Or, the van is dead! Long live the van!
Brian stayed home from church Sunday morning because he’s been ill and was still not feeling one hundred percent. He planned to take the van out “for a stroll” since it had been resting in its parking space all week.
After the service I was talking to friends when he called, and then I noticed he’d called once before as well. I didn’t answer right away. I was like, “Hm, I wonder what he wants,” and my friends were like, “Do you think maybe it’s an emergency?” So I called him back.
When he answered, he was yelling over all sorts of background noise, and I could hardly make out that he said, “The van’s on fire!”
“What?! Are you kidding me?!” I shrieked in the middle of the sanctuary.
“Jen, the van is gone!” he said, like what you would say if a person you knew had died suddenly in an accident or unexpectedly. It’s gone! It’s totally gone. We lost the van.
He told me where he was1, and I ran to the car to pick him up. Thank God he was okay.
Thank God we have another car!
When I got off the Highland Park Bridge and started driving down 28 towards the Fox Chapel exit, I could smell the smoke and there was a slight blue haze in the valley. I couldn’t see the van until I got off the ramp, was re-routed through that small shopping center’s parking lot, parked and got out of the car. Brian walked towards me and was truly, truly fine. Completely and totally fine! We walked over to look at the burnt out smoking van together and stood there just staring at it. We had to keep looking at it because it was so unbelievable. If we looked away, we might begin to doubt it happened.
Brian had jumped out of the van well in advance of it burning in earnest. He called 911 and help arrived as The Conflagration truly commenced. At some point, the propane tank2 blew in a bright yellow bloom. I only saw a picture. The fire was out by the time I arrived. The shell of it was barely recognizable. The pop top was completely burned away. The tires had melted. The guy with the tow truck had to scrape ashes and innards off the road and shovel them into the van before he took it away. We didn’t stay around to watch that.
When the engine stalled, he coasted off the highway to a safer place. I mean, what’s a safe place when your vehicle starts smoking? The van rolled to a stop across the street from a gas station. But there was less traffic there, and probably in the end, caused less of a ruckus and delays for people driving through. He got well away from it when the gas really caught.
I said that already. But I have to keep reminding myself that it’s all okay, it was the best case scenario, if you have to lose your vehicle to fire. No one was hurt. It could have gone many worse ways— at worse times in worse places with worse consequences. I have to remind myself that this is really how it happened, and I’m not going to wake up and find out that Brian really got hurt or died or someone else got hurt. Or that I was in there with him, and we were trapped or something. Or that we started a forest fire somewhere. Thank you Jesus.
We went back home, less than five miles away, and sat around the house in a kind of daze, texting everyone what happened, experiencing their own shock and amazement as if it was our own all over again. “I know!” Sharing it helped make it more real for us, less like a weird dream. Yes, this did happen to us. Yes, everything turned out okay. Yes, it is the cuckoo-craziest thing that has happened to us, maybe ever, in terms of bizarre happenings. Yes, it could have gone so much worse! Reassuring them reassured ourselves.
Seb, sweet son of mine, reached out to me separately to see how I was doing. He and I get the most emotionally attached to our vehicles. He was making sure I wasn’t too sad. I grieved hard for the old red VW Eurovan, the one we had when they were little kids3. But this one we’ve only had for a year, only known for a year, and while there are things I loved about it, there were things I didn’t like that were never resolved. The engine ran too rich and smelled like gas all the time. Brian was often on message boards hearing what people who owned similar vehicles had to say about this, and that it ran rich was kind of common. It didn’t seem like something to be alarmed about. It passed inspection, you know. I also didn’t like that it didn’t have a water hook up. It could carry water in a tank, and even though we cleaned it, who knows what was growing in there, so we didn’t use it. But that was a very trivial thing. I loved that it was a stick shift, and though it was a clunky behemoth, it drove in its own weirdly, smooth, pleasant way once it got going. I loved the little sink and stove, my canvas pop-top bed with mesh windows surrounding it. I’ll miss it, but I’m kind of relieved. I’ll miss the idea of it more than the actual van itself. If VW Eurovans didn’t end up having major problems, it would be The Perfect Vehicle for us. Or, if only either of us were mechanics.
I wrote about getting this van over a year ago, and the meaning behind it4. I assign so much meaning to everything, especially these vans. It’s part of the writer in me, seeing connections and meaning where it’s not outwardly obvious. I’m trying hard not to think that this van going up in flames isn’t a bad sign for #brian&jen2.0. That would be dumb. But now that this van is gone, we’re back to the drawing board, trying to figure out, how does #brian&jen2.0 move forward, so to speak? It’s an important question. We are climbers. We like camping. We like going on long trips to camp and climb. We tried a Eurovan do-over, and well, that just exploded. I don’t think we want to join the ranks of 90% of the US outdoorsy population who own crazier and newer and more expensive camper vans than ours. Do we look back to the days of our youth and start tent camping again? Sleeping on the ground, again? Or maybe we’ll get a truck and build out the back of it for sleeping and storage. Maybe we’ll get a super small and light trailer we can tow with a smaller car. Maybe we’ll talk about this forever and never truly launch #brian&jen2.0 because of decision-making burnout5.
I’m being dramatic. #brian&jen2.0 has launched just fine, and we are on the slow, gradual swell of the empty-nester-learning-curve. We’re figuring out what is most important to us and what our priorities are for this time of our lives. We can’t go back to our youth before we had kids, and we can’t go back to who we were when the kids were younger. We aren’t those people anymore. We may have similar loves and desires, but we have different priorities now that we have lived a good bit more life. Our hormone levels have changed. Our energy has settled. We don’t enjoy, so much, the sudden jolt of fear and ensuing rush of adrenaline. We never really, truly loved that, but this car fire may have burned it completely out of us for good. We’ll probably move forward in life more calmly, cautiously, which may end up looking on the outside like standing still.
Right now, we’re busy tallying up the items we lost in The Conflagration because our home owner’s insurance will cover most of that loss. Thank goodness for home owner’s insurance! Brian has entitled the spreadsheet Things We Lost in the Fire after a song by some sad band he listens to when I’m not around. We’ll replace these items. They are so easily replaceable because they are not necessities. All of the things we lost in the fire were extraneous. We’re still surrounded by more than we need. Abundance even.
The van is gone, and now Pittsburghers, you may breathe easier now. It will no longer pollute your air. Or ours.
- Fox Chapel near the Coffee Tree Roasters, for you Pittsburghers, and yes, that was our black plume of smoke, and, yes, we were in the local news, twice ↩︎
- It was a camper van, folks, hence the propane tank. ↩︎
- Living the dream, 2009-2016 ↩︎
- #brian&jen2.0 ↩︎
- Ha. Burnout. ↩︎
