Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (25 page)

Subject:
Re: question from vandwelling disciple

Hi Ken, the main potential problem is campus security. Generally, if they find out you are living in your van they won’t like it. I can’t really add more since I have never done it. My suggestion is to join the vandwellers group on Yahoo and ask the question there. I know there are people in the group who have done it.

Sail on,

Bob

Hmm. Not exactly the sage advice I was hoping for.

I scoured the Internet for more guidance and found the Yahoo! message board called “VanDwellers: Live in your Van 2.” There were thousands of members on the site and plenty of useful tips, but no one on there had secretly lived in a van on a college campus or could reassure me that I might get away with it. While I could only presume others had lived in similar fashion to afford their educations, I had no precedent to follow. I felt unsettled yet invigorated, as if I were venturing out into unexplored territory without a map or guide.

Oh, the freedom! There are few sensations as liberating as being in the driver’s seat of your own vehicle. Yes, there’ll be bills. Yes, you now
own
something that’ll weigh you down. Yes, you’re sorta destroying the environment. And yes, this was the sort of jalopy that might have given desperate Depression-era Okies cause to consider sticking out the Dust Bowl rather than testing the vehicle’s reliability en route to a new life in California. But all reservations aside, the freedom the vehicle lends its owner feels—at least at first—worth all those costs. I’d no longer have to hitch rides and depend on other people for transportation. I’d no longer have to travel according to the schedules of buses, planes, and trains.

As I drove north to Duke after buying the van at John’s, I had an overexcited, caffeinated, “I’m going to pee out of my asshole”
feeling in my stomach. I had so many questions and so few answers. I had a van, but I had no idea where I was going to park it. I had bills, but no job. I had a home, but no idea how to live in it. I had to go to the bathroom, but didn’t know where to go and didn’t want to follow Bob’s advice.

My first class was in two days, so I had to transform the van into a home as quickly as I could.

My first order of business was to get rid of the van’s two middle pilot chairs. I figured I’d need some room for cooking and getting dressed and just living in general, so I put up an ad on Craigslist seeking someone who could store my seats. I offered $30 and within an hour I had multiple offers.

After dropping off the chairs at a local’s home (who, thankfully, didn’t ask any questions about why I needed extra space), I drove the van to the nearest Walmart to begin renovating. I jumped into the back of the van and visualized what I wanted my home to look like. I had fantasies of installing solar panels on the roof, a periscope so I could see all around me, a wall of shelves, houseplants, a hammock! But I had very little time and only a bit of money. I could only hope to make the van comfortable.

On closer inspection, I discovered a whole bunch of stuff that I’d failed to notice on my initial tour at John’s. On the floor in between the two front seats were a mounted TV and VCR. And under the passenger seat was a twelve-disc CD changer with country star Alan Jackson’s best-of compilation
Super Hits.
All the windows were tinted, and they all had beige pull-down blinds (except for the windshield, of course). The doors and windows were automatic. On the van’s rear was a spare tire and hitch, and there were a half dozen lights on the ceiling that could be clicked on.

Just when I thought I had uncovered all the van’s secrets, I found a mysterious button inside on the driver’s-side wall at the van’s midpoint. I pushed it and the backseat grumbled,
vibrated, and—much to my jubilation—began slowly and suggestively folding down into a bed.

With the bed down and the middle chairs gone, I saw that I had more than enough living space—probably enough room to stretch and do push-ups if I wished. I took out all the stuff I’d brought and laid it across the bed before neatly packing it away.

I had with me nearly every useful thing I’d accumulated over the past two and a half years: a–20°F rated sleeping bag that I’d bought from a friend for $40; a set of expedition-rated thermal underwear my mom had bought me when I lived in the arctic
for a winter; an MSR ultralight propane backpacking stove that I’d bought for $85 before I journeyed across the continent; and a twelve-inch-long hunting knife for protection that I’d bought on the voyage from a hunter in Ontario, Canada. I also had a heavy, stout knife for cooking and a multi-tool that would be my can opener, screwdriver, and toenail clippers. I considered all of the above to be almost equivalent to “necessities.”

I went into Walmart and came back to the van with a cart full of supplies. I screwed five hooks into the ceiling behind the two front seats and cut tiny holes into a huge black cloth, so I could hang the cloth on the hooks. Between the black sheet, tinted windows, and blinds, I figured I now had “stealth,” as the vandwellers called it. (While I thought a big, creepy van with blinds and a black sheet behind the front seats might look suspicious, all I could do was hope that no one would ever even think that someone was living in his vehicle at a place like Duke.)

I screwed two large coat hooks into opposing sides of the van’s interior, where the middle pilot chairs used to be. One would serve as a coat hook and on the other I’d hang my dress shirts and pants.

I neatly folded the rest of my clothes into my suitcase and pushed it under the bed. At Walmart, I bought a plastic three-drawer storage container, which I would fill with bulk food and miscellaneous items. The two-and-a-half-foot-tall storage container would be a perfect counter for cooking my meals on my backpacking stove.

When I took a careful turn out of the Walmart parking lot, all my stuff gushed out of the drawers, so I went back in and picked up bungee cords to securely hold my drawers in place. At the Salvation Army, I bought some sky-blue bed linens, a white blanket, a small wastebasket, a pot, and a pan—all for $10.

I knew that food was probably going to be my biggest expense after tuition and the van, so I planned on doing all of my own cooking. I went to a Kroger supermarket and loaded up on
cheap bulk food. I bought a four-pound box of powdered milk; bags of beans, rice, and spaghetti noodles; several canisters of oatmeal; an eighty-ounce container of crunchy peanut butter; and a dozen large boxes of cereal. I also picked up a couple of small eight-ounce isobutane canisters for $19.

On top of everything I just bought, I’d soon pay my first car insurance and cell phone bills. I hated the idea of paying these, as I hardly considered them “needs,” but I knew from past experience that I would need a phone for job purposes. I signed up for the cheapest plan I could find ($37 a month), which gave me 200 minutes a month (no texting) and free weekends. Car insurance also seemed like it would be an unnecessary drain on my account, but because I wouldn’t be able to get license plates without it, I bought the cheapest plan I could find for $47 a month.

I needed an address and a mailbox, so I got a P.O. box at the campus for $21 a semester, as well as a membership at the campus gym for $34 a semester so I had somewhere to take showers. I bought used books for my two courses for $95. The last big expense was a campus parking permit for $182, which would pay for parking next fall as well. (I figured I needed a parking permit because I had no idea where I could routinely park in the city.)

When I was an undergrad, I spent my money carelessly, and rarely was I aware of how much I had in my account. Nor did I know how much debt I was in or how much debt I was going to have. I would do things differently this time. This time I’d be meticulous. I’d keep track of every penny. If I spent money, I’d write it down. I’d keep all my receipts. And each night I’d review the balance to make sure everything was in order.

The following is what I bought during my first week at Duke:

When all was said and done, I looked aghast at my balance: in one week, I’d spent $2,536.59, which was an alarming 72 percent of my savings. I only had $981 left, and I hadn’t even begun to pay the tuition, which was $2,178 for the semester. At this rate, I knew I wouldn’t get past my second week of school, let alone the next two and a half years without having to go back into debt.

I reminded myself, though, that most of these were one-time purchases, and that from here on out I’d only have to worry about tuition, food, car insurance, and cell phone bills. The stuff I bought today, I justified, would help me save tomorrow.

It was true: For one, I had no rent or mortgage bills to pay. The cheapest apartments in Durham were about $450 a month (utilities not included) and the Duke underclassmen (who are forced to live on campus for their first three years) had to pay far more.

The van made perfect sense. It would cost me nothing. Literally nothing. While I paid $1,700 for it, I figured I could get that or almost as much as that back when I’d sell later.

The van was just one way of cutting back. I figured I’d do without other things that were running millions of Americans into debt, like health care, entertainment, clothes, and transportation. For transportation, I’d walk and take the bus. If I needed new clothes, I’d sew up tears or buy used stuff at the Salvation Army (where a good shirt or pair of pants is rarely more than $3). I’d entertain myself with books and movies that I could get for free at the library, and while I always felt ill at ease without health insurance (which I hadn’t had for much of the last three years), there was no way I could afford it. To stay out of debt, I’d have to stay healthy.

Tuition was the biggest threat to my experiment. Normally, a sentence that has “Duke” and “affordable” in between a pair of periods would give one cause for incredulous laughter. But Duke’s liberal studies program was affordable if you could demonstrate financial need (which I could). My program reduced my tuition from $3,131 to $1,089 a course (which would cost me,
in total, about $11,000 for the degree). Because I was out of academic shape and because I needed to devote a significant portion of my schedule to a part-time job, I decided to take just two courses instead of the standard full-time three-course load. I’d have to pay $2,178 for the semester in four installments—one payment of $544 each month, the first of which was due in four weeks.

I spent the rest of the day in the Walmart parking lot, putting the final touches on the van and reading
Moll Flanders,
which was assigned reading for my first class. I pulled down all the blinds, slung up my giant black cloth behind the front seats, put on a long-sleeved T-shirt and sweatpants, and squirmed into my sleeping bag on the backseat, which I’d turned into a bed with the push of a button.

Between being thrilled about the prospect of attending classes and preoccupied with the Walmart security guard who strolled past my van every thirty minutes, I could hardly sleep.

I had my van and it was ready for vandwelling, but I still had so much to figure out. I needed to find a job, learn how to cook in the van, find a place to wash, and pass my classes. And, of course, I’d have to do it all without going back into debt.

Finally lulled by the hum of distant traffic, I fell into a deep slumber from which I didn’t wake until the early hours of the morning.

1
Credit goes to Michael Aaron Rockland’s book
Homes on Wheels
and David A. Thornburg’s book
Galloping Bungalows
for their admirable work on the history of vehicle-dwelling.

2
The term “vanning” refers to a culture in which people renovate their vans and camp together at large gatherings, which is different from “vandwelling,” which refers to a culture in which people live in their vehicles on a permanent or semipermanent basis.

— Day Seven of Vandwelling Experiment —

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

SAVINGS: $981

B
EFORE MY EXPERIMENT BEGAN
, I knew I had the personality for vandwelling. Over the course of my journey to get out of debt, I’d developed a penchant for rugged living, a comfort with tight quarters, a sixth sense for cheapness, and a tolerance for squalor that was, well, (I hate to brag)
unequaled.
Not only that, but I knew I had the physical constitution for it, too: I was blessed with a high tolerance for cold temperatures, practically no sense of smell, and a bladder (I hate to brag) the size of an adolescent’s football.