There's No Madness Like Nomadness

By Frank Trippett

They are named Phantom Flasher, Lazarus, The Red Onion, Chiquita Vanana, Vandal and such. They ride high and graceless, as always, but now their boxy bodies cry out for attention with garish designs and obstreperous Pap art: frontier scenes, Hawaii schlock, seascapes, erotic mush. Even one--the specimen, say, that flashes nude girls in and out of view with Op-artful magic--can pop the eyeballs. When large numbers heave into sight, zooming along the road in a spaced-out phantasmagoria of a caravan, they can set the innocent motorist to gaping and muttering, "What is going on here?"

The short answer is that vanning has become an American craze. Vanning? To van once meant to ship freight in a certain way. Today it also means to personalize a common van and build a life-style around it. Throngs of Americans are doing it. Some 2 million vans are in use today, and the auto industry is cheerily convinced that it will sell another 570,000 this year.

More striking than the number of vans is what the vanners do to them. The workhorse vehicle formerly coveted mainly by plumbers and other craftsmen winds up as a convertible den-bedroom-kitchen within and a showcase of accessories on the outside. Furnishings are usually elaborate, often splendid. Probably nine out of ten custom vans carry eight-track stereo, and crushed-velvet upholstery is not all that unusual. Neither are stained glass windows, wine racks, built-in television, fake fire places. Mirrors are very popular--on walls and ceilings. A few vans even boast chandeliers. Some rigs cost $20,000 or $30,000.

Vanners themselves, or at least the zealots, seem as much a cult as a fellowship. They have formed hundreds of societies. Many drive hundreds or even thousands of miles to converge with other vanners at picnicky socials that are held all over the country. Such a bash is known as a "truckin" or a "burnout" or a "push" or--ah!--a "van-go." Invariably, a key feature of the outing is the mutual admiration of vans and the adorning artwork. Some paint jobs cost $3,000. News of ever fresh extravagances circulates in 25 or so magazines devoted to vanning.

Plainly, the nation is witnessing a new form of nomadness, already epidemic and spreading fast. Why? Even though the craze began in California, it is not necessarily incomprehensible. Many observers shrug off the outbreak of vanaticism as merely an acute fling of the gadabout restlessness always evident in America. Any Pop sociologist might be tempted to interpret the van binge as simply a bizarre elaboration of the American's longtime romance with the automobile. At one time, folklore attributed the increase in vans to newly liberated youth's need for a convenient trysting place; indeed, the current B-epic film called The Van implies that this is still so. Yet advantaged juveniles cannot be blamed for the flocks of high-priced custom vans that have popped up in the past few years. In fact, vanning enthusiasts include a good many old coots as well as young marrieds, loners and lovers as well as adolescents.

No. None of the facile, offhand explanations would satisfy any reputable vanthropologist, if there were such a thing. The automobile industry, for all its reputed mastery of behavioral science, hardly advances real understanding of the phenomenon.

Says Ford Product Planner Les Ellis: "The van is an escape."

One might just as usefully explain the Hula-Hoop mania of the 1950s by pointing out that the hoop was a circle. Obviously the van is an escape -- to the vanner. But this does not tell very much to numberless Americans who would cringe at living in a self-propelled room that has been aptly likened to "a San Quentin isolation cell." In the final analysis, the vanner's conspicuous escapist tendency sheds no light on prime motives.

Even to the untrained eye, it must be clear that the true vanner, the compleat vanner, the certifiable vanaddict, is up to much more than has yet been figured out. But what? It may be that a clue lurks in some of the little-noticed paradoxes that glimmer on the very surface of the rites of vanning. One of these is that, in essence, to van is to get away from it all while going to great lengths to take it all with you. Another can be glimpsed in the strange fact that the vanner drives long distances to destinations at which the main activity is a celebration of the vehicles that have made the journey. Such intriguing realities must be taken into account by any respectable theory of the nomading crowd. And they do nag up some interesting possibilities.

One is that the true vanner, at heart, is not fundamentally interested in getting anywhere, only in going. This notion suggests that he (or she) may be the very embodiment of the American traveler envisioned by Social Critic-Historian Daniel Boorstin in his 1961 book The Image.

Boorstin believes that travel, which implies movement to varying places, has been largely transformed into a "pseudo event" by the homogenization of the U.S. roadscape, along whose orange-roofed sameness one is always in essentially the same place -- here, there, everywhere, nowhere.

He therefore chronicled the emergence of an American traveler who would "feel most at home above the highway itself."

The vanner comes close to filling that bill -- and would come closer except for the marvelous trick of contriving a vehicle that allows the inhabitant not only to feel at home above a highway but to be at home -- stereo blaring, coffee warming.

The paradoxical realities of vanning suggest another possibility. Perhaps the vanner's true destination is -- the van itself. To grasp this radical notion, one may need to shift into metaphysical gear. Yet consider the vanner's relationship to the van: the true vanner has not merely romanced the motor vehicle in the traditional American way. Actually, the vanners have embraced and subjugated the homely panel truck and, with Pygmalion's zest if not his graces, have transmogrified it into something utterly new and distinct: a mobile monument to self. It is self-contained and self-containing, and its womby little room is packed with the motherly comforts of home, while its skin screams advertisements of the inhabitant's wistful dreams.

The vanner moves about -- without quite traveling, if that indeed means changing places. The true vanner's place is the same at the end of each voyage as at the start. By this mode the vanner does profoundly escape in several ways. He or she escapes from the homogenized countryside into an environment that is, to say the least, individualistic. And leaves behind the common level of traffic for a higher perch that offers, many claim, the illusion of superior mastery of the road. In a time of widespread popular feelings of powerlessness, the vanner ascends to a swivel driver's seat that is called, within the cult, a "captain's chair." Ensconced thereon, of course, he has ventured into the technological fantasy of melding humankind and machine. Surely the vanners have also fulfilled Boorstin's unsettling vision of a people who "prefer to be no place in particular -- in limbo, en route."

Vanners, to be sure, see themselves in a simpler light. They think of themselves, as one of their songs puts it, as "freewheeling and easy . . . livin' our lives while we can." Such a romantic view is no doubt harmless. Yet it offers less insight into the new nomads than can be found in the remarkably prophetic first chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher . . . All is vanity."

--Frank Trippett

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