John Steinbeck Lived the #Vanlife Before it was a Trend
Van-dwellings (vehicles, usually vans, converted to house the driver), RVs, and Skoolies (converted school busses)have made a huge mark on our culture in the last decade or so, and #vanlife has skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic.
The trend has taken off in recent years in part because of the rising cost of housing in the US. When pandemic assistance checks hit people’s mailboxes, some invested the money into souping up their vans or trucks with insulation, food storage, and bedding in order to ditch their rental units for the open road. Because much of the workplace was replaced with virtual meetings, many van-dwellers didn’t have to concern themselves with staying in one place for work.
But this trend isn’t the first time people have been ditching their stationary houses for homes on wheels — in fact, the act of crafting a place to sleep in one’s vehicle has been around since the invention of the horse-drawn carriage.
This isn’t even the first time where we’ve seen a massive upward spike in the number of people living and traveling in their vehicles. The first major trend in the US started with the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl Era. Hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their jobs and homes decided to take control of the heartbreaking situation that they were faced with in the only way they saw fit — packing all of their belongings and family into a handmade, wooden cabin and strapping it to the back of their pick-up truck and moving on to someplace with more work available. Steinbeck wrote about these families in a series of articles called The Harvest Gypsies, which later inspired his highly-acclaimed novel, The Grapes of Wrath.
It’s also possible that his close relationship with migrant workers and exposure to their “mobile homes” inspired him to build his own.
In 1960, Steinbeck bought a brand-new GMC truck and hired the manufacturer to build him a cabin inside the bed.
“I specified my purpose and my needs. I wanted a three-quarter-ton pick-up truck, capable of going anywhere under possibly rigorous conditions, and on this truck I wanted a little house built like the cabin of a small boat. A trailer is difficult to maneuver on mountain roads, is impossible and often illegal to park, and is subject to many restrictions. In due time, specifications came through, for a tough, fast, comfortable vehicle, mounting a camper top — a little house with double bed, a four-burner stove, a heater, refrigerator and lights operating on butane, a chemical toilet, closet space, storage space, windows screened against insects — exactly what I wanted. It was delivered in the summer to my little fishing place at Sag Harbor near the end of Long Island. Although I didn’t want to start before Labor Day, when the nation settles back to normal living, I did want to get used to my turtle shell, to equip it and learn it. It arrived in August, a beautiful thing, powerful and yet lithe. It was almost as easy to handle as a passenger car. And because my planned trip had aroused some satiric remarks among my friends, I named it Rocinante, which you will remember was the name of Don Quixote’s horse.”
The purpose of Steinbeck’s trip, according to Travels with Charley, was to prove himself as a writer still in touch with the country and people he wrote about in his popular novels. Later, in an interview, his son, Thom would add that his father had a heart condition and he was nearing the end of his life. Steinbeck wanted to visit some of his old haunts before passing on. His journey would take him (and his dog, Charley) to some of the most essential cultural centers of the country. Starting in his home in Long Island, he would travel to New England, Niagra Falls, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Pacific Northwest, Yellowstone National Park, Texas, New Orleans, and Virginia — all while writing by the light of an oil lamp at a desk built into Rocinante’s cozy dwelling.
Steinbeck had a lot to say in Travels with Charley about the new wave of people who would eventually take to the roads in RVs. In 1960, when Steinbeck embarked on his trip in Rocinante, he noticed the very start of yet another upward trend of people living in their vehicles, but this time it would be that of those in mobile homes, a somewhat new invention at the time. Intrigued by the sudden surge of these newcomers of the road, he started parking Rocinante at mobile home lots and interviewing the folks that were living the mobile home lifestyle. On one such occasion, Steinbeck was invited by a man named Joe and his family to tour the inside of their mobile home and to sit down to supper together.
“They are wonderfully built homes, aluminum skins, double-walled, with insulation, and often paneled with veneer of hardwood. Sometimes as much as forty feet long, they have two to five rooms, and are complete with air-conditioners, toilets, baths, and invariably television. The parks where they sit are sometimes landscaped and equipped with every facility. I talked with the park men, who were enthusiastic. A mobile home is drawn to the trailer park and installed on a ramp, a heavy rubber sewer pipe is bolted underneath, water and electric power connected, the television antenna raised, and the family is in residence. Several park managers agreed that last year one in four new housing units in the whole country was a mobile home. The park men charge a small ground rent plus fees for water and electricity. Telephones are connected in nearly all of them simply by plugging in a jack. Sometimes the park has a general store for supplies, but if not the supermarkets which dot the countryside are available. Parking difficulties in the towns have caused these markets to move to the open country where they are immune from town taxes. This is also true of the trailer parks. The fact that these homes can be moved does not mean that they do move. Sometimes their owners stay for years in one place, plant gardens, build little walls of cinder blocks, put out awnings and garden furniture. It is a whole way of life that was new to me. These homes are never cheap and often are quite expensive and lavish. I have seen some that cost $20,000 and contained all the thousand appliances we live by — dishwashers, automatic clothes washers and driers, refrigerators and deep freezes.
The owners were not only willing but glad and proud to show their homes to me. The rooms, while small, were well proportioned. Every conceivable unit was built in. Wide windows, some even called picture windows, destroyed any sense of being closed in; the bedrooms and beds were spacious and the storage space unbelievable. It seemed to me a revolution in living and on a rapid increase. Why did a family choose to live in such a home? Well, it was comfortable, compact, easy to keep clean, easy to heat.”
By 1970, mobile homes became less mobile and the mass majority of them would indeed eventually be retired permanently to trailer parks. John Steinbeck passed away on December 20th, 1968, and though he was never able to witness today's #vanlife trend, I can’t help but think that he’d be pretty enthusiastic about these new travelers, living in their own Rocinantes, indulging their own wanderlust, and capturing their own adventure.
Are you a van-dweller? Have a story of your own you’d like to share? Send me a line at geneglarosh@gmail.com, or post a comment below, I would love to hear what you have to say!
As always, thank you for reading. As of this publish date, I am super occupied with research for my upcoming multi-part piece about legendary folk-country musician, Blaze Foley. I appreciate your patience while I keep you half-satisfied with some slightly lower-effort content while I work on the good stuff.
