There are many wonderful places in the world to wake up in the morning. Recently, and unexpectedly, one of these places for me was at a KOA campground in Nebraska.
I was traveling East on Interstate 80 in a Westfalia, a Volkswagen camper, which I had just purchased in Colorado from my brother. He’d started a business refurbishing old Westfalias. This past spring he found a 1985 model on Ebay in El Paso, Texas, bought it, and had it shipped to Colorado. As he told me all about it in conversations over the phone—its excellent condition and what he had planned for it (including installing a new fuel-efficient Subaru engine)—I started to think I wanted it before he sold it to someone else.
I’ve always liked Westfalias. I’ve always liked any sort of small home. When I was young, my aunt and uncle sometimes visited from Bronxville, New York. On Sundays we all drove around the Connecticut countryside and pointed out “Jimmy houses.” A Jimmy house came to be any small house, the more remote the more true to form. My mother says a Jimmy house also had few windows, but I don’t recall including that feature in what I liked.
In winter, after a big snowstorm, I built igloos. In summer, I built a couple of tree houses. One summer years ago a neighborhood girl and I walked upstream from our family homes and made a little stick hut to sit in and talk and listen to the water. My mother once asked me if the girl and I were kissing out there—the girl and I were about 13 at the time and certainly of an age to experiment—and the question struck me as odd. For some reason, it never occurred to me to do that with my friend. There was something about the little hut we made that was for talking, communing with the woods and the stream that rushed by. In my first few years on the Omega staff I lived in a trailer, and loved it. Perhaps that whetted my appetite for getting a Westfalia, the manifestation of which was years away.
One Sunday afternoon this past June I woke up from a nap and knew immediately I wanted to get the Westfalia. Perhaps I’d been told in a dream, just like in the days of old when people had dreams and did what they instructed because the dream was held as a message from the heavens. A couple of weeks later, I was in Colorado and my brother and I were putting the finishing touches on the Westfalia—my Westfalia now. And the next thing I knew I was driving it East across the continent.
Western and Midwestern states are huge compared to the matchbox-sized states of New England, where I grew up and went to college, and you don’t appreciate their immensity until you drive through them. I’d spent my first semester of college at the University of Denver, driving there with a friend in his car. When I got there the landscape and sky were too vast for me. The only patterns I’d known from spending my life among hills and rivers and meadows all crowded together and connected by old, narrow, winding roads, made me feel alienated and lost out there. In four month’s time I came home to be where I felt at home.
Now, some 30 years later, I was back on Interstate 80 waking up at the edge of a cornfield in Nebraska. I’d pushed open the top of the camper—it has canvas sides, like a tent—climbed up on the mattress there, and slept soundly, having exhausted myself from the long drive the day before. It was a sunny morning, and cool; the muggy heat that can plague the Midwest had not yet arrived. I heard the distant whine of traffic on the highway and didn’t mind it; it was the sound of my people—my tribe—at the moment. Travelers. But what I remember most is the feeling of fresh air on my face. I’d slept outside, I suddenly realized.
It had been years since I’d slept outside and now found myself missing the thousands of nights I’d not done this. On summer nights when I was young, I used to have a friend over to sleep under the stars in the backyard of my parents’ house. As a teenager, I slept on the screened porch. Throughout my 20s and 30s, my wife at the time and I hiked all over the place—the Adirondacks, Maine, Utah, Washington State—and slept in a tent. Outside you wake up to whatever the weather is, and accept it. You’ve no choice in the matter. I’ve found that if you spend the night outdoors, then whatever the weather is, you’re not separate from it; you embody it in a way that does not happen inside.
What I began to realize was that I was happy and content not only in the moment but also in the memories of all the earlier times when I’d slept outside; the past and present merged into one wonderful sensation. There was something else to ponder. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes in his book, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places, of what he calls the “oneiric” house. The word “oneiric” has to do with that which belongs to dreams. The oneiric house, Bachelard writes, is “a house of dream-memory, that is lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past.” The oneiric house, he says, is “the crypt of the house that we were born in.” It is where we are “in the unity of image and memory.”
I spent the first three months of my life sleeping in a baby carriage in a motel room in Buffalo, New York, where I was born. My hard-working father, then at the lowest one or two rungs of his climb up the corporate ladder, was shuttling between there and Connecticut, where he’d just landed a new job and was looking for a place for us to live while my mom stayed in Buffalo taking care of me and my older brother. The carriage was my little home on wheels.
Perhaps rooted in the core of my being, the Westfalia is like the baby carriage I spent my first few months of life in—it’s imbued with memories of home beyond my conscious reach, of a house that is gone but in which I used to dream my dreams and rest content with my own company.
I was reluctant to leave that campground. But after my second cup of coffee, the morning was well on its way toward noon, and I still had 1,500 miles and at least another three days to go before I reached my house—my so-called permanent residence, my mailing address—so I needed to be off.
I lowered the top, started the engine, backed out, and drove away. In the driver’s side mirror I saw the empty rectangle of grass where I’d spent the night, leaving no trace but two parallel rows of pressed grass where my tires rolled in and out.