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Says Ford Product Planner Les Ellis: "The van is an escape."
One might just as usefully explain the Hula-Hoop mania of the 1950s by pointing out that the hoop was a circle. Obviously the van is an escape — to the vanner. But this does not tell very much to numberless Americans who would cringe at living in a self-propelled room that has been aptly likened to "a San Quentin isolation cell." In the final analysis, the vanner's conspicuous escapist tendency sheds no light on prime motives.
Even to the untrained eye, it must be clear that the true vanner, the compleat vanner, the certifiable vanaddict, is up to much more than has yet been figured out. But what? It may be that a clue lurks in some of the little-noticed paradoxes that glimmer on the very surface of the rites of vanning. One of these is that, in essence, to van is to get away from it all while going to great lengths to take it all with you. Another can be glimpsed in the strange fact that the vanner drives long distances to destinations at which the main activity is a celebration of the vehicles that have made the journey. Such intriguing realities must be taken into account by any respectable theory of the nomading crowd. And they do nag up some interesting possibilities.
One is that the true vanner, at heart, is not fundamentally interested in getting anywhere, only in going. This notion suggests that he (or she) may be the very embodiment of the American traveler envisioned by Social Critic-Historian Daniel Boorstin in his 1961 book The Image.
Boorstin believes that travel, which implies movement to varying places, has been largely transformed into a "pseudo event" by the homogenization of the U.S. roadscape, along whose orange-roofed sameness one is always in essentially the same place — here, there, everywhere, nowhere.
He therefore chronicled the emergence of an American traveler who would "feel most at home above the highway itself."
The vanner comes close to filling that bill — and would come closer except for the marvelous trick of contriving a vehicle that allows the inhabitant not only to feel at home above a highway but to be at home — stereo blaring, coffee warming.
The paradoxical realities of vanning suggest another possibility. Perhaps the vanner's true destination is — the van itself. To grasp this radical notion, one may need to shift into metaphysical gear. Yet consider the vanner's relationship to the van: the true vanner has not merely romanced the motor vehicle in the traditional American way. Actually, the vanners have embraced and subjugated the homely panel truck and, with Pygmalion's zest if not his graces, have transmogrified it into something utterly new and distinct: a mobile monument to self. It is self-contained and self-containing, and its womby little room is packed with the motherly comforts of home, while its skin screams advertisements of the inhabitant's wistful dreams.