Driving Ms. Josie

There's a certain romance to traveling the back roads in a forty-two-year-old VW Vanagon camper named Josie. She's no sleek modern marvel, but she has something better: character. Josie is a boxy, unhurried beast, painted a faded shade of Assuan Brown and Samos Beige that once gleamed in the sun, now softened to suede by decades of weather. Her engine purrs with the steady rhythm of an old friend. It sputters and coughs now and then, a raspy uncle clearing his throat to remind you that time waits for no machine. Yet it is in those sputters and coughs, in the unpredictable roadside hallelujahs and muttered curses, that the true spirit of the journey shows its teeth.

Josie is more than a vehicle; she is a companion, a mule, an ark of half-forgotten dreams bumping along the two-lane blacktop. When she eases into a filling-station bay or noses under the shade of an ancient cottonwood, people look up. First they stare, puzzled by her square lines and two-tone coat. Then they smile—not at me, mind you, but at her, the way travelers once tipped hats to stagecoach horses after a hard pull. She carries more than backpacks and canned beans: she carries stories, rust-flecked histories, and the grease-shadowed fingerprints of every hand that ever opened her engine hatch. She carries rumor. And when she idles at the curb of a courthouse square, she does so with a traveler's dignity, like an elder who's seen the breadth of things and still finds something new to love in the face of each town.

Strangers smile—not at me, mind you, but at her, the way travelers once tipped hats to stagecoach horses after a hard pull.

1

Breakdowns are inevitable. You don't wander middle America in a forty-year-old van without expecting to picnic beside catastrophe. One miserably rainy I was lost and looking for the supposed ghost town of Alone, Kentucky the alternator light winked on like an accusation. I paid it little attention; I was closing in on my prey. I'd discovered the Alone cemetery; the town had to be nearby. Natch, nothing doing. I'd driven around and up and down the same series of backroad rises a dozen times looking for some hidden dirt road. My gas gauge read empty, which in Josie-speak meant she had just about six gallons left in the tank. I queued up the GPS and looked for the closest Walmart to gas up. My route directed me to Glasgow, and I turned her toward the target destination.

Once in the parking lot, I headed for a fringe parking spot to pull into and catch a quick nap. I could fuel up in the morning and shut her engine down. Waking from the quick nap, I decided to relocate, noise from the nearby road was just enough to be annoying instead of soothing. I turned the key and… nothing. Not a chirp, not a stunted, growling stutter. Nothing.

My mind instantly raced to the winking alternator light. She had tried to warn me; I ignored her. Then a sudden scary thought seeped over me: if I had found that ghost town, I'd now be stranded in it, with no cell service. I was drawing heavily on my karmic bank account.

Frustration clawed up my throat, but there was nothing to do except unroll the bedding, brew coffee on the butane stove, and watch thunderheads muscle the horizon. Birds jostled on the power line, curious about the intruder. I could almost hear Josie snicker: Slow down, kid. The view's better when the wheels quit spinning.

2

Romance lives in the imperfections. Josie's rear suspension squeaks and moans down dirt roads; her heater smells faintly of shoe rubber and bygone winters in who-knows-where. The dash rattles a Morse code no mechanic can silence. But those quirks are teachers. They make me listen. They make me lighten my foot, lean forward when climbing a hill, and pat the dashboard when we crest and the engine sighs relief. She has taught me patience the way a creek teaches stone—by persistent abrasion.

Speed limits mean little to a 67-horsepower air-cooled engine lugging half a studio apartment. Seventy-five on the interstate? Barely, but not likely. Fifty-five on a county road feels downright racy. Yet that slowness is invitation, not punishment. It leaves enough margin to read the hand-lettered signs—HOME-MADE FRY PIES 4 SALE or REPTILE ZOO NEXT EXIT—and enough time to debate whether a fry pie or a corn snake is more urgent. Slowness means you can smell alfalfa curing in a windrow, hear a cow bellow somewhere beyond the tree line, notice the color shift when the soil turns from clay to loam. A modern car rockets past those notes like a radio stuck on scan; Josie plays them on vinyl.

At night, camped at the end of a forest-service spur, rain patters her metal roof like fingers drumming a countertop, a lullaby no sound machine can counterfeit. Morning sun slants through the windshield, lighting dust motes that dance in warm currents. I make oatmeal on the stove, spoon it straight from the pot, and watch steam scroll across the cabin. Luxury can be measured in silence.

3

The engine's mid-range thrum becomes a metronome to thought. First come the trivial worries: Did I tighten that hose clamp? Did I have enough money in the savings account? After fifty miles, those fade, replaced by questions with longer tailwinds: Who am I when the phone loses signal? What parts of myself only breathe in the slow lane? Big existential shapes moving behind the clouds. Steinbeck, rolling west with Charley, found similar hauntings in the rattle of his custom camper. He wrote that travelers need time to "adjust internal sky to external landscape." Josie is my metered sky.

Somewhere just inside the Kansas state line, we idled at a railroad crossing while a mile-long freight train clattered north. The conductor, high in his cab, tooted two short salutes. For a second I imagined the van and the train trading war stories—old steel acknowledging older steel. We are temporary custodians of momentum; the machines know this better than we do.

Breakdowns, though—their gifts are grander. A burned-up voltage regulator in Glasgow, Kentucky, forced me to spend the night beside a trout stream lined with birch. No cell service, just moonlight and fish rising at dusk. The next morning, through sheer force of will, I determined that I could probably make it to the next town without too much damage to the battery, but the memory most luminous is the hush that dropped when the engine clicked cool. Without her failure, I would have barreled on toward the next postcard view, blind to this smaller grace.

Josie's square shoulders attract a certain folk: ex-hippies, mechanical nostalgists, little kids who've only known vehicles that communicate oil changes via dashboard emojis. They press hands to her flank like pilgrims touching a relic. At a grocery in Dawson Springs, a man in feed-store denim circled twice before asking what year she was. 1982, I told him. He tapped the body panel, nodded. "That's when vans were still honest." We stood neither strangers nor friends—just co-conspirators in the cult of honest steel.

When trouble comes, these people materialize. They hush no matter their politics, kneel beside the jack, offer a pry bar. Once, in Georgia, a preacher in shining shoes climbed under Josie in the drizzle to wire a dangling muffler bracket. "Hand me that coat hanger, brother," he said, as natural as reading scripture. Thirty minutes later he dusted off, grinned, and invited me to Wednesday supper at the fellowship hall. I left fuller than I'd felt in months: fried chicken, sweet tea, and ninety minutes of stories about the time the sanctuary ceiling collapsed under too much revival hallelujah.

These micro-communions are the gold seams soldering together the patchwork of long roads. I collect them like pressed flowers: names, situations, the peculiar tilt of a stranger's laughter. When Josie finally quits for good, I'll string those memories like beads and realize she never was just transport—she was lure.

There are days I imagine a newer rig: fuel-injected, climate-controlled, Bluetooth humming podcasts at 75 mph. Then I picture the conversations that would evaporate—no one approaches sleek efficiency on wheels. No one feels compelled to ask a Tesla driver how far he's come, where he's headed, whether he needs a socket set. Romance lives in the rescue. Romance lives in imperfection.

Besides, modern cars seal you off: triple-pane glass, whisper-quiet cabins, engines hidden beneath plastic covers. Josie, conversely, shouts her condition. She smells of gas when the float sticks, whines when the gearbox's second gear synchro begs lube, squeals belt if the alternator shaft runs hot. Riding with her is a duet: she sings minor 3rd harmony, I tap out the melody.

When the sun slips low, her windshield frames the landscape like cinema in slow motion. One evening in east Texas the whole horizon burned copper, and the van's flat front became a moving shadow theater—every tumbleweed rolling across tarmac exploded into silhouette. A sports car zipped by but saw none of it, its driver cocooned behind tinted glass, music bass to rattling. The romance of Josie is that she lets the world into the cabin: wind sneaks under door seals, sage scent fills lungs, road dust stripes the dashboard. She is permeability made automobile.

Nights bring routines: crack the window vents, drape a bandana over the reading light, draw her ancient, original equipment curtains. The mattress is thin, yet I sleep heavy. Somewhere past midnight the van settles—creaks, sighs, and cools. She is a critter then, curled up in her own fatigue. If coyotes yip, I imagine they're announcing the engine's heat ghost to their pack.

Morning is coffee gleaned from a cheap pour through contraption, eggs scrambled in bacon grease on the one-burner stove. Steam fogs the forward windows; I trace finger circles to peer out at whatever field, lot, or sandy arroyo we claimed. Nothing tastes as lonesome-sweet as breakfast in a parking pull-out while eighteen-wheelers huff by and dawn unwraps itself in slow pink sheets.

Romance requires risk. The risk is obvious: eighty-dollar tow fee turning into eighteen-hundred-dollar transmission job, or the risk of surrendering your neat itinerary to a cracked cylinder head. But there's a subtler peril: loving too deeply a contraption destined to strand you. I've learned to hold affection in my fingertips, never clenching. That way, when the final shudder comes, I'll pat the dash and climb out grateful instead of betrayed.

Lessons Josie teaches, in no particular order:

1. Set your mirrors wide—the past is large and will sneak up.
   
   
2. Use the shoulder when needed—there's more room there than you think.
   
   
3. A stripped bolt is not failure, it's negotiation.
   
   
4. When offered pie, say yes. Calories burn quicker than regret.
   
   
5. Keep a bar of soap for squealing belts and for hands that soil themselves helping.
   
   
6. Remember: every stranger is your mechanic-in-waiting.
   
   

Sage advice shaped from busted knuckles and county-road ash.

People ask what keeps me going when the van bucks and the bank account wheezes. I tell them about the porch lights. Drive through any town after dark—Chillicothe, Ohio, or Siloam Springs, Arkansas—and you'll spot a single porch bulb glowing over peeling paint, each one a lighthouse declaring there is still hospitality here. Josie pilots me bulb to bulb, proof-gathering for an argument that kindness persists.

One drizzly Thursday, after sixty dead miles, she rolled into an RV park outside Hannibal almost on fumes. I expected gate fees and suspicion. Instead an old couple motioned me over. We chatted a bit about Josie, how they'd had a VW bus back in the day. Loved it, they said. "Sorry we ever sold it," the man said. It was dinner time and they were fixing hamburgers over a charcoal grill. They offered me to stay for dinner. I quickly did the math: another can of beef stew vs. fresh ground beef. There wasn't even an argument in my head. I accepted.

One burger, a couple of cold brews, and a few hours of conversation about road life, the tour I was on, and it was beyond my bedtime. I rose to leave and offered some money for their hospitality. They refused. The woman simply asked to sit inside Josie, smell the vinyl, "hear the memories hum." We idled ten minutes while she told how, in 1979, they'd driven their bus to Yellowstone. "It rattled like a popcorn popper," she said. "But we heard each other talk every mile." That is the romance: the engine as conversation starter, the rattle as translator between generations.

Sooner or later, Josie will reach the hill she can't top: maybe a mountain pass too steep, maybe just the arithmetic of time. Until then we court each other across the map, exchanging vows at every sunrise. She promises one more crank; I promise to carry tools and humility.

In towns where interstates never came close, we park under ghost signs advertising chewing tobacco and ten-cent ice cream. Children peer through sliding glass, ask if she's a food truck. Teens pose for selfies, hashtag vanlife though they've never changed a tire. Old men kneel, trace fingertips over imaginary bumper stickers of their youth. They stand, eyes glinting like wrenches under shop light, and say, "Don't stop. We need you out here, reminding folks the road still belongs to dreamers."

Stories ride shotgun, it's true. And like any good romance, ours grows richer the longer it refuses to conform. Smooth asphalt is fine for rental sedans; give me washboard gravel, give me culverts swallowing mufflers, give me a sideways glance at the gas gauge, and a prayer for downhill coasts. In those margins I've met farmers who swap melons for spark plugs, grandmothers who bless trip and traveler with cedar-oil crosses on the windshield, baristas who scribble directions to free camping on paper cups. Romance is the economy of such exchanges—value traded in trust, not tender.

One day, perhaps, I'll park Josie for the last time—engine tired, frame freckled with rust, fan breathing its gasp. I'll step out, pocket the keys, and walk away slow. But I know this: long after scavengers salvage her parts, the romance will idle, valves ticking, somewhere in another pilgrim's chest. They'll hear it when they pass a dusty exit and wonder what might happen if they turned off the highway, slowed to human speed, and let the world climb in through cracked wing windows.

Until that day, we'll keep wandering: two faded tones, plenty of squeaks, plenty of room in the back for stray thoughts. The wind will push against her flat nose and spill around her corners with a sigh, as if even the air itself understands—some loves are better built box-shaped, rattling, vulnerable, unashamed of the patchwork keeping them together. Some romances are meant to go slow enough for the heart to keep up.