Wouldn’t It Be Nice

Perhaps the strangest thing for us about these times is the number of people who have said to us something along the lines of, “well, you had three years to prepare for this, huh?” Or “not much of a change for you, eh?”

I’ve had plenty of time to meditate on these statements, but I am still puzzled about what people mean by them.

Let’s be clear. There’s nothing about living in an RV that prepares you for illness, nationwide shutdowns, supply chain disruptions, or anything else we’ve all dealt with in the past six months. If anything, living in an RV makes you much more vulnerable to these things¹. Where are you going to camp when public lands close (which has happened to us twice now)?

When people say these things I think maybe they’re referring to the fact that I’ve always worked remotely, and we homeschool our children, but that was true long before we started living in an RV. The other thing I’ve considered is that, historically, people who are willing to leave at the drop of a hat, tend to survive upheaval better than those who are dug in, but I don’t think that’s what the comments above are getting at.

What I think people are referring to is the very mistaken idea that there’s something self-sufficient about living in an RV. There isn’t. Look, I love living in the bus, but even I will admit that the self-sufficient notion is mostly fantasy.

There’s plenty about living in an RV that makes you self-reliant, which is well worth being, and will help you all the time, not just in these peculiar times, but self-reliant is a far cry from self-sufficient. Self-reliance means you know what to get at the hardware store, self-sufficient means you never needed to go the hardware store in the first place.

It’s an interesting notion, self-sufficient. When I looked it up in the Webster’s 1913 dictionary (the one true dictionary) nearly all the example usage was negative, bordering on pejorative. Self-sufficient was next to words like “haughty”, “overbearing”, and “overweening confidence in one’s own abilities.”

At first glance I thought, well, that does describe luxagraf fairly accurately, maybe we are self-sufficient. But whatever it used to mean, for most of us today it means roughly, sufficient for one’s self without external aid. Which is to say, no one anywhere on earth is 100 percent self-sufficient.

We think self-sufficient is a singular thing when in fact it’s a spectrum on which we all live, where at one end you have the floating chaise-lounge bound people in the movie Wall-E and at the other you have children raised by wolves. That there are more people at the Wall-E end of the spectrum right now seems indisputable, and any effort you can make to slide yourself down toward the wolf children is worth making in my opinion.

But just because you can get a month’s worth of groceries at Costco does not mean you’re self-sufficient for a month. It means you can plan ahead, that’s all. Similarly, if you think living in an RV is going to make you completely self-sufficient you are in for a learning experience. I know this because that’s how I envisioned living in an RV, and I have personally learned the hard way how wrong that vision was.

The easiest example of this is solar power. I need about three minutes of conversation to discover whether the person I’m talking to has ever actually lived entirely off solar power. Which is to say that, while I love solar power, it does not make you self-sufficient. Having solar slides you down the spectrum a bit closer to the wolf kids, but honestly the lifestyle changes you have to make to live with limited solar power do a lot more for your self-sufficiency than the actual solar panels (which don’t last forever, and have to be made in a clean room — got one of those in your RV?).

Typically people hear solar power, and think, oh cool, you’re self-sufficient for energy. And sure, we can run our freezer, lights, and charge all our devices with nothing more than the sun. That is pretty cool. In fact there are times when I pinch myself because it still seems so science fiction to me. Solar is awesome. When it works. But sometimes the sun doesn’t come out for five or six days, or we’re camped in a deep valley with only a few hours of sun a day, or we’re camped under trees, or a fuse blows, or a wire frays, or the alternator goes out and you don’t realize it until it’s too late and your batteries are dead because you never installed the isolator. These are not hypothetical scenarios. All of these things have happened to us.

And you know how we have saved ourselves every single time solar power has let us down? By connecting to the power grid. By admitting that we’re not self-sufficient and using the available shared resources of our times.

Want another example? Water. We can carry just under 80 gallons. We can stretch that to about six days if we don’t shower much. That’s actually crazy impressive. The average American uses 80-100 gallons of water every day². But it doesn’t make us self-sufficient at all. Not even close. If we happen to be camped near water then sure, we can filter and boil and get by pretty much indefinitely, but I can only think of a handful of times in three years on the road when this would have been possible.

Then there’s food. Food is the best case scenario. We can easily store two weeks worth of food. I believe we could probably go about a month, though it might be a little grim and vegetable-less by the end. I’m super interested in trying to grow some veggies in the bus³, but so far we have not tried this.

The single biggest limitation on our self-sufficiency is waste. I’d guess this is true for all RVers, but I do know that five people on a single black tank is somewhat extreme, even by RV standards. Under normal circumstances we can go about three days without dumping the tank. If we’re camped somewhere that it’s okay to dump grey water (AKA, dish and washing water), we can stretch our tank to six days. Six days. That’s the hard limit. Anything beyond that, and you are full of shit.

So for everyone thinking, damn, those RVers were really ready for this lockdown, yeah, not so much. If it seemed that way it’s simply because full time RVers started abiding by the rules later and stopped abiding by them sooner. And I think in most cases they did that not because they didn’t think the virus was a problem, but because really they had no choice. And that’s not were you want to be.

This is actually something I spend a good bit of time thinking about though. I am with you people who think RVs are self-sufficient. I wish there were a way to make an RV more self-sufficient. But I’ve yet to come up with a way to do that without going to extremes that are impractical. We could, for example, put out tarps and harvest rain water when it rains, and dew when it’s damp, but that’s way more hassle than it’s worth when you’re going to have to dump the tanks anyway. And this is the core of why an RV will never be very far to the self-sufficient end of the spectrum.

If you want self-sufficiency in travel, look to boats. The self-sufficiency of boats was born out the best of mothers: necessity.

Boats are more self-sufficient because they have no choice.

So long as you are always just a few miles from the grocery and hardware stores (like RVers) you’re never going to apply the same kind of evolutionary pressure and so you’re never going to get the same level of self-sufficiency in the outcome.

Every smart thing in the bus was taken from reading books on sailing. Sailors know how to store food and stretch water because they have no choice.

There’s a side effect of this that’s worth thinking about though no matter how you live. Without that pressure, you also don’t generate the kind of community that sailors have, and in the end, even with social distancing, that community is what I’ve seen sailors turning to more than their own individual skills. The collective sufficiency trumps self-sufficiency every time.

But you have to have that collective sufficiency, and I’d argue that the dynamics of sailing are what created it. Take a group of people, select for self-reliance out of the gate, because you have to have some degree of self-confidence and self-reliance to even begin to want to live on a boat, and then throw those people together and stir the pot for a hundred-odd years. What you’ll get is a tight-knit community of like-minded individuals who know the value of working together because they know the hardship of going it alone.

That last bit is the key. The hardship of going it alone. When the going gets tough, most RVers go home. Most people with houses lock the door behind them and hole up. That’s not to say we haven’t met great people on the road, or that communities don’t come together, we have and they do, but so long as there’s a fall back plan to fall back on, we all do.

If there is no backup plan and everyone around you is used to improvising, solutions will be found. If everyone around you has a fall back plan, no solutions will be found.

In the end this is really neither here nor there, except to say that no, living in an RV does not make you much more self-sufficient than living in a house. Buy a few solar panels, get a water holding tank and composting toilet, and you’ll be every bit as self-sufficient as we are. Throw in a garden, five years practice in the garden, and you’ll be well ahead of us.

Don’t get me wrong, I love living in an RV. It’s more fun, puts a lot more adventure in your life, makes you feel more alive, makes you learn to rely on yourself, and host of other things that make it my favorite way to live of the ways I’ve tried so far. Don’t let me put you off it if you’re thinking of trying.

This is really just to say that, no, we were no more prepared for this very interesting year than you were.