The Okens and the Red Van Lounge

The first time I met the Red Van Lounge, I actually only met her engine.  I lived in the same dorm (for a week) as Chris Oken, the van’s previous owner.  As I walked down the hall to my room, I ran into Chris.  He was skating up and down the hall on a skateboard, zooming in and out of the open door to his room.  He came up to me, flipped his head to get his stingy blond hair out of his eyes, and said, “Hey, man, you like the Grateful Dead?”

The Land of Make-Shift and Bump-Your-Head

Moving some books around today, I found three folded sheets of paper that had fallen out of one of the books.  They were a fax that I wrote when I was an exchange student in Almaty, Kazakhstan, back in the spring of 1995.  I had hoped that my little essay could be published in the school paper, The Signal, but I feared that I was sending it too late to make the last issue.

I wrote this at the pinnacle of my evangelical days.  I basically considered myself a missionary to Almaty at the time, as I was preaching at the only English-speaking church in town — in the whole country, as far as I knew — and was leading a youth group and taking the kids from the church on outings.  I fully believed that I would end up back in Almaty one day, teaching English and preaching to the inhabitants.  Obviously, that did not happen, as I sit here, 12 years later, back in the States.  But I still treasure the time I spent in Almaty, and I was grateful to run across these memories again.

Jim and Bonnie got hitched

They actually got hitched up back in June. I just now got around to uploading these crappy little cell phone pics of the cake cutting. It was probably the bitchin’est parties in Edge Dwelling history, and it really warmed my peak-oil-believing heart when Jim said something along the lines of “enjoy the food, folks, ’cause the oils gonna run out in a few years anyway.”

Check out Jim’s photo compilation of the event for some real photography.

Project: The Red Van Lounge Logs

Calling all Edge Dwellers:

In the spirit of the Ouachita Memory Project, we announce a new writing project: The Red Van Lounge Logs.  Luke announced the project some time back:

Over winter break, Jim & I (the people, not the constellation) discussed a book we could make, but it will take all of us. In this book, photos of the Red Van Lounge will accompany stories of the adventures that surround it. Jim has plenty of images, as you can imagine. What we need are stories.

In its heyday, Jim drove that van across the country & as far north as Chicago and south at least to Dallas. He served us tea and freeze dried stew in Arkadelphia. I was there some of the time, so high I can’t remember.

So, in the spirit of the Ouachita Memorial Freewrite, I’m asking for your stories, anything you remember about Jim & the Red Van Lounge. Enough time has passed for him to assume I’ve forgotten all about it. That suits me.

If you have something you would like to contribute, you can either leave a comment here and Rix will email you get your submission.  Or you can go to the contact page and drop us a line that way.

Cross-country Floodwaters

In the early days of my career as an enthusiast of rafting and canoeing, I made several small treks into the waters of the mighty Ouachita. The first was the quest for the gazebo. The next ones I’m not so sure of. I know I made an early trek with Chad and Luke on the ever-changing arm of the river that we decided to call the amoeba. I know I also floated the full length of the regular Caddo-Ouachita circuit with Matt Weyenberg first. I took Mark Hartness with me to dilly around in the waters of the amoeba once. John and Chad and I—and maybe Luke, I can’t remember—crossed the swollen waters of the same receding flood together from east to west. There were some treks, however, that were meant to be, and this was one of them—the exploration of the cross country track.

The Easlies

Guy had a van, Jim had a van, and now I had a van. We took the golden, 1972 Westfalia camper top VW bus from the backyard it had been sitting in for almost 20 years. Guy pulled it on a chain behind his busted up Ford Bronco II. We got it into the back parking lot of Lancelot Apartments on 4th Street, and then we took stock.

This van was good—too good to be cannibalized for parts for Guy’s “Guido the Burrito” ‘68 pop-top and Jim’s ’69 “Red Van Lounge”. That’s why they decided it was mine. I had gotten the Veedub fever last December and almost ran to Dallas over Christmas break to buy a hard top Thing. But now my fever was quenched. The three of us would work on this bus, make it run, make it live, but we would need parts.

Guy’s friend Smitty was our connection. He knew the whereabouts of every rusting carcass in the county. He had pointed us to the junk yard out toward Mena where we had almost found the steering column Guy needed. He had led us to the back yard where my golden beast had waited for us. Now he told us that just a few miles from Gurdon there were some boys with a junk yard that had a ’71 bus that might suit our needs. We should go take a look at it, and if we wanted it, we could use Smitty’s trailer to haul it back to Lancelot and tear it apart.

“Now, keep in mind,” Smitty told us, “These fellas are pretty darn ‘backwoods’, if you know what I mean.”

Boating in the Tank

I came home from class to find Mike and his dog Anarchy hanging out on the front porch together. Anarchy was a strange dog. He was a beagle-pointer mix that had been raised in a kennel before Mike adopted him, and he had grown up with a complex that made him only want to relive his bowels on concrete. We kept him in the front yard on a chain with plenty of grass in the yard for him to make use of, but he always left his piles on the sidewalk and the walkway up to our front porch. It was through Anarchy’s shit that I now maneuvered to sit with the boys on the steps of the screened in porch.

Mert and the Tornado

I liked Mert. He was crazy, but you didn’t usually get to notice it in day to day life. Sometimes he would keep me in touch with his level of craziness. “How’s it going, Mert?” I’d ask. “Not too bad,” he’d reply. “I haven’t heard or spoken to anybody who isn’t really there today, so that’s good.”

I never knew exactly what Mert thought of me. He wasn’t necessarily one of the insiders—one of the “Odd Fellows” as we called ourselves. But he definitely fit in with us. The rest of my friends and I stood out because didn’t like the usual Bible college crowd. Mert stood out because of his psychosis. Regardless of the reason, our mutual eccentricity brought us together from time to time—like the time we almost died.