(This is Chapter One in my “Thoughts on Van Life” series of posts, in which I discuss that every upside of van living carries a defined downside. Check out the Introduction to these posts if you haven’t already).
UPSIDE AND DOWNSIDE: “UNVARNISHED,” THE BEST AND WORST OF AMERICA
Upside— You see the absolute best of America
Our National Parks and Monuments are among the most spectacular natural sights in the known world. Their grandeur is so immense, it can hardly be put into words (though the famed John Muir and others have tried).
There are 63 national parks and 130 national monuments in the system, made available to the public nearly every day of the year, staffed by dedicated, knowledgeable rangers who care deeply about educating people about biology, culture, and conservation.
We are so lucky to have them.
Far beyond the most-known and visited “big name” parks (e.g. Yellowstone, Arches, Bryce Canyon, Hot Springs National Park, and others)— are dozens and hundreds more parks and monuments whose names are barely known and seldom whispered (e.g. Chirachura National Monument, Gila Cliff Dwellings, Bandalier National Monument). These ‘hidden gems’ are no less worthy— some of them just as fantastic as the most famed.
In fact, I now believe the popularity of particular parks comes down to one simple thing: ease of access. So many beautiful places are truly remote, on seldom-traveled roads— but the most-visited parks, without fail, are near to much more infrastructure— perhaps due to their early popularity, but the ease they offer has now become inextricable from that success.
Arches is a great example of this: drawing 1.5 million people a year, it’s right off the highway and right near an airport. The only SLIGHTLY more remote Canyonlands — 30-60 minutes outside of the town Arches is in (Moab), gets half that amount of visitors annually.
This manifests in the difference between hiking strenuous 8-mile trails to see the best sights, or taking a leisurely 8-minute drive to see the best sights from the comfort of the air-conditioned car: that’s it. That’s often the only difference between an unpopular, underutilized park, and one that is on the tip of everyone’s tongues.
Remember that when booking your next trip. If you’re willing to work a little, to go a little further outside of town— the rewards will be fewer people and equally-amazing vistas.
The under-populated parks and monuments tend to inspire more awe for me— being truly alone in the wilderness, or only seeing a smattering of other travelers in a day— is a far more grounded way to see these places than fighting through crowds. I find that being alone in nature allows me to experience the natural wonders far more deeply— which the van absolutely enables, as I can plan for off-season visits or mid-week visits to dodge the crowds.
Living in one place day-to-day, it can be easy to forget that we have some of the most geographically-varied landscapes in the world across our great country.
State by state, and mile by mile, the landscape can change drastically—dramatically, in an instant, and the van allows me to be reminded of that on the daily. Having traveled extensively abroad, not every country is so blessed with natural variance and natural beauty.
Seeing these parks and monuments means seeing the BEST of America— as a friend likes to cynically say, riffing on the Ken Burns special titled “America’s Best Idea” — they’re “America’s Only Good Idea”. But honestly, seeing so many these natural spaces is the best example of the undeniable upside of living in the van.
Downside— You see the absolute worst of America
This is hard to describe without specific examples— so I’ll include some I have seen here:
Piles of trash that people left scattered across our great national lands.
Once-quaint-but-decaying downtown areas bypassed by our highways, falling into disrepair.
Sprawling private prisons that go on for what seems like miles.
The most vulnerable of our citizens huddled at gas stations, trying to get warm or get a bite to eat.
Passing through towns with ‘known’ names, affected by mass shootings or natural disasters.
Former slave plantations that inexplicably host wedding events.
RVers emptying their grey and black water tanks right onto beaches and into waterways.
Green lawns being watered in suburban developments in the middle of the desert.
Abandoned former boom-town industrial sites that never recovered from outsourcing.
The fences and gates and walls that people erect around houses in fear and distrust.
Roadside memorials for the hundreds of pedestrians and cyclists killed on our roads.
There’s no ‘trigger warning’ for some of these ugly sides of America— they can crop up outside one’s windows in an instant when constantly traveling in a van. These scenes often depict something in present-day that went terribly, horribly, wrong in our cultural past — and every single day spent in the van, they are ever-present.
Traveling so many miles, it’s impossible to insulate yourself from this reality with pretty Instagram filters— there’s some real brokenness in America.
In our typically, carefully-constructed, impeccable suburban middle-to-upper class neighborhoods, there’s little ugliness in-view. If challenged with such ugliness, people can often re-route around that unseemly sight— take a ‘better’ road rather than a potholed one, avoid spending time in that neighborhood that is down on its luck, pick a different fishing spot that is away from nearby industrial contamination, or stay away from that downtown area that includes so many houseless people.
This isn’t really possible in the van. Partly because you don’t know the lay of the land before approaching it. Partly because it’s impossible to know what issues have befallen a place before you get there. Partly because ALL the roads that aren’t major highways in America do have signs and signifiers of broken promises, broken systems, and broken dreams.
Living in the van, you tend to run windshield-first into the problems of America.
Every day, you can see the clear difference between those towns that have, and towns that have not. And can see the clear difference between the people that have, and those that have not. You can clearly see places affected by redlining, by drought, by over-pillaging of their natural resources— it’s all right outside the window.
Travel in this country does NOT always make for a pretty picture, and because of my policy against showcasing brokenness for tourism’s sake, I tend not to photograph these places, people, and spaces— nor do I share them on the blog.
Living in a van is to see wonderful things, but also to confront crushing realities. Which is a downside that any vanlifer has to square against all the beauty and wonder.
Posted by Sun
