Long May You Run

Blue's not much for camping, but when I remind him he has agreed to accompany me around the United States in an Airstream once the kids are on their own, he says, "Yes, and if Eliot's still living with us at thirty he can come too."

Eliot will make a fine traveling companion, but it was Carly who, when she heard of our plan, asked why we were waiting until she left for college to get a camper. Why, indeed, I wondered. Not long after that I bought a 1987 Volkswagon Vanagon Westfalia.

I bought surf racks, and installed a stereo system with a cassette player so I could listen to the old tapes I never played anymore. I found some Hawaiian fabric decorated with classic woody automobiles, and asked my friend Jenifer to help me make curtains. I had the muffler repaired, which improved the noise factor and exhaust emission, without eliminating the good old sound of a Volkswagon engine.

Once when I was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge at night, the headlights stopped working and I had to drive to San Francisco holding one hand on the high beams. The next morning I called a Volkswagon mechanic in Santa Cruz and he said, "That's pretty necessary to fix." He must have been used to people with old hippy vans and no money.

Blue objected to my buying the van at first. He took every opportunity to point out beat-up old VW buses behind tow trucks or broken down on the side of the road. But on our first road trip to Oregon he became a convert.

Our friends Jeff and Elizabeth drove down from Washington, we drove up from California, and we met halfway at a campground on the Rogue River. Like most parents we often had to separate our children in the car, so on the way to Oregon I sat in back with Eliot. I loved sitting in back of the Vanagon on road trips. The view from the fishbowl windows was spectacular.

The vanagon went fifty miles an hour, pedal to the medal and downshifting, on upgrades, but it rode comfortably on the downhill and the flats. If you drove over 75 or hit some wind it shimmied like a sailboat, so I took to driving in the slow lane and letting impatient drivers pass. Blue joked that it would take us twelve hours to get to Grants Pass, Oregon, but it didn’t. We got there in eight and a half. That was when he suggested we take the van to the Surf and Turf.

In September we drove to San Luis Obispo for the Surf and Turf with our friends Tom and Nancy. The event included a surf contest, golf tournament, and a barbecue for a small group of friends. It was the kind of party where there were as many dogs as people. The year before (our first) an old Golden Retriever had laid on his back under the barbecue as the drippings streamed into his wide-open jowls.

The hosts of the party parked their restored woodie in front of the house, longboards sticking out the back. The Vanagon with its woodie curtains fit right in. I swiveled the passenger seat around to face the back seat, pulled out the table, and served margaritas.

The van may have been another romantic idea of mine, but it couldn’t have been more utilitarian. When the kids were little and I had a babysitter in the afternoon, I often parked it down at the cliffs overlooking the ocean, opened my laptop, and spent a couple of hours writing or paying bills. Once I drove down to the cliffs, parked and took a nap, woke up, and drove home.

We called it a house on wheels, a term I had learned from a man in a campground in Oklahoma. Two months before Blue and I were married, my friend Tamara and I had taken a road trip to New Orleans on I-20, camping our way across the southern states. As we set up our tent by a lake somewhere in Oklahoma, a truck with a camper pulled into the site next to ours, although the campground was nearly empty. The back door opened, revealing a scruffy guy in a pair of cutoffs. He cracked open a Budweiser and sat down, legs dangling off the end of his truck as if it were a dock and he was fishing for crawdads.

He watched while Tamara and I argued in loud whispers about whether or not to move. (She wanted to, I didn’t. What was I thinking?) Finally we collapsed our tent and stuck it back of my truck, getting ready to move to a site near some other campers and far away from Crawdad, as he came to be known.

“Y’all aren’t movin’ on account o’ me are you?” he said as we climbed in the truck. “’Cuz if y’are, I can move. Damn, my house is on wheels!”

We kept the Crawdad quote alive for the rest of the trip, and twelve years later I resurrected it when I bought the Westfalia. I took it for repairs to the Volks Cafe ten blocks from my house. I loved to park in the back lot and walk through the garage, picking my way through the carborators and Volkswagon engines spread across the greasy floor. The radio was always tuned to my favorite local station, KPig.

KPig was an eclectic station, part country, part Bluegrass, part rock and blues. You never knew if DJ and KFat founder Laura Ellen was going to play Robert Earl Keen or Sarah McLachlan, the Indigo Girls or Lucinda Williams. The Volks Cafe went up a few notches for me when I heard KPig coming from the mechanics' radio. Peter, the owner, was the top servicing vendor for Vanagons in the country. He and the other guys up front hopped out from behind the counter at a moment’s notice to tighten a mirror or do a test drive .

But my favorite part of the Volks Cafe was the bulletin board for customers selling their vehicles. Here are some of the postings:

“’78 VW van
70k original miles
Champagne edition.
Red/brown
Asking $2700”

“Lilith, the Wonder Van is finally up For Sale.
1977 VW Camper
Sleeps four with fridge, sink, stove
Doesn’t currently run -- needs engine work and new ignition.
Great for living in.
Yours for $500. Call Shalom”


“1966 Volks Baja Bug
Mechanic’s Special.
Blown engine.
$100 O.B.O.
You Tow or I Can for $100”

Seven years after I bought the van, I put up my own For Sale card on the Volks Cafe bulletin board. We had put twenty-thousand miles on the van, and I didn’t have the cash to maintain it anymore. After months of false starts, I received an email from a young woman in Alaska named Becky. She wanted a camper to travel around Texas where she would be attending graduate school.

As we emailed back and forth, it became clear Becky had done her homework. She was the kind of buyer I had been looking for. She paid for an inspection at the Volks Café, then listing the needed repairs, made me an offer. We settled on a price contingent upon a final inspection from her brother.

Her brother Matt was a surfer from San Francisco, who timed his trip to Santa Cruz with the next Northwest swell. Matt inspected the pop-top, the stove, the fold-out beds. As he adjusted the passenger seat for size, I told him I hoped, when they grew up, my son was as nice to my daughter as Matt was to Becky.

“Well,” he admitted, “the deal is I get to use the van until January.”

Matt called his sister with the details of his inspection. As he pressed her number into his cell, he looked at the clouds gathering in the sky and said, “I hope she makes a decision quickly. The wind's starting to come up.” Spoken like a true surfer.

I went inside for a few minutes to give him some privacy. When I came back out, he folded his phone and handed me a cashier’s check. I handed over the title, and the deal was done.

My plan after selling the van was to trade in our company-leased Explorer for one new car that fit all our family needs. I dreamed and searched, but for me there was no camper to replace the Westfalia. A Baja or Bust vehicle just didn’t fit into the immediate plan. What I found instead was what I had sworn I’d never buy: a soccer-mom van.

I chose a Toyota Sienna. My 1940 edition of the Webster’s Dictionary defines sienna as “a ferruginous ocherous earth of a … yellow color, used as a pigment in … painting.” Ferruginous, I found out when I looked it up next, means iron-rich. Except for maybe black, none of the color choices for the Sienna in 2007 was iron-rich. Instead they were various shades of mop water.

How did the Sienna win my heart, if not by the name? It had the extra set of seats in back for transporting Carly’s band to a gig in the Santa Cruz mountains, and those seats folded down to make tons of space for surf bins, duffle bags, ice chests, and a dog. But the real reason I chose the Toyota van was that you could open the back and slide two longboards up the middle. Convenient for the two hour surf getaway.

I couldn’t complain about a new car with good mileage and the best mechanical reputation in the world. But it would take racks, a lot of hibiscus stickers, and Sex Wax smears on the windows to make the Sienna look like a surf van.

As always, Blue understood. When I ordered the new van he said, “Thanks for taking one on the chin for the family.”