Vanlife and Literature?

One of the guilty pleasures of taking extended roadtrips in the van is the opportunity to listen to music, read books, and be immersed in audio books. This post illustrates some examples of our literary companions on the road.

Of course, the backdrop literature of our roadtrips are the classics: Blue Highways, On the Road, Travels with Charlie, Nomadland, etc. The social science backdrop to our travels has been Kathryn Eden, Luke Scheafer, and Timothy Nelson’s The Injustice of Place, a remarkable analysis of the most disadvantaged communities in the country — mostly rural — butressed by on-the-ground visits, insights, and engagement with these communities by the research team.

More specific books to our itinerary have been histories, sociologies, or travelogues mapping to the regions or communities we are visiting. A good example was listening to the audiobook Empire of Pain while traveling through Kentucky and West Virginia. The obvious visible ravages of addiction in West Virginia brought home the consequences of Purdue Pharma’s egregious and callous disregard for life in a way the book (or the movies Dopesick or Painkiller) could never convey. Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land (petro-chemical pollution in Louisiana) and Corban Addison’s Wastelands (hog industry pollution in eastern North Carolina) provided some important insight into the alienation and tenacity of the residents in these rural areas.

Many recent books have provided valuable explanations of the politics and divides in our land, so apparent as you travel. A standout is Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. If you travel backroads in America, a constant is evangelical churches in every community, no matter how small; and religious radio, dominating the airways. Alberta traces the crosswalk of evangelical Christianity to a potent political force.

Traveling in incredibly sparse country in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota led to a fascination with the lifestyle and isolation of so many individuals and families in truly remote places that do not even have cell service. Ted Conover’s masterpiece, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge, engages with and describes these hard-to-reach settlers on the frontier who represent the quest for independence in the West.

 Alternatively, If you travel the suburbs of American – unavoidable – you will also learn about another dimension of struggle and alienation, beautifully described in Benjamin Herold’s Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs.

History is also on display. Heading to the Northwest and reading Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail, a New American Journey put the challenge of navigating a mule-drawn wagon down the steep bluffs along the Platte River into a modern context. Westward travelers in the mid-1800s made an unbelievable journey in their day; Buck’s recreation was a truly remarkable accomplishment in our time. We made it a point to see some of those bluffs in Glen’s Ferry, Idaho.

Betsy is especially good at digging deep into the history and politics of places we are visiting. In the southwest, especially when camping in the sands of the drying-out Lake Powell, she immersed herself in the history of the Colorado River (Beyond the Hundredth Meridian by Wallace Stegner; Brave the Wild River by Melissa Sevigny) and its water politics in the Southwest (Jack August’s Vision in the Desert, David Owen’s Where the Water Goes).

Longform podcasts count, too. The classic NPR series Bundyville, chronicling the anarchist Bundy family’s standoff against the government was the perfect setup for our journey through some of the same territory and extreme libertarian politics in rural Oregon. The Slow Burn podcast series on the Clinton Impeachment was proper background for a somewhat skeptical visit to the Clinton Library in Little Rock when touring through Arkansas.

From time to time, there is the coincidence of what we are reading and the roadmap of our somewhat random stops. In our most recent trip to the Upper Peninsula in Michigan we listened to the audio version of Salmon Rushdie’s Knife, narrated by Rushdie himself. The book reflects on the before, during, and after of a vicious knife attack at a lecture in the Chautauqua community in New York. We had visited this area in past trips and explored its history, the roving musicians – including trombone players that went from one Chautauqua to another.  We have thought about the uniqueness of this model of education, performance, and community, and talked with friends there. As we were listening to Rushdie and Knife, we happened upon another Chautauqua model in Petoskey, Michigan: the Bay View Community, a seasonal and historic hybrid of a Methodist camp and Chautauqua offshoot, founded in the late 1800s. The juxtaposition of the extreme violence visited on Rushdie and the bucolic and idealistic lifestyle of these Chautauqua communities, Victorian “cottages” set in the woods, was truly jarring.

Another coincidence of history and our current times on this Michigan trip came unexpectedly from our reading of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s. The book recounts the remarkable history of Doris Kearns and Richard Goodwin, especially his involvement with John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Eugene McCarthy. At precisely the time I was reading about Goodwin’s preparation of JFK for the famous Kennedy/Nixon debate, we listened to the Harris/Trump debate through the old-fashioned medium of AM radio in our van in the woods. The contrast in the preparation, substance (or lack thereof), and theater of these two eras of presidential campaigns could not have been more striking in the moment.

I recently had a conversation with my physical therapist, who could not imagine driving for more than four hours, ever. However, the opportunity to incorporate music, podcasts, Wikipedia, books, and audiobooks on the road changes the whole experience. The ability to deepen the experience of seeing and engaging communities along the way – and trying to better understand the complexities of our current predicament – is unmatched with all of these modern literary tools. While vanlife and literature may seem like strange bedfellows, they are perfect companions.