A Short History of My Life As a Car Camper

How a handshake deal and a borrowed van sparked an unending quest for the open road.

When I pulled into the Rockridge skatepark in Bend, Oregon, one warm August morning, two police cars were parked beside a large, dented, late-1980s van. Covered with ski and outdoor stickers, the young owners left the van’s sliding side door open, revealing a carpeted beige interior littered with crumpled blankets and containers of camping gear. The rear doors were open, too, and a twenty-something stood back there setting up his Coleman stove on an overturned plastic crate. Maybe the cops had searched them. Maybe the owners weren’t hiding the fact they were sleeping in there, the way I used to do.

I parked my van next to them. There we were, side-by-side, their old blue and gray van and my tan 1995 Toyota Hiace—different styles united in the cause of getting adventurers on the road. I’d been sleeping in cars since my dad let my friend and me take his Oldsmobile Silhouette van on a summer road trip in 1995, all the way up the West Coast, from Phoenix, Arizona, to Vancouver, British Columbia, when I was twenty years old. I was forty-seven now.

As I put on my skate pads in the shade of my van’s back hatch, one kid took his gear to the park. The other boiled water for coffee. They’d pulled in late to sleep, he said, and were road-tripping from a little British Columbia ski town, headed down to Burning Man in Nevada, hitting skateparks along the way. They’d never heard of Rockridge, but it looked clean in pictures. “When we woke up this morning, the cops were right there to greet us,” the kid told me. “They said, ‘Morning, boys. Have a good rest?’ We thought they’d got a call about campers and come for us, but they were just taking a break between calls.”

I told him about the night a sheriff knocked on my camper window when I was parked on a logging road near here. I was twenty-five. I’d just fallen asleep in the back of my red Toyota pickup. A small fiberglass shell covered my truck bed, which fit me and a few crates of stuff, and the knock shocked me awake. When I sat up shirtless, his flashlight illuminated my messy bedding and the large knife I kept for protection beside it. I expected him to tell me to leave. A number of people had kicked me out of places where I’d tried to sleep over the years. Instead, the sheriff said, “Hey there. Looking to see if you match the description I have of somebody. You don’t. Go back to leep and have a nice night.” The next morning I awoke to a lavender sunrise illuminating the thick trunks of old-growth ponderosa pines, and I drove deeper into the Ochoco Mountains for a day of solo hiking.

I don’t know where we got the idea to sleep in a van or how we conspired to take such a long trip. Dean probably suggested it. He was the more seasoned outdoorsman. Most of what I know about campfires and critters I learned from him. Whichever of us conceived of the trip, my dad offered to let us take his new, silver, early ’90s Silhouette. It was a brave gesture considering I got in a fender bender within six months of acquiring my first car at age sixteen and also got a ticket for driving with beer shortly thereafter. But my dad believed traveling was an integral part of a robust education. To understand the world, I needed to see the world, and Dad handed me his car keys. He trusted me. Meaning, he wanted to trust me, and when Joe Gilbreath trusted you, you couldn’t let him down. He made one of his signature deals, shaking my hand while offering conditions: Enjoy it, but if you crash it, you pay for it and you’ll be staying stranded wherever you are, or something reasonable like that.

[Read the rest in Adventure Journal, issue 29]