Glynn Wilson on top of Spider Martin’s canoe on my Plymouth Voyager van by the Mississippi River in New Orleans. Photo by Spider Martin
Tales From the MoJo Road –
By Glynn Wilson –
COULTERVILLE, Calif. – People have been naming vehicles, animals and storms for a very long time.
Dating back at least 15,000 years to the Mesolithic Age, perhaps, when the oldest known boat on the planet was named the “Pesse Canoe” after it was discovered in 1955 in the Dutch village of Pesse.
In his novel Don Quixote in 1605, Miguel de Cervantes named Quixote’s horse Rocinante, an “old nag” transformed into a “foremost” steed for the purposes of the old knight on a doomed mission, tilting at windmills.
In his 1962 travelogue Travels With Charley: In Search of America, John Steinbeck named his camper truck Rocinante as a pun on top of a pun. He knew he was dying and it was one last roadtrip with his loyal dog.
My first introduction to a writer traveling around with a canoe on top of a van was probably a story about the science writer John McPhee, although Google had a hard time finding a picture of McPhee with his canoe. Finally found one in the New York Times, and now know why. McPhee was a shy man who didn’t like publicity pictures. He never did TV interviews, and I guarantee you he never took a selfie. But he did consent to one for the Times and let them use a picture.
John McPhee with his daughters Jenny, left, and Martha in Ontario in the 1970s. Photograph from John McPhee
I knew of his penchant for driving around the Princeton campus in a van with a canoe on top, so I once asked him about it when he spoke to one of my journalism classes in the late 1990s in Knoxville, Tennessee. He confirmed his fetish, and went on to write a book about the history of the canoe, The Survival of the Bark Canoe.
The first person I knew who drove a van with a canoe on top was the photographer Spider Martin, who once did an ad for Minolta cameras standing on top of his green 17-foot Kevlar canoe on his white Ford Econoline van, which he sold to me in 1993.
That was my first van of many. Can’t seem to find that picture either. It was before the internet and the web.
After that van broke down on the way back from Knoxville to Birmingham in the year 2,000 when I was about to move to New Orleans to teach at Loyola, Spider loaned me his canoe after I bought a Plymouth Voyager van, my second. He was worried about me living in the city destined to be flooded by a hurricane without a boat. That picture I do have, me standing on top of his canoe on my van by the Mississippi River (see above).
Leaving New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina flooded the city in 2005, I moved to Washington and then back to Alabama, where I bought a Chevy Venture van with the money from covering the HealthSouth-Richard Scrushy trial in Birmingham for The New York Times. Added a 13-foot Pelican canoe on top. My third camper van with a canoe on top.
That setup I used for traveling, camping and working for about seven years, including covering the BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. I just called her Chevy after the Sammy Johns song, or sometimes Venture when we were out on an adventure.
Chevy van with canoe on top in College Park, Maryland, on the way to New York. Photo by Brooks Boliek
Chevy van with loyal dog Jefferson by the French Broad River in North Carolina. By Glynn Wilson
In 2012, when I was nominated for a Green Oscar by Wild South’s Roosevelt-Ashe Society for Outstanding Journalism in Conservation, I took my new dog Jefferson on our first adventure together to North Caroline, and made a video.
In 2014, I got my hands on a full blown RV camper van, a Dodge Roadtrek my friend Brooks Boliek named Ramsey. She would be my fourth that lasted the longest, 10 years. In it we, my dog Jefferson and me, started traveling to Virginia, Maryland and Washington and covering news for the better part of a decade, all while volunteering with the National Park Service. Never added a canoe on top of this van. It seemed too tall for that, and hiking with the dog sort of replaced canoeing as a form of exercise.
On the Fourth of July 2024 in Cunningham Falls State Park in the Catoctin Mountains in Maryland. By Glynn Wilson
In 2024 on the way to Arkansas, that van finally died in West Virginia, and I picked up Gwyneth Ford there, named after her deep forest green color. She would be my fifth — the one to get me all the way west to California.
Gwyneth Ford in a Missouri campground: By Glynn Wilson
Many Rivers to Cross Before I Find My Way Home
She got me back to Birmingham for a rock and roll detour before taking me all the way across the country to California, Yosemite and San Francisco.
The Cathedral of Yosemite National Park
On that first trip to the Golden Gate Bridge, she broke down on the way back to Coulterville. She’s been limping along since.
The reason I write today is because I just picked up a new van in Modesto. Not sure what to call her yet. Number Six. I see a white hat. We’ll have to take a few trips together. It’s coyote country. She got nice curves. Maybe Dollie.
New white Dodge Grand Caravan. By Glynn Wilson
