Photo by Tim Zänkert on Unsplash
When I was twenty years old, a few good friends and I embarked on a road trip in my nineteen ninety-four Chevy Astro utility van. We were starting in Florida, with no plans but to head the only direction there was to go: north. I had decided only a couple months prior that I would save as much money as I could and quit the mind-numbing, soul-sucking retail job I’d been working. I wanted to be on my way to the non-conformist, nomadic lifestyle I had idealized since I’d first devoured works by Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, and Abbie Hoffman. The roadblock to that paradise was the menial job I had once enthusiastically applied for, because it was a means to an end, a way to buy my own car. Another was the suburban hell hole I detested at the time, the town in Florida where I had lived with my parents for over ten years. Headstrong, determined, and full of deep credence for my personal revolution, I told some friends what I had planned, and enlisted their participation...
We save up some money, we drive, we live out of the van. We’ll make money when we need to. We weren’t coming back. My friends and I had covered the van’s stark white exterior in bumper stickers, graffiti, and Sharpie diatribes. During our first stop in the small Disney developed town of Celebration, Florida, the cops were called on us simply for parking in a residential area and looking like “a hodgepodge of suspicious youths.” We relished the description. Truth be told, the van itself was perhaps more alarming than any one of us.
• • •
I went looking for my first car at eighteen. I told my dad (who was assisting me in my search), that I wanted a van. In my head, I pictured the Wyld Stallyns van from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, or that badass A-Team van, or a non-descript van one might picture a kidnapping ring would use to steal children off the street. I had only a couple thousand dollars saved up from my first job, where I was making seven dollars an hour. Luckily, the cars that pittance afforded me, were exactly what I hoped for. I wanted to live out my Gen X wannabe fantasies and have a van that had all the implications of the bohemian lifestyle I strived to lead.
My dad, who had good intentions but didn’t quite understand my aesthetic, took me to see several vehicles. They were the kinds of vans a stressed-out mom in her forties, who wears light wash, straight leg denim and thinks beige is an acceptable color for a car, would buy. I scrunched up my nose, rolled my eyes, and sighed with disgust at vehicle after vehicle. I didn’t care about what was safe or had good gas mileage. I couldn’t be the fierce beatnik, hippie, artist, revolutionary I envisioned in any of these boring cars! Finally after weeks of looking, my dad brought me to a shady, run-down looking dealership literally on the other side of the tracks: “El Cheapo Rides.” And there she was. I think my dad had intended to show me this van as a joke, or perhaps a “reality check” to convince me what I was asking for couldn’t possibly be what I really wanted. He was wrong. So, so wrong.
When I first saw what would become the van I owned for over ten years, put over one hundred thousand miles on, and even lived in, I looked at it in a way you might envision the way someone looks who’s trying to mimic the heart eyes emoji. It was white, mid-size, and had apparently been used as some sort of work van. There were only two seats in the front and a metal cage that separated the front from the back. There was more metal caging that covered all the windows in the back. It was un-upholstered and completely bare bones, except for the driver and passenger seats. It’s lucky that I never got into any serious accidents in that van because any passenger sitting in the cage had nothing but maybe a bungee cord and their sense of balance to keep themselves from rolling around the back of the vehicle. No one but me thought it was funny when I quoted Stuntman Mike from the movie Death Proof “This car is 100% death proof, only to get the benefit of it honey, you really need to be sitting in my seat!”
• • •
At sixteen, I dropped out of high school, anxious to begin my “real” life. I respected the educational system, and often dreamed of college when I was a kid. At age twelve we moved from Maine to Florida, and the culture shock, coupled with the onslaught of hormones, had made me grumpy, rebellious, and sick and fucking tired of the establishment. I no longer looked at my future and wanted anything to do with school or a traditional career. In hindsight, the catalyst for the road trip was a desperate need to do something different, change direction. It established a pattern I would come to repeat. It is a cycle that has infested my entire adult life, of making a commitment to normality, then abandoning it when my mental health so degrades, I can no longer tolerate it.
After leaving high school, I became depressed and isolated myself from my friends. Despite this, in those last teenage years, I managed to get my driver’s license, GED, and the aforementioned first job. I had no sense of direction but my desire to own a car. I wanted to meet new people, experience a culture that wasn’t the lily-white enclave I had lived, gone to school, and worked in. With that car, I knew freedom would come, and a purpose.
These details of my life in my teenage and early adult years, and the van that became an extension of my personality, paint a picture of who I am that is vastly dissimilar, in many ways, from the person I am today, at 33. However, they are of key importance to understanding the chapter of Laura’s Life I am in currently. Unfortunately, I must report that I did end up back in Florida some months after we had initially embarked on the road trip. The romantic fantasy of living out of a van with four friends and a dog proved to be a little much for my introverted inclinations. For the many years that followed, I put aside the devotion to the ideals that had sparked the road trip; I had abandoned my desire to be a creative visionary or an insurgent. I settled, as so many do, into a conventional life. Although, a consistency remained: the van. Even after several blows to its health, with my dad’s indispensable help we kept the van alive, and between us, invested easily ten times as much money into it over the years than it was worth. But ultimately, as all things do, it met its maker.
Throughout my twenties, I had steady employment and my own apartments. Most recently, I worked at a grocery store where I was promoted to the bakery manager. I made more money than I’d ever made, and was able to afford a decent car. I didn’t struggle to pay bills or buy food. I got away from Florida a second time, made it stick, and now live in a city that I love. I have the best friends, a supportive family, and a weird, but loving cat. All of this is to say, despite achieving what many people value, and what I had come to think I valued, I still wasn’t happy. While I had not entirely lost my belief in the counterculture, I had failed to manifest that belief tangibly, instead falling into the trap of monotonous, capitalist, consumerism driven culture. With each day that passed living my mainstream life, I became more and more despondent. What, after all, is the purpose of a life that undermines all the values you truly hold most dear?
I don’t know the exact moment that it became clear I had to change my life, in the same way I don’t remember what struck me so spontaneously thirteen years ago when I decided I had to quit my job and leave Florida, as soon as possible. In both instances, I was overwhelmed with a sense of determination and drive that erupted from the deepest part of my heart, the part that dictates our true desires. In this instance, it was the drive to go back to school. To go do that college thing I had so vehemently avoided in my youth. I spent fifteen years staring into an abyss of dead-end jobs, being hustled along on a conveyor belt, taking me to the Land of Regret. Through the perspective that age and experience have brought me, I have realized that bucking societal institutions, simply out of hatred for the status quo, is a futile endeavor. Yet too, submission to a system of servitude was starving me of those things my young self ardently aspired to espouse: creativity, curiosity, and passion. Eighteen-year-old me, the one who had that blunt bumper sticker on her van that declared “Fuck College,” would have never believed me if I had told her where I am right now.
Title is taken from lyrics to the song: “We Laugh at Danger, (and Break All the Rules)” by Against Me! (Laura Jane Grace, Warren Oakes, James Bowman)