(Memoir: 1970s–1980s • Childhood • Travel • Family)

Event Date: Spring 1980 Written From Memory: 2025

⸻

The Blue Van to the Edge of the World

The first time I saw the Atlantic Ocean, I was five years old, strapped into nothing but the wide-eyed wonder of a kid who was suddenly discovering how big the world really was. We were in the Schaut’s faded blue Volkswagen van—a Bay Window model that rattled like a coffee can full of bolts but somehow felt like a magic ship. Looking back at the old photo, it’s probably a ’72 or ’73. But at the time, it was just the van, our family’s covered wagon to the sea.

There were ten of us crammed in there, no exaggeration. Debbie Schaut—pregnant with Amanda—sat in an oversized upholstered living-room chair we had wedged into the middle after taking out the seats. The rest of us kids were packed like lively cargo, sometimes on laps, sometimes sprawled on the floor with books and sandwiches. Seat belts weren’t suggested, weren’t required, weren’t even thought about. We were riding on trust and the hum of the highway.

Mom and Dad loved the idea of Maine—the ocean, the lighthouses, the rocky coastline, the salt smell—and they shared that love with us in the most economical way possible: by driving straight through. I remember the endless rhythm of the tires at night, the glow of headlights sweeping over us as adults took turns reading stories to keep the younger kids calm, the smell of bread and ham sandwiches being passed around, and the strange comfort of being half-awake in a nest of siblings and friends.

We were going to visit Mom’s best friend, Deena Nelson, who had moved to Maine with Floyd. Their daughter Ella came along with us from Wisconsin. There were three kids already in their family. Plus the infant. Plus us. It was chaos. It was perfect.

The Nelsons had just moved, so their old house stood empty—a two-story maze of bare floors and echoing rooms. To a five-year-old, an empty house is a wonderland. We unrolled sleeping bags and bare mattresses across the floor, and it felt like we were camping inside a skeleton of someone else’s life. We ran circles through the rooms, played games under windows that looked out toward the ocean, and laughed until the grownups told us it was bedtime.

Maine itself felt holy to me. Not in a church way, but in a geography way—the way a kid obsessed with maps suddenly touches the thing he’s only traced with his finger. I remember Camden’s harbor, the wooden boats bobbing gently, the smell of lobster traps drying in the sun. I remember the vast, blue expanse of the Atlantic—my first ocean, and it made my small Wisconsin world feel thrillingly bigger. I remember Acadia National Park like a dream of granite and pine. Cookouts where the adults laughed late into the night over card games. The sense of being welcomed as children into the world of grownups in a way that felt warm and safe.

And the van—that rattling blue van—carried all of it. It was our vessel, our cradle, our moving fort, our first glimpse of long-distance adventure. When the highway opened up, and I saw the ocean waiting at the end of it, something permanent set inside me: that the world was wide, and that I could go anywhere.