A writer named Ross McCammon created a thought experiment that’s become known as the “two beers and a puppy test.” Here’s how it works: Pick a person in your life, and ask yourself two questions about them:

1. Would I have two beers with this person?
2.  Would I trust them to look after my puppy for a weekend?

Some people are beer people, some are puppy people, and a sacred few are both. (Some are also neither, which is unfortunate.) Last February, when I decided to travel to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and wanted someone to go with, I found myself asking two very similar questions:

1. Would this person enjoy partying in New Orleans for three days?
2. Could this person and I drive 13 hours and stay in close quarters for a very chaotic weekend without killing each other?

Robby, for example, is a wonderful person to travel with. He packs light, walks quickly, and likes trying new things. Problem is, he would rather eat a bowl of shattered glass than go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I invited him as a formality and was unsurprised when he said no. He couldn’t get the word out fast enough.

I wanted to do Mardi Gras in the corniest way possible: hotel in the French Quarter, hand grenades on Bourbon Street, wandering along Frenchmen. New Orleans is one of my favorite places in the world, but I didn’t have any friends who lived there at the time. And honestly, though I know the Bourbon Street celebration is made up of tourists (with locals attending cooler neighborhood parties and parades), it felt a little rude to try and suss out more unique places to go. In the same way my friends and I don’t want bachelor parties in our favorite dive bars, I didn’t want to risk crashing an event that was special to locals. Plus, the cheesy novelty of Mardi Gras in the French Quarter appealed to me. Bourbon Street was where I belonged.

As I thought about who I should ask to come with me, I was pleased to realize that there are several people in my life for whom the answers to both “would they like Mardi Gras” and “would we travel well together” are “yes.” Two of those people are named Patrick and James, and they live two blocks up the street from me. I met Patrick in grad school. He’s a music writer from Connecticut by way of Brooklyn who used to wear a black baseball cap and only spoke when he had something hilarious to say, which made me think he was shy. (He’s not.) Pat is sweet and brilliant and very good at pool. Soon after meeting him, I met his partner, James. James, who is also a music writer and is originally from New Jersey, is thoughtful, sharp, and reads a pile of books every month. He and I often do DIY projects together, which we execute with surprising efficiency. Both Pat and James exclusively wear black t-shirts featuring bands I’ve never heard of, and more importantly, they love spontaneity, parties, dive bars, and wandering aimlessly in new places. When I asked if they wanted to go to Mardi Gras on the most cliche trip we could possibly manage, they said yes.

We packed the car and drove thirteen hours. The next three days were a colorful blur: We strolled by the river. We found a magical little bookshop right off Bourbon Street that felt like a different planet. We ate heavy, decadent brunches. We ate horrible Mexican food. We bounced between chaotic, fantastic gay bars. We walked through a stream of bubbles that poured from a balcony in the morning light. We stumbled across the warehouse belonging to Dr. Bob, the strange-but-kind-of-famous folk artist whose work features the tagline “BE NICE OR LEAVE.” The woman working there, who was thrilled when we told her we were staying in a hotel instead of an Airbnb, took out a scrap of paper and wrote down her favorite po’ boy order in the city. We walked another mile to the shop she recommended, passing a neighborhood parade in which everyone was dressed up like food, and ordered our sandwiches. We had a religious experience eating those po’ boys on a park bench. We caught beads and trinkets and a rubber chicken that flew from parade floats. We searched for my phone when I inevitably lost it while jumping up and down at a nighttime parade. We met up with the disturbingly attractive and sober European couple that found it, who were very good sports when I threw my arms around them in thanks. We meandered for hours down Burgundy Street, picking out the houses we wanted to live in. We danced until our feet hurt. 

I left Mardi Gras a better person. This happens every time I go to New Orleans. If I were to participate in a three-day bacchanal in any other location, I’d likely plummet into a shame spiral afterward. But on the thirteen-hour drive back to the Carolina coast, I just felt warm and grateful. I am lucky to be able to have experiences simply because I want to, and I’m even luckier to share those experiences with other people. When Patrick, James, and I got back to Wilmington at 2am, we were still talking and laughing.

Last Saturday, almost exactly one year out from our Mardi Gras adventure, I awoke with no plans. The morning was a welcome mat to a day that could be anything. I ate a cheddar biscuit, threw back some coffee, and texted Patrick and James. I told them I wanted to recreate a day we spent together a year ago, when we walked miles on Burgundy Street for no reason at all.

Wilmington is a far cry from New Orleans, but it has a similar, lighter aura of chaos. And when you live somewhere for years, you have the opportunity to hold the city in your hand like a gem, occasionally turning it to see new fractals inside. 

We met and started up Princess Street. We walked past the cocktail bar with black ceilings and a massive record collection, past the soda-bottling-plant-turned-pop-up-market, past the eclectic coffee shop that’s closing soon. Though we didn’t officially set rules for our day, it was understood that we’d only wander into places that at least one of us had not been before.

We stopped in an off-the-beaten-path art gallery featuring paintings of houses that reminded us of New Orleans. We went to Crofton’s Pretzels, an ancient gas station that was transformed into a lovably ridiculous pretzel bar. We ordered cheese-filled pretzels that burned our fingers, and Patrick introduced me to birch beer. We walked toward Castle Street, pausing to explore a surreal gift shop/aerobics studio/video screening venue, where the owner told us about her daughter who passed away, how she and her husband live on a boat now, how she wants the little shop to become a place of community and love. We wandered into the Spanish market with a wide tiled counter where a family teaches paella classes. We bought olives and tinned fish. We ducked into a tiny witchcraft shop that sold pottery and potions and had strange burlap dolls hanging on the walls. Then, out of morbid curiosity, we went into the new putt putt bar and played nine holes. I lost, despite having a hole-in-one that involved the ball bouncing off a keg.

It was a pointless, delicious day. The three of us wandered, as we always do, with curiosity and no plan. Beautiful things happen when you spend time with people who say yes. Yes, I’ll get two beers with you. Yes, I’ll watch your puppy. Yes, we can wander the same streets we walk every day, finding ways to make them feel new.

I live in a 966-square-foot bungalow in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. The house is 22 feet wide and 45 feet deep. It has white plastic siding (unfortunate) and a quaint front porch with a wooden swing (very fortunate). There’s a jasmine plant that swallows the right side of the porch, and every summer, the vines explode into a curtain of white flowers that smell like angels’ laundry. This house is charming, strange, inefficient, whimsical, and honest. It’s also old: Named the Moore-Davis house, this home was built in 1898 and has a wooden plaque from the Wilmington Historical Society hanging between the two front windows. It used to be two stories, but the second story caught fire at some point (likely between 1938-1949), and the owners removed it entirely–which explains the strange layout of the remaining floor. 

When Robby and I bought the house in 2018, we thought we’d only be here for a few years. We had little interest in or reason for home improvement projects. The walls could stay dingy white, the ancient carpet could remain intact, and we’d sell the house soon and be on our way.

Problem is, we fell in love with this house, and with Wilmington. We decided to stay, at least for a little while. This led to a series of haphazard home improvement projects, passionately–and often poorly–executed, that have increased in frequency and ambition, snowballing into what I can only describe as the early stages of addiction. Or, if we’re being rosy about it, a love affair. I am in love with painting plywood walls aggressive shades of rust and marigold. I am in love with ripping up carpet and extracting the staples beneath until my wrist is sore. I am in love with drilling holes for shelves, realizing I did the math wrong, shouting god DAMN it, patching those holes, and starting again.

Robby is less in love with these things, but pitches in when I inevitably get in over my head. The thing is, I’m not particularly good at DIY. I aim high, plan poorly, and budget inaccurately. Of the dozens of home improvement projects I’ve attempted, several have featured a searing moment of clarity in which I realize I’ve done everything wrong and need to start from scratch. Here is the one I think about the most.

Two years ago, I made the very sensible and chill decision to tear up the carpet in our bedroom, sand the paint off the original hardwood floors, and stain them. I had done something similar two years before in the back room of our house when I ripped up the carpet in a frenzy. (“Frenzy” is truly the only word for it–I got pissed about something completely unrelated to carpet, happened to glance at the carpet, and then moved all the furniture and ripped it out.) While that project ended up being incredibly labor intensive–try sanding an entire room of 122-year-old wood with a 5” orbital sander–overall, things actually went smoothly. The floor was raw wood in good condition; I slapped on two coats of tung oil and called it a day.

This beginner’s luck caused me to approach the bedroom with unbridled hubris. I lifted up a corner of the carpet to find thick original floor boards coated with ugly brown paint. All I had to do, I told myself, was rent a sander–an actual, industrial sander this time–and sand up the paint. I’d find a cool stain, or maybe just some polyurethane, and would have the warm, rustic bedroom of my dreams within a day and a half.

Robby wanted no part of this project. I told him I’d do the whole thing myself; he would not have to be involved at all. He did not believe me.

My friend Elly came over to help. We drank boxed wine, ripped out the carpet, and pulled up the legion of staples beneath. It took hours. The brown paint was disorienting (who paints wood brown?) but the floors were in such good shape that it was hard to think about anything else. What could possibly go wrong when this floor–this stunning, ancient floor–echoed so beautifully when we stomped across it in our boots?

The next day, I rented an orbital sander from Home Depot. I placed a box fan–pointed outward–in the bedroom window to create a negative air space. I put on goggles and a standard, covid-era face mask and got to work. I quickly discovered that instead of detaching in the form of dust, the paint was melting. Within five seconds, the three sandpaper discs on the bottom of the machine were gummed up with hot brown putty. I tried different sandpaper grit levels. I tried moving the machine faster, then slower. The paint kept melting. This was not going to work.

I went back to Home Depot and rented a drum sander, designed for tougher jobs. It was still slow going–the floor had at least two seemingly impenetrable coats of paint, and reloading sandpaper in a drum sander is cumbersome. I hacked away at the floors for hours. It was 11pm when I finally called it a day. I showered, went into the back room where Robby and I would be sleeping, and curled up beside him.

It was at this moment that Robby asked a question that will echo through my brain for years.

“Hey,” he said, “is this lead paint?”

We immediately ordered a lead paint test online and called poison control, who advised us not to sleep in the house. Based on the age of our home, this likely was lead paint, and we’d treat it as such until we could get a test. 

We slept in the van for the next two nights while I worked to rectify the home I had just filled with potentially toxic dust. I felt horrendous. Not only had I created a scenario in which Robby, Thelma, and I were possibly inhaling lead paint, but the floors weren’t even done: stubborn swaths of reddish brown were stuck to the wood in random patterns. Robby and I bought lead abatement suits and masks from Home Depot and tried to sand some more, but it became clear that it would take days for us to remove every piece of paint. Days of us sleeping in the van, renting industrial equipment, and working in a cloud of lead. 

After 24 hours of wearing hazmat suits and fearfully trying to finish the project–during which we called every hardware store in the area, none of which had paint tests–the lead kit arrived from Amazon. It was a container of pretty, marigold-colored Q-tips. We ran one under the sink and then rubbed it in a patch of paint dust. It immediately turned dark fuschia: positive.

We looked at the floor. The wood that had been properly sanded was absolutely gorgeous–dark cool oak with strong grain running through it. The floor was a map of six-inch-wide rivers, sporadically interrupted by toxic waste mudslides. We decided to quit. I briefly mourned the room I had wanted to create, then got to work covering the unfinished floor–paint and all–with five coats of polyurethane. We’d researched how to neutralize lead paint, and this is one of the methods.  Five coats was overkill, but we wanted the lead to remain sealed in, even if the poly chipped. The moment the first coat dried, the floor tested negative. We kept applying coats anyway.

Over the three days of this project, I rented four pieces of industrial equipment, took six trips to three different hardware stores–none of which are near my house–spent hundreds of dollars, had roughly seventy-four marital arguments, and cried three times. The guilt was the worst part: I had forgotten lead paint existed. I had exploded it through our house.

The strangest part is, immediately after we were finished, I felt the nightmare had been worth it. Assuming we didn’t have permanently heightened lead levels (possible, but unlikely! I refuse to get checked!), these messy, warzone-ass floors were still better than beige carpet from the early 2000’s. They felt truer to the house itself.

When the dust settled (oof), Robby and I patched things up. We hung more art in the bedroom. We built library shelves. We added a beautiful duvet and a cool rug and a striking longhorn skull, which is now mounted somewhat menacingly above our bed. Our bedroom has become my favorite room in the house: it’s warm and moody and full of treasures.

I believe that the places we live feel the love we put into them. This is true for generational family homes and college dorms, for cramped apartments and childhood bedrooms. Our homes capture the energy of what’s inside, and the act of caring for them or dreaming with them in whatever ways we can–regardless of how long we’re there or how much we’re legally or financially able to alter–means something. I have the privilege of living in a home that other people have loved, and of being able to uncover a new chapter of this house one room at a time. For me, love looks like poorly executed projects that give me searing back pain and possible lead poisoning. For the person who lives here after me, it will look like stripping off five coats of polyurethane and wondering what the hell  happened here. Hopefully, they’ll forgive me. Hopefully, they’ll do what feels truest to who they are in this home.

I’ve always been good at starting things, and the older I get, the less I take this for granted. I’ve been known to strike up conversations with strangers, pick up hobbies, switch jobs, pull friendships out of thin air, move into a van, and dive into intense home improvement projects with little preparation. I tell myself to just go, and then I go. Usually, the habit of suddenly shifting myself out of neutral ends well. (Most things in life are lower stakes than we’re led to believe.) However, like many people who are chronic starters, I’m often a poor finisher, and there is no part of my life that has suffered from this more than my writing. 

When I write something good, I feel euphoric for roughly six hours. It’s a longer, headier version of runner’s high. My first memory of this sensation is from first grade, when I wrote the true account of our class losing our pet hamster, Lucky. (The harrowing story ended with us finding Lucky in an adjoining classroom.) A few days after turning in the assignment, the teacher printed my essay on to a clear plastic sheet, which she placed on the projector and read aloud to the class. My words were six inches tall and bathed in yellow light on the screen, and I hadn’t thought they were special, but there they were, and afterward another kid complimented my story, and I realized that I liked the story too. I had written something good–something worth sharing, even–and when we lined up to go to lunch, I floated to the cafeteria.

You’d think I’d chase that high a little faster. Work a little harder to float on a daily basis, to feel at peace with my brain and my heart and the world. However, as someone who–in the years since first grade–has dedicated a lot of time to writing, I have a few mental hurdles that get in the way:

1. That euphoric feeling doesn’t come if I sit down and write crap, which happens a lot. When it happens several times in a row, it’s hard to not think, I’m losing it, losing it forever–which is utterly terrifying and a pretty good deterrent from starting altogether. (I realize this goes against my initial claim that I’m good at starting things. I think what makes starting a piece of writing different is that I usually don’t know what I’m beginning. If I paint a room, I pick out a color and have a mental image of what it should look like. When I sit down to write, I stare at a white page that can become anything in existence. It’s all very dramatic.)
2. The initial writing process, known as the “shitty first draft,” is exactly that–a first step. If I write something I think is worth pursuing, I get that euphoric high, and then eventually I come down and take another look at it. Sometimes, I realize I need to take the poem/short story/essay down to the studs. Sometimes, I send it to a friend and they don’t draw the conclusions I was hoping for. Sometimes, I decide it was never good at all. The process of getting a piece of writing from existing to done (“done”) is daunting. So I take my foot off the gas.
3. The end result has to be perfect.

Of course, the fear of not doing something well, the resulting habit of not seeing that thing through, and the obscene standard of perfection are not what life is about. I’m not sure why humans exist, but I know it’s not to be afraid. I am thirty years old. I have a life to live. I feel most alive when I’m writing, and I feel even better when I share that writing with people.

So, I’ve decided to do that sharing here. If you scroll down, you’ll see the most recent post is from September 2021. It’s now December 2024. So much has happened in that gap, and I regret not writing about some of it on this blog. Writing for other people, ironically, makes me recount things more thoroughly and honestly. There’s an accountability–what really happened? how did I really feel?–that doesn’t occur when I’m scribbling my most immediate thoughts in a journal. 

I’ll publish here once a month, and the things I write will not be particularly polished or cohesive. One month might be about religion, the next might be about paint. There will probably not be many pictures, because adding pictures on this website makes me want to throw my laptop at a wall. If you choose to come here, you’ll find my attempt at loving a life I sometimes only like, and at teaching myself that nothing will ever be perfect–including me, everyone I know, and everything I’ll ever write or do–and that’s wonderful in its own way. 

I’m going to share one more motive for restarting this very tiny blog. If I’m lucky enough to live a long time, and if my memory starts to fade during that time, I want to be able to crack open this virtual wooden chest and watch my thirty-year-old self think. I want a fairly consistent, technologically-backed-up account of the world I’m in. My future self will have the gift of past play-by-play encounters with people and events and ideas. I want to show her–or maybe remind her–that we are a person who tries, who goes, who starts.

I put the locations of overnight van stops into two categories: desirable or necessary. Desirable places are free, wild, and at least semi-legal; a police officer won’t knock on our window at 1 a.m. demanding that we move. We’ve gone to sleep on a cliff in the Badlands, a mountainside clearing with a view of the Grand Tetons, an Iowan gravel road beside a lake that turned bright pink at sunset. More commonly, we’ll sleep in a wide,

simple field or tree-lined clearing. These places are easier to find the further west we travel, where there are less people and more public land. In the western half of the country, we can sniff out a desirable place almost every time.

Necessary locations are also semi-legal and free, but far less sexy. Think: Walmart parking lots, hotel parking lots, shopping center parking lots. So, parking lots. But not those that are at trailheads or adjacent to any sort of greenery–these are noisy and homogenous, with lights the size of cookie sheets beaming through the clear plastic top of the fan above our bed. These are typical east coast fare. It’s possible to find desirable places on the east coast, and we often do, but parking lots are easier and more prevalent. Plus, if you’re at a Walmart, it means you have instant access to food, goods, and a toilet.

I hate Walmart. 

We park there when we don’t have the time or energy to find a nicer spot, and of course we end up needing something from inside, so I walk in, use the bathroom, wander the always-slightly-different-from-every-other-Walmart-I’ve-ever-been-in map until I arrive at whatever box of pasta or screws we need, then quickly check out and return to the back of the parking lot. I hate the bigness of everything, the reputation of the company, how everyone inside looks sad, and how freakishly bright the lights are. And the ceilings, which have bleach-white pipes jutting everywhere against a dirty-snow background. Even as a kid, I hated the ceilings. 

So, two days ago, when I found myself wandering through a Walmart for over an hour, listening to soothing music through earbuds and pleasantly forgetting what I came in to buy, I felt a little jarred. I stopped short in the cleaning supplies aisle to search my brain for what I was supposed to be doing. I had been hypnotized by red dutch ovens glinting on their hooks, thirty different styles of desk lamps, mounds of undersized radishes that huddled together as if for warmth. I opened my phone and read a fifteen-minute-old text from Robby, who was in the van with our dog: “You just going to live in there now?” For a second, I thought, maybe.

When we finished the northeast portion of our trip in early August, we headed toward Big Sky, Montana, where my little sister was working as a camp counselor. She was leaving at the end of the month, so we needed to hurry. We pulled five- to nine-hour days and made it there in a week. We stayed in Big Sky for one week, then had to head back to North Carolina for wedding events on Labor Day weekend. From the day we moved into the van, we’ve been on a deadline. This means we wake up, make a pot of coffee, and go. We haven’t had the chance to stumble upon a place and park there for a week or two, which is one of the core reasons I was drawn to this lifestyle in the first place. So far, it feels like a perpetual commute. It’s a commute that I’m deeply enjoying, but the fact that we’ve always had an imminent destination puts me on edge. Someone is expecting us; we have to get there.

A couple hours before I was put into a Walmart trance, we were parked at a Desirable place: a boat launch with tall trees that parted in a narrow gap to reveal dark blue water. The thin gravel road ended in a large circle typical of rural boat launches. We parked smack in the middle of it. The ground was level (no need to switch which direction we slept so that our heads would remain above our feet), and it was clear that no one would bother us. We hadn’t seen a single car since leaving the highway nearly ten minutes ago. 

Robby looked around nervously. Flies the size of camera lenses knocked against the windshield.

“I don’t like it here,” he said. I found that strange. This was not the first time we’d stayed at a rural boat launch; they’re common spots for overnight van parking.

“Why not?” I asked.

“What if something happens? We’re miles away from anybody.”

We had briefly paused the podcast we were listening to, which was about a little boy who was kidnapped and murdered in rural Minnesota.

“Is this about the podcast?” I asked. I was slightly creeped out too–it wasn’t often that we parked in a place this remote, and we’d been listening to hours of careful reporting on the atrocities that can happen when other people aren’t around.

“Maybe a little,” he said. “Want to just find a Walmart or something?”

As we kept driving, I scanned the back of the van. It was a wreck. A pile of clean clothes that we’d yet to put away was split between the nook–which is what we call the small bench with a swivel desk–and the bed, which served as the eternal catchall for things that needed to be secured before we could start driving. The gigantic silver sunshades were layered messily on the blanket since they were too cumbersome to roll up nicely. A book, a laptop, and a mysterious charging cord were tangled together on a pillow. Charlie’s little fleece sweater, which probably smelled awful, was resting on top of clean underwear. 

If this were a house, or even a tiny apartment, these minor misplacements would not add up to a mess. We each only had one drawer’s worth of clothing, for crying out loud. But that was part of the issue: things needed to be folded, rolled, put away precisely in the right spot. While cleaning the space required less work overall, it demanded strict methodology. The van was always three crumpled t-shirts away from looking like a frat house. 

We pulled into the Walmart parking lot an hour later. We’d been driving through a heat wave for a day and a half, and the pavement practically sizzled as the sun went down. I felt caught between our cluttered van, which we did not have the energy to deep clean, and the wall of heat just outside the door. So, I said I needed to pick up a few things and went into Walmart, land of aisles wider than my house. 

As I emerged from the Walmart hypnosis, realizing that the only thing in my cart after nearly an hour was a bottle of sunscreen, I quickly gathered a few other items and went back outside. With each step I took toward the van, the spell grew weaker. By the time I reached our darkened space at the back of the parking lot, I was sweating and fatigued. I swung open the back doors of the van. 

“Great, you’re back,” said Robby. “I need to use the bathroom.” We have a composting toilet, but do our best to reserve it for emergencies. He closed his laptop–he had been finishing up some work–kissed Charlie on the head, and went inside.

I hauled the cooler out from the under-bed storage space, commonly called “the garage.” We had a top-rate marine refrigerator in the kitchen, but it had stopped working the second we got on the road. We were pretty sure we needed a larger battery for the solar panels, but it was possible the fridge itself was broken. Either way, we simply transitioned our food to a Yeti cooler instead of addressing the problem head-on. It had worked okay so far.

I opened the cooler. The heat had completely melted the ice. The cardboard packaging of a few different items had dissolved into little pieces that floated like algae. A half-eaten bag of spinach was full of green water. What’s more, a tub of butter had melted, tipped, and spilled. Everything in the cooler was coated in a fatty sheen.

I almost cried. It was 9 p.m. and 90 degrees. I was huddled in a Walmart parking lot, and it occurred to me as I used my hands to scoop fistfuls of butter out of a cooler that I had no idea what state I was in. Kentucky, right? Or were we already in Tennessee? I think the boat launch had been in Illinois–were we still there? I decided it didn’t matter. I piled our food–now buttery garbage–on to the pavement beside me while Charlie looked down from the bed, head resting on perfectly circular paws. 

I thought about taking a picture of the mess. Since moving into the van, I had felt some excitement about posting on Instagram again, both for posterity (I rarely take pictures of anything, and I want to document this adventure) and because I get a shallow sense of validation when other people see what I’m doing. It doesn’t feel healthy, but I think it’s common. There’s a primal itch that’s scratched when I can post an update to people in or adjacent to my circle, people that I grew up with, or went to school with, whom I haven’t thought about in a while and who have not thought about me. I’m here, and I’m doing something interesting. 

For over a year before purchasing our van, I was plugged into “van life” Instagram. It first came from a place of curiosity, and then as Robby and I got more serious about making the shift, I used the accounts to gather information. I learned about solar panels, water tanks, composting vs. cassette toilets, the pros and cons of various layouts. I watched van tours obsessively. I felt both fascination (look at how that stovetop pops out of the counter!) and a nagging emptiness. Some van life profiles seemed designed to make me feel small. I scrolled through endless variations of the same carefully staged, barely-messy bed, billowing linen curtains framing a bright blue ocean and craggy rocks. The captions were always: “Just another Tuesday morning” or “This is what happens when you take a leap and follow your dreams [star emoji] [leaf emoji] [globe emoji].” Some of the emptiness arrived because I was bringing my own insecurities to the viewing–I was sitting on a couch during COVID, bored out of my skull, desperately wanting the type of freedom that these women (always women, always gorgeous) seemed to be peddling. She is free and fun. I am trapped and bored, and therefore boring. But there’s something broken at the heart of carefully curating your life, which is, of course, the very essence of Instagram. I think when you’re living an alternative lifestyle that’s viewed as aspirational and often requires a high level of privilege, both of which usually apply to van life, that curation becomes even more damaging. Now that I had a van, now that I was living a life vaguely similar to the images of lives I’d been pining over for a year, I wanted to be careful about what I showed the world. I wanted to share my experience, but not in a way that made other people–many of whom I loved–feel small.

I’m not sure how well I’ve done so far. When I look at my page, I see a couple of carefully edited pictures of me smiling at breweries. I’m stomping around a basin in Montana with my little sister. Robby is feeding a slice of apple to our fluffy little dog, who watches him adoringly with wildflowers in the background. I’m in a denim jacket, barreling toward a little chapel that sits at the foot of Montana’s Lone Mountain.

The captions and stories (which are videos posted on Instagram)  are a little better. There’s one that references a fight I had with Robby, there’s one about the evening I broke down when I felt like I couldn’t be in the van for another second. But there isn’t much balance. There aren’t pictures of me huddled in the parking lot of a mysteriously located Walmart, an image that would be emblematic of living in a van. 

Part of this lack of balance is logistical. I can take a picture of a mountain; I can’t take a picture of a fight. I’m also not trained to think of taking a picture of the mundane things, the boring or hard things. On this particular night, when I did survey the trash and think, maybe I should take a picture of this, I realized that my phone was at the bottom of a bag full of groceries. I was too tired to fish it out.

Yesterday, one of my best friends called to say hello. “Your life looks incredible,” she told me. “The pictures you’re posting are gorgeous.”

I felt a twinge of guilt. Many aspects of my new life were incredible. I was going places and doing things that I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. I could live anywhere I wanted. Moving into a van had been more fun and rewarding than I had allowed myself to estimate. But doing so required sacrificing space, community, and often sanity. There’s much about it that is not enviable, and I wasn’t sharing those aspects.  

I wiped the cooler down, restocked it with fresh groceries and ice, tidied the parking space I had commandeered, and went into the van. I took several deep breaths. When Robby came back, we took Charlie on a walk around the parking lot.

“I don’t like the van today,” I said.

“No?”

“No.”

He took my hand. We kept walking.

“How was the Walmart bathroom?” I asked, half-jokingly, to break the silence.

“I had to leave immediately,” he said.

“Why?”

“There was a man masturbating in the stall next to me.”

I let out an involuntary chuckle. “Seriously?”

“Either that, or he was really enjoying taking a shit.”

“Should we find another bathroom? Do you want to walk into that Home Depot or something?”

“No,” he said. “I’ll just go in the morning.”

Charlie scampered under a shrub and circled the trunk multiple times, sniffing intently.

“I’m sorry a man was masturbating in the stall next to you,” I said after a minute.

Robby shrugged. “It’s okay,” he said. “He probably has a really tough life.”

I nodded, appreciating his empathy. I may not have been as generous.

We walked a little further. Our van lurked in the distance, messy, waiting. I decided that some days were just going to be like this. The butter would melt, the van would feel microscopic, the people of Walmart would masturbate in the bathroom. We’d exist in a bewildering haze.

“Robby,” I said, “what state are we in?”

He looked around and squinted, as if the name of the state were written in the sky surrounding the parking lot.

“Kentucky, maybe?” he said.

“Maybe.”

The moon had come up, but was barely visible behind a thick cloud. We turned and walked back to the van.

On July 15, 2021, Robby and I eased a camper van over the crooked lip of our driveway and drove away from home. Or rather, we drove our new home away from our house. The van named Wilma contained a bed, sink, composting toilet, and refrigerator. There were cabinets, drawers, a little study nook with a desk, solar panels on the roof, stick-on linoleum tiles, and the palpable absence of our five-year-old dog, Wiley. We had to put him down twenty-four hours prior. Our long-awaited sendoff felt hurried, tragic, and incomplete. 

Three and a half years ago, Wiley (formerly Orion) developed a limp. He stopped putting his full weight on his left front paw, often holding it daintily out in front of him, as someone might hold a teacup. Through X-rays, the vet surmised that the cause was some sort of bone injury and prescribed pain pills. One year, a worsening limp, and more X-rays later, it was determined that one of his toes was now warped beyond repair and had to be removed. Cue biopsy, surgery, more scans, more pills. Though the vet, surgeon, and radiologist were now sure this was the work of an autoimmune disease or cancer, no one could decipher the specific cause. Wiley just got worse.

Wiley developed an aggressive streak. This dog, who had never so much as glared at a human being, started lunging and snapping. A few times, he bit people’s thighs. We took him to a trainer who taught us about “fear biting” and gave us tools to help Wiley feel safe and calm. While we did see improvements, the trust had vanished. How long would it take before we could have people over without worry? What would happen if we left the room for a moment? What if he hurt a child? The dangerous behavior had descended over the course of a couple months, and we were bewildered. One thing, however, was clear to the trainer, the vet, and us: the aggression was caused by physical pain.

A couple weeks before we left in the van, we took Wiley in for another X-ray checkup. We sensed he was in more pain than usual; he could now barely make it around the block and didn’t like to play if it required jumping. For two years, we had lessened his activity and given him pain pills. We wanted to check the progress of his bones and ensure he was on the right medication. We were also open to discussing the possibility of amputation.

The vet was shocked by the X-rays. She turned off the light in the exam room to show us the images on a computer. The bones of Wiley’s left paw looked like a conjunction of poorly-built railroads. The vet pointed to the unnatural angles, the fused pieces, and, most terrifyingly, the bones that were missing.

“You see this area?” she said, dragging a long, immaculate fingernail around a black space the size of a nickel. “There used to be a bone here. It’s just gone.”

The computer glow lit up a series of labeled bone models on the counter. I looked at the foot, all the happy plastic pieces that clicked together like good teeth. 

Amputation requires three working legs, and while Wiley’s left leg was an obvious nightmare, his right was more quietly terrifying. It looked like a small creature had taken a round bite out of his elbow, and the X-ray was already showing some frayed bone-edges that were rampant in the left paw. The vet said that our next option would be to take him to specialists and do a bone tap to further narrow down the possible diseases (we were now down to three or four), and, though he would continue to experience discomfort, explore more intense pain management regimens. We agreed to send the X-rays off to radiologists, then went home. The vet would call us when she heard back later that week.

Within a day, we knew what we had to do. This dog couldn’t run, this dog couldn’t play, this dog had only two good legs. In many ways, this dog had been fundamentally changed by long term pain. We could spend the next year(s) and a small fortune chasing down a diagnosis and staving off the inevitable with pain pills, but one truth remained: the most advanced treatment would not bring his bones back. 

So, on a day that felt like hot, mosquito-ridden honey had been poured over the world, we put Wiley down in a patch of grass outside the veterinary office. He was happy to be with us, smiling and licking my thighs, which was where we placed his head for the end. When the vet injected the final, bubblegum-pink serum, he went slack but stayed warm. Robby and I were inconsolable. Orion-Wiley’s tongue jumped out of his mouth and curled upward, frozen in a kiss.

*

The van rumbled across the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge, and I watched Wilmington over my shoulder: bright buildings lined the river like jars of candy. Then they were gone. Charlie, our white shih tzu I found on the street years ago, was curled in my lap. I wondered if he missed Wiley. I wondered if he had any inkling that we weren’t going back to the house, and if he was truly happy in the van, or simply happy with us. 

We bought Wilma in early May. We nearly wiped out our savings, sold our only car, and burned through the insurance settlement from Robby’s car accident two years ago. The 2019 Ram Promaster 2500 had been in our driveway and served as our sole mode of transportation for two months. Though we purchased it with the majority of the conversion already completed by the former owners, we used this time to make small improvements. We installed a swing-up counter extension, a swiveling Lagun table, and hung fairy lights around the perimeter of the living area. We frequently made breakfast inside of it: we’d slide open the door and I’d cook coffee and eggs on a one-burner camp stove while dog walkers did double-takes. 

A few times (embarrassingly few), we slept in it. We piled our dogs and ourselves on to the short queen mattress and opened the in-roof ceiling fan like a skylight. The mattress was comfortable, the muffled city-sounds pleasant. Moving around was tough–if I was at the sink and Robby needed something from the dresser behind me, we basically had to do cartwheels over each other–but we felt we’d get used to it. With the amount of money and hope we’d poured into this vehicle, “we’ll figure it out” seemed like the only good response to annoyances.

Still, I wondered if we’d all, little by little, come to hate this van. I imagine that’s what falling out of love feels like: small quirks morph from charming to grating. The choppy water pressure turns to Chinese water torture. The peeling linoleum tiles become dogeared to-do lists. 

It could happen. This could be the worst thing we’ve ever done. Moving from 966 square feet to 55 square feet will present challenges we haven’t predicted. Stress responses to a shift this drastic–both in space and lifestyle–could strain our marriage. Six months from now, we might sell the van, get an apartment, and pretend like this never happened.

If this adventure starts to go south, I think we’ll have learned something from Wiley. During times when his pain and aggression were in full swing, our love for him didn’t come from a place of carefree joy as it once had. It came from creating the best day we could, one day at a time. We loved him not by playing fetch or tearing through a creek together, but by wedging pain pills into pieces of hot dog, by carrying him the rest of the way on a walk, by calming him down when strangers walked by our porch. If we lose some of the bliss–either from van life or our relationship–I think we can find and show love by executing the little tasks. We can keep our space clean and our words kind.

Of course, I don’t think this is going to be the worst thing we’ve ever done. Though we’ve just started out and fully expect a long and rich series of blunders, Robby and I each seem to have an aptitude for living in a tiny, mobile space. I’m spontaneous, he’s efficient. Van life needs both. 

We’re in the Adirondacks now, parked on a corner between an antique store and a marina. The sky hangs low and smothers the hamlet like a gray blanket, but Wilma feels cozy. We’ve started a collection of postcards and photographs on the wall above the bed, and we’re leaving a space for a picture of Wiley. I like the idea of his face floating among all of the places we’ll see. 

We sent a friend to pick up his ashes for us. We’re going to find a place to scatter them.