Living anarchically, the missing years.
This year a great deal of my research has been into van life and nomadics, and trying to suss out how a mobility solution could also be a temporary or even emergency shelter, during placid American vacationing or more apocalyptic circumstances of necessity.
I need to have something more dependable to drive anyway. It might as well have a bed and a modus vivendi.
In my head I had 30K budgeted for the purpose. That much would go into it when I culled away half the pension, an almost equal amount would wipe out my credit debts, and there’d be some left over, plus the other half-pension, plus social security in a few years, plus whatever I’m able to cobble together from some odious employment situation or bumbling entrepreneurial activity.
When I first visited the gorgeous little target city in the holy land, it was in a van with a bed. That one’s long gone. I have the creaking little red pearl that I’ve been driving for a decade. Someday it will give up the ghost. Whenever that happens, I’ll need wheels, and I’ve wanted them to be extremely dependable wheels, maybe never having to buy new ones ever again after obtaining these.
In the long ago time and ever since, up til recently, it’s always been a van like that, that I pictured in my head. Maybe an E-350 this time. Maybe even a pretty new Transit, which I could theoretically get stripped down to key and heater and bare walls for something like my budgeted amount.
In large part what got me thinking of other solutions was her and more specifically her cats and where they’d go, on a vacation of a month or more.
I thought a lot about the supplementary space of a trailer for that, and thinking about towing and space made me look harder at larger rigs with more horsepower.
When you look at ‘motor homes’ and ‘recreational vehicles’ seriously, the first thing you learn is the Classes.
5th wheels aside, the biggest one is a Class A. It’s likely to be 35 feet or more, might have a more powerful diesel engine, and high-end amenities like microwave, dishwasher, even washer dryer.
Too long for my blood, or a winding mountain road. I want to be able to get her up a dirt track sometimes, and a yacht is no good for that. Even so, we contacted one guy who had an old one for sale in Ohio for ten grand. It was too cheap to pass up. But it sold quickly to someone else.
A Class B is a van, basically. Sometimes the roof or the sides are extended pretty radically, and it gets marketed as a B+ or a Super-B, but it’s small and tight and familiar. They can be surprisingly loaded and expensive, up to hundreds of thousands, precisely because the van converter is trying to miniaturize everything, which takes time and money.
The reason this has always been my first choice though is that I want to be that van converter, and build up from bare walls, instead of paying top dollar for somebody else’s idea of a floor plan and what’s necessary.
A Class C is something in between. It’s a van chassis, but usually with a big square box on it, and probably with dual rear tires. This is probably the most popular thing out there right now. Those rent-a-camper rigs that you see everywhere these days are mostly Class C’s.
You get a lot more room to work with in a Class C, but you almost never get the chance to do the work. Unlike with a van, it’s pretty near impossible to find them as blank canvases. Somebody’s already done the conversion and is selling their ideas of how to live to you at a premium.
More recently I’ve been trying to work around that predicament by studying box trucks. These are mostly sold commercially to moving companies or tradesman or package delivery services. It’s very hard to figure out, for example, how you get a blank Unicell body onto a basic Ford Transit van chassis, unless you want to order a fleet of them, which of course I don’t. But there are things available in the used market, and not all of them cost a fortune, or have impossibly high mileage on them.
I’m leaving out a lot and glossing fast.
But here’s the basics of where I ended up.
The Cadillac solution is to buy a new or nearly new Ford Transit chassis-only and load it up with a lot of nice features, most importantly to me: four-wheel drive; maybe cruise control and a built-in navigation system …
Then wrangle with a dealer, preferably a commercial dealer, to get the sweet 17-foot or so box mounted on the back of it, with the right kind of doors put where you want them. This gorgeous low-miles version would probably run about 75K total, depending on how crazy you got with modding it for solar or other kinds of power, and so on.
The current budget solution of choice is go buy an old U-haul and get approximately the same amount of space to work with for under 10K. Then replace the entire drivetrain (let’s say engine, transmission, tires and brakes) even if they’re still in good shape. Or at least budget for that, and still come out of it with no four wheel drive, but only paying about a third of what the Transit cost. Well within the original plan of a 30K budget anyway. And likely to be able to tow a big-ass trailer with a little car and a dozen cats in it, if that needs to be a thing someday, too.
I’m almost willing to Retire Now and drive to the company dealer in Vegas and throw down eight thousand or so today for one of the eighteen qualifying trucks they have sitting on their lot presently.
What’s stopping me is a bigger and older dream. A little grounded house in my dream town, no more than a mile from the co-op food place.
I’m not willing to give up on it yet.
I already have a grounded house, but it’s in the wrong place by four and a half hours.
Even if I get moved there somehow, I’ll still need a ‘new vehicle’. Even if I never get there, I’ll still need one. But the dream of being there comes first, and if and when I can get that far, my needs might be different–I might have more money, or less. I might want to spend more time and effort on that dream place as opposed to a perfect mobile rig.
Also there’s this.
By the end of summer, if I do nothing and continue to avoid jobs like the plague they are, I’ll be out of money. If I don’t address that, I’ll be compelled to pull the trigger on cashing in the pension at least half way, and with that my options get much more limited. I’ll probably never own a place in the silver downtown, and whatever truck I buy might end up being a home of last resort in the end, combined probably with this one in the miserable town in the middle of the barren waste.
So: now that I’ve spent some long months studying and contemplating solutions, I’m full circle, back to thinking again realistically about how to sell another sliver of my shrinking time for some more cash, in service of the big dream.
In ten days it will be a year that I’ve had the privilege of being without a formal job.
I don’t want to let go of that freedom.
But maybe just maybe some things are worth living as an indentured servant for.
And maybe just maybe the Machine can use me, without slavemaster harshness, as a Ranger man, as a guide to natural wonders and history.
Nothing’s going to happen before our transcontinental family trip at the end of this month.
But upon returning, my aloe plant will stop living in a bucket, and go into the ground.
That’s a metaphor, for my reluctant and wary willingness to consider trying to make a deal again with this deceitful and betraying System that has done me so wrong.
They say it can’t be won
The way the game is run
But if you choose to stay
You wind up playing anyway.