I wanted them to know the difference between the South, where they were born, the Midwest, the West, the Northeast. I didn’t want them to read about the deserts and mountains and forests, I wanted them to be in them. We were tired of the suburbs, and we wanted our kids to see the United States, to have a better sense of the place they were born. We bought it to make it our full-time home. We didn’t buy it solely so I would have a project. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine, back when that was a marker of cool. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is a 27-foot-long fiberglass container of beauty and joy. When you say “ motor home,” most people picture something that looks nothing like our old Dodge. In June 2015, my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motor home that, at the time, was just shy of its 50th birthday. My kids called it the bus. Sign up for our Longreads newsletter for the best features, ideas, and investigations from WIRED. So I stop right in the middle of the road. We are on Highway 168 somewhere in Eastern California, between the Nevada ghost town where we camped last night and the top of the White Mountains. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. Dotted here and there are clumps of creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow rabbitbrush. To the east, as far as I can see, the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way toward a desert valley floor, dust-swept and brown. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, and limestone laid bare by dynamite. I start looking for a place to pull over.
The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000-pound RV on your back will eventually make any small-block engine overheat. But you can smell trouble coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slipping in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That broke several thousand desert miles ago.
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