The Van | Adventures | Shawn Lenker

The timber-lined interior of an empty van, rope and a crate along one wall, rear doors open onto a sunlit wooded track. — The Shell, Before Anything An empty shell with the back doors standing open on a forest track. Nothing in it yet, which is most of the appeal.

The Shell, Before Anything An empty shell with the back doors standing open on a forest track. Nothing in it yet, which is most of the appeal.

An empty cargo van is the least romantic object on the planet. It is a metal box that smells like cold steel and costs more than it should, and turning one into something worth living in takes a winter of measuring wrong, cutting again, running wire that has to come back out, and settling where the bed goes twice because the first answer was wrong. This chapter is about that box, because I have been circling one for years and have not bought it, and the reason why turns out to matter.

I am no longer attached to when. It does not have to happen in the first year or by any particular date. It happens whenever the two of us are ready to give a winter to it.

The flattering explanation for the empty driveway would be that I have been nobly holding the build in reserve for somebody, and it would not be true. It takes money, a stretch of time I have not had, and somewhere to keep a vehicle in pieces for months, and it kept losing to other things. But I have never pushed to finish it alone either, and that part was a choice. A van built by one person is a van shaped around one person's habits. Better that it be ours, whoever she turns out to be.

I have a rough idea of what goes in it, and I hold all of it loosely. It needs two real desks, because we both work and neither of us is going to spend a year hunched over a laptop balanced on a knee. It needs Starlink on the roof, so that a canyon with no bars on the phone is still an ordinary Tuesday at work, and enough solar and battery to carry both of us through a grey week. It needs water we can actually wash with and heat that works at altitude in February. Most of all it needs the insulation done properly, which is the unglamorous half of the budget and the half that decides whether the whole thing is livable at all. And the outside of it stays plain, with nothing painted on the panels, so that we can park on a city street overnight and nobody gives it a second look.

A hand-drawn van floor plan on a workbench beside a brass compass, a pencil, a tray of pastels and a mug of black coffee. — The Layout We Will Argue About The floor plan spread on the bench with the coffee going cold beside it. Every square on it is a decision one of us cares about more.

The Layout We Will Argue About The floor plan spread on the bench with the coffee going cold beside it. Every square on it is a decision one of us cares about more.

And then the things I have not thought of, which is her half of it. I have been sketching layouts alone long enough to know exactly what a layout drawn by one person turns into.

By the time it is finished, the two of us will know things about each other that four years of dinners would not have told us. How she handles being wrong with a tool in her hand. Whether I go quiet and short when the work is going badly. Whether we are good at deciding together when both answers are defensible and one of us has to fold.

One rule gets set before the first cut, while neither of us is annoyed yet. Whoever cares more about a given decision gets that decision. I am good at arguing, and that is exactly why the currency has to be something else.

A warmly lit workshop at night, sawdust on the bench and floor, tools racked on the wall, a dark blue window behind. — The Winter It Takes The shop at eleven at night in February, sawdust across the floor and the window gone blue. This is where the winter goes.

The Winter It Takes The shop at eleven at night in February, sawdust across the floor and the window gone blue. This is where the winter goes.

I would rather learn all of that over a plywood subfloor than in year six.

Then we take it out, and this is the part the whole build is for. The early years of a life together can start to feel like a room with the door shut, and the van is how the door stays open. A week in the desert because the week happened to be free. A month working from the coast. Driving to the friends and family we have been meaning to see for years and parking outside their house instead of booking a hotel, in whatever part of the country they ended up in.

The first trip will go badly in some specific way we did not plan for. Something will leak, or the heater will quit on the coldest night, or the one detail we were certain about turns out to be unusable in practice. I am writing that down now so that when it happens we both read it as a fact about the van. Vans get fixed in a parking lot with the doors open.

A camper van parked alone on a stony desert pullout at night, warm light spilling from its open rear doors, snow-capped mountains and a crescent moon beyond. — Somewhere With No Cell Service A pullout at blue hour with the door open and the lantern lit. No bars on the phone, and four hundred hours of conversation still to go.

Somewhere With No Cell Service A pullout at blue hour with the door open and the lantern lit. No bars on the phone, and four hundred hours of conversation still to go.

The routes get half planned. Some of it aimed at something specific: a coastline, a friend, a stretch of desert I have wanted to see since I was twenty. The rest left open on purpose, so there is room for a road we take because the name sounded good.

And all of it gets filmed. Both of us shooting photos and video of the whole thing, and then the two of us, with a lot of help from the machines I spend my days building, turning it into stories worth watching and putting them out into the world. That is a large part of why the desks and the satellite dish matter. The van is a studio that happens to move.

And a lot of it is just the two of us in the front seats with hours to fill and nowhere to be. An audiobook the whole way across a state, arguing about it at the next fuel stop. An album she puts on that I have never heard. And the conversations that only happen in the dark at hour six, the ones about the things neither of us has told anybody. I have a few of those. I want to be the person she tells hers to.

Two brass mugs of coffee and a folded map on a rug inside a van, a basket of fruit and a lit lantern beside them, open doors framing a misty river valley at sunrise. — Coffee On The Tailgate Two mugs and a map on the floor, the valley coming up through the mist behind them. Most of it looks like this.

Coffee On The Tailgate Two mugs and a map on the floor, the valley coming up through the mist behind them. Most of it looks like this.

It goes quiet sometimes too. A long stretch of highway where neither of us says anything and it stays comfortable the whole way is one of the things I am actually after.

And then, when the timing is right, we stop moving and start the family. The van is not what we give up to do that.

It goes in the barn. It comes out for a week in the fall. Friends and family who want to come stay have somewhere to sleep with the door open onto the field. Our children learn to sleep in it, and at some point one of them takes it across the country without us and does not answer their phone for four days, and we let them.

I expect we rebuild the interior once, twenty years in, when the plywood is soft and the kids are grown and we want it to be a two-person vehicle again. I am looking forward to that build more than the first one.

That is why this one is chapter two instead of the whole book. It is not a phase to pass through before real life starts. It is the thing we keep.

A blue and white camper van parked inside a timber barn, split firewood stacked beside it, preserving jars on a shelf and a child's bicycle leaning nearby. — Kept In The Barn In the barn beside the stacked firewood, with a child's bicycle leaning against the bench. It gets a home instead of a sale.