January 2010
As I have become fond of saying, it takes a lot of planning to live spontaneously. What is a slave set free if he has nowhere to go? No means to make his way? No vision? It wasn't a New Year's Resolution. It just sorta happened. Once I saw the change in my spirit from simply planning a two-week cross-country train ride out to the Nevada desert, I started asking myself what else I could do. What else do you want to do? Well, I want to live in a truck. And the scales fell from my eyes, and I realized I don't have to live in a house like everybody else. I really don't need all the trappings and decorations hanging on the walls or stuffed in the closets. Sure, I like my collection of basses and flannel shirts, but anything store-bought once can be store-bought again. And so the research began. If I'm going to live out of a truck, I'll want to be able to park it anywhere. As much as I want a psychedelic hippie-wagon, you just can't park one at the mall overnight. Everybody's going to know you're living in there, and before you know it, you're impounded or run out of town. No, a boring vehicle is what's needed here. Something I can park in your neighborhood, or at your mall, business park, hospital, college, and of course, camping in the forest. So that leads me to buying a plain white cargo van. A cargo van is easily adapted into any situation, and I should be able to get into one pretty cheap. Camping - check. Neighborhood parking - check. Business parking - check. Looks like lots of people are making cargo vans into living spaces, so it must work. But something tells me I don't want to be hunched all day or sitting down all day. I need to be able to stand up. This is for real, not a temporary living situation! My mind turns to box trucks and step vans. Now we're getting into some bad boys. A box truck would be cool, and once you have a box, you have a room, right? It would need a pass-thru from the cab, of course. In that case, why not just look at step vans, and have it all connected, not to mention low to the ground? And I've always had this silly dream of driving a milk truck around. I stumbled across a 1995 GMC Grumman diesel step van with 123,000 miles on it. A former Snap-On Tools truck. The guy wanted $4,000 on Craigslist, and that looked like a pretty good deal, if it ran. I emailed him, and his reply was, "I'll knock off a thousand if you buy it this week." Just like that! I drove eighty miles to Dover, New Hampshire, and it ran just fine. Being a Snap-On Tools truck, a lot of insulation work had already been done, so it was warm in the back. There was a propane heating system rigged up with a wall-mounted thermostat - just like home! A rechargeable three-battery electrical system with outlets on the wall - just like home! And of course it had all those crazy elastic bands on the ceiling and walls where every tool had once displayed. A couple days later it was parked in my driveway with my name on the pink slip. Step One. Commitment.  
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