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.