It’s ten past seven in the morning. The sun is not yet up. The air is heavy and damp and I find myself standing on a dock in eastern North Carolina next to a little pile of stuff. It is a sad day. No, no. It’s not thatday, that dock, nor that pile of stuff my larcenous friends. That comes later and will remain a secret. This morning I am waiting for my friend Don to swing by on his way to work – a concept that is still beyond me – and give me a ride to the rental car company. Today I am going on a quest. Today I am looking at cars.

To give you an idea what this means to me consider this. If I am in a group of people and someone asks where I live and I tell them “on a sailboat”, everybody leans in because there’s got to be a story there. If the next question is along the lines of “But where is your house?” and I say that I don’t have one the response is general disbelief. “Gasp!” is usually heard. Invariably the next question is: ”What do you do with your car when you go sailing?” When I reply “I don’t have a car”, the crowd quickly disperses towards the hors d’oeuvre table. If the conversation happens one-on-one the person I’m talking with usually points into the distance and yells “Look, it’s the Black Hole of Space” or something. By the time I look back my companion is receding quickly into the distance. My new car will signal my return to polite society.

The U.S. is the land of stuff and at the top of the pile of stuff you need to live here is a car. Everything else exists pretty much so that you have something to pick up in your car when you buy it. Groceries, pets, personal electronics, furniture, large and small – all of it exists so you have something to do with your car. I bet each of you has a story that starts out along the lines of “I remember back when I moved a king-sized mattress and box spring from Dubuque to Juarez tied with kite string to the top of my VW Beetle” – or other generationally specific small car. This is the U.S. and here it is all about the car.

Since I will be moving from a life afloat to one ashore NEXT WEEK! – my, how the time flies. I need a car. Being the coldly rational person that I am, I realize that I might need more than a “car” to meet my varied and diverse needs. First and foremost I am going to have to travel around a bit to find out exactly where me and my little pile of stuff is going to come to rest. Reliability and comfort are going to be pretty important. Next, it’s got to be able to swallow me and my stuff to get me to the rest of my stuff so I can put it all in a U-Haul for the move. My vehicle will need to be commodious and powerful. Lastly, because push will come to shove, I’ve got to be able to live in it – or out of it more likely. To meet all of these requirements I decided that my best course of action would be to get my hands on a Conversion Van and damn my carbon footprint.

Oh yeah, it’s also got to be cheap. 

I started out by borrowing a friend’s car and driving around looking for something that might be available locally. There were a number to choose from all of which were surrounded by and trapped in substantial new growth forest. I guess they just couldn’t get the mower in close enough and over the years the trees took over. These I quickly ruled out. I moved my search online and after seeing the same batch of van-turned-landscaping-features expanded my search horizon. Fifty miles, one hundred miles, two hundred miles – the radius grew. I called on the choice ones. “Sorry. Sold it 15 minutes ago.” I weeded out the vans that were obviously over-priced or just plain out of my price range. After a couple of days of searching I was left with four. One, two, three, four. Spread over an area that stretched from Wilmington, North Carolina in the south to Hampton, Virginia in the north. Four vans. I called the owners, set up viewing appointments and reserved a rental car for the trip. With that I stepped out into traffic on the highway to hell.

Don arrived on time and whisked me off to rent my car. I had reserved an Economy level car, of which there are usually none so you get a free upgrade. There were none so I got my free upgrade. “Yes!” Off I drove in my brand-new, low-mileage, Chevrolet – GM is encouraging people not to say “Chevy” any more – Impala. It was, as the saying goes, a fly ride. One of the problems of moving from a sailboat – which flat-out does about 9 MPH (14 KPH for everybody else) – to a car is that you are not sufficiently velocitized. I hit the gas and start to freak out at about 40 MPH (65 KPH). The fear eventually wears off but the first 15 minutes or so is kind of exciting as other vehicles, including farm equipment, zip past me like I’m standing still. Pretty soon I regain my need for speed and zoom along with, and often faster than, everybody else. I set my course – or whatever you do on land – north for Edenton, North Carolina and put the pedal to the metal.

The first van I looked at was a 1993 Ford Conversion with 165 thousand “mostly highway” miles on it. The color wasn’t offensive and it was in pretty good shape for a vehicle of that vintage. It’s only problems were a driver’s seat that moved only when you and it both agreed it was time, some missing trim lights, and a faint tapping sound in the engine. It drove pretty well and the brakes and steering did mostly what they were supposed to. All-in-all it had some potential except that the custom interior looked like a Timothy Leary makeover of a Las Vegas strip club – I’ve seen them in the movies – and the price was a bit high. I moved onto the next one.

One of the problems I foresee in writing fiction is that what passes for reality in my world is usually much stranger than the things I am able to make up. I headed East on US Route 64 towards Nags Head, North Carolina on the Outer Banks. I had spoken with the owner several times about the car and now called him for directions. The putative owner was a Preacher whose flock was the Ministry to which the van had been donated. He told me I would find the van in Nags Head next to the windmill and parked in front of the thrift store at the Crisis Pregnancy Center. See what I mean. To say that the van was in “good” shape would be an error along the lines of saying the U.S. Federal debt is “manageable”. When I kicked the tires paint flakes the size of potato chips drifted to the ground. I was unable to find a square inch on the van – save the glass – where rust had not taken root and started spreading across the paint like a corrosive ground cover. The door was unlocked and I opened it. The sight and smell that greeted me was what you would expect had the van been occupied by an extended family of itinerant oil-change specialists who spent their days smoking unfiltered cigarettes and not taking out the trash. I called the Preacher back and told him I didn’t think the van was the experience I was looking for. I’m not sure if criminal misrepresentation is one of the seven deadly sins or not. It should be.

I drove off the island and back onto the mainland. My destination was Hampton, Virginia where I was to test drive the newest, second most expensive, and furthest North van in the group. This vehicle was almost exactly as represented. Whew! The Dodge van was in pretty good shape, things mostly worked, the engine started on the first crank and ran smoothly. The drawbacks were that it was black and that the owner, a retired Naval Officer and Pittsburgh Steeler fan, had expressed his fandom with a large Steeler logo on the back door. Now, I don’t have anything against the Steelers or football in general but as somebody who doesn’t understand why people get excited about a team “being in the red zone” – wherever that is – such graphic displays of idolatry are lost on me. The absolute best part of the visit was that his house was exactly under the landing approach for Langley Air Force Base and our conversation was frequently interrupted by the mega-decibel roar of F-22 fighters on final approach. This van moved to the top of the list.

There was one final van to consider located some 300 miles to the South in Wilmington, North Carolina. It was another Ford with lower miles and less expensive than the first. It sounded great when I spoke with the owner and had high hopes as Wilmington may – or may not be – my final destination. The first clue that all was not what it seemed was that neither the seller nor his brother who lived next door could give me accurate directions to where they were. So I guessed and managed to find a workable short cut. I arrived on scene and was greeted by the owner and a vehicle with some very nice tires. They were really nice tires. I am still not sure how the vehicle was able to stay together for, and why the owner and I survived, the test drive. The van looked like it was made from rust. Even the structural part of the underbody was a powdery red. The plastic parts were rusty. The steering system felt like somebody was driving the car by remote control while they were sending a text message and driving the car they were in. I would turn the steering wheel and nothing would happen. Then something would happen and I would turn to correct back and nothing would happen. If I stepped on the brakes I think the tail lights came on to let the guy behind know it was time to press the stop button on the remote control. Arriving back at the seller’s place I kissed the ground.

I was done. Thoroughly depressed and frustrated at having driven 300 miles for that, and now completely velocitized from two days on the road I headed back to Beaufort, North Carolina to make my decision. Along the way I thought, compared the virtues of the two remaining candidates, and aided by a couple of phone calls, decided on the Dodge van up in Hampton, Virginia. That was when I saw the blue flashing lights in my rear view mirror.

Fast forward to yesterday. I made a whirlwind trip from Beaufort, North Carolina back to Hampton, Virginia with my very kind, and patient, friend Ed. We made the drive in about four hours. We spent about an hour going to the “very close” bank to do the paperwork and to the “just down the street” Motor Vehicle office. Both of which were miles away from where we were. I got my number from the receptionist at the DMV and asked how long the wait was and if I had time to go get lunch. The friendly and helpful greeter snatched my number back and said I could either wait with my number or go get lunch. I told her I would wait and meekly took my number. Then Ed and I snuck out the fire exit and went and got lunch. We returned an hour later and still faced a half-hour wait. So much for following the rules. The paperwork completed, Ed and I returned to the van. He took off in the rental, I in the van and we drove into the rain. 

For some reason it always rains when I buy a car.

Four hours later I ended the day, with Ed and Don, sitting in Luigi’s eating pizza and drinking Italian beer. Ed was road-weary, Don was work-weary, and I had taken the first real step to becoming a dirt dweller again. I owned a van. As we relaxed and talked over the day I felt comforted by being with good friends at a sad time. I was also struck by the realization that, whenever it is I get wherever it is I’m going, the first thing I’m going to do is sell the van and start riding the bus.