeks I was in Georgia.

Some friends have asked me how the new, nomadic life is going, and I tell them that it hasn’t really felt that nomadic. I’ve enjoyed being close to my friend Ron — I had a regular rotation of several campgrounds, none of them more than half an hour from his place. It reminded me of the decade-plus ago when we both lived in Denver, in old, cheap apartments within walking distance of each other. A friend calls and says “do you want to come over?” and you just go over. It’s lovely. We both got into paddleboarding (more on that later) and explored some rivers. We even took an airbnb trip to the Smokies and northern Alabama before the pandemic escalated. So it’s been interesting and good, if different from the types of images that motivated me to buy this big-ass van (wilderness, solitude, aspen groves, desert mesas).

Here’s what I remember from the last few months:

A cotton-candy-pink bird forages on a shoreline and it is so quiet that you can hear its three-clawed feet pattering in the mud. Ninety minutes later we are scarfing down fried chicken in the car in a crowded parking lot.

In the trailer park, people drive golf carts around in loops: maybe this passes for exercise, or maybe they are hoping to run into someone to talk to.

Until November, I sweat and sweat and sweat, and then it cools off enough for me to run in the morning and it’s glorious. 

During the day, there is constant traffic and the lights are always red. There are a lot of billboards, all promising different things, but the one that makes us angry is the one that says “Jesus promises stability.”

I spend the night at a trailer park and the ladies in the office are sweet and efficient and wearing masks. But the spot I’m assigned is across from a mobile home with one of those flags that is half the U.S. flag and half the Confederate flag, and although my privilege probably keeps me safe here, I keep running through the equations with slightly different variables: who would be safe in this spot, in this trailer park/this county/this state/this country, and under what circumstances? What could make all of us safer? And the people who chose to pay for and display that absurdity of a flag, why is that flag the story they tell themselves? And what is the topography of the shared responsibility for all of this bullshit?

We paddle the Hillsborough River and see no other boaters but two alligators. One is basking on a log, and when I turn my head for a second it drops into the water with a massive splash: one moment there was a six-foot alligator; the next moment there was nothing but ripples. It was that fast. My friend decides he will not paddle here alone.

I see live oaks that have Spanish moss hanging from their branches, sure — but they’re also covered in lichens, and on the horizontal branches there are carpets of multiple kinds of moss and clusters of foot-tall ferns. It’s a whole ecosystem in one tree.

I’m driving “home” (most frequent campground) late one night and I am alone on a very dark road. In my headlights, I see a human figure in the middle of my lane, facing directly at me. I think: goblin! But it is a human person. I swerve into the other lane in case he moves. But he doesn’t move a muscle. He is in a half-crouch with his hands on his knees. I catch a glimpse of him in profile as I pass: his face is set in a rictus, jaw clenched. He is still staring straight ahead, unblinking, as if he hasn’t even seen me.

I call Ron just to reassure myself that I haven’t slipped out of the real human world and into someplace else.

“Oh my God,” he says. “But no, you’re still in the real world. There’s a lot of meth around here. He’s not a demon or anything. It’s just Florida.”
He is wearing a dark sweatshirt and standing in the dark on a dark road; what if he gets hit? I call the police and I hate that to this day I still wonder if that was the right decision.

We get into paddleboarding. Ron already has an inflatable paddleboard, and I buy one with money I should be saving for things like van insulation or the loose crown on my lower left molar that is already living on borrowed time. But the paddleboard is amazing. Previously, I hadn’t gotten it: why stand when you could sit? I’m lazy and I have crappy feet; I hate standing. But this isn’t regular standing. It’s walking-on-water standing. In our favorite river, the Weeki Wachee, you can see all kinds of things from a paddleboard that it’s harder to see in a kayak, just because of the angle. On a paddleboard, you look straight down and there’s a fish striped like a zebra, an old pine log submerged ten feet down in the clear water, a scurrying blue crab, a bed of rippled sand.

We start at the public park and paddle up against a stiff current. Twice, we get to the three-mile mark and there is the same black-and-white cormorant in the same tree both times. We are familiar with the fact that if you time it right, so that you get back to the park as late as possible without actually paddling in the dark, and the crowds taper off so you have the river to yourself, the deepest pools are turquoise on our way upriver and viridian on our way down.

There are sometimes manatees on the river. In this part of the world, manatees are THE charismatic megafauna. And they are charismatic as hell. Once we are out late, a couple miles up the river with no one else around, and we see a mother and baby grazing on eelgrass in shallow water. We watch for minutes, mesmerized. The baby is tiny for a manatee: about the size of a Corgi. It must be very, very new. There is another manatee that I’m pretty sure I see several times on different days: it is very plump, with three pink slash marks across its back. We get to the point where, if there is a throng of other boaters stopped near where manatees are feeding, we don’t try to stop and see the manatees. We’ve seen them before, and we’ll see them again, when we don’t have to worry about the people and their kayaks and canoes in the current.

The last time I went to the Weeki Wachee, I went alone. The leaves were turning, because the calendar’s close-to-Christmas is Florida’s fall. I hadn’t ever planned on seeing a blazing orange maple next to tropical blue water, but it happened. Close-knit formations of big, soft gray, doe-eyed fish darted under my feet, and at the appointed time the water started turning dark green. In one of the final bends just upriver from the park, there is a deep spot called Hospital Hole. As I paddled down towards it, I saw one manatee, then another break the surface to breathe. I drifted over the hole, away from the manatees near the surface, and I saw the outline of another one eight or ten feet down against the very dark blue of very deep water.

The Weeki Wachee is a very narrow river, usually not more than thirty feet across and often only twenty. It’s also shallow, four or five feet on average, twelve where the current has carved a deep groove or pocket. Hospital Hole is at one of the river’s widest points, I’d guess maybe 150 feet from bank to bank. The hole itself — technically a sinkhole, but with a couple of small springs feeding into it — is only about 30 or 40 feet wide, but 140 feet deep. It goes down so far that there are different layers of water: freshwater, saltwater, a layer that is anoxic, another layer that is so full of hydrogen sulfide that divers can smell the rotten-egg odor even though they’re breathing compressed air. I read online that the manatees often go to Hospital Hole to sleep at night. The sinkhole-spring, like a big deep pocket, gives them space to stay together and still spread out. They can sink down below where they have to worry about boat engines or curious paddle boarders or whatever else manatees worry about. Every so often, they come up to breathe, then sink down again. Respire, rest, repeat.

It’s 7:17 p.m. as I am writing this, so they’re probably there right now.

***

So that’s Florida! Other, more nuts-and-bolts things that have happened include…

I installed lights and outlets. This was a big project and a big deal, since it means that I can have things like a fan (to keep me from sweating to death in the summer), an electric cooler (a.k.a. mini-mini-fridge) for things like vegetables and hummus and cheese and cold boozy beverages, and, well, lights at night that aren’t a harsh blue-white solar lantern, which is what I was using before October, when I made these improvements. Anything electrical is always a little scary; I’m nervous every time I have to go into the breaker box and always surprised when I’m able to touch it without shocking myself. I also had an extremely minimal understanding of how to splice wires together and how to connect all these lights to each other, to the dimmer switch, and to the breaker box. This involved a lot of googling, and even though the DIY van blogs seemed to say that installing lights would take half a day, it took me the better part of two days. But it’s done, and I’m very happy with it. Fiat lux, motherf***er!

My new favorite public agency is the Southwest Florida Water Management District. Occasionally, if I’d had a few drinks at Ron’s house, I spent the night parked in his driveway. Sometimes I stayed in private RV parks. (This was mostly driven by the need to empty the van’s port-a-pot once a week or so — public dump stations are not easy to find in this area of Florida; the closest was about an hour away.) But mostly, I stayed at campground operated by the SWFWMD. These campgrounds are in big tracts of forested, marshy, watery land, and they are great primitive campgrounds that cost $0. There’s no water, no showers, no other fancy campground amenities, but there is usually one outhouse, and each campsite has a picnic table and a fire pit. They’re basic and beautiful.

My favorite campground is called the Serenova Tract. It’s about 15 minutes from Ron’s house, and the campground is in a bunch of pines and live oaks. Horses are allowed, and on one of the last weekends I spent there, several people with horses stayed overnight and hung up Christmas lights. The next morning, they were joined by a dozen other horses and riders who all went for a morning trail ride through the woods. I was insanely jealous.

The other SWFWMD campground I stayed at was called Cypress Creek. It’s a little farther from Ron’s place than Serenova, so it was my second choice when Serenova was full but my van’s shitter wasn’t. It’s a beautiful spot, with tons of big pines. But right now I’m a little wary of it because the last time I stayed there I woke up from a dead sleep at 4:51 a.m. when I heard someone singing and talking to themselves. (The campground had been totally empty when I got there and still was as far as I could see.) It was probably just someone who had come in on foot and was drinking because it was cold (40 degrees) outside, but it was still a bit unnerving. 

I also have a favorite RV park. I was thinking that my relationship with these places would be strictly utilitarian, and it still mostly is. But out of the three RV parks that I’ve stayed at, there’s one small one called Suncoast that I actually kind of enjoyed: even though I only went there occasionally, the three staff people remembered me when I called or came in, and they often gave me a discount on their regular rates because I don’t use any electricity. They (both staff and most guests) also seem to be taking pretty good pandemic precautions. (I actually saw someone get kicked out of the office when they tried to come in without a mask, something that I’ve never seen in any other business since March!) The place has nice big pine trees, and by the office there’s a table where people put free food that they aren’t using, or occasionally two-day-old bread that someone got from Publix for free. The last time I was there, some people had decorated their campers and RVs with lights and it was kind of charming. I still heavily prefer to be out in the woods by myself and not spending any money, but I’m glad I found someplace pleasant for my once-a-week-or-so sewer/water needs.

I figured out how to stay warm while sleeping. This is a bigger deal than it sounds because a) I haven’t insulated the van yet, so at night, it’s only a few degrees warmer than whatever the temperature is outside, and b) I’m a very cold sleeper. Florida is SUPER WARM compared to any other place I’ve ever lived, but in December, it started getting a little chilly at night: down into the fifties, then the forties, then, a few nights ago, 30 degrees. I’ve camped in near-freezing or slightly-below-freezing temperatures before, but sometimes it wasn’t very comfortable — even with good long underwear and socks and a hat and a zero-degree-rated sleeping bag. But I’ve figured out a system for my bed that uses four blankets, layered like a licorice allsort: a quilt, a heavy wool blanket, another quilt, and a faux-wool blanket. If it gets below 40, I can add my zero-degree down sleeping bag and be not just comfortable but actively toasty, like a baking croissant.

Unrelatedly, I’ve been having a hard time getting out of bed in the morning.

I’ve found that my life in a van is basically like my life has been anywhere else. I work. I sleep. I stay up late reading things on the internet when I should be sleeping. Sometimes I go running or do yoga (while trying not to bump into the cabinet or kick the front console or hit the ceiling). Sometimes I do fun things, like paddleboarding or talking to friends. I make goals and plans and don’t follow through on them, except when very very occasionally I do. But when I’m looking up van stuff online, I often run across photos of people who are #selfemployed #vanlife and the photos of them working are:

A woman is seated propped up on pillows in the bed in the back of her van. The doors are open, framing a view of the cerulean sea, so that you can practically smell the gentle breeze blowing over the dunes. She has a laptop on her lap and is looking thoughtfully out to sea while a cup of tea steeps on a tray that is on the white coverlet of her bed.

Or

A man is seated at the dinette in the back of his van. He has a laptop, a French press, a mug of coffee, and a plate with two scones on it on the table. The table, and in fact the whole dinette with its two upholstered benches, would be at home on a small luxury yacht, and it’s the kind of dinette that you make into a bed at night. The astute, intent expression on the man’s face give the viewer to understand that he is competent and disciplined and never stays up two hours past his bedtime because he’s too lazy to lower the dinette table and rearrange the cushions and put on all his sheets and blankets. We are also given to understand that the electrical system in his van would have no problems handling the power drain of a bean grinder, even though he is clearly parked in the high Rockies — again, with the back doors open, the better to take in the late spring air and see the fresh green of the aspen trees — and it’s often cloudy. Lastly, we are given to understand that he baked those scones himself, because when he’s not working, hiking, lumberjacking, or otherwise living his best life, he enjoys unwinding by baking bread and pastries. (Not in the van; don’t be silly! He bakes outside, over a wood fire.)

(A tangent: Why do so many people have their van doors open in photos I see online? Do they only stay in places with no bugs? If I tried that in Florida, or even Maryland or Colorado half the year, I’d be awake half the night swatting at mosquitoes and/or flies.)

In contrast, a photo of me being self-employed in a van would look like:

A woman is sprawled in an ungainly fashion on her narrow bunk. Her laptop is braced by her lower ribs and propped up with a pillow placed over her gut. The pillow has a cat on it. The windows of the van are covered in silver bubble-wrap, so very little light gets in. Absolutely no doors are open, because the van is parked behind a Dunkin Donuts so the woman can get free wifi and not burn through all the data on her phone plan. She takes a break to heat up a can of Campbell’s soup on an alcohol stove, adding a handful of dehydrated mixed vegetables, to be healthy. As she stirs the soup, she gazes contemplatively out the windshield towards the adjacent parking lot, where there is an IHOP. #vanlife

Or

A woman is sitting in the passenger seat of her van with her feet on the dashboard and her laptop on her lap. Beside her in the cupholder is a steaming Hydroflask full of the cheapest tea she could buy at Publix. The van is parked in a grove of live oaks. Spanish moss sways gently in the morning breeze. Behind the woman, in the dark recesses of the van, sets of clothes are hanging: leggings and a shirt, still sweaty, by the side doors, a bathing suit over the sink, a t-shirt and shorts for sleeping in by the rear cabinet. Several kitchen towels are draped on the driver’s seat and on the dashboard because the cab leaks above the sun visors when it rains, and even though she’s tried caulking it three times, she still can’t get it to stop. #vanlife

The good thing, though, is that I’m still getting work and making a living. I can do it someplace that’s safe, without having to risk my life to do it. And I’m getting paid a fair hourly wage. But then the very terrible thing is that everyone should be able to say what I just said, but so many people can’t: they’re not making a real living through their work, they have to risk their lives to do it, and they’re not getting paid a fair wage.

(Brief interlude as I stare at the ceiling angrily.)

***

Here’s what I’m doing next:
I left Pasco County on the 16th. I’ll be in what I think of as “traveling quarantine” until the 30th, staying in a national forest near Jacksonville. (With a couple of stops at state parks to refill water, empty the port-a-pot, and maybe take a real shower.) I’ll be in Maryland on New Year’s Eve and will stay at my parents’ while I insulate the van, build interior walls, and do a bunch of other stuff so that I can call it (mostly) finished. Then I’m thinking of going to New Mexico and spending late winter/early spring there… parked on top of a mesa… sipping a cup of French-press coffee on my white coverlet while I thoughtfully gaze out the open doors of my van…
(I really would like to park on top of a mesa though.)

Photos from the Road (9/8/20)

A few photos: 1) First night on the road in Kansas 2) Inside, on the road. Fitting all my stuff in there was A LOT. I definitely need better storage, but for a few days I just dealt with boxes all over the place. At night, I had to stack the boxes up in the rear so I could move around and get to the bed, and in the daytime, I had to move the boxes onto the floor so they wouldn’t topple over. I also got rid of the regular-size twin mattress, which just dominated the whole living space, and replaced it with a narrower, lower one, like you might have on a boat or in an RV. I don’t need a ton of bed space anyway, so I think that’ll work out better. 3) The inside looks cuter with the fairy lights. 4) Dinner in Greenridge State Forest in western MD.

Scary Roof Hole (9/8/20)

One of the most important features of the van is the roof vent/fan. It’s a deciding factor, actually: without it, I’d probably get heatstroke in the summer. My brother (whose help and whose driveway/garage space/tools were crucial throughout all of this) helped me install the fan. We had to cut a hole in the roof and it was terrifying. I don’t have good pics of the vent/fan installed, but here is the scary roof hole with a scary forest fire sun. (It was only around 5pm when these photos were taken -- the light was so weird!)

Janky Shapes Made Out Of Wood (9/8/20)

There are four janky shapes: a cabinet; a very tall bed frame; a cube that goes over the toilet; and (not pictured) a low shelf with storage underneath that goes across the back of the van. Prior to this, my only experience building janky shapes out of wood was when I was 15 and built a treehouse. So the build quality of all this isn’t great, but so far none of it has collapsed, and that’s really all I’m going for. The white cloth stuff is an old sail. I figured it would a) look kind of neat and b) save weight compared to using plywood panels. It’s also cheaper than plywood -- a guy down near Chatfield Reservoir south of Denver with a boatyard was willing to trade an old sail for a bottle of medium-shelf red wine. I’d like to incorporate more of those found/repurposed/traded/recycled materials like that, but the pandemic makes it tricky. It was nice to be able to use a lot of scrap wood: some of the frames and paneling for these janky shapes were old 2x4s and plywood that my brother just had lying around.

Update! (9/8/20)

So y’all probably figured as much, but: I made it to Maryland! This was weeks ago, and it seems like I’ve been inundated with life stuff and work stuff ever since. But it still feels like I just got here three days ago; it also feels like I’ve been here for three months. For 2020, that sounds about right.

Here’s what happened:

August 17: Denver to Hoxie, Kansas

August 18: Kansas to a state park somewhere in Illinois

August 19: Illinois to Indiana in a rainstorm, COVID test, drove to western MD

August 20: Did some work in western MD, socially-distanced visit with my parents and brother after my niece and nephew were in bed, spent the night in their driveway

August 21: Left before 6, drove back to western MD, did some work in a state forest parking lot, got negative COVID test results; turned around and drove back to parents’ house. Spent the weekend with family.

Since then, I’ve just kind of been here. I officially sold my condo on the 28th — which probably won’t seem fully real to me until I go back to Colorado and can’t stay there anymore!

It seems a little anticlimactic, maybe, to go through all the work of making the van into a self-contained cross-country travel machine and now I’m just staying at my parents’ house like I’ve been doing for years. But the pandemic has made everything weird. I’m assuming that it’s going to get a *lot* worse this fall, so before it does and before there are more widespread outbreaks or travel restrictions, I want to make sure I check in with family/friends. So right now is about spending time with people while I can, and hopefully later this year/next year will be more of the parked-in-a-forest-for-a-week kind of stuff.

Here’s how the trip went:

Overall, great! There was a weird moment when I was looking for a campsite near a small lake in Kansas, and I was going downhill and the brakes locked up and made a weird noise. I later realized that this may have just been because the dirt roads around the lake were very muddy and slick. The next morning, the tires and tailpipe were caked solid with like half an inch of mud. I haven’t had any weird brake noises since, even when driving in heavy rain.

The bigger issue, though, became obvious during that same torrential downpour west of Indianapolis. The cab leaks… a lot. But only when the van is moving. By “a lot,” I mean a steady drip. Water dripping into the passenger side footwell. Water splashing on my left arm. Water darkening the industrial gray headliner above the windshield, starting from the right and left sides. The funny thing is, I thought I fixed this. There was some leaking in a rainstorm as I was driving around Denver a while ago. So I caulked over a seam between the van’s fiberglass topper and its old metal roof, figuring that was where the water was coming from. But either I didn’t fix it well enough, or the water is coming from somewhere else — like the above the corners of the windshield, where there are some patches of rust.

Fortunately, when the van is parked, there are no leaks at all. When I spent the night in the woods in western Maryland, it rained during the night and I stayed dry. Even the roof fan that my brother and I installed by ourselves (more on that in a while) has kept the water out, miraculously.

And there were no breakdowns, no mechanical issues. The bed was comfortable, the nights were dark and quiet.

It was definitely a weird sort of trip. I was traveling in quarantine, essentially: no going inside at gas stations, no public restrooms (with one exception where I was 99.9% sure the outhouse hadn’t been used in months and no one else would come in), no fast food or snacks on the road. (I subsisted on some chocolate zucchini bread my sis-in-law made, protein bars, and dehydrated chili mix, and I cold-brewed tea in a Nalgene bottle.)

The choice to get COVID tested rather than do a 2-week quarantine was kind of a weird one. My brother, niece, and nephew were visiting my parents but couldn’t stay very long. With all future plans very up in the air, this visit might be the most family togetherness we’ll have in quite a while. And I got the test through a private lab and paid for it out of pocket, so I wasn’t using public resources. But on the other hand — resources are resources. So I feel ethically murky about it.

What’s next?: While I’m in MD, I’m hoping to do some repairs to the van and build some more storage. In about a week or so, I plan to head south, possibly stop at my brother’s place in Atlanta, and visit my friend Ron in Florida.

Creative Destruction (8/1/20)

After our very successful shakedown cruise, I immediately started destroying the van. This was mostly because of the upcoming solar installation: the installer asked me to strip the ceiling so she can put in the roof vent and brackets for the solar panel, and also to strip a small area of the rear wall down to bare metal so she can anchor the battery and electronics.

During this process, I realized that there was mouse poop in the ceiling. My friend Julie, who is a genius, suggested I vacuum it out so it wouldn’t all fall on me when I removed the ceiling upholstery. I did this, but didn’t find out until later that my brother had removed the filter from his shop-vac — so it just kind of scattered the mouse poop around the interior of the van. It was a good idea in theory, though.

It was a long day, driving from Gunnison to Denver and then ripping the ceiling out of the van. But then the next day, I just kind of kept going. I eventually want to insulate the interior and put up nice new walls, so I figured I’d go ahead and remove the old walls now.

And reader, it was so gross.

For one thing, I found the mouse. Or *a* mouse. I’m assuming it was the same one who pooped in the ceiling, but maybe there are more mice that I have yet to find.

I found an old coffee cup. I found years’ worth of spilled coffee and who knows what else that leaked down from the cupholders. I found shredded and half-shredded candy wrappers. I found the mouse’s nest, made out of fiberglass insulation, which does not seem like a good thing to make a nest out of and may have contributed to the mouse’s demise? I found two Embassy Suites key cards. I found that one whole wall is filled with hoses and wires, the vast majority of which I don’t need and which it will be A Chore to remove.

I found that the dumpster behind my condo building was full. I piled the debris on top of it anyway.

Shakedown Cruise (8/1/20)

I took this past week off from work. Everyone is dealing with A Lot right now, and my specific assortment of A Lot (need to move out of the condo, need to get the house-on-wheels in livable condition, need to do more writing, urgently wanting to get out of the city and into the mountains) had me feeling kind of burned out.

So I went for a three-night trip in the van, just to try it out and start getting a sense of how life on wheels might work. The van was a champ! A few things I realized:

* The fold-down rear bench seat isn’t an ideal bed. Part of that has to do with the fact that I am only 62” long but the bed is only 60” long; even though I slept diagonally, I still sometimes ended up bumping my head on or kicking the windows. I’m going to try to build a bed platform that I can store the bench seat under and then dismantle easily when I want to install/use the rear seat.

* I love tent camping. It makes me feel like a little kid in a fort. I love tent smell. I love (except for those middle-of-the-night “what’s that noise?” times) feeling so close to whatever is going on around me: cicadas, chipmunks, rain, wind. And since I’ve done a lot of tent camping, I can set things up and take them down pretty quickly and don’t have to think about it much. But I can see how one can get used to camping in a vehicle. It’s so easy! More than once, as I got ready to leave my overnight spot, I’d find myself standing there and thinking, “is that really it? I just… drive away?”

* Colorado has been breaking my heart for the last decade or so. For most of that time, I was living elsewhere. When I’d come back to visit I would be shocked, even though I heard what was happening: the rising costs of living, the increase in crowds and traffic, the feeling that everyone is being increasingly squeezed. It’s harder to even find a campsite in the mountains close to the front range or in some of the more popular areas. But I was so relieved to find that the mountains are still powerful and magical and compelling to me, and that I can still find ways and places to be alone surrounded by wildness. The first night I was east of Buena Vista, parked off a forest service road. I didn’t see a single person pass. I fell asleep to the sound of rain on the roof. The second night was in an aspen grove that a heavy wind sluiced through. I took an amazing hike on a trail that kept climbing and climbing until I was in a meadow surrounded by mountain peaks, where hummingbirds jousted and dive-bombed over the wildflowers.

* That being said, I was really unsettled by most of the humans I did see. It seems that a lot of people are going to the mountains to pretend the pandemic isn’t happening. I might’ve seen a couple bandanas around people’s necks on hiking trails, but no one had anything actually covering their faces as they passed me or each other, and no one made even a token gesture of stepping off the trail. Crested Butte was downright crowded — tons of people eating at outdoor tables on the Main Street, and those tables definitely weren’t far enough apart. Many license plates were from Texas, which is a virus hotspot, so… that doesn’t feel great. On the trail outside of town, I would’ve had bikers literally breathing down the back of my neck if I hadn’t scrambled into the sagebrush. It made me grumpy and anxious. But that’s also the feeling I’ve had here in central Denver: especially in a neighborhood that skews young and hip, most people don’t seem at all concerned about the health and safety of others. I’ve taken to deliberately farting in stores. But that’s a whole other post.

* When I left for this short trip, I told myself I’d be cautious. I hadn’t gotten a professional mechanic to inspect the van yet, I was still getting a sense of its size and geometry, and I don’t yet have a jack or lug nut wrench that I would need to change a flat tire. And there was no cell phone reception for most of the trip. But a couple of times, I really needed to see what was down a rough, potholed, rocky, narrow forest service road. And the van did really well — I think it can make it down roads that would be tricky in any other car I’ve ever owned.

First night!

Nailed It!: The World’s Worst Curtains (8/1/20)

I don’t often watch reality shows, or baking shows, or baking reality shows, but one time I saw some clips from a show called “Nailed It!” where home bakers try to replicate Instagram-gorgeous desserts and often fail spectacularly.

https://www.insider.com/nailed-it-netflix-baking-fails-photos-2018-3

I realized that probably many of my van projects might end up something like “Nailed It!: Campervan Edition.”

The catalyst for this realization? I made the world’s worst curtains. The photos below pretty much say it all. I’ll just add that these “curtains” are my old bed sheets and I did not sew them. I just cut them raggedly into rectangle shapes, much like the Grinch cut his Santa suit from the red curtains in his lair.  I’ll also add that I later took the curtains down.

Someone who actually knows what they’re doing (photo from twowanderingsoles.com)

Nailed It!

Quarantinemobile (8/1/20)

Like I mentioned in the intro, on a camping trip earlier this summer I ended up stopping at a gas station that didn’t feel safe. And after I put my condo on the market, I often had to leave for an hour or two or three at a time because of showings, inspections, and the like. One of the biggest things I miss about normal times is being able to go to a coffeeshop, bar, or bakery, hang out for a while, buy a small thing, and use the bathroom. I was blissfully unaware of what a luxury that was.

So “where will I pee?” has been a big question for me this summer. And hand-washing is going to be a big part of life for a while. So a portable toilet and sink were some of the first items I ordered for the van. Here they are in the photos below. Since then, I actually switched their location to the other side of the van, aft of the side door.

I don’t like the plastic-y, oddly shaped aesthetic, but the sink was relatively cheap ($80) and will tide me over until I have the time to build a nicer-looking one. So far, the sink and toilet both seem to be working well. And it’s pretty awesome being able to scrub my hands immediately right there in the van after a trip to the hardware store or grocery store.

The Unseating (8/1/20)

I’ve posted some of these photos on social media already, but in case anyone wants more details about this stuff, I’m going to do a few posts about what I’ve been doing to the van. First order of business was to remove almost all of the seats, which, in the van’s time as a hotel shuttle, cradled thousands of asses over hundreds of thousands of miles. RIP seats. You served well.

The Great Unseating would not have been possible without help from my brother, whose driveway I’m using as a work space. The seats were bolted through the van floor with washers and nuts underneath the van, so removing them required one person in the van and one person underneath. This was actually weirdly fun because I got to lie on one of those little boards with wheels and scoot around underneath the van, playing face limbo with the gas tank.

Another thing I did not expect was how hot the bolts, washers, and nuts were immediately after we removed them. And there were so many — I think about 30 bolts altogether, with their associated nuts and washers. By the time we finished and I moved the van to a different spot, it looked like it had rained little metal bits all over the driveway.

I posted the seats for cheap on craigslist and Facebook, but there were no takers. So after a few days I loaded them up and took them to the dumpster behind my condo. The neighborhood’s dumpsters are thoroughly dived, so they probably didn’t sit there long.

I kept the rear bench seat, both for possible use as a bed and because I do want to have the option of carrying more than one passenger.