1969 Econoline

I’ve always owned vans. The first one I got was a 1969 Ford Econoline. I paid for it in some minimal amount of cash and half a pound of Mexican brick weed, the kind that gets smuggled across the boarder crunched into its densest possible form and inserted into something innocuous, like a car driven by a drug dealer. I also bought a dog with the same currency during this period of my life. This speaks as much to the proprietors of the establishments I shopped at as it does to who I was at the time.

The van was metallic green with a yellow Starskey and Hutch stripe on each side – think of a more angular Nike swoosh. The grill and round headlights spoke of it’s age, as did the font of it’s logo. It had the obligatory shag carpeting on the floor, walls and ceiling. Homemade benches and camping utilities and captains chairs. By the time I came into possession of this vintage love-machine, it was 1993, and the carpet had absorbed the sordid events of dirty hippies, metal heads and deteriorating dreams for a quarter of a century. I had delusions of rebuilding the green machine to its former glory, but these disintegrated in clouds of pot smoke at a slightly faster rate then the sheet metal of the Econoline was disintegrating into rust.

The steering linkage was so worn out that one could turn the wheel 180 degrees without affecting the direction of the tires. This didn’t stop me from sailing it home from Boulder, Colorado, where I was attending university, to Deerfield, Illinois one summer and parking it in my parents suburban driveway. The neighbors on our quiet street must have considered keeping their kids off the streets upon seeing this leaking abduction mobile lurking in a puddle of it’s own filth on Linden Ave.. My father insisted on bringing the beast to a shop to make my trip back to Colorado slightly less suicidal, and the mechanic, after making a couple repairs (the equivalent of dropping a bucket of water in an empty well) suggested that the vehicle wasn’t worth throwing away, as it was likely to voluntarily evaporate into vapor within the week. None the less, I was adamant that the first piece of shit transportation I had ever bought with my own money/drugs would not be abandoned in the land of large yards and small minds. It would return to the land of big mountains and cloudy minds.

The van should not have been on a highway. The aforementioned steering issue and long stretches of Nebraska highway combined to make my job more akin to sailing a large yacht in treacherous waters than driving. I would spin the wheel from one end of its free zone to the other, bouncing back and forth as if tacking upwind. I must have yelled “coming about” a few times to my first mate, an unfortunate cannabis-traded Golden Retreiver – Wolf hybrid fighting for balance in the back, wondering at her fateful ownership.

I should also mention, that the van contained everything I owned, as upon leaving Boulder, I had been homeless, one week out of my lease and sleeping in my ship. When, somehow, I made it back to Colorado, I lived in the Econoline for another week or two, going to my job as a bellman/elevator attendant at the Hotel Boulderado and leaving my poor dog with a bowl of water and food under the van to fend for herself in the blocks surrounding my parking space. I would come home in the evening and call her name – Sasha, and 9 times out of ten, she would come, sometimes a day later.

I found housing with friends and the Econoline slowly faded from use. I can’t exactly recall what became of that van. It’s lost in smoke to me. Perhaps it did finally evaporate. Perhaps I sold it to some naïve sap. Maybe it’s been reborn into new purpose and identity as I have in the many years since we parted company. Most likely, it’s rusting in a field somewhere in Colorado. You can see it from the highway, sinking in the tall grass, waiting for the snow to blanket it and the many stories it has carried.