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.