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The vanner moves about — without quite traveling, if that indeed means changing places. The true vanner's place is the same at the end of each voyage as at the start. By this mode the vanner does profoundly escape in several ways. He or she escapes from the homogenized countryside into an environment that is, to say the least, individualistic. And leaves behind the common level of traffic for a higher perch that offers, many claim, the illusion of superior mastery of the road. In a time of widespread popular feelings of powerlessness, the vanner ascends to a swivel driver's seat that is called, within the cult, a "captain's chair." Ensconced thereon, of course, he has ventured into the technological fantasy of melding humankind and machine. Surely the vanners have also fulfilled Boorstin's unsettling vision of a people who "prefer to be no place in particular — in limbo, en route."
Vanners, to be sure, see themselves in a simpler light. They think of themselves, as one of their songs puts it, as "freewheeling and easy . . . livin' our lives while we can." Such a romantic view is no doubt harmless. Yet it offers less insight into the new nomads than can be found in the remarkably prophetic first chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher . . . All is vanity."
—Frank Trippett