VANDWELLER was my pen name before it was a word, and long before it was a VanLife movement term. People have been living in vans for as long as there have been vans, and there was a HUGE housetruck scene in the ‘70s that influenced me greatly through the book Rolling Homes by Jane Lidz. But it was ‘98, I was parked off the interstate (my home at the time) and felt a book brewing inside me, and I remember thinking, “I need a word to describe myself. I’m not homeless, it’s on wheels… am I a van liver? I’m a van… DWELLER. I dwell in a van. That’s it!” Well, it became my pen name for a number of self-published books in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Most notably Nomadic Notations and VanGo! And some music, too. I had all the vandweller domains and a site on vandweller.com, and - to date this all - my email was vandweller at AOL! It was early on in the internet, man. There were a couple of sites about converting buses, and me. The guy who started the first AOL chat room about this kind of thing asked me if he could use my name. I was honored. He called it Vandwellers. Now it’s a term you see all over in the vanlife/tiny home world. I think it’s super cool. I don’t think I started anything, but I know the word vandweller wasn’t online before I was.
The Vandweller chapters bookended a few years back east opening up my first music shop at 27. I’m 54 now and haven’t worked for anybody else since. Before that, ‘95-’96, I was in Spirit of The Wind - a 1988 extended-body Dodge. While the shop was happening, I knew I wasn’t going to stay up there, that this was a temporary step… so I bought & built Blue Moon, a ‘73 Ford “Parcel Van” box truck. I lived in it during 2000-2001, when I built a tiny shack deep out in the Texas woods. Those were the Vandweller years, I was online once I had the little shop going in ‘97, in with a group that found each other called “Rolling Homes” and we got together - twice! In Missouri. East and west coast folks, we had about a dozen people who met up. I’ll fill that in here, and other happenings, over time.
Where are they now? Spirit of The Wind was resurrected and given to a friend whose daughter needed shelter from a bad situation. From there, unknown. Blue Moon is parked where it landed me, its mission completed in the spring of 2000. In 2001 I fired it up for one last trip to Missouri for the second gathering, and it made it home and never started again. It was my first home out in the woods, and I recorded an album in it called American Bandwagon. Another tale for another time. Of the core of the Rolling Homes Across America little gathering, I’m the last around. The VanDweller books have been out of print for many years, and what’s around now - not to mention the whole online and YouTube video era - is SO much better.
MORE TO COME!
