Changing Lanes
Gumby Jesus blesses the van, 2016 Eureka Springs, Ark. (Jon Sall photo)
You cannot outrun the road.
It took a while for me to get there. Route 66, Highway 61, Mississippi River Road, Pacific Coast Highway, Lincoln Highway. Nice memories and lots of pictures. Hair blowing in the wind on the way to Key West. Now I don’t have much hair. The high beams are closer than you think.
This marks the 10th anniversary since my blue Ford Transit Van rolled out of the Kansas City Assembly plant into my merry fate. This was the same factory that produced the van for “American Pickers.” In 2014 Ford invested $1.1 billion into the plant that created 2,000 new jobs.
I spent considerable time and money to get the high-roof van tricked out into a moveable SRO and office I’ve never really used. I was off and running in June 2016. Through March 2017, I traveled to 24 states while covering 24,222 miles. When I wasn’t alone I was accompanied by my photographer and friend Jon Sall. Ride or die.
It was a dopamine drive.
We produced the 186-page “The Camper Book (A Celebration of a Moveable American Dream)” for Chicago Review Press in 2018. Actor-musician-RV fan Jeff Daniels wrote a fine forward and we took my van to Michigan to spend a day with him. My friend Tony Fitzpatrick contributed beautiful ornithologist art for the wrap including the Small Bird of the Sacred Heart.
Giganticus Headicus, Route 66, Kingman Az. 2016 (Jon Sall photo)
I’m looking back with the advent of summer.
Would I consider this today? Should I sell the van? There’s no tariffs here! The values of respite and the calmness of nature that I learned in my travels are important. My parents died within seven weeks of each other in 2015. After 30 years I left my beloved Chicago Sun-Times in 2014. Now I’m thinking I had some kind of PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder.) On the surface, of course, this van idea was about escapism. But it was probably more than that.
The road has always been about connection for me. I never cared much if I was alone, except for going to a drive-in movie theater. I’ve never done that solo. I was looking for the next new spirit, a cool neon-drenched diner in the desert or taking in a minor league baseball game in Tulsa, Ok. Something got lost. Perhaps it’s age. Maybe I’m no longer having fun driving around at one in the morning. Perhaps it’s the cruel divide that didn’t exist in America in 2015, at least to the degree it does today.
Our road buddy, actor-Detroit Tigers fan Jeff Daniels in Michigan. He wrote a wonderful foreword for our book. (Jon Sall photo.)
I still enjoy driving my van to faraway places like Wisconsin. And Aurora, Illinois. It only has 69,000 miles on it and has retained a touch of the new-van smell. It is not a Tesla. The van probably should have 478,000 miles on it.
The van has seen a lot, from Merle Haggard’s favorite diner in Redding Ca, (Lulu’s Eating and Drinking Establishment) to the Iowa State Fair to John Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley” departure in Deer Isle Maine. Just when I lean into the idea of selling the van, I go inside what we called “Bluebird” and recalibrate. Life is smaller. And more manageable. And there’s a CD player where I can spin my old mix CDs.
Graceland RV Park, Memphis, TN., 2019
Storytelling is a traditional cornerstone of trips down historic roads such as Route 66 or the Mississippi River Road. People are giving of their time. Nuance and detail are often celebrated.
In a world filled with rapid technological advancement, regionalism still needs to be recognized, but there is no room for provincialism.
Places change.
Memories travel.
In a 2000 lecture at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. the late urban planner Jane Jacobs wanted to encourage thinking about enlisting change and time as practical allies. “Not enemies that must be regulated out and fended off on one hand or messily surrendered to on the other,” she said. “We might as well learn how to make constructive alliances with the workings of time because time is going to continue happening; that’s for sure.”
There were big and impossible dreams over time. I remember a night in Santiago, Chile where over a beer and tequila a friend and I figured out how I could drive the van from Chicago all the way to Santiago. We were maybe in love for a weekend.
She said you take the Pan-American Highway through Mexico, Costa Rica, ferry across the Panama Canal (maybe), then roll on through Colombia and Ecuador. I would then sell the van to a Pablo Neruda romantic and fly home. That didn’t happen. But Jon and I did drive the van around Wrigley Field after the Cubs won the World Series in 2016. And the van was a life-saver during COVID, a period when van life took off.
Camping in the French Quarter, 2017 (Jon Sall photo)
Perhaps writing this will give me clarity and I can let the van go. Late last year I called Prime-Time in Elkhart, IN, the firm that did the conversion; desk, bed, sink, cabinets, microwave, refrigerator, reverse sensor and a television that I really only used once during a long Thanksgiving weekend in Pensacola, FL.
They said it would cost much more money to trick convert a transit van out in 2024. A chassis alone is $55,000 according to Prime-Time. That’s much more than I paid. In early fall I bought four new tires as a veiled promise to keep going. I’ve been told to put the van up for sale on eBay and it could sell it in a few days. I can barely sell my Rod Stewart albums on eBay.
Sort of used this van workspace over the last eight years.
I still write on a vintage eMac and use a nearby MacBook Air for reference and files.
I just looked at the “Camper Book File Pictures.” I don’t see as much of me as I do of the van. This wasn’t about me. It was about a circle of discovery. Look! Here’s the van at Bob Dylan’s high school in Hibbing, MN.
There’s Jon’s photo of the van parked under the weird Gumby Jesus in Eureka Springs, Ark. and the van at the Big Texan on Route 66 in Amarillo. Each picture is a heartbeat. Who was I then? Since COVID I’ve learned to enjoy the trappings of home but there’s no one to stay home with. Tall bridges have become more daunting to navigate. Songwriter Leonard Cohen once said the older you get, the lonelier you become—and you search for a deeper love.
Eventually, I will sell my van and I want the next owner to be happy. Wave to a stranger. Take in all the views, even on a rainy day. At the end of the road, we are responsible for the joy in our own ride.
Jon Sall photo, summer 2016
Do nothing. When the van is ready the buyer will appear.
Good idea! Thank you, Paul!!!