My Parents Did Vanlife. I Turned Out (Mostly) Normal

Long before vanlife became a social media trend, I was living that lifestyle as a kid.

For a certain segment of society, vanlife is all the rage. The lifestyle offers an easy promise: trade your roots and stability for freedom and the open road and shed your cumbersome belongings to collect experiences instead. Popular vanlife accounts document the highs of the lifestyle, but I know it isn’t so simple.

In 2001, my youngest sister was born. With her arrival, we had outgrown the little brick house I’d lived in for most of my childhood. So, my parents sold our home outside Boston, packed my three younger siblings and me into an electric blue Westfalia van, and drove us across the northern United States from the East Coast to South Dakota and then down to Oaxaca in the mountains of southern Mexico. The whole process took years–at least, it did in my memory.

“The drive down took one month,” my mother corrected me when I called to confirm these details. Children being ill-equipped for long-haul routes, we made slow progress across the country. We stopped each day after only a few hours on the road before our back-seat quibbles escalated into any major meltdowns.

While my siblings and I played games and fought over the best seats in the rear of the car, the country spilled past our windows. We breached the borders of the familiar northeastern states and crossed into the flat and domesticated fields of the Midwest, then the rugged wild of the West. All the while, our parents rotated through everyone’s favorite cassettes as we drove. Mine was N’SYNC, but I still sang along to the Clash and the Dead (both my dad’s).

At night, we camped, usually. The siblings in a tent and our parents in the van’s pop-top. We splashed in the Great Lakes and swatted bugs off our skin on the shore. In South Dakota, a bison wandered into our campsite as we slept and scratched its head on the picnic table while our mother watched horrified through the screen of the van. Hotel stays were a special highlight, especially when it meant a pool or–jackpot!–an indoor waterslide. On the car radio in a sunny Colorado campsite one morning, we learned two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. We continued south.

Why did your family move to Mexico? The question used to embarrass me in school once we’d returned to the States. There was no military job, no family business, no cultural connection. My parents spoke Spanish from studying in school, and they’d heard Oaxaca was a thriving city with a big community of artists. The plan was to stay for a year. The point was to have an adventure and, hopefully, pick up some Spanish-speaking skills. At the end of our route in Oaxaca, we settled into a pink house with tile floors and a tiny courtyard where scorpions roamed.

I enrolled in a local private school. Instead of the single-structure building I was used to at home, at my school in Oaxaca, each class had its own separate structure in a walled campus. On breaks, we were free to roam the campus. I had no idea what was discussed in my classes. I tried to cheat on my tests, but I couldn’t make sense of my classmate’s written answers any more than the questions, so I usually handed in a blank sheet, averting my eyes from my teacher’s. After school, at least, I could get a popsicle from a man with a cart outside the school. That was an interaction I could still manage, with pesos, gestures, and a smile in lieu of thanks. Eventually, I made some friends and picked up more of the language, so I could fill more of the page with my still-broken Spanish.

Even though my family eventually returned to the U.S. and traded vanlife for house life, I haven’t shed the call of the road. Last fall, with some downtime to kill in between jobs, I set off on my own road trip. If my parents had crossed the country with four kids in a van, I figured I could manage a mid-sized SUV and a dog–I didn’t want to go to California without my own child, canine as she may be.

A few hours into driving the empty expanse of I-70 past Kansas City, a familiar boredom enveloped me. I’d thought a cross-country road trip would be the perfect time to absorb a Robert Caro biography, but I was wrong. I couldn’t hold so many narrative threads in my mind at once; after two hours, I topped out. I didn’t have anyone in the car to talk to.

I got so bored I considered calling the religious hotlines advertised on billboards along the route. But finding religion seemed like an unlikely salve to my road trip boredom, the kind I hadn’t known since my pre-smartphone childhood. At least then, I’d had my siblings for fun and arguing (its own kind of fun).

I should’ve remembered the monotony of driving. I didn’t have my family with me this time, but they were part of my route. First, I stopped to see my youngest sister, Chloe, and her girlfriend in Ohio. Then, on the other side of Kansas, my middle siblings Taigh and Maddie in Denver. The thing about being trapped in a car for a month with your family is that it makes you close to them.

Back then, we were driving toward the unknown, at least for us. Then we had each other for company and bickering alike. I know the hazards of a long-haul drive, but I also know the upside.

Before the recent surge of vanlife accounts stormed social media, anyone hearing about my childhood summer living in a van might think my parents were involved with a cult or in trouble with the law. Neither was true. Our core family value, if not our only value, was a sense of adventure. My parents put the four of us in a van and went south to chase it. Looking back, I’m grateful they did.

In Denver, my boyfriend met me to join us for the second leg of the trip. We went to Moab, to Joshua Tree, and Red Rock Canyon, after trading my car for his rig, a 44-foot R.V. that is more like a ship than a motor vehicle. We went to L.A. and Vegas for concerts and to Newport Beach for work. We stayed aboard the ship in the desert and upgraded to hotels in the city for better access to hiking or dancing, where appropriate. We found trails where my dog could run free. We saw reality stars at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. We cooked aboard the rig, and (I believe) he forgives my attempt at buckwheat pancakes. We watched military jets take off in Utah and the stars in California at night. Why? The answer doesn’t embarrass me now.

Today, families considering vanlife may wonder how it will affect their children. I can only speak for myself. It wasn’t too hard to adjust to a new school, a foreign language, a different city. But boredom and stillness? I’m allergic to that now. The greatest risk in an adventure is a different way of seeing things.