Carol Bergman

 

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts..

 

-Mark Twain

 

 

The van in the parking lot had Florida plates. It didn't look like any van I had ever seen. It was oversized, bulky and had a panel on the top that looked odd, like a tornado had dropped it there, which it might have done considering the tornado we had recently on the tail of Hurricane Debby. Compost dumped in the zero waste bin, and feeling righteous, I headed back to my car and spotted a woman surfacing from the side door. The van was mesmerizing and I kept on looking. The woman noticed my curiosity. "Want to have a look inside?" she asked. Then she slid the door completely open onto her living space, a miracle of engineering. It has everything—sleeping quarters, a cooking range, a compostable toilet, refrigerator, running water out of a tank—all of these accoutrements of living powered by the solar panels on the top. Solar panels! Even though the van uses gasoline to run @ 20 miles to the gallon, the solar panels power everything else. There are very few days that don't have enough sunshine to power-up apparently, Jan explained. That's good news for all of us in our climate-changed world, I thought. What a strange summer it has been—too much rain, not enough rain, early hurricanes, heat in June, too cool in August.

 

The woman was rosy-cheeked and and energetic for what turned out to be her 70 years, which she admitted to frankly in an unsolicited offering. I didn't share my age, never do, but she didn't seem to mind and kept on talking as she shook my hand and I shook hers. "Name's Jan Whitman," she said. "I travel up from Florida in the summer and visit friends and family all over the Hudson Valley." As the former Director of the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley and the Founder and Former Board President of the Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center in Kingston NY, Jan has many friends and former colleagues to see. And though she settled in Florida in retirement, the van keeps her moving, connecting and exploring in the spring and summer months. Though I have traveled a lot and lived on two continents, I was envious of the nomadic life, crossing state lines with ease, and attempting a regional dialect and outlook other than my own. How grand it would be for all of us to enlarge our worlds and learn more about our fascinating diverse country, not from an airplane, but from the ground. Our little corner of the earth would expand exponentially.

 

By definition, our homes and nation-states are circumscribed, our villages, and towns too insular and tribal these days. The village I live in, embedded in a town, was the site of Dutch, English and French Huguenot enslavers. It's still nearly all white. This was a shock when I first arrived here from the city in 2018. The signage in front of the historic houses didn't provide any clues. Much has changed recently, most notably the founding of the Margaret Wade Lewis Black Cultural Center. Slow but sure the board of the center presses onward with their programming and the renovation of a donated building.

 

I wondered if Jan was aware of the progress in New Paltz since she left for Florida. I didn't ask as I was already planning an article about her for the local paper. I knew they'd be interested in how she'd converted the van. "I had it done by a dedicated custom builder," she said. Sad to say, the last one in in my area, Vantastics, has gone out of business. But, for those interested, any local artisan who specializes in woodwork could do most of the interior work. Different contractors would be necessary to complete electrical wiring and  install the solar panels. Total cost: approximately $50,000. Considering the price tag on homes these days, conversion vans are a bargain. Many aficionados are doing the conversions themselves; there are several "how to" You Tube channels. And Facebook has numerous sites. "Van Life for Senior Women," for example, is replete with suggestions. It has 23k followers which leads to the conclusion that the itinerant life is more than a fad, it's a way of life, which is heartening indeed. Might local municipalities house their homeless in such vans, I wonder? Would that contribute to solving our affordable housing crisis?

 

Not long ago, I ran into a descendant of a Munsee-Esopus band of First Americans. He was driving a truck filled with farming gear and the paraphernalia of daily living, including a tent which he pitched in the fields of the farms where he had been hired to work. Not a migrant worker, an American, who continued to lead the nomadic life of his forbears, following the seasons or, in modern terms, seasonal work. His family was waiting for him back on the reservation. The dollars he accumulated through his labor would see them through the winter.