ghostwolf howl

I heard the sound late at night in a Wal-Mart parking lot. It seemed to cut below the other noises, the whispering October leaves, the omnipresent highway rumble. I listened closer, catching its long, lonely whine blending with the bare branches as they scraped the trunks of the other oaks. It was coming from the opposite direction of the highway, out behind the store, behind the tall black trees that loomed over the lot. I pulled myself half outside my sleeping bag and leaned forward to peer out the bay window of my van. The store’s all-night lighting cast a shrill yellow glow onto waving tree limbs. As I watched, the sound bent down in pitch and disappeared, leaving me to strain my ears into the rustling quiet. A brittle clatter of dead leaves over asphalt, and it was back, literally sending chills down my spine. There was something out there in those woods, and it was howling.

I pulled open the side door to the frigid air and the sharp smells of the forest. Crouching on the metal floor, huddled against the chill, fumbling with my recording equipment, listening: this is just what I had hit the road to do, I thought with a thrill.

I tried listening to the howl more intelligently. What was it? It sounded like a wolf, but deeper, and each utterance seemed to draw out far longer than any animal’s lung capacity could allow. I began to hear modulations. Once in a long while, the pitch would abruptly shift one or two overtones up and then rapidly fall back down, the way you breathe through a flute without really knowing how to play it, or if you run your hand lightly up and down a violin string without pressing. Maybe the source was man-made? Perhaps there was some abandoned structure out there in the woods, a busted machine or a hollow shed, and the wind was rushing through it, creating different frequencies? The pitch, however, didn’t seem to have any correlation to how hard the wind blew. And besides, it was coming from the woods – it was out in the wild and sounded lonesome as hell. I sat there for hours listening, shivering, trying not to breathe too hard.

Wal-Mart was closing for the night, and I could hear the manager’s day-end announcements over the PA system. They drifted to me from the outdoor loudspeakers of the garden department, but the sound was far away and strangely warped. It came as a sort of wordless whine, a perfect complement to the howl. It occurred to me that it didn’t really matter what my ghostwolf – as I’d come to call it – was. The divisions between the civilized world and the wild have long become blurred to the point of irrelevance. I was reminded of characters in a DeLillo novel, disappeared old people, lost for days in a supermall, presumably stealing candy bars from the vending machines, trying to decode the anthropomorphic corporate sculptures through frightened, rheumy eyes. Is a Wal-Mart any less a jungle than the forest I saw before me? The whine of the manager was every bit as inchoate as the howl of the ghostwolf. They came, ultimately, from the same place. And what sound could be more distinctly American, this strange counterpoint of frontier savagery and urban alienation, this marriage of Wal-Mart and wild?

I was terribly disappointed to find the next day that the tracks were not that good. My recording equipment did not share the human ear’s ability to distinguish between and focus on particular sounds, and the ghostwolf was lost to the trees and traffic. I could bring it up by fiddling with the equalizer, but only at the cost of any sense of environment. The ghostwolf was like a lightning bug, I guess: so mesmerizing in its crepuscular dazzle that I felt compelled to capture it, but dead in the jar by next morning. In retrospect, it would have been a difficult musical tool anyway. In my recordings, I’ve consistently avoided music in favor of sound. Unlike music, which is already complete in and of itself, sound is raw sonic material waiting to be organized into music. But this ghostwolf tricked me; even had I taken a suitable recording, there was nothing I could add to it. The howl was already a coherent music of its own, rife with its own messages and mythology, whole as the hungry, wiry wolf it evoked.

a history of solitude

[this is a section of an originally longer post]

So, I have to admit, I had my apprehensions about this trip. Living in a van and roaming around the country doesn’t exactly scream “airtight security.” Especially with my budget – I had weighed my money heavily towards being on the road longer with less comfort – there were any number of things that could go wrong. Sure, I had passing images of myself leaning against a broke-down van in the Mojave Desert as buzzards circled overhead, or of ending up bloodied, facedown in the toilet of some sketchy backwoods rest stop, but ultimately, those extreme scenarios didn’t really stick to the wall. What did was solitude.

...

Almost immediately, van life revealed itself as a true pleasure. All around me, American life rolled out, people woke up in the morning, went to work, lived, went to sleep at night, and the whole process reminded me of the natural drama I found in the woods in middle school. Like any kind of living, van life allows you opportunities to pursue the white whale, but the chase is not impersonal as it is in a world of books or full of adversity as it is in the woods - it’s simply pleasurable. In the long hours between stops, time stretches out, your mind relaxes, and your thought rate decreases. I found I had inadvertently traded in the nonsense intellectual flurry that so characterizes modern living for something slower and truer, a thought every fifteen minutes; enough time to take it and hold it in your hands, regard it, understand it. Spend enough time at this pace and the whole world settles into finer focus, your mind and soul fit into a clarity of thought and feeling. I felt no additional loneliness as the days stretched into weeks with little human contact. Instead, what contact I had was cast into a bold relief. A simple interaction, exchanging money with a toll clerk, ordering a plate of wings, whatever, somehow sprang from thoughtless two-dimensionality to meaningful, three-dimensional nuance; it became a room you could walk into and look around. Longer conversations become invariably profound. Avdo, a Bosnian construction worker and a marvel of human decency and innocence, overturned a year of study at Princeton in the course of a conversation.

My gaze turned outwards; with fewer deadlines to meet and personal challenges to fulfill, I began to look outside and around me, to open my eyes and ears again to what was immediately present. Freed from the absurd self-orientation that college practically demands, I thought less of myself and more of my environment, less time wondering who I was and whether I was fit to belong, and more time simply being – and belonging.

...

All things considered, it’s not entirely surprising that finding real solitude again should produce reconciliation of mind, soul, and purpose. This was first made clear early in my travels to Acadia National Park. I shot up to Maine straight from New Jersey, intending to spend the rest of the fall trickling down through the northeast. I ended up spending most of my time stuck up there at the top of New England, unwilling to leave. Acadia National Park is a strange place in many ways; it’s hard to say what keeps bringing people back there, where the magic lies. There is no single, sweeping vista, no grand canyon or Niagara Falls, the grandeur is never overwhelming. But few places in the country have such a history of human investment; Acadia National Park has in some way been protected land for over a century now, and is currently one of the most popular nature reserves in the country. It is not quite wild; in the 1920s, Rockefeller created a series of walking trails and beautiful bridges throughout the island, and before a great fire in the 40s, it was dotted with magnificent estates of the super-rich. Now it’s less exclusive, and a ring road along the coast of the island permits people from all over to get a quick sense of the landscape, and to dig deeper only if they so desire. My life there was idyllic; I spent about a week and a half driving into the park before dawn every morning, watching the sun rise over the ocean, going for hikes, recording and exercising in the van, swimming in the clean, salty water, watching, listening, soaking it in, and leaving only after the sun went down over Cadillac Mountain. My favorite place to sit and think (or not think) were the rocks above Otter Point; I spent hours at a time there, watching the waves come in and the crows somehow find food amongst the cliffs. Then it was off to Sand Beach to get the blood flowing again. Here, at the only natural sand beach on the rocky coast of Maine, the water sometimes gets up into the fifties in the summer, and while I was there in October, I could sometimes feel ice crystals in the water. I would change into my bathing suit in the van and then take off at a run from the parking lot, down the hill, over the beach, straight into the water, never stopping until I could no longer touch the ground and I was far out in the chilly surf. Then I’d turn right around and do it in reverse, moving hard to keep my blood from freezing. I went religiously, once a day. Sometimes the surf was high and brown, sometimes the water was like polished glass. Sometimes I’d do it alone, other times there’d be bemused tourists gaping. “He must be training for something…” an old lady confided confidently. “How’s the water?” a big man asks in a Southern old-boy drawl as I shoot past, arms pumping, little wet droplets shaking every where. “Very cold,” I reply, not pausing to stop, “very good.”

Later, back in Pennsylvania, I had an interesting conversation about Acadia with someone who had grown up in Maine. I mentioned my uncertainty about the attraction of the place, the sense that it was truly magical, but how I wondered why. “It’s because humans and nature have grown up together there. We found it long ago, and lived there with respect for the place. When the fire burned everything down, we recovered with the land. Now it’s not really wild, but it’s not really human either.” That made a lot of sense to me. It’s a place humans can go not to test their might against the wild, or marvel at wild natural spectacles, but to rediscover Eden. Acadia is a new garden, a place still somehow unfallen, where humans can leave the cities to find mountains not made by the hands of man, but where nevertheless, man still somehow belongs.

late september

Eventually, I found shelter at a 24-hour CostCutters lot and killed the engine, mist still swirling in my eyes long after I closed them.

I was getting used to van life. I took this first shorter trip in large part to make mistakes and learn from them, but I was impressed by how few mistakes I had to deal with. I was spending less money than I had expected, the traveling was almost entirely a joy, and the van itself was performing wonderfully. The only real practical obstacle remained the showering situation, which was a relatively small challenge in the grand scheme of things. I’d evolved (sort of) past my first heroic but basically inane night in the shoebox-bathtub, first acquiring what turned out to be little more than a bigger shoebox, and finally calling it quits and having an old-fashioned, outdoor shower on the side of a less active road in the Adirondacks. It was marvelously liberating after repeated attempts to twist myself into various pretzel shapes to get myself clean and keep the water off the rug at the same time. You can, however, get thrown in jail for liberating yourself from indoor showers, and I resolved to find a more sustainable solution.

This eventually took the form of a colorful inflatable kiddy pool, a mass of purple and pink plastic shaped into a butterfly, complete with goopy grinning face and flopping antennae. So far, the butterfly is the best solution, although I’m still not sure what to do with the damn thing after I’ve showered. While it deflates to store nicely in the shelves when it’s dry, I’m more often left with a large, wet, purple butterfly occupying a large part of the back of my cargo bay. We’ll see.

I'm going to jump ahead a little bit in an effort to get closer to the present. I traced the New York - Canada border, and then came down through Adirondacks to return home to Pennsylvania. There, I was faced with a disappointment: Anthony was not to accompany me. However, I was able to stack up on supplies, and soon headed east towards Lancaster, Ephrata, and the other towns of the Pennsylvania Dutch country.

I arrived in Ephrata in the very late afternoon. Main Street was closed, but people on foot were thronging past the barricades. “What’s going on?” I asked a cop as I slowly drove through the detour. “Town fair,” he replied through thick moustaches, expression masked by those dark shades that seem to be the style of choice for rural police the nation over. “Happens last weekka September every year.” It seemed a good event to check out. I pulled into a public lot manned by a boyscout unit, paid them the demanded three dollars, and set out on foot.

The Ephrata Town Fair was an attractive scene. Hot dog vendors and amusement park games lined the sidewalks, and people filled the space between. Respectable older men in khakis and dress shirts walked arm-in-arm with their short wrinkled wives. High school skateboard punks walked impatiently around them, also navigating the mothers with strollers and overweight couples. Tattered bikers loped about in Lynard Skynard tshirts, and kids begged to play the watergun game or ride on the miniature Ferris wheel at the end of the street. “Try your brawn at our test of strength,” one announcer called, and almost simultaneously, another, “everyone’s a winner! Give it a shot folks, there’s a winner every game.” Townfolk recognized and greeted each other, shaking hands, backslapping. Electronic tweedles celebrated accurate horseshoe throwers, the air was thick with fried food and funnel cakes, and everywhere you looked, people were there, moving up the street on the right and down on the left, the occasional disgruntled child cutting across with a scream.

I decided to try playing for them. I walked up to one receptive looking vendor, a tiny pizza stand with two short, older ladies cutting up the pies and talking up the customers. I walked over to the one who was smiling. “Hi, I’m a classical cellist,” I began, immediately receiving an eyebrow of suspicion. “I was wondering if I could play by your stand. I don’t need anything from you, I just –“ “No!.” she said with a nervous smile. “Oh…. I can’t play?” “No, no!” she said, scuttling back further behind the counter, “we can’t do that!” “Okay, well, thanks for your time.”

I went from vendor to vendor, smiling and getting turned down. Their reactions reminded me of the AAA employee I scared in Pottsville. Suspicion, mistrust, fear. They averted their eyes as soon as they could, saying they didn’t think they were supposed to do that, or that they’d have to ask their supervisor, who wasn’t there. When is you supervisor getting back? I don’t know. Eyes low, scampering away to sell another funnel cake. Meanwhile, “Ding! Congratulations: you win!” and the more well equipped stands played the radio. “Party like a rockstar, party like a rockstar” blaring over and over again over the whack-a-mole.

I wasn’t sure what was going on. Who outside of a college theory class is afraid of J.S. Bach? I decided I’d try to do it the right way, and got directions to the fair office. I explained my situation, that I was on a grant from Princeton University, that I was offering to play. The young lady behind the desk was thin, with a huge nose and permed, frizzy blonde hair. She looked receptive, but said she couldn’t help me. A few years back, the fair had trouble with pamphleteers, and now everyone doing anything had to work from an approved stand. “See, cos you could just be out at that corner, but you might be harassing the people across the street from you, see,” she droned out through her nose. “It’s crazy, though, I have the hardest time booking music for this thing.” I offered to play inside the fair office, where there was some sort of showing of prize vegetables. A few people poked about the tables, inspecting cucumbers; cucumber competition enthusiasts, I suppose. She looked at the edge of her computer blankly for a moment. “No, sorry, I can’t let you do that. But are you going to be around on Saturday? I have no idea who to put ahead of the pumpkin eating contest.” I declined, saying I’d be out of town, thanked her, and stepped out into the street again. "Party like a rockstar, party like a rockstar.…”

Discouraged, I went back to my car and drove down to a truckstop. Please seat yourself, the sign read, so I did. They had the standard buffet set up, so I shoveled on some lasagna and mashed potatoes, adding some hamburger and veggie soup after picking some crud off the bowl. Take as much as you want, want as much as you take, please don’t waste! read the sign over the buffet. “Hey hun,” a portly waitress asked on my way back to my booth, “what’d you like to drink?” You have any beer? She smiled. “Oh no, we don’t sell that here.” I’ll just have some water, then. “DORIS!” the waitress screamed. “This young man wants a water!” I sat down and realized I was just opposite the TV. The sound was off, so I had to infer what was going on from the images and subtitles. Four well-dressed, multiethnic performers appeared to be singing or reciting quotes from famous Americans in front of a giant screen of waving grain fields. One was talking about the spirit of liberty. THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY IS THAT WHICH SHALL ALWAY STAND FOR FREDOM , the subtitles buzzed by. Another was saying something by Ronald Reagan about what we have to do IF WE ARE TO REMAIN THE LND OF THE FREE. They smiled and performed with a glazed earnestness, passing the microphone off to one another. I couldn’t see the audience except for the people right on the side. They were only one row deep in big chairs, men sitting politely in suits.

By the end of my hamburger soup, the program had changed to shots of Bono in his huge translucent goggles with African women carrying babies. The subtitles were getting worse. I’m not sure how they make those things, but I imagined an overeducated hamster cooped up inside the television, smoking and typing furiously. Every time he made a mistake, the letters paused, backed up, and then made another mistake without stopping. BONE NO SOUNDS ALARM AIDS AND POVERTY IN AFRICA, and then a little musical note.

I paid for the buffet and drove across the street to make camp in the local Walmart parking lot. Just as I pulled in, my iPod shuffled its way to the Glenn Gould recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It jumped straight to the reprise of the aria from Gould’s second recording, made at the end of his life when he was quite mad, just before possibly committing suicide, generally celebrated as one of the greatest – and most eccentric – recordings of classical music ever. The performance is painfully slow and heartbreakingly beautiful. You can here him choosing, settling upon each note, moving with profound deliberation, this mad, gentle man, creating a little universe for himself and for you in every shift of tone and rhythm. And despite the best efforts of his recording engineers, you can hear him singing tonelessly, inchoately along, directing his fingers by some inner melody audible to him alone. I shut off the lights and sat in my darkened van listening, aware, as I always am when hearing Gould play Bach, that in my thoughtless digging I had stumbled into a sacred cavern. I had left the FM transmitter go for some time, and there was a popular station threatening to cut in on my frequency, but I didn’t want to stop the musical flow to adjust the channel. The static rumbled evenly, and Gould weaved his vulnerable way through it, singing hopelessly, agelessly, fending off a broadcast to millions just long enough to play me the final cadence.

the van of destiny (pt. 2)

I drove back from Huffle’s in my new used van more numb than excited. I was satisfied with the price; unbeknownst to Mr Huffle, I had stopped at an AAA office on the way back from the mechanic to crosscheck the price with their notary. Her estimate of the van’s model, mileage, features and service record came in at some three thousand dollars above the sticker. So I felt good. Of course, good is just what Ol’ Bill intended to make me to feel upon leaving his lot, so that’s partly a testament to his abilities as a salesman. But I also felt good about our bargaining, In the United States, price haggling is a dying art; I had to go to China and Africa to learn the basics. At the end of the day, I’m acquiring a fairly ideal vehicle for about $3.500 below its estimated value, so I feel I have little to be ashamed of.

And what a magnificent vehicle it is! I had at last moved out of Harrisburg, waving goodbye to Mrs. Rodriguez and the hedgehogs and Allison Hill to stay with my parents in Hershey while I made my preparations. This process – outfitting the van, buying supplies, making plans – was more than a little daunting. There’s little precedent for my project. While the roadtrip is of course a time-honored American tradition, there are few Americans who move into a cargo van and roadtrip non-stop for a whole year. There are, however, plenty of Americans out on the road. Driving back and forth between home and Kmart to get supplies, I peer curiously down into windows, wondering who these people are and where they are going.

What, I reflect, could be more American than the car? Every morning, this country steps into its 207.8 million passenger vehicles and drives to work, to drop the kids off for school, to have a good time, whatever. We zip along a thin black streak, each of us enclosed within our little air-conditioned bubble of designer metal. In our cars, we buy ourselves complete individualism in motion; the comfort of choosing our own seat position, music, and atmosphere, each passively reveling in the luxury of not having to interact with anyone else except through turn signals. We are at liberty to drive just as fast we want within a law that we break and that the state expects us to break. We cruise high over the speed limit, jockeying for position, and then slow down when we see the cop, and just enough of us get busted to fill the local police department’s monthly quota.

We all in some part define others and ourselves by our cars, making public statements about our own identity and priorities, and regarding those of others. We pick our cars carefully, weighing what we want and what we can afford, choosing our identity from a palette of options supplied by Toyata. I’m in a Hummer, don’t fuck with me. I’m a socially and environmentally conscious citizen, observe my Hybrid. We cannot see each other except in a brief, moving flash obscured by windshield, but we can easily recognize and understand the declarations of our vehicles.

The real status distinctions made by cars, however, are much more unconscious, threads worked so widely and deeply into the fabric of lives that we see them every day and do not recognize them. We build our society around cars. A fifth of America’s gross domestic product is reliant on the auto industry. 2.3 million Americans are employed by either General Motors, Chrysler or Ford. One out of every six American workers makes a living in an auto-related industry. Our biggest corporations are Auto and Oil companies, and the latter largely decides our country’s foreign policy.

In this car-ruled society, those who cannot drive lose. We shovel our old into nursing homes, set safely away from the violence of the highway and from participation in communities, spending the golden years playing bingo and begging for a visit from the grandchildren. Similarly, Americans under 16 are reduced to total dependency, relying on their parents to ferry them to soccer practice and piano lessons and the mall, hamstringing their own developing independence and self-reliance – until, of course, they get a car of their own.
Besides the young and the old, many are kept from participation in the modern car society by – you guessed it – money. As the example of Harrisburg shows, we give choice jobs to those who can already drive to work, sequestering those too poor into ghettos hedged by rail or highway and accessible only by bridge. These people may even be able to afford buying a vehicle, but to drive one each day is wildly expensive, some 9,000 to 11,000 dollars each year in internal and external costs like insurance, maintenance, gas, parking, and depreciation. Meanwhile, We concentrate our products in huge department stores on the edge of town, accompanied by massive parking lots and connected by separate highway exits, accessible only by car, leaving those who cannot reach them to fend for themselves with inner city groceries and minimarts on streets sometimes too dangerous to walk by night. Having limiting road access to those wealthy enough to afford riding those roads, we then spend all our government revenue on expansion and upkeep of this gated resource, tacitly subsidizing the driver. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that 1.2 to 1.6 trillion is spent annually on passenger ground transportation, numbers far “greater than our total national expenditure on either education or health.” Everyone pays equally for these resources, though only some can use them. In any ratio of utility, a poor single mother riding home on a bus pays far more than the governor to surface the road he rides on his BMW. A welfare state indeed, but who is subsidizing whom?

Author Jane Holtz Kay notes “70% of all state and local law enforcement activities are expended on traffic management issues.” Another man was shot several weeks ago on the exact same intersection at which Jonas Strunk died. The police, presumably paged by a gunshot sensor, arrived quickly, stringing off his little balloon-and-flower makeshift memorial with crime scene tape. The investigation continues, but so will the violence. Simply slowing the volume of shootings– leaving aside any inquiry into their root causes – would require a much heavier round-the-clock police presence. Currently, the police are too busy managing traffic into and out of the suburbs to be able to do more than zip in and put up tape. This suburban traffic, however, generates revenue for a poor city; revenue that will subsequently be spent on building more parking garages in downtown Harrisburg to attract more drivers.

This is a municipal cycle of generating revenue and then spending it to generate more, all within a system that only privileges a certain class of people. This vortex is replicated on the personal level, and the poor are not the only victims. The car does not quite translate into the rich man’s gun, but cars kill as many kids in the suburbs as guns do in the city. The cost of car ownership is high even for those who can afford it. Ivan Illich, writing in Energy and Equity some 30 years ago, reports “the typical American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car…. He sits in it while it goes and while it is idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls, insurance, taxes, and traffic tickets. He spends four out of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.” If anything, Illich’s estimates are conservative, since they do not take into account time “consumed by other activities dictated by transport; time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages: time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer meetings to improve the quality of the next buy.”

The vast freedom the automobile appears to offer is misleading. We are free to define ourselves in any form car companies decide for us. The powerful speed of the automobile offers to dramatically increase our efficiency and leisure time. However, we will spend 8 billion hours each year stuck in traffic, costing us between 43 and 168 billion dollars of lost productivity. We are free to come and go at high speeds whenever we want, although our days will mainly be structured by work time spent financing our cars. As Illich, points out “the model American puts in 16,000 hours to get 7500 miles; less than 5 miles an hour.” We drive to work and then work to drive.

Given all this, the Manchester Guardian determined “the private car is an environmental, fiscal and social disaster which would not pass any value-for-money test.” The total impact of the car from production to disposal, “is a state subsidy equivalent to giving each car user a free pass for the whole year for all public transport, a new bike every five years and 15,000 kilometers of first-class rail travel.” Nevertheless, the car is not going anywhere. We are, as I mentioned, a society built on cars, and to substantively address the problem would be to substantively change the very structure of our society. Our economy and our nation is reliant on the automobile, but as the above article suggests, they are also probably dying under its weight. One half of the oil and one third of the automobiles sold in the United States are imported. We spend 50 billion dollars combating the health effects of air pollution, and lose 176.5 billion to motor vehicle fatalities. Equally devastatingly, we destroy our environment for the car. We funnel our creativity and productivity into paying for the car. We sequester the poor to riding on the bus in Allison Hill. We put the northernmost point of Confederate progress during the Civil War under pavement. We cannot resist the car. From Steinbeck to Kerouac, from On the Road Again to Road Runner, from Lost Highway to Highway One Revisited, from the journals of Louis and Clark to Thelma and Loise, our culture is steeped in travel, in roads, and in cars. The roadtrip – that most American adventure that entered me into this inquiry – is most often a journey to “find oneself,” that other American project. Either that, or to “find America.” And what, after all, am I doing this year?

I think of that strange moment when Ol’ Bill softened just after agreeing to sell me the van. That nostalgic, almost fatherly look. Maybe he knew what he was doing. He clearly knew, in his excitement, his vociferous involvement, and most of all, that last, bittersweet softness, that he was officiating over one of the great rituals of our contemporary society. The moment when a young man gets his first car. The debate over the cost, as if it was something that could be tabulated on a sticker. The transfer of the check, and then of the keys, from the salesman to the new driver; the two shake hands, and the father is left at the desk, looking on silently, inscrutably. I think he knew, on some level, that he was handing me the keys to America, or rather the keys to find America, a nation scored by highways too wide to ever cross, filled with riders like me, driving into a long sunset from a Western to find a proud, desperate frontier country. They rode over it by the thousands on half a ton of metal each, mile by burning mile.


Materials on America's car culture is from:

Illich, Ivan. Energy and Equity. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

Kay, Jane Holtz. Asphalt Nation. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1997.

and the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics at:
http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/

THE VAN OF DESTINY (pt. 1)

September arrives abruptly, knocking me free from these thoughts. Acorns fall with crashing reports like military salutes around my parents’ house in the wooded hills between Hershey and Hummelstown. Somehow, they jolt me from my complacency even more than the very real gunshots that slew Jonas Strunk. Before I know it, Arthur has left for Japan, vowing to teach a class of elementary English students the wonders of Sir Mixalot, and Julian has departed for Azerbaijan without a word, but after leaving a South Allison Hill Civic Association t-shirt neatly folded on my bed. I curse myself; I had meant to take him for a trip in the van before he left. Instead, I’m still looking for a van, wearing his tshirt.

I’ve spent the latter part of the summer researching cars, looking up prices, occasionally visiting a dealer to check out a vehicle. This one’s in Maryland, and I can’t find a mechanic to crosscheck it. This one’s closer, but they won’t let me take it to a mechanic. This one gets lousy gas mileage. This one’s too small.

At last, I find a handful that seem to fit. One is at a dealer in Palmyra, and two are at William Huffle’s Used Cars in Mechanicsburg. At the latter, a well-groomed, slightly pudgy young man named Eric shuttles me around the inventory, answering questions and opening doors. He’s polite, collected but not suave, and encouraging but not pushy. He generally disproves all the bad rap on car salesmen. One of the vehicles I’m looking at is a 2004 Chevrolet G1500 Express cargo van. I decide it makes more sense than a similar Ford I’m eyeing, and ask to drive it to a mechanic in Hershey to get it checked out. Eric agrees, and hands me the keys.

It’s something of a shock after the little Toyata Prius I arrived in. Cargo vans, I think, have crossed the invisible divide that separates cars from 18-wheelers. The thing is enormous. At first, it’s like I’m steering a boat down the middle of 322. I can imagine the rudder shifting with the steering wheel, watery asphalt grinding away in a rough charcoal wake. When I go up hills, the engine sounds like a jet intake, and when it gathers momentum, I have the vague sensation of riding an asteroid on an Earth-skimming near miss. In my old cars – the current Prius and a much-beloved old 1991 Honda Civic hatchback – the headlights of minivans and SUVs blasted bothersomely through my rear window. Now, I look down with perverse satisfaction at the drivers of these once towering behemoths as they lean anxiously forward in their now-absurd little buggies. SUVs, I hear, don’t do very well in crashes. Just before I give myself a mental smack on the hand, I imagine my craft cruising serenely, sublimely through a twisted pond of Hummer metal.

The company that previously owned the van installed a system of shelves and grates in the cargo bay. Many of them would serve me well – I was planning on installing something similar anyway – but in their current empty superfluousness, they’re nothing but noise pollution. When I hit a bump or break, the vibrations travel through the whole vehicle ending in the metal-frame shelves, which then shake, rattle and roll, making a truly ungodly racket. Strauss’s Alpine Symphony includes scoring for a Thunder Machine. This usually takes the form of a large, thin metal sheet that some sturdy young percussionist draws out and shakes like hell to cut through a 123-piece orchestra. If he could have heard it, Strauss may have preferred to simply use a Chevrolet.

But on some level, I like the din. I felt real disappointment in many aspects of the Prius, which displays gas mileage on a little onboard computer screen, runs silent as a ghost but repeatedly emits a small, civil beep to remind you when you’re backing up and chirps wildly at you when you don’t buckle your seatbelt. Compare this rather aggravatingly civil personality to the van, which roars and rattles but somehow stays in one piece and chugs gasoline like a frat boy sloppily chugging Beast in a keg stand. It’s like leaving your elementary school librarian to go out and play in the parking lot with a Hell’s Angel.

And as it happens, the gas mileage isn’t actually so bad (for a van). Its large frame is built on a 1/2-ton chassis – as opposed to the one-ton chasses supporting vans designed to haul huge amounts of cargo – so it achieves the same level of efficiency as a smaller vehicle. This is important to me, both because I have trouble ethically justifying an automobile that guzzles more gas than necessary, and because gas will be my biggest regular expense on the trip, pretty much replacing rent and utilities evenly.

My mechanic gives it the go, more or less, and I drive back to Huffle’s with my father, who knows less about cars than I do, but comes along for support. I’ve settled into the feel of it, the lower pickup and greater momentum, the larger turning axis and the rear-well drive. It’s really surprisingly maneuverable. There’s a light whistle in through one of the windows. “So, are you going to take me across the country so I can listen to all the sounds out there?” I silently ask the steering wheel. I hit a bump. “GragragrakukukukukakakakakakaCHUNKgaDUNKabrrrRUNKKKUKNKNKKkkk!” the van replies. Yes. This is it: the Van of Destiny.

Back at Huffle’s, Eric abruptly disappears once it becomes clear that I’m buying. Out of nowhere pops a stout grey leprechaun. He’s short but compact and dense; one would imagine that if he curled up tight, he’d do well as a bowling ball. His gray hair is flattened desperately under a snugly fitting baseball cap, and wild gray moustaches stick out every which way like tumbleweed. Glittering, squinty blue eyes twinkle out from his behind thick glasses. “Hi!” he shouts gruffly, gripping the syllable in his stomach before launching it out like the bolt of a trebuchet. “I’m Bill,” He thrusts forward his hand. I take it; he shakes firmly, someone spastically, and then hollers “siddown!,” thumbing the chair in front of his desk. “Now lemme tell you something about cars, son….” The cavalry has arrived.

Bill, the human foghorn. Bill, the Used Car Philosopher. Good old Bill, your best friend when buying a used car. Bill goes on for about five minutes about the glories of used cars before he gets it that I’m not considering getting a new one. There’s a fresh Prius outside; I guess he figured I was thinking on a classier level. I explain that I received a grant to buy the van, and so am working in a very strict price range, and ask if the price negotiable. “Is the price negotiable!” he shouts, abruptly leaning back in his chair, hands over his head. He drawls the words with weary familiarity. Then, suddenly, he’s leaning forward again, hands on the desk before him. “Now that’s a good question. Is the price negotiable. Now, you see, at this establishment, we don’t have a whole lot of window dressing. You see this office? Now, I could get myself my own room, get Eric over there a nice little cubicle, get leather chairs for us to relax in, but I don’t. Why? Because that would make your van more expensive. Now, here at Huffle’s, I need to be competitive. That highway out there is nothing but used car lots, and I need to be competitive. So I don’t put in a whole lot of this and that, so that the price on that sticker there can be as low as it can be.” I apologize and tell him that the price on the sticker is out of my range, and ask if he could lower it. “You ever bought a house, son? How old are you?” I’m twenty-two. “See, you don’t understand. I built this house. Now I’ve got to choose between selling these vans for a certain price and keeping this house. You see where I’m coming from? I’ve got a house to maintain. That’s where I’m coming from.” The age question riled me a little. I say that I understand where’s he’s coming from, but since I’m working on a budget for all my expenses next year, I have to choose between his van price and eating. That’s where I’m coming from. “Now you looked at a lot of other cars,” he draws leadingly. I nod. He changes tactics again. “Okay, well you’re not going to get a better deal in the midstate. Why don’t we try and make something work, here. Why don’t you go ahead and tell me a price that you think you’d be able to pay, and I’ll tell you if it stacks up with where I’m coming from.” I quote him a price, knocking a thousand dollars off the sticker. He blinks at me, then leans back again and shakes his head. “Now, you see, what you’re telling me, the question you’re giving me here is, do I want to do business with you, or do I want to make money? You know, do I want to make a profit? Now don’t get me wrong here, I’d love to give you this deal, but that’s just out of my range of consideration. Now I know you’ve got your own concerns, but I don’t think, see, that I can make that number square with my concerns.” I ask him to make a counter-offer. “You see, if I give you this van for your number, you can just drive off. But then when you want another car, you might come back here, and you know what? Ol’ Bill will be plain gone. See, I got to be competitive. And if I’m giving away vans like that – if I’m not thinking about my business, well I’m just gonna disappear and you won’t be able to come back to Ol’ Bill for a new used car.” I ask him to make a counteroffer. “Now lemme ask you a question here,” he says instead, leaning forward more, peering out at me over his glasses, squinting further, little slits of eyes twinking. “Lemme ask you a question, real straight-forward, yes or no. Okay?” Okay. “Real straight-forward.” Okay. “Is there any way I’m going to sell you that van for the number on the sticker?” No. He leans back with expression of a parental disappointment. “Fellowship for what?” he drawls. Music, I reply. “What kind of music?” but then, just as I’m trying to think how to answer, he blurts out a number almost under his breath, adding 800 dollars to my offer. “That’s only two hundred dollars away from the sticker price,” I reply, “so it’s still out of my range. But I tell you what, I understand where you’re coming from, so I’ll meet you in the middle.” I give him a number 500 off. He squints at me. “Excuse me a moment,” he says, launching out of his chair and going to a back room, talking and laughing loudly at another employee, leaving me to sit quietly at an empty desk with my father, who looks at me inscrutably. Eventually Bill returns. “Excuse me,” he says again. He has papers in his hand. “Now look at this,” thrusting them at me, “these are complete records for everything that’s happened to this car since it got bought. Everything. Now, this car has been serviced religiously every three thousand miles since day one. Now, you’re not going to find a record like that on a car like this anywhere in the midstate. So what do you say to this number right here?” He says, pointing with his pen to his last offer. No, I’ll meet you halfway. He leans back again, giving me that same disappointed look. “What kind of music?” he asks again. I’ll send you a CD if you give me the car. Suddenly he’s shouting again. “Eric! Eric, whaddya think? Should we sell him this car? I think he got a fellowship from his dad. He’s gonna send us a CD.” Eric looks uncomfortable, and mumbles something. Bill doesn’t listen. “Fine!” He barks. “It’s a deal,” he is suddenly soft, fatherly. “It has been a true pleasure doing business with you.” The hard twinkle promptly returns. “Now you can clear up the details with Eric, like whether you’ll be paying in one check or multiple installments?” And just as suddenly as he appeared, he’s gone.