Van Diaries, Revisited
Or, "Freedom"
Tuesday, 4th October, 2022:
A day of preparations before our crossing tomorrow.
Even though there's still a little left to be done on the van, we drove out along a gravel backroad in the hills behind Martinborough, made love, and lazed in the noon-shine. Tonight will be our last night in a real house for who knows how long. I'll miss the kettle, for sure!
Next time I write, we'll be in the South Island…
It’s been two years since my partner and I travelled down the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, living in our busted-up 1993 Toyota Hiace - lovingly referred to as ‘the Slut’ after her insatiable appetite for petrol: two people and too many books stuffed into the back of a van along with everything else we could fit in with us. Life on the road was not easy. For a week in the wilds outside of Hokitika it rained, and rained, and rained - while we sat stuck inside our Slut with our clothes and our spirits damp, and an op-shopped chessboard for company. We fought sandflies and weka and the stuttering flames of a butane burner on which we cooked the same staple meals of two-minute noodles and lukewarm porridge.
But when I look back on those times, it is not the hardships that come to mind. I remember that first evening as we drove mountain-wards from Blenheim into the yawning maw of a snowstorm; waking up in the middle of that first night by the side of Lake Rotoiti with the wind whipping glacier-cold as I ventured out into the whirling abyss to take a leak; the following morning with clear skies and the mountains all around us snowcapped and gleaming. I remember freedom - a Kerouac-ian feeling that wherever we went we would find adventure, that there was nothing tying us down save our imagination and our persistence.
These days we live a pretty mundane existence. We both have full-time jobs, incomes. We’re moving into a new place, soon, with a fridge, and a washer/drier, and a heat pump, and - God forbid - an indoor toilet. The ordinary realities of modern living. But luxuries, luxuries! How easily we take them for granted.
And how tethered we are to these daily routines! No more waking up and choosing where next to voyage. Wondering whether or not we’d have a secure place to park up and sleep. The risk, the uncertainty - the thrill. The suffering. The joy.
I want to wake up in a foreign land where I know no-one and can’t speak the language! Watching some strange and unknown world filter by as I sit in a shaded café with dirty tables. Why did we ever choose this domestic life? So we could have a place to sit in front of the television, a weekly fee sent to some absentee landlord whose mortgage we’re paying off?
Ah, freedom. In homelessness and damp spirits, in the price of petrol and the grinding of the gearbox.
But do I miss you? Not really. I’m really rather comfortable now, and I suppose that’s the sad truth.
Comfort: the death of freedom. We’re given everything we could ever need: out of the womb and into the wide world: we’re told what to do, and what to think, and how to live, and how to love - everything provided for us, so long as we submit to a comfortable life. The freedom to waste away in front of the latest of Entertainments. The freedom to never have to do anything, never to struggle, never to find the strength necessary to carry on.
And how can I escape? How can you? That plot of land by the sea where the wind smells of salt and the ground is ripe for planting: and who needs comfort, anyway? Or maybe it’s that death-trap of a motorcycle bought in Shanghai and taken from one end of the Silk Road to the other? Huxley said it best:
But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
Give me that mattress in the back of a Toyota Hiace; give me the camp-side long-drop and not showering for a week; give me the open road and the fear that the petrol is running low; give me freedom - and let me lust for comfort once again.