Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (24 page)

It was true. The wipers were new, but I’d later learn that they only had a couple of settings. On slow, I could count on them to wipe every couple of minutes. I was reluctant to put them on fast because the arms waved so rapidly they created a sort of mirage, granting me an exclusive window into what looked like a wet and blurry parallel universe.

While the ad promised that it “drives great” (which was more or less true), it had more than enough problems to justify its $1,500 price tag: One of the two side doors wouldn’t open, there were large patches on the windows where the tint had peeled off, and there were enough dents and scrapes and bruises to have sent unluckier vehicles to be crunched under giant tires at monster truck rallies. Worst of all, the tires were bald—so bald that, later on, when I went to buy a part at Sears, a couple of mechanics doubled over in laughter when I asked them if they thought the tires would pass inspection.

“I’ll take it,” I told John anyway, unable to hold back my grin. Despite its deformities, it was love at first sight. Plus, I had little choice. My classes were going to start in a couple of days, and I didn’t want to overstay my welcome at Marietta’s. But when we got down to the business of paying, John tacked on a ludicrous $200 “documentation fee.”

“Dennis didn’t say anything about this on the phone…” I said, heartbroken, knowing that this was precious food money. I’d calculated that I had just enough money to keep me afloat for a couple of weeks—just long enough for me to land a job.

“That’s the deal, buddy. You can take it or leave it.”

I had no choice. I gave him the $200 and signed my name on the papers with a hard, angry flourish. But as flustered as I was with John, I couldn’t have been more thrilled about moving into my new home.

I got behind the wheel and started the ignition. There was a grumble, a cough, then a smooth and steady mechanical growl. I turned out of the lot and headed north toward Duke.

— Day Two of Vandwelling Experiment —

.............

SAVINGS: $1,617

W
HEN WE THINK ABOUT
someone who lives in a van, we probably think of pop-culture losers who had to resort to desperate measures in troubled times—losers like Uncle Rico from
Napoleon Dynamite,
or
Saturday Night Live
’s Chris Farley, who, playing the motivational speaker Matt Foley, would famously exclaim, “I live in a van down by the river!” before crashing through a coffee table. Or maybe we think of the once ubiquitous inhabitants of multicolored VW buses, who’d welcome strangers with complimentary coke lines and invitations into writhing, hairy-bodied backseat orgies. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, living in a van was for failures and pedophiles, not ascetics and adventurers.

But it wasn’t always this way. Americans have been living in vehicles for centuries. Technically, the first American mobile home was the horse-drawn Conestoga wagon that transported and housed pioneers migrating west in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Later, with the advent of the automobile, people almost instantly recognized that cars could also function as homes. The idea took off in 1935 when the house trailer underwent mass production. This new contraption—coupled with the Great Depression—made living in a vehicle an attractive alternative to Hoovervilles. In December 1936, the
New York Times
announced that “We are rapidly becoming a nation on wheels… [M]ore families will take to the road, making an important proportion of our people into wandering gypsies.” A year later, in February 1937, the
Times
estimated that there’d be two million people leading “a gypsy life.”
Harper’s
prophesized that the mobile home “will eventually change our architecture, our morals, our laws, our industrial system, and our system of taxation.”
Fortune
described the mobile home as “the most promising form of instant low-cost housing since tents and caves and hollow trees.” And in 1952,
Newsweek
declared that “the sixth largest city in the United States is on wheels.”
¹

But these were mostly mobile house trailers. The van itself didn’t enter the scene until 1950—a pivotal year in vehicle-dwelling history—when the German company Volkswagen manufactured the Type 2 bus, which would become the prototypical “hippie van” for American consumers for the next several decades. The converted vans were complete with seats that folded into beds, birch interior panels, cabinetry, a sink, an icebox, water storage, curtains, an electrical hookup, as well as a large awning that connected to the van’s exterior. Americans—typically servicemen—would pick up their VW in Germany, drive it across Europe, and ship it home.

As the van gained popularity in the United States, in 1961 Ford decided to introduce its Econoline model. (Dodge and GM would quickly follow suit with versions of their own.) During
the late 1960s and 1970s, the vandwelling demographic shifted from families who went on camping trips to hippies who saw the van as a small price to pay for a lot of freedom.

The “vanning” culture exploded, and California was at the movement’s epicenter,
²
with 250 converting factories springing up just in Los Angeles alone. “A new form of nomadness is sweeping the country,”
Time
magazine said. Groups of vanners began staging large, Woodstock-style gatherings across the country, sometimes with as many as 6,300 vans and 30,000 people. Drugs, alcohol, and sex, quite naturally, were a large part of the festivities, as were topless (and some bottomless) competitions. Terry Cook, author of
Vans and the Truckin’ Life,
describes the typical vanning scene:

Eventually you meet some other guys with vans. You hear about the local van club one way or another and get invited to a meeting. It is like Dorothy when she opened the door of the house that the tornado blew away to Oz and found herself in Munchkinland. Suddenly you meet new friends with similar interests. These Munchkins are into vans, but they are also into other stuff you’re into, like rock music or partyin’ or goin’ places and meetin’ chicks—beaver patrol.

As the van grew in popularity, it made more and more appearances in pop culture, like on
The A-Team,
where the four heroes embark on rowdy adventures in their GMC. In
Scooby-Doo,
mystery solvers Scooby, Fred, Shaggy, Daphne, and Velma operate out of a floral multicolored van called the “Mystery Machine.” The bad guys in
Starsky & Hutch
often ride in vans. And in the 1977 movie
The Van,
a young man named Bobby tries
to lure young girls into his van, which he calls his “fucktruck” and “fuckmobile.”

Cook ends his book optimistically: “The movement is big and keeps on getting bigger because the van is a true expression of America’s romance with, and now
on,
wheels… vans are here to stay.”

But they weren’t.

While vans never really went away, the vanning and vandwelling cultures faded. Vans became known less for “beaver patrol” and more for picking up your kids at soccer practice. Now, only 2 percent of mobile homes are mobile (only using their wheels to get from the factory to the trailer park), and today’s vanning groups pale in comparison to the legendary thousand-strong extravaganzas in vanning’s glory days. In the 1980s and 1990s, living in your van—perhaps because of the relative stability of the economy and the end of the counterculture movement—was no longer popular. The days of using your van as a “fucktruck” were long gone.

But in the age of the Internet, there has been a new vandwelling surge. In 2002, the Yahoo! online group VanDwellers was created, which by August 2012 was a watering hole for more than eight thousand members, some of whom hold intimate gatherings in places like the desert near Quartzsite, Arizona. Their ranks increased drastically after the bank crashes and subsequent home foreclosures and have been growing steadily ever since. In November 2011, the
New York Times Magazine
reported that while over a million homes will be repossessed, van sales are up 24 percent. “Living in a van or ‘vandwelling,’” the article read, “is now fashionable.”

Despite the surge, vandwelling is still just a subculture of a subculture, and mainstream America still considers living in a van as a “creepy” or, at best, an “eccentric” thing to do.

But living in a van just made sense. The average American house, according to author Graham Hill, contains 2,169 square feet—double what it was in the 1950s. Mine would have 60.
Most would agree that it would do us a lot of good if we took up less space, used fewer resources, and wasted less money. Why not live in a van?

I figured that living in my van and adopting a spartan lifestyle would help me graduate debt-free. But there was more to it than mere financial necessity. I also thought that these next few cash-strapped months might give me an opportunity to experiment with a new way of living. If just for a few months of my life, I’d pare down my possessions and strip my life of all unnecessaries. I’d polish my intellect at school but sand down my body to a fine grain with a tough life in the van. I’d embrace a bare-bones, uncluttered simplicity—a voluntary poverty. And if I came to learn that I had been dependent on some pleasure or comfort of a vain nature that did not contribute to my subsistence, then I knew I’d leave Duke having learned at least one thing of value.

But I also hoped—from this upholstered hermitage—to look upon the world around me from a novel vantage point and see my country with an enlightened pair of eyes. I’d be a monk, a hermit, a recluse: within society, yet completely separated from it. I’d hunch over my books and papers and befriend ancient thinkers, never concerned with the neighborhood of man all around me. I didn’t need them, and they didn’t need me.

Or that was the plan, at least.

Unlike most any other graduate program, the Duke liberal studies program covered all the liberal arts: history, philosophy, literature, anthropology, social sciences, everything. It was a dream program—except for it would cost me.

The tuition for the degree was $11,000, which most would agree isn’t bad for a graduate degree nowadays, but because I had no job and now, after buying the van, only $1,600 in the bank—which somehow had to get me through the next four months—affording further education would be (as higher education
is for most American students) practically impossible. If I did things in a conventional manner by paying the typical costs (apartment rent, utilities, food, transportation, tuition), I knew there was no way I’d make it to the end of the semester without having to take out loans.

Most other students in a similar predicament might have either taken out loans, kept working to save money, or enrolled in a graduate program that paid their tuition. Or they might have just decided to not go to school. These were all sensible and logical solutions, but postponing my reentrance was un-thinkable.

A couple of years before, I’d tried to get into ten Ph.D. and creative writing programs that offered assistantships, which would have provided me with free tuition and a modest stipend. All those applications had been rejected, as were the three scholarships I filled out after being accepted by Duke. While I’d hoped to sneak my way around college tuition, I’d met warty, mustachioed border patrolmen on all the conventional roads to an affordable education.

No big deal, I thought. The van, I justified to myself, would be a fun, if just temporary, fix. Because I could return to my well-paying job with the Park Service in the summer, I knew that all I had to do was live in a van for this first semester. According to my calculations, after another summer with the Park Service, I would save up enough money to allow me to pay for the rest of my graduate education. I’d suffer in the van for the first semester, then sell it and upgrade to an apartment during the next fall semester. And still live debt-free.

If Henry Thoreau was my philosophical mentor, Bob Wells was my practical adviser. I’d been reading his how-to vandwelling website,
CheapRVLiving.com
, for months, learning everything I could. On his site, Wells gives advice on everything you need to know about living in a van: how to pick a van, how to ensure “stealth,” how to install solar panels, even how to go to the bathroom.

Bob hadn’t always been such an expert. He started vandwelling in 1995, when his wife of thirteen years divorced him and kicked him out of the house. Because he had little money and only a low-wage job at a supermarket, he bought a $1,500 Chevy box van to be both his home and means of transportation. The first night he slept in his supermarket’s parking lot, Wells cried himself to sleep.

Over the next few months, he made a number of improvements. He brought in an ice cooler, a propane cooking stove, a TV, and even a recliner. He lined the walls with insulation, made shelves for food and supplies, and acquired a propane heater. He slept on a homemade bunk bed, used public restrooms, rented a P.O. box, and started going to a gym where he’d take showers. When he had to go to the bathroom at night, he’d use a “pee pot” that he’d empty out at red lights on drives around town.

As Wells grew more comfortable in his van, not only did he stop crying himself to sleep, but he also began embracing the simple life in ways he never would have expected. He had fewer bills and more time to himself. He cut down his hours at work and stopped buying useless things because he didn’t have any extra space to store them.

He ended up retiring from his job, spending most of his time traveling, occasionally working as a seasonal campground host to make money. To share his love of vandwelling and help people transition into their vans, he created his website, which is now considered by many vandwellers to be the authoritative guide on how to convert your van and renovate your life.

If there was anyone who could tell me if secretly living in a van on a college campus was possible, it would be Wells. I e-mailed him and eagerly waited for his response.

To:
Ken Ilgunas

From:
Bob Wells

Date:
December 12, 2008