IF THIS VAN IS ROCKIN'

My first van was a little red Ford of early vintage — some time in the early Sixties.  Bob bought it for transporting bronzes.  It already had a past, driven to Alaska and back.  I don’t think we were married yet.  I was just learning to drive.  We were in Conrad and without discussion he bought this van and then wondered how to get it up to Browning.  I was how.

My first driving lessons were in the pickup on the Starr School road in an early sprinkling of snow so we could see the tracks I made.  The idea was to see how I could back up and stay in the same tracks, and that I could keep the tracks straight.  I was terrified but Bob was not as harsh as my mother had been.  She taught my brother on the Portland greyhound racetrack parking lot when no cars were there.  She was never harsh with my brothers.  She thought males were tender.  They are.

So when Bob bought the little red van, we started home in the dark.  There was no traffic but I was very uncertain.  He followed closely in the pickup and a few miles out of town began to honk and flash his headlights.  I thought something fell off the van, but he wanted to signal and talk because I was riding the center line and he said a highway patrolmen would give me a ticket for that.  (Also for having no driver’s license.)  

That little red van became my buddy, my refuge, a personality.  When things got really tough, I took a box of tissues and hid somewhere (behind the grocery store or in the brush where the tribal headquarters had been until it burned down) so I could have a good cry.  When things got even worse, I drove up to the foothills and plunged down old roads.  And worst of all was at night when I drove the rez criss-cross on ranch access gravel, hoping I’d have a fatal accident.

When Bob’s daughter, Margaret, was dying of cancer in Anacortes there were times the docs would call to say this might be the end.  Once we went by plane, once by railroad, and the rest of the time in that van.  The last time was for the funeral and I forgot to put the sleeping bags in.  We were too exhausted to drive all the way home and had no money, so we slept in the van on flattened cardboard boxes, somewhere in Kalispell.

When I began to teach again, I bought a new green Ford 150 cargo van and went down Highway 101 along the coast, then back up the spine of the Rockies — just to show I could.  I never stayed in a motel — just slept in the van.  I drove that vehicle happily until I was in Hartford, Connecticut, doing my internship for ministry.  An important part of the undercarriage failed and I could not get money to fix it.  I called my mother who refused to help.  She did NOT want me to be a minister.  Self-afflicting, I sold it for a few hundred dollars.  I was badly cheated and my supervisor relished that.  He seemed eccentric but was worse.

The next van was in Helena when I’d begun the Montana circuit-riding.  I had important help, including money, from a handsome young man who wanted to do a good thing.  He was selling cars for a living and came into money, so gave me the van, not for me but for the circuit-riding.  It was an old van that had been used by a geology team or department who would use it to power electronic measuring instruments in the field, and then send the information back to home base.  Therefore, the body was in better shape than the motor.  I cut a sliding window in the side.  There had been an aerial, but it was gone, leaving a little cluster of holes so that when the wind blew just right, it played a chord like a harmonica.

When I had the green van, I parked at the museum of Indian Art on the Gonzaga Campus.  I was wearing bib overalls and the receptionist was expecting a telephone repair person.  She assumed that’s who I was and ushered me deep into the backstage of the building until I realized she had mistaken me.  I just wanted to see the art.  

In the tan/gold van I was wearing a safari jacket with shoulder badges (a delphinium on one side and a mountain goat on the other, and driving with my elbow out the open window.  A man was hassling a woman in a turnout, so I pulled up alongside and he thought I was some kind of officer so he backed off.

I insulated the green van with fiberglass batting, but that was a bad idea — the filaments floated around and made me itch.  So the second yellow one was insulated with styrofoam and a friend said it was essentially a beer cooler.  No beer though.  I made two plywood boxes, one for a bed across the back of the bed and the other for a desk along the side opposite the doors.  

Once I rendezvoused with the Reverend Peter Raible and whomever he was married to at the time and made coffee for us since it was early in the morning.  The wife had a box of donuts or something.  The campground was the Cut Bank one, up past Kiowa Kamp, not overused.  Probably visited by grizzly bears these days.

Vans in those days were considered sexual objects and someone sold bumper stickers that said, “If this van is rockin’, don’t you come knockin’.  But that wasn’t my interpretation.  There were several concerns I had about this circuit-riding thing.  One was that my belongings might end up all over the state unless I was careful to keep them in the van.  I learned to lock the van.  Sure enough, the older women interpreted themselves to be my mother and would open my suitcases to check for clothes to wash.  If they ran across documents, even counselling notes or legal analysis, they felt free to read them.  I had no office and it was much too early for computers.

It was the potential I loved.  Smart phones weren’t invented yet, so there were still a few pay phones.  I could go anywhere.  I could disappear to Mexico and live in the van forever.  It was like a boat.  All I needed was a gas card.  I thought.