How to Build a Van Dweller
The experiences that drove me to life on the road
One of my earliest memories is of the Eifel Tower. It was small enough to fit in my hand, and painted silver, and enclosed in a plastic case with a four-footed base. Iridescent glitter swirled up when I shook it or turned it upside down. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
After years of looking at my snow globe, I stood beneath the real thing
The snow-globe was a gift from our foreign exchange student. Her name was Marie, and she was from France. We’re on good terms with her now, though my mom tells me she wasn’t very nice to me back then. I don’t remember. I just remember that snow-globe, and a lovely girl with wild hair and a charming accent, and wanting to be exactly like her.
My dad was a member of Rotary at the time, a club that was founded to eradicate Polio throughout the world but gradually grew into community service projects and international cooperation missions, including the Rotary Youth Exchange program. Marie was sponsored by my dad’s Rotary club, and they needed host families, and so our little family of three grew a bit, for a while, and took on some international flavor.
If we’d never hosted an exchange student, I don’t know what I would be, or if I would have this same urge to go, go, go. It seems like I’ve wanted to hit the road and not stop until I’d seen everything there was to see for as long as I can remember. But then, it feels like Marie handing me that snow-globe was as long ago as I can remember. So maybe, if we’d never had an exchange student, or maybe even if Marie had never handed me that snow-globe, I wouldn’t have looked inside and wanted to see the real thing more desperately than I’ve ever wanted anything. Maybe I would have been a teacher, or a therapist, or a social worker, or a librarian.
Instead, I decorated my room with Eifel Towers and Arc de Triomphes, covered the walls in maps of the world and stuffed them full of pins marking all the places I wanted to go, filled my shelves with travel books, globes and back issues of Condé Nast Traveller.
The moment Marie handed me that snow-globe, all those years ago, I knew I was going to be a Rotary Exchange Student. It never even crossed my mind that I might not get accepted, or maybe exchange wasn’t the right choice for me. It was just a fact of life, as sure as my name: I was going to be a Rotary Exchange Student.
So, when I went to my high school counselor for advice on when I should do it (junior year, senior year, or as a gap year) and he basically told me that he wasn’t sure I was cut out for such a difficult undertaking (despite never having met me before), I walked out and never spoke to him again. And, after much deliberation, I applied to Rotary Youth Exchange as a gap year.
The first time it occurred to me that I might not become an exchange student, was after I’d submitted the application and the waiting began. The longer I waited, the more likely it seemed that I just wouldn’t get accepted, and since Rotary was an 18-and-under program and I was already 18, there would be no trying again the next year.
But I made it.
After an application thicker than the one I submitted for college, in-person interviews, three separate orientation sessions, and months and months of study and preparation, I took off for Berlin, Germany. I’d brought my dream to life.
I actually lived outside of Berlin, in a small town called Fürstenwalde, and it was beautiful. My host Rotary Club was welcoming and indulgent of my desire to learn outside the classroom, my host families were engaged, and going to a German school was like stepping into a whole other community. The students in my class were incredibly helpful, even in ways that didn’t seem so at the time.
The first week of school, I clung to my English-German dictionary like a safety blanket. I never put it down, and I used it both to aid in my interactions and as a blatant signal that I had no idea what was going on. I even brought it along to my first P.E. class, and that was where my classmate Obeida drew the line.
He walked up to me, took the dictionary from my hands, said, “You don’t need this,” and walked away.
It was the best thing anyone could have done for me.
I learned German the way a child does: without structure, without “right” and “wrong” answers. I learned words through context, through repeated usage, through getting things wrong and being corrected.
When I hear or speak German now, I find it difficult to translate, because I don’t think of the language in terms of English. I just understand it, and I understand that while a word might technically have an English equivalent, it just doesn’t feel the same as the German one. Sometimes I feel like I can express myself better in German, just because I’m in a mood and German has the better context. Sometimes I miss Germany so badly it’s like I left a part of myself behind.
The other exchange students became closer than family to me. Half of them were basically insane and I wouldn’t trust them to hold my purse in a library for five minutes (not because I don’t trust them with my things, but because I’m pretty sure they would have found a way to throw a rave and forgotten all about my purse by the time I got back), but I would easily trust them with my life. Every single one of them. Even the ones I didn’t talk to all that much, or didn’t have a deep, soul-baring moment with. There’s just something about being in this position where you’re essentially alone in a place that doesn’t make much sense, and having access to all these people who are going through the same things at the same times.
Honestly, I try to avoid thinking about them, because it hurts way too much to know that they’re scattered across the entire world, and I’ll never, ever, be able to get all 100 of them in one place, at one time, ever again. It’s like having pieces of my soul in 100 places around the world. I can’t be entirely whole without them, and I’m having to learn to live with that, because I tried forcing myself to be whole again and it just doesn’t seem to work that way.
I think that’s the biggest appeal of living in the van: I can go see them. All of them. Sure, I might have to ship the van overseas once or twice, but if I’m living wherever I park, then I can stretch my fingers across continents and maybe find a little peace in drawing those lines across the Earth, playing connect-the-dots with these people who mean everything to me.
Maybe it’s crazy, to want to drive to Brazil and Argentina and Venezuela and New Zealand and South Korea and Turkey and South Africa and the Philippines and twenty other countries. Maybe it’s crazy to think I’ll make enough money writing to keep doing this long enough to get there. Maybe its crazy to think that I can push through gangs, and war zones, and jungles, and deserts, and oceans, and police states, and still come home in the end. But I can’t imagine any other way to live my life.
These friends of mine live with some of this stuff every day. And what I’ve always wanted to do with my writing is bring people together and foster understanding between cultures. While the United States needs some understanding and togetherness, it has never been the end-all, be-all of the world. It’s just one corner, and there’s just too much to see, and touch, and learn about. And I can’t wait to do it.
I’m going to be careful. I’m going to do my research. I’m going to try to have friends with me along the way. I might have to decide that certain parts of the drive just aren’t worth it and ship the van past those places. And the more dangerous bits will come after a year or two doing the United States. But I want to see these places and meet these people again. And, just like with Rotary Youth Exchange, I can’t imagine not doing it.
