In the late 1980s, a much younger me had decided to make some major changes in life, and I won’t bore you with what that was about. Suffice to say that for what I had in mind, I needed several thousand dollars — money I did not have.

I had a steady job, an ordinary apartment, and a beater van that was paid for, but still I was barely breaking even. How could I come up with all that money?

Well, why not live in the van? Just by not paying rent, I’d save hundreds of dollars every month. I could raise all the money I’d need in, I figured, maybe two years.

Was I nuts or would this work? Yes, and yes.

♦ ♦ ♦  

The most obvious problem would be living with no shower, no toilet, and no sink.

But I could shower at my job. I was the only person working overnight at a car dealership, and the building had showers for its day-shift mechanics, so I had privacy and shower access seven nights a week. First problem, first solution. What’s next?

I visited a store that sold supplies for recreational vehicles, and bought a portable toilet, very low-tech — just a lightweight chair with a hole in it. You sat and shat into a plastic bag clipped to the chair, under your butt.

I brought the toilet home, attached a plastic liner, and took a practice poop in the kitchen. Why the kitchen? Because the bathroom in that apartment was too tiny to squeeze in a second chair.

There was no leakage, and no stink when the lid was closed, but there was a lot of liquid at the bottom of that trash liner, which seemed like an unnecessary risk of spillage inside the van. It seemed wiser to pee into a bottle in the van, and use the portable toilet only for poop, so that became my habit.

I bought cheap, refillable plastic jugs of water for drinking, and also for washing my hands after using the toilet. With no drain, of course, I’d have to step out of the van to wash my hands, but that seemed workable.

Living in the van was an unusual thing to do, and people tend to frown on the unusual, so it seemed wise to be discreet. This was long before the internet, where every weirdo in the world voluntarily reveals themselves, and back then I thought I was the only weirdo.

The van wasn’t at all discreet, with big windows on both sides, and another big window at the back. If I lived in the van, anyone walking by would see inside, and I needed more privacy than that.

So I carefully measured the van’s interior, bought some plywood, borrowed tools from a handyman friend, and constructed a clumsy, ugly wooden box that would fill the back of the van. The box would be my bedroom.

I painted the box’s exterior black, to match the color of the van. My thinking was, someone who sees wood through the window might be suspicious and wonder what’s inside — I’d be inside, and wanted no visitors, no suspicions. But someone who sees only black through the windows of a black van wouldn’t think twice about it.

When the paint had dried, I slid my big wooden box into the van. It was after dark, and leaving a flashlight lit inside, I walked around the van’s exterior. As I had hoped, the painted plywood box made the van look like it was empty, and no light was visible from outside. If I was inside reading a book or watching TV, no-one outside would know.

I bought a futon, took some blankets and a pillow from my apartment, and tested the set-up to make sure I could sleep in a wooden box in my van. That didn’t work, at first. Parked in the lot at my apartment building, every time anyone came or went in their vehicles, it woke me.

It would be smarter, I figured, to park the van farther from all the humans and their cars, so I crawled from the bed to the driver’s seat, started the engine, and drove away. Spent the rest of that night in an almost-empty park-and-ride for the local transit system, where I slept undisturbed, until a cop pounded on my window at dawn. “Sorry, officer, I must have fallen asleep. I’ll be headed home now.”

OK, I said to myself, gotta watch out for the police, but maybe this “living in my van” thing is going to work. After another test night, it seemed like all systems were go, so I gave my landlord notice that I was moving out.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Spent the next few weeks shedding possessions, moving most of my books and other stuff into a storage facility, and tinkering with my set-up in the van.

Made another trip to the RV supply store, where I bought a small cooler that plugged in to the cigarette lighter and could keep milk cold enough it wouldn’t curdle.

Bought a portable TV and a small fan, both of which plugged into the lighter. With an extension cord that reached from the cigarette lighter to the back of the van, my nifty new 12-volt appliances would be within arm’s reach, whether I was in the front or back of the van.

I bought a battery-operated lamp I could screw into the plywood over my head, so I could read in bed with no worries of draining the van’s battery.

It’s been four decades from then to now, so I can’t tally what prepping the van cost, and inflation would make the numbers nonsensical anyway. As I recall, it added up to about two months’ rent for the apartment I was leaving behind, and it felt like a wise investment. Felt like I was a half-assed homeowner, with no more rent to pay at the first of every month.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

I must have moved out of my apartment a few days early, because the first night in my half-ass tricked-out van wasn’t the first of the month. Googling just now, I see that it was Monday, September 28, 1987.

The date is Googleable because on my first night as a van-dweller, I watched the premiere of a new show called Star Trek: The Next Generation, on my little black-and-white TV, in the front seat of my van, parked at a 7/11 and sucking down a Slurpee.

♦ ♦ ♦   

Over the next couple of years, I made sandwiches in the van, and bought a 12-volt cooking pot, so I could have soup or ramen with my sandwiches. I read books and wrote zines in that van, and peed into jars with screw-tight lids. The van was home, and it was honestly kinda homey.

♦ ♦ ♦   

At first, I parked and slept in residential neighborhoods. It was dicey, though, to crawl from the driver’s seat, through the curtain and into the back of the van, while someone might be peering out their living room window to see why nobody’d gotten out of that black van.

After a few cops had knocked on my window, demanding to see my ID and play 20 Questions, I decided not to park near people’s houses. Usually I parked and slept in large, mostly empty parking lots.

♦ ♦ ♦   

Seattle isn’t known for especially shivery winters, but when it was 40° outside, it was also 40° inside the van. I had plenty of blankets, and the van had heat when the engine was running, so in the winter, I usually slept in the driver’s seat, not on the futon in the back. I’d tilt the seat, cuddle up in my blankets, and every hour or two I’d start the ignition and run the heat for a while.

Summer was a bigger problem. Science says the color black absorbs and radiates heat, and I can vouch for science. If it was 80° outside, the van became a sweaty oven. Nope, no air conditioning. In the Pacific Northwest before climate change, air conditioning was a luxury, something for rich folks, unless you’re living in a black van.

Hoo boy, by 8 or 9 every sunny morning, I needed to be in the front seat with the windows rolled down. Most summer days, even with the windows open, I needed to splash water onto my face every 45 minutes or so, to keep the grime and sweat from dripping into my eyes.

♦ ♦ ♦   

Most of my effort setting up the van had been about building the bedroom box in the back, but after the first few weeks I rarely slept there. I lived in the driver’s seat, tilted back so no-one could see me.

What that means is that the van didn’t even need to be a van. It could’ve been a compact two-door hatchback. There was usually nothing in the bedroom box in the back, except my futon, some fast-food wrappers, and the toilet.

♦ ♦ ♦   

The toilet, by the way, was another aspect of my big plan that didn’t work out as I’d expected. It was smart to have it, sometimes a necessity and a great convenience, but I only used it in emergencies. Thousands of times I peed in a bottle in the van, with no serious spills (am I allowed to be proud of that?), but almost all my pooping was in the men’s room inside fast-food restaurants, department stores, libraries, or even churches.

Why? Well, I’m not easily disgusted, and dropping a deuce in the van didn’t bother me. What I didn’t like was opening the van door with my soiled hand, in order to get out and scrub up by pouring water through my fingers onto the asphalt. I didn’t like the possibility of dropping or accidentally ripping the bag while trying to tie it up neatly, and spilling its contents all over the van, and needing to dispose of the turd quickly, before the summer heat aromatically baked it in the bag.

♦ ♦ ♦   

Midway through my first vagabond summer, I stumbled upon a great improvement to my living situation — a rest area on the interstate. It was a long drive north from where I’d been parking, but the rest area had trees and shade, so the summer heat wasn’t quite so scorching.

And it had easy access to toilets and sinks. The restroom had a billion spiders and bugs, and one of the stall doors never latched, but none of that mattered ‘cuz I had indoor plumbing overnight.

♦ ♦ ♦   

During my time in the van I had perhaps a dozen unpleasant chats with curious cops who wanted to see my license, and wanted to know why I was parked wherever I was parked. Sleeping in a parking lot is borderline breaking the law, or at least cops think so, so I was always nervously on my best behavior during those interactions. Plenty of “Yes Sirs” and polite, often untrue answers to their many, many nosy questions.

A ticket or even an arrest was always possible, but I was lucky — every one of those conversations ended with “Thank you, officer,” as the cop walked away.

And yes, I am aware that any of those middle-of-the-night knocks on the window of my van could’ve turned out a lot worse if I hadn’t been white. Sadly but realistically, my advice is to avoid being black while living in a van.

♦ ♦ ♦   

The cop interactions were a serious drag, and after yet another 3AM chat with a cop, I was almost ready to give up and start looking for an apartment.

I was only about 2/3 of the way to my financial goal, though. Not paying rent was the whole point of everything I’d done, but it gets tiresome, knowing that any night could be interrupted by any policeman.

What I needed was someplace where I’d have permission to park the van, and I’m not sure I would’ve found it on my own — there was no Googling back then. Luck came through for me, though.

After being rousted by another cop at the rest area, my gut feeling the next night was that the same cop would back be to make me miserable again, so instead I cruised a few semi-busy roads, looking for an empty parking lot. That’s when I saw the sign.

“Camping — Nightly, Weekly, Monthly,” it said, with prices I’ve forgotten, but they were low. Behind the sign was a dirt road, a few trees, half a dozen seedy-looking mobile homes and rusty recreational vehicles, a few cars and pick-up trucks, a restroom and shower, and three empty parking spaces.

It was sort of a trailer court and sort of a campground, and it looked perfect for my needs.

One of the mobile homes had a sign that said “manager,” so I knocked and we talked, and in five minutes I lived there. No forms, no background check, not at a place this … let’s say, ‘affordable’. The rent was crazy cheap, about a third of what I’d paid for the apartment I’d left a year earlier. A good deal.

And best of all, I no longer needed to be discreet about living in my van. A guy in a Plymouth was also watching TV in his car. Same as me, my neighbors walked from their vehicles to the shit-shack (as we called it) carrying their TP or soap and towels. We were a low-rent community of nomads.

I un-installed the bedroom box, and in the summer opened all the van’s windows and the tailgate for a delightful breeze. I tilted back in the driver’s seat, and slept with my feet sticking out the window. It was home, and it was perfectly legal.

After living in the van for two years, I’d saved up enough money to fund my next adventure, made possible entirely by a generous endowment from living in my van.

5/25/2020
Republished 4/17/2023
Republished 1/12/2025 

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