thoughts on our build journal

How to do van life:

Step 1: Get a boyfriend who has a van.

Congratulations, you are now doing van life.

The other day, Doug and I watched a #vanlife video where a chick in booty shorts and a belly shirt talked about how rewarding it is to build out your van yourself… and then the rest of the video was her boyfriend building out the van. Naturally, I made fun of it… even though I’m kinda doing the exact same thing.

All I do these days is write — submitting my memoir to publishers and contests, seeking out freelance opportunities, and working on a collection of essays about riding a bike on every continent. So when Doug said he’d love to do a build journal but just doesn’t have the time, I thought, what’s one more creative project? It’s a hell of a lot more fun than book proposals — I get to ask my boyfriend questions about a meaningful experience in his life, and he gets to see a nice tribute to his hard work.

Of course, it does raise an uncomfortable question: Who am I to write about someone else’s van build, especially stuff he did before we even met? It reminds me of my research in grad school. Even though I got a CDL and drove an 18-wheeler, that still didn’t make me a trucker. I was inherently an outsider. And what good is my opinion if I’m not an actual representative of the population I’m writing about?

I suppose the best answer is: If I don’t write this build journal, there’s a good chance it won’t get written at all. So I intend to do it as responsibly as possible, by accurately representing Doug’s experience and remaining honest about my role.

And what role is that? Perfect example: As I was writing this post, I heard a deep sigh from the garage.

“Everything okay?”

“I fucked up.”

I wandered over to Doug’s workbench, where he gazed disconsolately at the electrical cabinet. “I put the hole for Boris too far over.”

(Boris, I should note, is the USB port for our fairy lights — because I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to #vanlife without fairy lights.)

“Show me what you mean?”

“See how the cap is twisted like that?”

“Didn’t you say we aren’t using the cap?”

“Yeah…”

“I feel like that cap only exists in case Sharon spills her coffee on the USB port on her way to work.”

“Classic Sharon… But when I put the plastic fairing back on the wall, there won’t be enough room for the USB.”

“Does it have to go back on the wall?”

“… Actually, it doesn’t.”

“Problem solved?”

Doug has expertise, but I have beginner’s mind. Never underestimate the power of a good sounding board or brainstorming partner. And hey, even though I don’t have the skills to help Doug build our van, by sharing his stories, maybe I can help inform or inspire you while you build yours.

covid-19 silver linings.

• Zoom yoga is actually pretty great. The video keeps you accountable, but not being in a class means there’s no urge to be competitive. Less ego means it’s more about feeling into my body.

• We have so much time to work on the van!

• I’m forced to double down on my commitment to exercise and eat healthy.

• Living with Doug’s family means I’ve gotten to know them really well.

• Cooking is fun!

• So are some of my new hobbies:

  • Bird identification

  • Painting birds that I’ve learned how to identify

  • Feeding geese

• Making fun of covid-19-themed commercial clichés:

  • “In these challenging times…”

  • “We show up so you can stay home.”

  • “Now more than ever…”

  • “We may be staying apart, but we’re in this together.”

the freedom life

Laura was the first and only solo female touring cyclist I met on my trip, and I was her first too. Lest you think I’m badass, this girl finished a ride across Australia and decided she wasn’t ready to go back home to France yet, so she flew to L.A. and biked to New York City, by way of Michigan.

“This is my first tour,” I told her.

“Do you like it?” she asked.

“I love this life.”

She nodded and smiled. "This is the freedom life.”

ken and nancy

The light was deep and gold, and the shadows stretched long, and I was starting to get that ol’ end-of-the-day, where-am-I-gonna-sleep anxiety.  Turns out Ohio’s pretty flat and doesn’t have a lot of trees, which adds a whole other level of stealth to stealth camping. It’s such a vulnerable feeling, searching for a place to sleep along the road.

I passed a man and woman working in their front yard, and they gave me a friendly wave. I was struck with a pang of longing. Look at these nice, normal people finishing up their chores. I bet they’re gonna go inside and eat dinner in a cozy dining room. And here I am, all alone, looking for a place to pitch my tent before it gets dark.

I should ask them if I can camp in their yard, I thought.

No, don’t, I thought.

They seem nice though! They actually acknowledged me.

Don’t be a freeloader.

For camping in their yard?

The road ahead crested and sank through empty farmland.

You know what? Worst that happens, they say no, and I’m no worse off than I am right now.

And so I doubled back. They were still there, and they gave me a smile as I slowed to a stop at the foot of their driveway.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Can I ask you a question? My name is Brooke, and I’m biking across the country. I’m looking for a place to camp for the night. Could I camp in your backyard?”

“Only if you agree to play for our high school basketball team!” laughed the man.

And that’s how I met Ken and Nancy.

Without a trace of hesitation, they offered me a spot in their yard… and a shower, a conversation, a giant bag of snacks, and a $200 donation to Represent the Village.

I laid in my tent that night and laughed at myself. Back in Oberlin, I’d perused satellite photos and asked a waitress where the safest place to camp might be. But when I decided to just wing it, a pair of complete strangers gave me $200. More than that, they gave me sanctuary. They extended kindness to someone who was lonely and afraid.

I don’t think kindness is inherent. Nor, for that matter, is cruelty. Or maybe they both are, lying dormant in our nature like seeds in the earth. What I do think is inherent is our power to choose which of these qualities to cultivate. But what is kindness without someone to receive it? By asking for help, and accepting it with gratitude and grace, we’re giving kindness a place to grow.

Thank you, Ken and Nancy, for treating a stranger with love.

forward

Every day is the same on a bike tour: You move forward. The scenery around you blends like watercolors until you realize you’re in New England, which is a quite different thing than Pennsylvania, or noble, tangled Virginia before that. And you’ll be surprised down the road to find yourself in the Midwest, in the desert, in the mountains, and, if you are tenacious and lucky enough, you will look around and blink and find that you have arrived at your destination.

Of course, you can’t think about that, not in the beginning, not even in the middle. You keep your eyes on the horizon and no further. The great constant of the horizon is this: It will never rise to meet you.

score

I woke up early and was just about to tiptoe out into the early light of the morning when Evan came out of his room.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, did I wake you up?”

“No, not at all,” he said sleepily. “I just wanted to say it was really nice meeting you, and we should keep in touch.”

“Absolutely,” I said, and we hugged goodbye.

He went back inside and I headed north, along the narrow streets of his neighborhood, through a park and a back lot and to a main thoroughfare with a roomy bike lane that would eventually take me to Tufts. And I thought:

What if everyone you knew was a melody? Each person with their own time signature, key, instrumentation, theme; with beginnings and endings, patterns and evolution, a story to tell. With some of them you might harmonize, and I suppose you could call that love. Others might be dissonant, but what’s life without a little discord?

I found harmony with Evan and his friends, but then I moved on. I’m always moving on. My family so far away, my friendships so temporary, sometimes even just an evening. In their symphonies a faint pianissimo, a measure or two of music, and then a fermata suspended over a rest.

The melody of a traveler: a solo no one else can hear.

gettysburg

If I’ve just met someone and think they might be cool, I like to hit em with a one-two punch. I smile kindly, look them square in the eye, and ask with complete sincerity:

“When’s the last time you pooped your pants?”

You can learn pretty much everything you need to know about a person from how they answer this question. You’d also be surprised at how relieved people are to drop social pretense, stop pretending to be cool, and actually get real and talk about the great, humbling unifier that is poopin’ your pants. Plus, the story is almost always interesting, involving either a) travel, b) drug/alcohol use, c) horrifying gastrointestinal distress, or d) all the above. The shields are down, the person is comfortable, and that’s when I ask the second question:

“What are you afraid of?”

It trips me out knowing that people act differently around different people. Without some uniformity to your actions, how can I tell who you are? Are some of the ways you perform your personality more authentic than others? And if so, how authentic is the version you show me? I can’t stand fake people… and of course I’m terrified that I’m one of them.

Because there are a million different variations of how I perform “Brooke.” In Malawi, I was a lovable goof named Masho; on the Appalachian Trail, I was an artsy nerd named Slim Rims. My family knows me as quiet, frumpy, and a little sullen, but everyone at McMurdo knows me as “that fashionable girl who’s always smiling.” So… which one is it?

I suppose the answer is, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.” Socially we are reflections of our environment; biologically, our cells are in a perpetual state of shedding and regeneration. The only immutability is change.

A brook flows through a forest. The water is never the same from one moment to the next; nor the rocks in its path, the earth it carves out. But the current has a direction; it’s predictable enough. So don’t try to define it; simply sit with it, here in the present moment. With the brook as with Brooke; the current and the current.

All that said, the least authentic thing I can think of is the abhorrent dance of “professionalism.” Just a bunch of stilted, arbitrary rules, a judgmental dance. Little kids in neckties, monkeys pretending to be robots, damming the brook, damning the Brooke. Believe it or not, When’s-the-Last-Time-You-Pooped-Your-Pants Girl isn’t super-great at pretending to be professional.

But I was doing my best at Gettysburg. I had my town dress on, writing in my notebook in my best handwriting, deftly using the parlance of international admissions… and the counselor was deflecting me at every turn with responses that could have come right off a website. All buzzwords and fluff and nothing of substance, and amidst it all, there was a moment when I realized what she was actually saying was, “I’m so sorry, but we don’t have enough money for what you’re asking.”

We stopped and looked at each other. We both knew this meeting was going nowhere. But it was 4 p.m. on a Friday, and she wasn’t going to get anything else done for the rest of the day, so she asked me about my tour. We both visibly relaxed, and ended up chit-chatting for a bit while she ran out the clock. I didn’t ask her when she’d last pooped her pants, but for a moment, at least, the kids took off their neckties, the monkeys stopped beeping, and the brook flowed freely.

we shared the side of the road

When you live on the side of the road, you see all the shit people throw out of their cars. There are water bottles, soda bottles, piss bottles, empty cigarette packs, wadded-up napkins, plastic bags, tampon applicators, splintered plastic cups, pulverized Styrofoam, a hundred bajillion cigarette butts, beer cans, plastic liquor bottles for brands I’d never heard of (Sobieski? Rebel Yell?), and wrappers for every kind of processed food imaginable. The unofficial sponsor of roadside litter is indisputably fast food restaurants.

What truer advertisement than a greasy McDonald’s bag full of trash on the side of the road?

Sometimes there were mysteries: a single shoe, a vacuum cleaner, a white teddy bear with a red bow tie.

And then, of course, there was the roadkill. Nothing reminds you of the fragility of life — there on the side of the road, as you pedal your bicycle while two-ton death machines shoot past you at 45 miles per hour — than the corpses of those who weren’t so lucky.

The Cherokee would pray for forgiveness after killing an animal. Deer were a staple of their diet, and every part of the animal was a resource: hides for clothing and drum heads, bones for weapons, hooves for glue.

Today, we leave them on the side of the road to decay.

I saw a fawn that looked like it was sleeping. It must have been hit, I realized, by one of the cars that had just passed me.

Another time I heard a far-off buzz like radio static and smelled something like shit and garbage water and rotten food. As I got closer, the picture came into focus: a fog of flies settled over the bloated, putrid corpse of a deer. I retched and tried to hold my breath as I passed. Have you ever tried to hold your breath while pedaling a 70-pound touring bike?

There was a completely desiccated deer, leather stretched tight over bared teeth. And the one that had been cleaved clean in two. I saw the back half first; the front was easily 100 feet down the road. Her eyes were open.

There were raccoons and possums that died snarling, and frogs flat as chewing gum, and turkey vultures gathered around the rotting corpse of a cat; they floated indignantly into the air at my approach. I saw something pulverized beyond recognition, like vomit splattered across the road.

I saw fretful sparrow hopping around the motionless body of its partner, urgently chirping as if to say, “Wake up, please, oh please wake up.”

The saddest to me were turtles, their shells shattered like ceramic bowls of stew dropped on a stone floor. It’s not fair, I thought, glaring at a car that passed me with barely two feet of clearance. They can’t help that they’re small and slow.

the storm

In my dream, there were birds flapping against my face. I swatted back at them, but they wouldn’t quit. In the background, the roar of a gas station hand dryer.

My body came to life before my brain caught up. I swiped at the air and blinked hard and saw wings and yellow nylon pummeling my face. ??? was as close as my brain could come to a coherent thought.

The birds faded from view, my brain organized itself into some semblance of consciousness, and I came to the realization that my tent had collapsed. No, that wasn’t quite right. It was moving — shuddering and wriggling like a cat trying to escape a hug.

I grabbed hold of the wall and held it still enough to peer through the bug netting, and that’s when the pieces clicked into place: A massive cloudbank was charging over the lake, and the trees were bowed over in the roaring wind. I scrambled out of my tent with one blind thought: RAINFLY.

The air was chaotic and charged, whipping my dress around my legs, twigs and rocks biting into my bare feet. It felt like riding in a car on the interstate with all the windows down. Panicked, still a quarter-asleep, I tried to wrestle my rainfly into place, but the wind kept tearing it out of my hands and flattening my tent. With a lot of cursing, I managed to secure the fly, replace the stakes that got ripped out, and then dive back inside — more to support the structure than to take shelter.

But then a thought came to mind: Is it safe to be right next to a lake in a lightning storm?

Google’s response was, “haha no.”

I shot out of my tent like it was on fire and crashed through the bushes toward… I have no idea where. I was barefoot; I wasn’t even wearing a bra. And then, finally, my logical brain woke up enough to take the steering wheel. 

“What are you doing,” she said flatly. “Girl, you have a bicycle, remember?”

“Oh, dope.”

So I put on my shoes, dragged some driftwood and rocks over the top of my tent and yelled, “GOOD LUCK, TENT!” over the shrieking wind, and then unlocked Lucky and chased my headlight into the wild night. I headed for a stand of trees — maybe I could hunker in there, wait out the worst of it, and then go back for my tent once it was over.

And then I saw it: Shelter! Salvation!

An outhouse! 

I careened over and tried the door — it was open! — and turned on the light. The floor was concrete but clean. No spiders, no bugs, and the toilet even had a lid. As far as outhouses go, this was a palace. I gave a cheer of victory, leaned Lucky against the wall, put down the lid and had a seat.

After a moment, I thought, “Sleeping pad’d be pretty nice right about now.”

And so I rode like a madwoman back into the wild, windy night, rolled tent, pad, and sleeping bag together into a big sloppy burrito that I stuffed into a pannier, and then tore back just as fast as I could, cackling and breathless with the exhilaration of it all.

As soon as I set up my sleeping arrangement, the storm hit.

You know how you count the seconds between the thunder and the lightning, and that tells you how far away the lightning is? There was no counting on that night; they were linked like zipper teeth. And me cheering from my bed on the outhouse floor. 

Before this trip, I probably couldn’t imagine a scenario in which I’d be grateful — profoundly so — to sleep in an outhouse. But that night, I was giddy. There’s a special kind of relief that comes from knowing you’ve hit bottom. I mean, this was undoubtedly the worst place I was going to sleep all trip. And if I was this happy to be in the worst place… I could handle anything that might come my way.

In a world underwater, I had found an air bubble. A safe, dry place to sleep.

leaving chicago

I cried openly on a boulder on the side of a crowded bike path while eating two cinnamon-chip scones.

As you can imagine, absolutely no one acknowledged me. People in the city are good at pretending they don’t see a giant woman with tears rolling out from her sunglasses eating two cinnamon-chip scones. Maybe they assumed I knew what I was doing, that I had this situation under control.  

Or maybe I was a ghost! 

I had absolutely nothing under control. My life was a swirling vortex. I had spent the last hour trying to leave the city, but I kept getting lost and ending up in the same place, a quarter-mile from Olive Oil’s house. It felt like a maddening dream.

I felt so lonely.

I had to say goodbye to a friend, and I wasn’t going to see another one until Montana. I met a person who felt connected to the same reality as me, and then I had to say goodbye to him too. I had checked my email and saw the name Ben Sagres, and I couldn’t bring myself to open the message, because the sight of his name made me feel like I’d chugged a pitcher of icewater. The worst part was how familiar it felt. This was how I felt all the time when we were still talking, I realized with shock. How had I managed to convince myself that this was okay?  

I slumped and sighed and let the tears crawl down my cheeks. Gazed over at Lucky, my sole companion. I felt like an animal at the zoo. My every action was public, and no one knew my name.

But.

I eventually found my way out of the city. The skyscrapers shrunk to suburbs that sank into unburnished land. I rode past tall grass and chain-link fences, through soft drifts of cottonwood fluff, to a town called Zion. The bike path dwindled to dirt and finally led me to a lonely little scrap of beach with smooth stones the color of olive oil and Himalayan sea salt, beneath a sunset like weak herbal tea.

I locked my bike, set up my tent, and crawled inside. Sighed. I’m sad. I recognize and honor that. And I told myself the ups and downs are two sides of the same coin. Trust the setbacks, ride them out. Without loneliness, friendship wouldn’t mean a thing.

Is it hard to ride your bike across the country?

Nights like this one, little man. Nights like this one.