On Feeling Alive

There are a lot of van-life YouTubers out there. Folks who have, for either real or show, bought and refurbished vans and box trucks and old ambulances and trucks with pop up campers, and set off down the road in search of an unencumbered life. Without the need to stay tethered, they roam, primarily out West, it would seem, where the spaces are vast, from park to camp, back road to backwater, sometimes off trail for days at a time. They have it all: a place to sleep, a roof over their heads, a few days provisions, and an unending road unfurling from who-knows-where (but, importantly, always putting pavement between past) to the promised future. Even if it means making showers an every-few-day affair. It’s all so very bohemian, romantic.

I remember in high school a few buddies and I came up with a road trip plan. A week or two, NJ to California. We’d hit a few parks, a few small towns and a few major cities, maybe the world’s biggest ball of twine. We could make do with diners and gas station beef jerky, chip in for gas. None of us had long range cars, but we figured a Ford Escort could seat five comfortably. We’d see the country. We’d connect with the world, the American people, the landscape, the ceaseless sky and road. We’d see where the sun sets in the Pacific. We’d watch the moonrise over the Rockies. With a little savings, with a printout from MapQuest, we could make it work. Who was stopping us? After all, this trip would only be the beginning of everything, a rebirth into young adulthood.

I went off to college before plans made it any further than dreaming, as did a bunch of us. That’s what I was good for in those days, plans. Some of the guys stayed in town, and I think a few years later some of them did go on a road trip across country. I don’t know if for them it was as picture perfect as it all seemed to us then. If it changed them, if it redeemed them. If they’d do it all over again.

But this is to say I get the dream of van life. I get the dream of waking up somewhere new each and every day, building a life of limitless possibility. And apparently, especially during lockdown, so did many across the country. YouTube tends to amplify a voice, I doubt there are millions of van-lifers out there, but there are many thousand, and the creators among them are becoming more popular by the day.

A few days ago, they started showing up again in my suggested videos on YouTube. I don’t watch every one. Maybe it’s because I’m jealous of their freedom, or maybe it’s the opposite and I think it’s impractical, to want to settle down and build equity. I can’t make up my mind. At the end of the day, I think having watched a few surmises the premise of many.

But a video popped up that grabbed my attention. Natalie Lynn's “I Just Turned 20 and I Feel Alive.” The thumbnail is a frame of Lynn sitting cross-legged in the middle of an abandoned, tree-lined stretch of road somewhere in early fall, in the late afternoon, a mountain in the background where the road thins in the distance. She’s holding up a small cake with a single lit candle, smiling. Just out of frame would be her two-toned green and white camper van parked on the side of the road. I, too, have felt like Lynn, twenty and alive, but it’s been a while to say it nice. I wanted to relive those moments. To feel the boundless again.

As she says, Lynn never expected to be celebrating her twentieth birthday on the side of the road, but there she is, eating cake on the ground of a pull-off by what looks to be a lake with her friend Matheus, cars zipping past at twilight. The music is charming, off-beat. Then they’re dancing on a guardrail, goofing really, and Lynn’s voiceover says something that I remember all too well:

The point is, the older I keep getting, the more I start to realize I have to get comfortable with the fact that one day eventually I, and everyone I know, is going to die.

Maybe that’s the right of passage we all go through. Not the epic trip, not the various tests of character, but coming face to face with one’s own impermanence. At least, that’s what it was for me. This overwhelming sense that unless I got my shit together and did something, anything to leave my mark on the world, I’d be forgotten. I needed to rack up experiences as if they were points in a game, to feel the highest of highs and lowest of lows, to fill my diaries and letters with every color of life. Someone, somewhere, sometime in the future would look back and say, “this Andy guy, he lived.” But, like Lynn, that’s only because I was terrified of death.

Later in the video, to remind herself of her own impermanence and to face death head on, she and Matheus climb out over the abandoned Vance Creek Bridge in Washington, the second highest railroad bridge in the country. It scares them. But as the music swells and the drone pulls back from atop the bridge to reveal the damp, smokey, impossibly gorgeous Washington hill-top panorama, it’s impossible to not sense that at that very instant, Lynn is on top of the world. Alive in death. Alive because of death.

This is the promise of van-life. To live bold so that every moment feels, if not planned, deliberate. Earned. Well spent. Alive.

The comments on Lynn’s videos are relatable. Viewers want to either have the award-winning artistry and vision to capture their own lives as well as Lynn does, or to literally have her life, her freedoms and her philosophy and experiences. So much of YouTube’s popularity is spurned on by either admiration or envy, and Lynn’s videos garner both in spades, as do most of the videos in the van-life genre. Is that a bad thing? I don’t know.

Lynn is an influencer, in the same bucket of creators as the Kardashians, despite the fact that she’d probably cut off my head for drawing the distinction. Instead of hawking beauty products, Lynn is sponsored by an online thrift store. And I get sponsorships, you have to earn an income. But, having a sponsorship like that, even if it’s as quirky as Lynn seems, makes you wonder about the duality of living a truly free existence while obsessively framing every moment in order to make art, which in turn is only validated by viewership on a social media platform. It’s art in a nutshell in any genre, risking the authentic for the well-choreographed. It only works if the audience knows the art is genuine. I’m in that audience. I want to believe in Lynn.

Many van-life YouTubers make videos about the behind the scenes, the day-to-day minutia, risk the glamour for the insightful. They recognize that folks want what they have, and they can make content to empower the right decisions for those that are on the same path. It’s a concession, really. Sometimes the ideas for new videos run out, sometimes the never-ending rapture of the road has its downtime. Not everything in a free existence comes freely, and has to be earned.

And, I think, that’s the ultimate long-tail of recognizing one’s own impermanence. That for every world-changing moment, there are chores. For every grand experience, there are ten spent staring at one’s feet. Some of life is unavoidable, but it is no less living. It just doesn’t make for as good content.

But this brings me back to why I started writing this. At what point does the living become the artistry itself? At one point does philosophy mix with cinematography to the point that the two are irrevocably yoked? At that point, can anyone make the distinction between content and creator, and isn’t that the dream of every artist? To be awake in a dream? Watching Lynn’s video, I overwhelmingly believe that she is who she portrays herself to be. That this is real. When Lynn goes beyond just talking about her vulnerabilities, her fearing death at that specific point in her life, and expresses this twenty-minute video with such clarity and wit, she’s expressing something that validates who I was back then and to many extents, who I still am today. And for that, to me, it succeeds.