Day 1, May 10 - Sleeping in Cars

When I was a kid, one of the most exciting summer break activities was to camp out in my parents’ light blue Volvo Combi on our driveway. This was in the 80’s when Volvo was still Swedish and the Combi was the biggest car in the neighborhood. Sleeping in a blanket fort or tent in the backyard were other options, but a car sleepover was the most luxurious staycation adventure of them all.

Sometimes my then best friend and neighbor, Sandra, would come along. We’d sit in the back of the car with blankets and pillows just simply immersed in the fact that we were having a car sleepover. What else do you really need to be doing than sit and smile about being in the middle of a car sleepover? We never slept, though, because this was in the summer in the Land of the Midnight Sun. Darkness never settled in for the night and Sandra did not have the patience to count sheep to fall asleep. The orange sun just barely pivoted in the sunset colors of metallic blue and blush pink around the dark green tops of the pines on the crest of the granite mountains that surrounded the meadow of our neighborhood before showing off in the dawn colors of metallic blue and blush pink. 

Sandra would usually have left me to sleep alone by the time the street light on our property would go on. Yes, in spite of a light sky, the street lights were still set to be turned on during summer nights. I have always found that phenomenon funny. Knowing that that light would always go on also made me feel extra safe throughout my childhood and teens. One of my most nostalgic sensory memories is seeing fluffy new snowflakes swirl through the darkness into the cone of yellow light of that streetlamp when walking home from school, practice, or a friend’s house when the winter was so cold that my face was frozen stiff and my breath made smoke in the raw Viking air. 

When alone in the Volvo—the then safest car on earth parked on the then safest street on earth—I would spy across the street on our two neighbor families. I would track their movements through windows behind rosehip and spirea hedges, a rowan tree, porch pavilion wooden beams, open curtains, and not-quite-closed blinds as they finished eating dinner, watched TV in the family room, and sought out late-night snacks. Feeling sneaky and mischievous, I would come up with the words for the dialogue I could see, but not hear, them have. I would giggle at my own jokes, all the while knowing that only I would ever find them funny. I would look out of every window of the car to look for shadows, cats, and cars that were already parked for the evening. I would wonder if I should be scared, but I never quite got there. Eventually, I would try to sleep, but it was always an uphill battle. Our driveway tilted up from the street to the garage door and my pillow, blanket, and body would slowly glide to the hatch in the back of the car. I’d put my nest in order, slip, slip, stretch my legs to hold things in place, then slip, slip again to have to re-nest over and over again. In hindsight, I should simply have laid down parallel to the hatch instead of tempting fate with my head towards the garage. I would try to count sheep, imagining each of them individually with white, curly fur bodies and unique personalities. Making up sheep is exciting stuff. I don’t recall ever waking up in the back of the car, so I suspect I never managed to fall asleep during a childhood car camp out.

When I was in my twenties, I ran out of rent money during the last year of my first Master’s degree and became “unhoused.” This was the same year I had bought my first car, a light blue 1971 Ford Galaxie 500 Country Sedan, for $400 in Atlanta, Georgia. While the car seemed intact when I started driving towards Pensacola, Florida, Da Bomb offered plenty of challenges along the way. The rain started early, and by the time we were traversing the six-lane beltway, the cab was completely fogged up. Around the same time, the two side mirrors collapsed inward, offering no sight what so ever. The back view mirror worked, but my “tag in tow” sign was taped right smack dab in the middle of the rear window. Although the wet paper became more and more soggy by the minute, it never let go of the window. To see my way thorough the weather and traffic, I had to alternate between bouncing up from or slide across the slippery leather bench seat to de-fog the part of a window I needed to see through. Meanwhile, the steering wheel was so loose that knowing where the car was going was more of a spiritual experience than a directional reality.

At some point during the ride, the front of the car started smoking. I have no sense of smell and had no experience with cars so I could not tell if it was caused by fire or something else. I parked by the side of the highway and took a look. The car was not on fire, but some sort of fluid was sort of bubbling up in the front. This was way before cell phones and I could not see an emergency phone from where I was, so I got back into the car, locked the doors, settled down in the backseat with my feet over the front seat backrest, and waited. I wondered if I should be scared, but the highway patrol cop car had arrived before I got there. The friendly officer took one look at my car and said, “Your radiator is leaking.” These were completely foreign words to me, but I happily accepted his escorting us to the closest rest stop to “fill her up.”

Once Da Bomb and I arrived at the closest rest stop, I saw two men smoking by the side of the building. They looked harmless and as if they might know something about cars. They took one look at my car and said, “Your radiator is leaking.” After some mansplaining, they started looking for containers in which to carry water and showed me how to refill what was leaking. Before we said our goodbyes, they had “filled her up” and placed two gallons of water in the passenger seat in case I needed more along the way. I called my then roommate, Kelly, from a payphone to tell her that I would be back later than expected. I don’t think she was convinced that Da Bomb and I would make it home at all. Had her dad, Mike, been closer than Toronto, Canada, she would have asked him to go save me. 

Fortunately, I did get home to Kelly and, when she moved and I could no longer afford rent, Da Bomb became my home. I bought two large plastic tubs for my clothes and threw my life into the back of the car. At the time, I was working at the university, so I parked outside the building which housed my office during the day and either slept on someone’s couch, on the floor of the office, or in the back of the car at night. When Da Bomb was not in the shop for exploding a disc break, blowing the head gasket, or burning the engine to roll up the back window, Da Bomb and I would cruise the streets before dawn to meet the sun at the beach. I jogged along the waves and got cat-called by the construction workers who were rebuilding Pensacola Beach after hurricanes Erin and Opal. Fit, tanned, and free: It was the best time of my life.

I drove Da Bomb the day I met my then future husband for the first time. The following year, she was the only thing affected by Y2K. She never started again. Yet, she did move again. She was stolen from the parking lot outside the apartment complex where my husband and I lived. We soon found the car and I sold her for $100 to the man who had purveyed her. He wanted the engine and I wanted the “FORD” letters. I got what I wanted. Then, I got to drive a red Neon, a daughter, a full-time job, a house, a divorce, a doctoral degree, and a live-in boyfriend. In the midst of keeping a job, going to school, and raising Malaren, I fell in love with RV camping. I bought a 16-foot Skamper soon after the divorce and I bought Nautilus, a 1972 Airstream, a couple of years after that. I renovated Nautilus from the grass up after the floor gave out in the bathroom and the blackwater tank fell out on the street. After a year of weekends working on the trailer, Nautilus and I got my mother and my friend Kajsa to Grand Canyon in style. We picked up Malaren and Todd, my then boyfriend, in Tucson, Arizona, to join us. It was the adventure of a life-time.

To be able to take the trip to Grand Canyon, I had to get a tow vehicle. I found my 2002 Suburban while taking an “online car porn” break from grading speeches during finals week. I celebrated 15-years-on-the-job that semester and figured it was time to get Nautilus, The World’s Largest Lawn Ornament, on the road. After three years of “online RV porn,” I had found Nautilus on the way to the grocery store; Bona was parked two blocks from the house at the best car dealer in town, Frontier Motors. I knew the car was a perfect fit as soon as I sat on the driver’s seat. The seat was plush, the steering wheel sturdy, and the windows were so large and high off the ground that I felt as if I was having an out-of-body experience. And then I got to drive her. And then I got the monthly payment below $200. And then they gave me an apple pie based on a recipe from Dresden, East Germany, to celebrate the purchase. My paternal grandfather’s family comes from Dresden.

I love driving. I honestly feel super fortunate to be alive at a time when cars are a thing and to be able to afford driving my own car. This gratitude makes me very patient in traffic. What if we had to walk? I enjoy the daily commute every single time, but true love is a long road trip. I can drive for days. While I am driving, nothing else matters. The whole point is the experience of the movement through space, to see new things, encounter new people along the way, and engage in new thoughts as a result. When life is tough, the knowledge that that movement can start from the parking lot right outside the office or home at ANY random time has made it hard to not just leave oh so many times. Many of those tough times occurred during the pandemic, and only the threat of deadly disease held me back from turning the key and go until I ran out of gas. A year into the pandemic, I found myself in an empty nest after 19 years of raising my daughter, a new home after 18 years of keeping the old home to offer stability for my daughter, in a new job after 17 years of teaching Speech, and single after sharing my life with a live-in boyfriend for 16 years. Even the cat died. The only tangible constant was Bona. The only intangible constant was wanderlust.

To reward myself for completing the grueling coursework for an MBA—my fifth, and final, university degree—during the pandemic, I decided to build out Bona into a camp mobile. I love to work in wood and fabric. This build-out gave me the opportunity to do both. I built two platforms, a tall one for the bed and a short one for fabric kitchen cupboards, and I sew the curtains for behind the driver’s seat. Originally, I had gone for function only, not paying any mind to the look of the build. But then I remembered the joy of turning Nautilus from a nondescript Airstream to a mermaid’s lair and, well, the urge to express myself aesthetically took over. There’s not a lot of room for self-expression in a jam-packed Suburban, but suffice it to say that the platforms have molding and the curtains look Victorian. I engineered the flannel sheets so I can fold one part of the mattress over the other to get to the storage compartment under the pillow. The bedding is complete with a quilt I made a while back using my childhood bed set showing the map of the United States and the phrase “Dreams Come True” in a variety of blues, teals, and aquas. My mom helped stitch the applique by hand. It is easy to see which of the states she stitched.

I slept in Bona with this setup for a week while in training to earn the Wilderness First Responder certificate in preparation for trying to become a tour guide. Like many of my wonderful fellow trainees, I was parked among tall trees that held squirrels, bats, and owls. It was absolutely amazing to wake up with my head on the pillow looking out of my backseat window looking over a lush forest in early morning sunlight, but there was some drama, too. I learned that I needed a doormat on the ground by the door I used to climb into the car to not track dirt into my sleeping bag. One night, a frog was loose in the hatch. The car keys were lost for a couple of hours on the day I was supposed to drive home. 

Tonight, I will sleep in a car again. This time, I am on a road trip for a second exciting summer working as a tour guide at Bryce Canyon National Park, one of the most beautiful and interesting places on earth. This time, Gary is coming along. As we packed Laramie, the Conquest motorhome, he said, “Let’s drive this thing around until we cannot drive no mo’.” We are currently lying with blankets and pillows just simply immersed in the fact that we are having a summer-long car sleepover. What else do you really need to be doing than sit and smile about being in the middle of a car sleepover?