USExplorer
Well-known member
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2015
- Messages
- 544
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A new year is approaching, and with it my four-year odyssey of wandering has reached an end. A little background...
In May 2014, I was an academically gifted but socially inept twenty-year-old nerd who had just finished three years of intensive college courses and three seasons of equally intensive groundskeeping work at a local golf course. Family talk centered around an upcoming move from New Jersey to North Carolina, and restlessness was growing like a disease.
I had never been out on my own before, and as the oldest child of the family, I felt it was my prerogative to do so. However, I balked at the high cost of rent; no way would I pay half my income just for a wooden box to sleep in. But abject homelessness was too much an affront to my dignity. I associated regularly with the local homeless men of my college town; although we had the kinship of fellow social outcasts, there was nothing in the lifestyle that appealed to me.
Then I read "Blue Highways" by William Least Heat Moon, and grew enchanted by his unvarnished depiction of van life. This is it! Adventurous without risk, affordable while maintaining a basic level of comfort and dignity. I signed an agreement to put down $800 a month toward my dad's Ford Explorer. Its gas mileage was horrendously low in the stop-and-go traffic of New Jersey, but voila! The seats folded down flat and there was enough room to sleep in it.
After some initial flurries, my family quickly became accustomed to my strange habit of stealth camping in the county-owned scrub lots behind our upscale home. I methodically analyzed and solved the problems that arose. When my family sold their home and decamped to the pinelands of the South, I stayed behind for three weeks. My first boondocking experience was camping on the golf course I worked at, to the amused approval of the head groundskeeper.
Fast forward over four years, 100K miles, 60-odd states, half a dozen seasonal jobs and countless memories. There have been times of profound isolation, disillusionment and soul-searching; times of reckless partying and drug use; times of unbelievably hard volunteer work; times of relaxation and contentment with rubber-tramp friends. Watching van dwellers coalesce from isolated individuals to a social community has been rewarding, though I have never considered myself part of the "tribe".
(I was never a full-timer; after discovering seasonal jobs in May 2015, I spent each summer season since then in company housing all over the nation. This discovery was most fortuitous, as I had set out on the road three months earlier with no income and only a thousand dollars in savings. Ace calculus, fail arithmetic.)
And here we have the "tribe", composed mainly of hardy, plump, and happy retirees in comfy old rigs, content to sit back and relax on the vast badlands of the American West. Long gone are the flood of restless young Dean Moriarty types, driven by powerful and inexplicable forces back and forth across our nation's broad expanse, hungry for money, women and adventure. Did they ever exist outside of Jack Kerouac's imagination, one may ask?
Perhaps the great empty expanses of the West have been finally and irrevocably tamed by placid, lumbering campers and intrepid hikers. The myth of the wild frontier has breathed its last, and from henceforth will only exist in museums and the dreams of restless young men.
But now is no time to reminisce; the new year will begin a new life for me in a new city on the desert shores of Lake Havasu. The Wild West lives on in this lakefront boomtown. But to the CRVL/vandwelling community in general:
All of you are part of an amazing phenomenon; the creation of a culture. Visionary leaders like Bob Wells have exerted powerful positive influences, but the future direction of this burgeoning community will depend on the efforts and influence of every leader following in his footsteps. As the community grows in numbers and power, its problems will grow proportionally. There is only so much land; resources are limited as well. The open-door nature of the community will inevitably attract a fair share of predators and wannabe Napoleons. How these issues are resolved within the community will determine what kind of future is in hold for you all.
Best wishes in this most American of experiments!
In May 2014, I was an academically gifted but socially inept twenty-year-old nerd who had just finished three years of intensive college courses and three seasons of equally intensive groundskeeping work at a local golf course. Family talk centered around an upcoming move from New Jersey to North Carolina, and restlessness was growing like a disease.
I had never been out on my own before, and as the oldest child of the family, I felt it was my prerogative to do so. However, I balked at the high cost of rent; no way would I pay half my income just for a wooden box to sleep in. But abject homelessness was too much an affront to my dignity. I associated regularly with the local homeless men of my college town; although we had the kinship of fellow social outcasts, there was nothing in the lifestyle that appealed to me.
Then I read "Blue Highways" by William Least Heat Moon, and grew enchanted by his unvarnished depiction of van life. This is it! Adventurous without risk, affordable while maintaining a basic level of comfort and dignity. I signed an agreement to put down $800 a month toward my dad's Ford Explorer. Its gas mileage was horrendously low in the stop-and-go traffic of New Jersey, but voila! The seats folded down flat and there was enough room to sleep in it.
After some initial flurries, my family quickly became accustomed to my strange habit of stealth camping in the county-owned scrub lots behind our upscale home. I methodically analyzed and solved the problems that arose. When my family sold their home and decamped to the pinelands of the South, I stayed behind for three weeks. My first boondocking experience was camping on the golf course I worked at, to the amused approval of the head groundskeeper.
Fast forward over four years, 100K miles, 60-odd states, half a dozen seasonal jobs and countless memories. There have been times of profound isolation, disillusionment and soul-searching; times of reckless partying and drug use; times of unbelievably hard volunteer work; times of relaxation and contentment with rubber-tramp friends. Watching van dwellers coalesce from isolated individuals to a social community has been rewarding, though I have never considered myself part of the "tribe".
(I was never a full-timer; after discovering seasonal jobs in May 2015, I spent each summer season since then in company housing all over the nation. This discovery was most fortuitous, as I had set out on the road three months earlier with no income and only a thousand dollars in savings. Ace calculus, fail arithmetic.)
And here we have the "tribe", composed mainly of hardy, plump, and happy retirees in comfy old rigs, content to sit back and relax on the vast badlands of the American West. Long gone are the flood of restless young Dean Moriarty types, driven by powerful and inexplicable forces back and forth across our nation's broad expanse, hungry for money, women and adventure. Did they ever exist outside of Jack Kerouac's imagination, one may ask?
Perhaps the great empty expanses of the West have been finally and irrevocably tamed by placid, lumbering campers and intrepid hikers. The myth of the wild frontier has breathed its last, and from henceforth will only exist in museums and the dreams of restless young men.
But now is no time to reminisce; the new year will begin a new life for me in a new city on the desert shores of Lake Havasu. The Wild West lives on in this lakefront boomtown. But to the CRVL/vandwelling community in general:
All of you are part of an amazing phenomenon; the creation of a culture. Visionary leaders like Bob Wells have exerted powerful positive influences, but the future direction of this burgeoning community will depend on the efforts and influence of every leader following in his footsteps. As the community grows in numbers and power, its problems will grow proportionally. There is only so much land; resources are limited as well. The open-door nature of the community will inevitably attract a fair share of predators and wannabe Napoleons. How these issues are resolved within the community will determine what kind of future is in hold for you all.
Best wishes in this most American of experiments!
