van life

Van Life

The other day I stumbled across a YouTube video showing a stealth camper build in a box van exactly like a friend of mine's rig.  Got me to riffing on van life. Several years ago I seriously considered getting a box van and building a little apartment in the front half, show inventory behind.  Hit the road, never look back.  

Karen and I did van life back in the seventies. Corvair van set up for stealth camping. The night we got out at La Push to go fishing with a friend, the fish plant office got robbed, glad I wasn't making a trek across the parking lot to the washroom while the burglars were doing their work.  

Light blue Corvair utility van, no windows except in the front and rear doors.  Sold it to a guy, all excited about having the collector car, he parked it over in the Fountain district in Bellingham. Sat there untouched, rust starting to weep down at the corners, twenty years and more. The last time I drove past that intersection everything had changed.   Van gone.

Next van in our lives, an early sixties VW with the factory built camper. Table and padded benches make down into a bed. Icebox and some cupboards. I don't recall anything about cooking. Karen drove it to Petersburg, Alaska with the cat FuFu. Always on the lookout for eagles, keep him in the van. Karen worked in the cannery while I had a job on a purse sein boat. Really fun to get in from fishing and hang out in the van for a couple days, like going home.

Went camping sometimes in an old dull red Ford van I used in my work.  Had a double bed size platform across the back. Spare tire and tools under, old futon on top. Not that uncomfortable.  Emma slept on the floor behind the front seats.   Kind of forget the details, but we went way up a logging road to a campground, completely deserted. Woke up in the morning to find paw and nose prints from a bear looking in the driver's side window, and me shivering outside a couple times in the night to pee. Glad I didn't come face to face with that guy.

Almost couldn't get that darned thing started in the morning, sigh of relief to roll back down that hill to the highway. Engine running at higher speed but wouldn't idle something to do with the choke. Old rig, pop the engine cover between the seats and tinker with the machine.   All that counts in the fish business is we got in, didn't we?

Speaking of the fish business back in the seventies, living and working in those small boats totally reminds me of van life. Self contained and a family of friends, colleagues, competitors all doing the same thing, big parties on the docks when we got into town to market the catch. Hard work and even a little scary.   Great for nostalgia, not always that much fun at the time either. Best days of our lives. 

A folding aluminum camp chair in the back of the van we used for shows these past dozen years is as close to van life as I'll ever come.  I hope.  Taking breaks from Fremont Market sales booth I relaxed in my chair visualizing the camper build I'll get started on as soon as I don't have to stuff the thing full of show kit and inventory every week. 

Every week lasted until two-hundred-fifty thousand miles and the bearings needed to be relined and I'm still working almost full time in the day job trying to retire from doing shows and I let the van go in favor of compact cars.  Still got a place to sleep in case the dust hits the fan, but not quite the glamorous life of the YouTube gang.

Are they really having so much fun, or is it about prepping us all to think it is an exciting adventure to be homeless living in our cars?