Who knew surfers doin' the #VanLife thing could be
this elevating!
The resilience of America and its citizens never fails
to elevate. Where else but, say, Bangladesh or Romania,
can a man work fifty hours a week and not earn enough to provide a
roof over the head of his family?
Hence America’s living-in-car culture.
Some of my best friends, gainfully employed, have taken, at
various points, to habitat in their little Japanese saloons and
hatches. If America has the highest rate of incarceration in the
world it can also claim to have the highest rate of
in-car-ceration.
Get it? Yeah.
Anyway, a spin-off of the Car Dream is #VanLife where surfers,
mostly, deck out a Ford Sprinter or VW Vanagon and live
the nomadic dream of moving from beach to beach. Each day a new
lineup, a new scene, a new angle on the swell, the sun.
What thrills me, and I suppose I’m not alone, is surfing your
ass off and then returning to what is, effectively, a giant
bed and licking the salt off your lover’s thighs while you do a
switcharoo and flop the old hoagie in her face. Oh, that might be
life’s greatest pleasure.
In the April 24 issue of The New Yorker Rachel
Monroe has a cut a piece out of the life-of-the-road dream. The
story is called #VanLife, The Bohemian Media Movement.
Like all stories in The New Yorker it is written in the
most compelling and authoritative manner.
Let’s excerpt a little:
Emily King and Corey Smith
had been dating for five months when they took a trip to Central
America, in February, 2012. At a surf resort in Nicaragua, Smith
helped a lanky American named Foster Huntington repair the dings in
his board. When the waves were choppy, the three congregated in the
resort’s hammock zone, where the Wi-Fi signal was strongest. One
afternoon, Huntington listened to the couple have a small argument.
Something about their fond irritation made him think that they’d be
suited to spending long periods of time together in a confined
space. “You guys would be great in a van,” he told them.
The year before, Huntington had given up his
apartment in New York and his job as a designer at Ralph Lauren,
and moved into a 1987 Volkswagen Syncro. He spent his days surfing,
exploring, and taking pictures of his van parked in picturesque
locations along the California coast. It was the early days of
Instagram, and, over time, Huntington accumulated more than a
million followers. He represented a new kind of social-media
celebrity, someone famous not for starring in movies or recording
hit songs but for documenting an enviable life. “My inspiration,”
went a typical comment on one of his posts. “God I wish my life was
that free and easy and amazing.” Huntington tagged his posts with
phrases like #homeiswhereyouparkit and #livesimply, but the tag he
used most often was #vanlife.
King and Smith left
Nicaragua for Costa Rica, but the idea of the van stuck with them.
King, a telegenic former business student, had quit her job at a
Sotheby’s branch when she realized that she was unhappy. Smith, a
competitive mountain biker and the manager of a kayak store, had
never had a traditional office job. They figured they could live
cheaply in a van while placing what they loved—travelling, surfing,
mountain biking—at the center of their lives. When King found out
that she’d been hired for a Web-development job that didn’t require
her presence in an office, it suddenly seemed feasible.
King and Smith, who are thirty-two and
thirty-one, respectively, had grown up watching “Saturday Night
Live” sketches in which a sweaty, frantic Chris Farley character
ranted, “I am thirty-five years old, I am divorced, and I live in a
van down by the river!” But, the way Huntington described it,
living in a vehicle sounded not pathetic but romantic. “I remember
coming home and telling my mom, ‘I have something to tell
you,’ ” King said. “She thought I was going to say we were
getting married or having a baby. But I said, ‘We’re going to live
in a van.’ ”
Is #VanLife really the dream it’s painted to be on
Instagram?
Ken Ilgunas spent most of two years living in
a van when he was a graduate student at Duke University in order to
avoid racking up debt, an experience he chronicled in a book called
“Walden on Wheels,” published in 2013. Living in a van makes you
thriftier and more self-reliant, Ilgunas told me. You learn to live
with discomfort, a quality that he doesn’t see in the Instagram
version of vanlife. “My van never looked like anything out of a Wes
Anderson film,” he said. “It was difficult for me to wash my
cooking pots. For a couple of weeks, I had mice living in my
ceiling upholstery. There were times the van got so hot I thought I
would die if I took a nap. And it was lonely. Just knowing that I
would have to tell women where I lived deterred even the thought of
dating.” In contrast, the vans on Instagram look like
“aesthetically pleasing jewelry boxes,” Ilgunas said. “Usually with
one or two good-looking people sprawled out in bed in front of a
California beach.”
Read the rest and
the in-between bits here!
And learn how to build your own van, the brain
spawn of the lovely Cyrus Sutton!
(Click
here.)
