Up in the Air

I tore the rear air conditioning unit off the back of the bus today. It joins the front unit in the growing pile of bus trash at the side of our house.

Afterward I stood back and looked at the Travco. All the clean lines and curves joined together again, no more air conditioning warts to interrupt the sliding smooth and unbroken swoop of white and blue. The big blue bus looked sleek and whole again.

I’ll admit it gave me no small measure of satisfaction, thinking that perhaps, amidst the exponentially increasing insanity, I’d made some tiny thing right in the world. It was that same sort joy that comes from eating really dark chocolate. The aesthetic perfection of hundred percent dark chocolate.

I didn’t really get a chance to savor this feeling because the universe hates smugness and soon after I had another thought, hmm, maybe I should check and see if it’s going to rain any time soon… Oh, well, yes it is. For three days straight. Starting tomorrow. And I just opened a fourteen inch square hole in the roof of the bus. Genius.

I got a trash bag, some painter’s tape, some duct tape, a dictionary of German swear words, and got to work.

I had some time up there on the roof of the bus to reflect on what I had done. More or less an incredibly impractical thing. In the service of what I think is my offbeat, but at times deeply felt sense of aesthetics, I had ripped out two at least partly functioning air conditioners.

Actually I should probably look up aesthetics in the dictionary and make sure that’s what I’m acting in the service of. Or I should read Kant. But then it all gets very technical and is predicated on the belief that there is an absolute sense of “good” and “bad” to beauty and I don’t know if it matters that much. Maybe dark chocolate metaphors are good enough. If the dark chocolate is good enough. Screw Kant.

Somewhere in a tangle of duct tape and torn plastic trash bags, I got to wondering what Kant would have made of a 1969 Travco. The engine would be new and presumably mind blowing, but Kant was probably familiar with Gypsies at least. The mobile home concept would be familiar. Probably frowned on, but familiar. But what would he make of tearing out an object of convenience and comfort because I think aesthetic integrity and beauty trump personal comfort?

I decided there was a high probability he would think I was an idiot to forego the comfort of air conditioning, which, from his point of view, would be like magic. The problem is I’ve never been able to get through more than a few pages of Critique of Judgment without being overcome with a desire to reach back through time and give the man a hug¹ and say, relax, it’s all going to be okay.

Aesthetics have always seemed pretty simple to me. There is stuff in the world that makes you feel delight. So when you discover this beauty and delight in the world around you, you embrace it and do what you can in service of it². Like removing ugly air conditioners.

The designers of the Travco, to my mind, felt the same way, though they were doubtless bound by certain economic and marketplace constraints I don’t have. Hence, warts on the roof if you must. But no one who’s of a purely practical bent would ever have designed the large front sliding windows the way they are designed. They’re wildly impractical, worse, they leak. But there they are. Pure aesthetics. They look like the person who designed them had discovered delight in their beauty. Little water coming in? Get a towel.

The marketplace does not value aesthetics though. The wonderful sweeping curves of the Travco’s windows leaked badly enough that at some point (early ‘70s) the idea was abandoned altogether.

Aesthetics are a learning experience, a feedback loop of sorts, though the experience is better when it creates change in other direction — adding in wildly impractical, but aesthetically delightful, sliding windows as it were.

Consider dark chocolate. I’d never really had any until I started dating my wife. I thought chocolate was something that skins a cheap candy bar full of nougat and indecipherable ingredients. The first time my wife gave me a bit of real chocolate was revelatory. The possibilities of life expanded, I had discovered more joy and beauty. Aesthetic progress you might say.

Aesthetics are a life long process, always in flux, that’s part of what drives us all to want to know what’s around the next corner, over the next hill. As naturalist and herbalist Juliette de Bairacli Levy writes, “I believe that this endless search for beauty in surroundings, in people and one’s personal life, is the headstone of travel.”

My own aesthetics are like yours I imagine, complicated and often contradictory, nothing so firmly delineated as to please Kant. But one thing I have figured out is that comfort is transitory and moreover, relative. Aesthetics are neither³.

Which is to say, removing the air conditioner might mean that I end up hot, sweating and unable to sleep, but this too, as they say, shall pass. I won’t always be hot sweaty and unable to sleep. I will always have to look at the air conditioning wart that used to be on top of the bus. Comfort must be chased; beauty exists.

This is what I kept telling myself the next morning as I mopped up the floor where all the water had come pouring in after my duct tape and trash bag covering collapsed under the weight of accumulated rain water. Comfort is relative. Beauty just is.

For those of us from the relative north, one of the stranger sights in the tropics is the way everyone grabs a jacket the minute the temperature drops below 80 degrees. Even though I have been on the other side of it; living through a succession of New England winters with less and less pain each time. Still, I’ll never forget the first night I spent in Goa. The sun went down, the temperature dropped to about 80 and the jackets came out. One person’s balmy evening is another person’s winter.

By the time I got to Seam Reap several months later I thought I had adjusted a bit. I had not. It was hot, hotter than anything I have experienced before or since. Hotter than Death Valley. I was traveling with Matt and Debi at the time and somehow we convinced ourselves that we didn’t need air conditioning. To be honest I think it was Matt that convinced Debi and I. But he was right.

During the day we spent our time outside exploring Angkor Wat in the heat of the day, when the rest of the tourists were passing the time in air conditioned cafés). We went out in the heat of the day precisely because it was hot, because hardly any other tourists did. We had Angkor Wat to ourselves.

We could have returned home to a nice air conditioned room. But if you do that you never adapt. Our bodies are fantastically adaptable machines over the long run. You get used to the heat. This never happens if you retreat to air conditioning at every opportunity.

At night we would crank the ceiling fan to 11 and then, one after the other, take the coldest shower we could get, which was just below scalding because the water tank was in the sun all day, and then dive in our respective beds in hopes that we’d would fall asleep before the real sweating started.

What does this slightly masochistic experiment have to do with aesthetics? Nothing directly, but I came away with from that experience knowing that comfort is relative, both psychologically and physiologically. Seam Reap set my relative quite a few notches above where it had been previously and ever since then I have never really been hot. Sure, it gets moderately unpleasant to be out working in the heat of the day in the Georgia summer, but every time I catch myself about to complain I think, well, at least it’s not as hot as Seam Reap.

If you’re going to be spending a lot of time in the heat it makes more sense to push through a bit of discomfort until you start to adapt to it than it does to hide out in air conditioning all the time. Eventually, after a few years I suspect, you’ll be pulling out the jacket when the thermometer dips below 80.

Adaptation may well be our greatest talent as a species. Air conditioning undercuts that.

So in the end it makes more sense to tear out aesthetically unpleasant air conditioning units than it does to keep them. Comfort is relative and transitory, aesthetics are not.

That said, up until now I’ve been making it sound like a binary choice — air conditioning wart atop the bus or nothing. I am not the only one living in the Travco. And the one thing I put higher than aesthetics is never impose your will on someone else. Plus, I do like to have my dark chocolate and eat it too.

I would never subject my kids to Seam Reap without air conditioning. Not at their age anyway. Children are physiologically different, their bodies aren’t as good at cooling themselves as adults are.

That’s why I took the now useless 110V wire from the roof air conditioner, extended it with some new wire and rerouted it behind the closet and down to where the refrigerator used to be, where there is now plenty of room for a window air unit, which will serve as our new air conditioner and heater.

I can hear Kant breathing a sigh of relief. The magic is there if we need it. The beauty is there as well. Granted, I ripped out the generator, which means we’ll never be able to run the air for long, but we should be able to run it enough to cool things off in the evening before bed (and we can run it as much as we like if there’s shore power around).

If it does get so hot that no one in my family is happy, or god forbid, our dark chocolate starts to melt, we’ll do what people with movable homes have done for millennia — go somewhere else.