Roads From the Ashes
Page 23
Suddenly and without warning, we were engulfed in a whirling torrent of rain. It obliterated our vision and turned the sky even darker. Just when we were seeing ourselves on tomorrow’s list of storm victims, an underpass appeared in front of us. Two cars had already pulled to the side underneath it, but there was still room for 34 feet of NicoVan. “Phew,” I said as we breathed normally for the first time in half an hour. “This came along in the NicoTime. Heh, heh.”
I thought we would be able to wait under the bridge until the storm passed, but suddenly I noticed that we were sitting in a depression in which the water level was rising ominously. Unlike the Phoenix One, the NicoVan had extremely low clearance, and it wouldn’t be long until we were afloat.
“I’ll keep watching,” I said to Mark. “I’ll tell you when we have to leave.” Only five minutes had passed when we joined the cars ahead of us and pulled onto higher ground to avoid being flooded. The storm had abated slightly. It was still raining, but the wind had quieted to the point at which large objects were staying on the ground. We could drive, and soon we were headed northwest on the expressway that would take us to the campground where we’d been staying. We hoped it had escaped the path of the storm, which we now realized was heading east, toward Lake St. Clair.
We passed a car that the wind had flipped like a tortoise, and we marveled at the piles of debris left in the storm’s wake. Just as our shoulders were relaxing, just as we thought we’d made it through unscathed, the hail started.
Heavy hail and motorhomes are not a good combination. We’d seen the effect a good BB-shower had on a brand-new trailer in Missouri. It looked like it had been used for target practice at an Uzi school.
“Uh-oh,” I said. “This could be very, very bad.” But just then, another underpass materialized out of nowhere. We screeched to a fast halt underneath it, and the hailstorm soon spent all its ammunition. The sky lightened, and we drove on. Our campground was completely untouched.
Two days later, on the fourth of July, we had no NicoVan events scheduled. Early in the morning, I turned on the television to learn the latest news about the storm. The stories weren’t happy. A dozen people had lost their lives, and several neighborhoods had been destroyed. The Red Cross was asking for volunteers to help clear streets and mend houses.
“We could do that,” I said. “Why don’t we call?” I knew Mark would like the idea. As a former Red Cross disaster specialist, it was just the sort of situation for which he’d been trained. He called, and we spent the day at a devastated mobile home park north of the city. Mark chopped down trees to clear roads, and I served refreshments from the NicoVan. That night, we watched fireworks from a hilltop near our campground. They were beautifully boring, mere child’s play after the weather extravaganza of two days before.
I wish I could say that Detroit’s tornado attack was the closest call we ever had aboard the NicoVan, but months later in Virginia Beach, we faced an even more frightening threat. We were driving along an expressway in the direction of the local chapter of the American Cancer Society when, BAM! I thought a tire had exploded.
Mark pulled off the road, and we leapt out to check our tires. They seemed to be intact, but a wisp of steam was escaping from under the right front wheel. I sniffed it.
“That’s not steam,” I said. “It’s smoke.”
Mark jumped back inside the vehicle and suddenly two computer cases and a cellular telephone were hurtling my way with Marvin in hot pursuit.
“Catch!” yelled Mark. “And call for help!”
The NicoVan was on fire. I could see flames leaping three feet high inside the coach. I grabbed Marvin, slid down a grassy embankment, and dialed 911.
What was I saying about haircuts and hail? Trust me, they are insignificant irritations compared to the worst threat of all. Bar none, fire is a motorhome’s deadliest enemy. Nearly everything is flammable, and the parts that aren’t will still vanish in a holocaust of exploding gas and propane tanks.
Thanks to Mark’s skill with a fire extinguisher, the immediate intervention of a good Samaritan in a glass delivery truck, and the subsequent arrival of the Virginia Beach Fire Department, the NicoVan and its inhabitants escaped vaporization.
“You had about fifteen seconds,” said one of the firemen. “Then it would have been ka-boom.”
As it was, it took a week to set the NicoVan to rights. Mark, Marvin and I moved into a hotel that welcomed dogs, and a Mack truck repair shop rebuilt the NicoVan’s electrical system. Miraculously, the interior of the coach had escaped damage except for a fine layer of white dust, the spent contents of two fire extinguishers.
It had taken two, and the van was equipped with one. The anonymous angel in the glass delivery truck had provided the other, then vanished before we could shake his hand. Nowadays, we always carry two red cylinders, and whenever anybody asks for road safety advice, we always say, “Buy an extra extinguisher. You may catch on fire in a place where there are no glass delivery trucks.”
After the NicoVan’s media tour drew to an end in St. Louis, Mark and I worked directly with its corporate sponsors to launch a second circuit. From August, 1997 to January, 1998, the NicoVan was managed by the company we founded for the purpose. RTA Marketing was a quantum leap toward our goal of reaching the new horizons made possible by mobile communication. Technology had given us a home as wide as the continent. The virtual kingdom brought us community that circled the globe. With RTA Marketing, we entered the corporate realm.
Chapter 18
Dashboard Dreams
“You Don’t Look Like You Live in a Van!”
During our second year on the road, Mark and I were invited to a dinner party at the Knickerbocker Club in Manhattan. We chatted with the other guests and exchanged the usual information about residence and profession.
Except we were distinctly unusual, conversation-stopping in fact. A silence hung in the air after Mark described the Phoenix One. I felt a dozen eyes raking me from head to toe. A regal matron in a designer dress broke the spell. “You don’t look like you live in a van!” she blurted. It was perhaps the most sincere compliment I’ve ever been paid.
But what do people who live in vans look like if they don’t look like us? The problem lay not in our appearance, but in the expectations of a race of apartment dwellers. It was funny, really. I’ve been in Manhattan studios that are no bigger than the Phoenix, and I’d never dreamed of saying to their occupants, “You don’t look like you live in a gym locker!”
But you learn to expect ejaculations of surprise when you mix cultures in unlikely ways. You’re shocking when you want to conduct business with corporate America without owning a purse, when you dine at the Knickerbocker Club only hours after a visit to the Hawthorne Receiving Manhole. When you’re blazing trails, you have to learn to love the evidence that your machete is cutting through virgin brush, because most of the time, your progress is invisible to outside observers. After all, you don’t look like you live in a van.
We’d had to establish a stationary office in a megalopolis in order to give RTA Marketing credibility in its first incarnation. The blanket assumption that a business of any import could not be run from mobile corporate headquarters was still too firmly entrenched in the minds of potential clients, and our solution was almost laughable. RTA Marketing was still operated from the road. It just didn’t look like it lived in a van.
In the course of five years on the road, we’d hacked out solutions to many challenges facing mobile entrepreneurs, and with every improvement in our ability to conduct business and communicate, we raised our expectations a notch or two. The black box had been the first hurdle in what has become a long obstacle course toward nirvana: reliable, fast communication that works anywhere, anytime. The deus ex machina I once conjured to effect e-mail on the fly is now a minor demigod in a whole new tantalizing pantheon. Satellite communication looms on a near horizon.
The transformation has already begun, quietly, without fanfare. Corporations with large fleets of service technicians are equipping their vehicles with specialized radio systems to transmit voice and data in the field. Trucking companies install e-mail systems in the cabs of big rigs. Even the ubiquity of pagers and hand-held cellular telephones is part of the revolution.
If you ask someone to name a mobile business, chances are he’ll say, “Hot dog cart,” “Ice cream truck,” or “Carnival game.” These enterprises and their cousins have been staples of fair circuits, suburban neighborhoods and boardwalks for decades. Their owners are as interested as anyone else in the advances in telecommunications, and improved systems will make their lives easier.
But what of businesses that have never been mobile, businesses that have been tethered to location by the need for communication and community, but whose operations could be carried out on the edge of Flathead Lake as easily as on Wall Street? And what of enterprises in rural areas, where scattered populations mean that professionals must travel hundreds of miles a day no matter where they set up shop? Reliable mobile communications coupled with innovative vehicle design have the power to change the face of business forever.
Mark and I had progressed from free-lance writing to journalism to online publishing, all on a roll, and we’d followed up by managing a marketing company from the road. Dashboard entrepreneurship works, and we’ve barely plumbed its possibilities, barely identified it as an emerging phenomenon. But emerging it is, even if it’s not always obvious. Dashboard professionals can’t yet afford to look like they live or work “in a van.” They can’t afford earning epithets like “on the lam” or “fly-by-night.” In this they know a kinship with Native American hunters, the Nez Perce, the Umatillas. The agrarian history of Western Europe holds the American majority firmly in thrall. If you move around untethered to a base, you’re either poor or you’ve got something to hide. People shouldn’t be trusted unless they’ve got addresses supported by dirt, preferably dirt for which they hold the deed.
The most valuable real estate Mark and I own is our virtual domain on the World Wide Web. As miraculous as it still seems, it’s provided us with a new vision of home, community, and business. More than once, when someone asks me where I live, I’ve been tempted to answer, “Cyberspace.” I don’t, though, because it’s not quite true. As long as I still have to get real-life haircuts, I’m still living in the world of three dimensions. My permanent address may reside in the virtual universe, but at night, it’s not where I lay me down.
While I have no desire to live in virtual space, I welcome the power of its metaphor. The architects of cyberspace have christened their formless constructs with comforting nomenclature imported straight from the heartland. “Home” and “mailbox” lead the list of terms that suggest sedentary permanence. It’s a helpful benefit for the perennially migratory, since the bulk of English travel words carry negative connotations: migrant, vagabond, rover, transient. If you’re constantly in motion, you’re always having to explain yourself, but if you can point to a presence on the Web, it’s almost as reassuring as owning a fireplace. The Internet bridges the gap between a desire for roots and a yen to wander, two formerly conflicting dreams that now have a chance for simultaneous expression.
And of course the reach of cyberspace extends beyond North America’s shores. It circles the globe, and even extends to extraterrestrial points when it needs to. I believe it holds the power to unite earthlings everywhere. I believe it’s part of the white buffalo’s promise.
A Small White Miracle
The white buffalo was born on a small farm in Janesville, Wisconsin, in 1994. For many Native Americans, her birth fulfilled a sacred prophecy and heralded a new age of peace and understanding among all the people of the world. When stories of the unusual occurrence— the odds of an albino buffalo are no better than one in ten million— were reported by the press, pilgrims began arriving in Janesville to visit the calf. Hundreds came every day, and sometimes thousands.
Paul Bethe, a friend whose path crossed ours in Chicago, asked if we’d like to join him on an expedition to see the white buffalo. “I have the address of the farm,” he said. “And I know how to get there.”
On a morning in early November, 1995, we set out on our pilgrimage. The day was cold and gloomy, and by the time we arrived at David and Valerie Heider’s farm, steady rain had begun to fall. We parked in a boggy field, dug out our rubber boots and rain slickers, and followed makeshift signs pointing in the direction of a house and barn.
“Are we all still sure we want to do this?” asked Mark as we slipped and slid our way up the path. There was something absurd about slogging through a mire in the rain for the privilege of seeing a buffalo’s child.
“We don’t have to stay long,” I said, “But we’ve come this far. It would be silly not to walk the last hundred yards.” Nearby, two women and a man were carrying on a similar discussion. I heard the man say, “Shit. I can’t believe I’m walking through the mud to see a damn buffalo,” but none of us turned back. We soon arrived at the fence behind which Miracle was standing. Miracle. That was her name, and she was just standing there, nestled against her mother, in the rain.
People were standing nearby, a dozen or so. They were silent, and we stopped talking, too, even the swearing grumbler. My eyes were drawn to the fence. Hanging from every wire and post were offerings: tobacco pouches, feathers, handwritten messages, photographs, strands of beads.
I drew near the fence to take a closer look at Miracle, and found myself standing next to two teenage girls. One of them was crying silently. Mark and Paul joined me, and for twenty minutes or so, we just stood there in the rain.
And so did the buffalo. Nothing else happened, no sudden sun, no rainbow. We walked back to the Phoenix in the same gloomy rain, and the storm lasted far into the night.
It would be easy to dismiss the white buffalo as nothing more than a genetic freak, and a disappointing one at that. By the time we saw her, she wasn’t even white any more, just noticeably lighter than her near-black relatives. But I couldn’t disregard Miracle when I saw her, and I can’t forget her now. The prophecy is too lovely, its incarnation too wonderful to ignore.
Miracle’s presence on earth is just that, a presence. She is nothing more and nothing less than a white buffalo, a rare gift. She’s artistic talent in a baby, a novel in the mind of an aspiring writer, the promise of peace among all people. She’s unrequited potential, which is nothing at all unless we do our part.
The world isn’t made a better place because we wish it so, but because we create it so. A path is nothing unless it’s taken. Roads are merely pavement without travelers upon them. New technologies stand waiting behind a fence already festooned in offerings, but homage is only the beginning. We’ve paid our respects to the miracle, but unless we accept its promise and seize the day, we will find ourselves standing forever in the mud, forever wishing in the rain.
I say, what better time than now to grab your arrowhead and your red underwear? I say, let’s hit the road.
Megan Edwards
At home, at work & on the road
September, 1998
roadtripamerica.com
Photographs
Still hot to the touch on October 28, 1993, this is all that remains of the upper house, a former livery stable on the estate of Abbott Kinney.
Our living room was a former pump house on the Kinney estate, was built in the early 1900s.
In January 1994, the Phoenix One begins to take shape at the Revcon manufacturing plant in sou
thern California.
The Phoenix One takes on some boulders on one of our first off-highway adventures in Icicle Canyon near Leavenworth, Washington.
A 6.5 ton vehicle is hard on tires. Mark became very skilled at changing tires in challenging locations.
The Phoenix One is dwarfed by sequoias in Redwood National Park in early summer, 1994.
Daily chore: Mark set up drainage hoses for the black and gray water storage tanks.
The Phoenix One poses in slickrock country near Moab, Utah in January, 1995.
Robin Salzer hosted a “welcome back” party for us at his restaurant in Pasadena in 1995. Here, Freddie Speicher stops in for a visit.
Mark, Megan, and Marvin pose with the Phoenix One near the Rose Bowl in December, 1995. Photo by Florence Helmberger
Mark, Megan, Marvin, and the NicoVan in New Hudson, Michigan on July, 1997 Photo by Bill Schwab
The Phoenix One visits Chicago in 1996.
Mark, Megan, and Marvin—and RoadTripAmerica.com—are profiled in People Magazine in December, 1996.
Green Bay Packers legend Ray Nitschke with Mark and Megan in Green Bay, Wisconsin on August 25, 1997
Debbie Mazar, Great American Smokeout Spokesperson of 1997, with Marvin the Road Dog in the NicoVan at Times Square, New York City on November 20, 1997