Moving Stuff and Hauling Ass in a Diesel Ford Transit

It made the Ford Econoline feel like the Chrysler Building on wheels and most other modern vans seem to have been drawn up by apes. It begged to be caned. I fell hard.
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Originally published in the June 2015 issue of Road & Track.

Cross-country moves are both amazing and terrible. I was reminded of this two days ago, when I drove to Seattle from Road & Track's home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Old job: Executive Editor. New job: Editor at Large. Switching roles for more writing and a change of pace.)

Most of our house went into a moving truck. The rest came with me, in a diesel Ford Transit van borrowed from Dearborn. The Ford left the Midwest holding my dog, my friend and co-driver Jeff Diehl, and boxes of fragile stuff I wanted to keep an eye on. Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington. Three days. Instructional.

You expect a fully loaded cargo van to drive like garbage, a mule with too many bags. The Transit, a bright light in the current flock of European-style vans, sat carefree and comfy at 85 mph, bounding along on a wave of torque. Pile into a tight corner, and the stiffly sprung rear axle would just kind of roll-spit you out the other side, like an old Mustang on Percocet. It made the Ford Econoline feel like the Chrysler Building on wheels and most other modern vans seem to have been drawn up by apes. It begged to be caned. I fell hard.

The road does weird things to your head. There was babbling about the Transit's greatness to no one in particular. ("You there! Cow in that field! Steering feel!") In the mountains near Bozeman, Montana, I became consumed by an absurd, titanic battle with an Audi A4 Avant, countering the Transit's lack of pace with a hefty dose of bravado. Hunched over the wheel and squinting, I shook my fist at the sky. When we finally passed the Audi, Jeff looked into the driver's window.

"He's wearing headphones! Doesn't even know you're alive."

"Doesn't matter," I said, the speedometer creeping past 95 mph. "Every van dies. Not every van really lives."

At a Minnesota truck stop, possibly under the influence of monumental sleep deprivation, I bought a $2.99 bumper sticker that said "Princess" in curlicue font. It was still on the rear door when Ford's fleet guys retrieved the van in Seattle. As I watched them drive off, I noticed that someone's finger had drawn a heart around the sticker in road grime. I hope both things stay there forever.

In the West, you get a better understanding of everything great and terrible about America. In most states, the government asks that each residence have a mailbox. West of Wisconsin and north of Kansas, that requirement transmutes into a minimum of three pickups rotting in your backyard—every dwelling, every street, visible from the highway. One Montana house had five Ford Rangers of various vintages, lovingly parked in the dirt, next to a driveway the size of a football field. Truck stops sold vomitus taquitos and steaklike bison jerky. We got stuck in traffic next to a trailer park where each home had a detached garage almost as big as the trailer itself.

It all reeked of Aaron Copland and that Nineties TV commercial for beef. Open space: It's what's for dinner. (Though Montana's communal vibe suggests a missing postscript: You got a problem with that, you commie jackwagon?)

The dog, admittedly, helped the mood. A three-year-old English springer spaniel named Elly, after Bernd Rosemeyer's wife. Sweet, but also dumber than a bag of hammers. Despite the fact that her fluffy dog bed was perched in the Ford's cargo area, she insisted on riding between the front seats, head contorted over the cup holders, eyes locked on my face. Every time I moved her aft, she'd plop back up front, visibly uncomfortable. (Drive with animals, relearn life lessons. Love is weird. Also, what looks like suffering isn't always.)

And moving gives you a better understanding of your own possessions. The boxing-unboxing process is a weird kind of Christmas, unearthing things you don't remember acquiring. Do I really need a cocktail napkin from the launch of Bob Lutz's watch company? How, exactly, does one obtain a blank piece of 1970s Hoffman Motors BMW dealer stationery? What was I going to do with it—go back in time and prank-mail Germany? ("Achtung, Herren Falkenhausen und Bracq! Sind Ihre refrigerators running?") Plus, you know, boring stuff like furniture.

Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, three days. And everything great and terrible about America.

The moving truck should—and here I stress the conditional—arrive and unload everything in a few days. It left Michigan late. Movers operate on their own timeline; like Einstein's river, you can't control them, just go with the current. Maybe the water feels nice against your toes; maybe one of the loaders rips a hole in your couch. Too many moves over the past decade have helped me realize that much of life is simply allowing events to unfold. You can't hurry anything but panic.

Including the bleed-down of tension. I now have that sea-leg feeling you get after an epic journey, where you both never want to drive again and feel slightly empty because you're not behind the wheel. It's a cross between posttraumatic stress, Stockholm syndrome, and the good parts of a chemical addiction.

Predictably, it's hard to shake. And so I found myself diving into Craigs­list yesterday, laptop on my knees, on the floor in an empty apartment. There are cars on the other side of the nation. Some might even need to be driven back here. A lot of people live in this big old country, but few take the time to really see it. You don't traipse across your front yard occasionally, who says it's yours?

Sam Smith is an editor at large for R&T. He has not yelled at a cow since the incident in question.

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