Fixing an old car is a much cheaper than the new-buying alternative. For $10k you can buy the shittiest new car or you can buy 10 decent used ones. What will last longer? Despite that, thousands of people sell their perfectly good cars every day so that they can get a new status symbol. Their loss, our gain.
When I was 17, I met a bald guy that lived in a van and drove around the country giving motivational speeches to high school kids. Seriously. I wish I remembered his name. He was the original motivational speaker that lived in a van, down by the river. A couple of things this guy told us really stuck in my mind. He had a good ‘Don’t do drugs’ message which is what got his foot in the door of high schools. I don’t remember the specifics of that. What I remember him saying was “Don’t waste your time doing something you don’t love. Find a way to make your passion your career,” and, “Luck is where preparedness meets opportunity.”
The other thing I remember was his used car economics theory. It went something like this. If you buy a new car, a cheap new car, it costs you $10,000. It lasts you a maximum of ten years. Instead of that, this guy said, why not buy a $500 car, put no money into it, and drive it until it is dead. That gives you two cars a year for the same price. Chances are some of those cars are going to last longer than a year. So, for him, it was twenty used cars versus one new one.
The point I’m getting to is that the bald guy corrupted my way of thinking just like I’m hopefully corrupting yours. I blame him for everything. You can blame me for everything too. Ha ha.
Here are the last couple of cars I’ve owned and lived in.
1989 Plymouth Voyager Minivan… cost $175… name Pig.
I saw an ad for Pig and had to check it out. The car was sputtering and stalling and no one could tell the lady who owned it why. She tried to donate it to charity, but they didn’t want a car with a mysterious problem. So she sold it to me for $175. I changed the spark plugs and it fixed the problem. I ditched one of the bench seats, turned the other sideways, picked up a cabinet off the street, and spent $10 to buy flower print fabric for curtains and industrial velcro to hang them with. I lived in it for six months before selling it for $500.
1970 VW Bus…. cost $200…. name Paradise.
There was a hippie guy parking this bus near the kayak shop I worked at. He put a sign in the window and I bought it. I was living in the bushes behind the shop where I had cleared a space and set up my hammock. I cleaned the bus up. I don’t know how this dirty guy had lived in the filthy thing. I bought fabric for curtains, nice sheets for the bed, and moved in. This is the bus on the cover of this book.
1978 VW Bus….cost $100….name Turtle
(Picture is the pop-top on the previous page)
I was looking at this bus on the streets of Seattle when the owner came running out of his house and offered it to me for $100. A neighbor helped me get it running and it lasted me three years and four or five trips from Vancouver B.C. to California. I traded it for the laptop computer I’m writing this on because I couldn’t bring the bus with me to Hawaii.
1977 VW Bus… cost… TV and VCR… name Belle
This was my first VW. It was rusting away behind the radio station I worked at. They tried to give it away as a prize and I offered the guy my TV and VCR for it. He took the working TV and VCR. I bought a book on VW’s, fixed it, and then bought the interior from a junkyard before moving in. I took this bus to Alaska, where I lived in it and sold it for $1200 before leaving.
Not bad, huh? I’ve owned more than twenty different cars. They’ve almost all been pieces of shit. That hasn’t stopped me from driving all over the United States and Canada in them.
Overcoming the Darkness
One of the hardest things about being houseless is dealing with the dark. I don’t mean being afraid of the dark. I mean, what do you do when it gets dark?
In prehistoric times, I’m sure communities of cavemen and women sat around the fire, used torches, made candles, and utilized them as soon as the sun went down. People still do that, all over the world. It’s either that or go to bed.
The problem we have in being houseless is that we have to fly under the radar of modern society. Make no mistake. Society does not want to see us having a great time while they toil and trudge to the office 60-hours a week. That’s the reason why the police routinely sweep through parks and areas where the homeless set up camps.
If they see us having a decent time without the toil, it makes their blood boil. So even if you can scavenge up a decent little hut, make your own candles or set up a solar cell, and run plumbing to your cardboard shack; you can be sure that Joe Citizen will have John Law sweep through your little enclave and burn your corrugated castle to the ground.
So what are you supposed to do? You’ve got a few options.
1. Go to bed when it gets dark, wake up when the light comes.
2. Stay up all night and sleep all day out in the open. You can sit in Denny’s reading and nursing that bottomless cup of coffee for at least a few hours.
3. Be stealthy. Use only as much light as you need and cover it as much as possible.
An old military trick is to put a red lens on your flashlight to make it less visible to the enemy. It works. Within limits. Obviously you don’t want to light up the hobo jungle with an eerie red light that will make Suzy Homemaker think of a Stephen King novel.
Push lights are cool but not very efficient. They take a couple of AA batteries and provide a small amount of soft light. I prefer a small headlamp that directs the light where I want it and a key chain LED. Both can be bought at any outdoor or variety store. My LED key chain cost $8 and provides enough light to find my way in the dark or find something in a dark van. I’ve used it to read, but prefer the white light of a headlamp instead.
I realize that some of this sounds paranoid, but like Abbie Hoffman said, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they are not out to get you.
Tarpatecture: The many uses of Tarps
My friend Kalalau Larry introduced me to the term tarpatecture. Larry is a modern day Viking. He paddles kayaks, makes mead from honey and water, bakes bread in the jungle, and spends about half of his time living in one of the remotest places on the planet. The Kalalau Valley on the island of Kauai.
I was living in my VW bus on Kauai and Larry had built an incredible little shelter with tarps on the same vacant lot where I parked. You see when Larry isn’t in Kalalau he works in the real world and stays comfortably invisible under his brown tarps. When he is in Kalalau, he lives under the brown tarps too.
Tarpatecture is using a variety of tarps strung between trees, bushes, rocks, or frames to shelter you from the weather. Ideally, a good tarpatecture structure has geometric implications which are pleasant to the eye in addition to being functional.
Tarpatecture can be as simple as a lean-to or as complex as a bamboo dome. The key is using your tarp in the most effective way in the particular environment you find yourself in. I’ve seen tarps on sheds and even in giant trees.