Living In A Van Down By The River: Why Cody Woman Loves Living In A Van

It’s the first day of August and Megan Anderson is up before sunrise researching the financial markets. 

She needs to be caught up and camera ready in an hour from now at 5:30 a.m., when she’ll record a video detailing the current state of the mortgage market for the tens of thousands of newsletter subscribers at MBS Highway, a real estate firm where she works as VP of client relations. 

From there it’s on to emails, calls and more research to prepare for an upcoming episode of her “On the Highway” podcast. 

It’s work that inescapably requires an office. Her office, though, is the embodiment of escape.

She’s working out of a Ford Transit high top van, parked in a clearing beside a U.S. Forest Service road in the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. 

She swings open the back doors as the first tentacles of light reach over the horizon. The smell of cedar trees and Pacific fir blows in on the morning breeze. Purple lupine flowers and thimbleberries dot off in the direction of Mount Baker in the distance.

Even corporate executives don’t have office views this majestic. But she does, at least for this day.

Anderson’s itinerant lifestyle puts her in a new location virtually every 48 hours, which means her view the next day could be even better.

“I work East Coast hours, so I’m off early, and when I’m done, I’m right here,” Anderson told Cowboy State Daily. “I’m out, I’m enjoying nature, reconnecting and refueling. It’s my favorite part of van life.”

Van Life Millennial

Anderson, 33, grew up in Cody, Wyoming, and is now among a vast and growing community of van life millennials for whom life on the road has become something of a rite of passage. 

They’re an adventurous set with a reputation for putting experience over material wealth.

Yet half a generation has passed since the arrival of the hashtag #vanlife, a moniker playfully adapted from the 1990’s rap artist 2Pac, whose “THUG LIFE” motto was pop-cultural shorthand for living young, wild and free. 

But does van life still hold the same liberating promise?

Anderson’s experience offers a lens into the evolution of this lifestyle, and shows how it can be positively life-altering while simultaneously less than picturesque, as it was the morning she jolted upright in bed to the sound of a man screaming at her in a Cracker Barrel parking lot near Memphis, Tennessee. 

“It was 3 o'clock in the morning, and this angry man was yelling at me,” she said. “He was screaming about his own car issues and telling me I'm white privilege. It was completely terrifying. My adrenaline was going, and I left as fast as I could.”

Or the time she awoke to a group of drunken men circling her van on scooters, shouting at her to get out of the vehicle.

“That’s one of the reasons I don’t like van life in cities. I never sleep well. Walmart, Cracker Barrel or rest areas, I don’t like those scenarios,” she said, explaining that for these reasons she keeps her van packed and ready to leave on a moment's notice every single night of the year. 

It seems like the great outdoors could be dicey too. But maybe that’s only the slanted impression that comes from half a decade of Gabby Petito headlines. 

In either case, it's comforting to see posts of Anderson relaxing in a camp chair and wearing a sundress while cleaning her Winchester shotgun.

Even as the culture has evolved since first popularized by mountain bikers and surfers living out of Volkswagen Vanagons up and down the Pacific Coast, the lifestyle still attracts a distinct type of personality.

Anderson’s story reveals how van life is still delivering on the promise of adventure and freedom, along with miles and miles of opportunity for deep personal growth. All while showing us there’s no wrong way to do life on the road.

“I love being able to go from the girl that bathes in rivers to the one getting her nails done to match her new sundress,” she said.

Meet Megan Anderson

Anderson is short and fit with blonde hair and hazel-green eyes. People tell her she resembles the actor Reese Witherspoon, who portrayed in the movie “Wild” one of Anderson’s real-life heroes: author Cheryl Strayed

Anderson is a self-described type A personality, the kind of woman whose to-do lists read like technical manuals: detailed, step by step, nothing left out.

What she quickly learned about van life is that details aren’t always hers to control.

“Freedom is what I fell in love with. But part of that means I now have to make basic decisions every single day that most people don't,” she said, explaining that she moves locations almost daily and rarely stays in one spot longer than three nights. “Like, where am I showering today? Where am I sleeping today?

“All those decisions, on top of work, it was decision fatigue. It created so much anxiety every single day, and I hated that.”

But new places meant new people, and it's from fellow travelers that she’s learned to embrace her spontaneity and appreciate the unexpected.

At VANFEST in Florida, she chummed up with a journeyer who produces podcasts interviewing other van-lifers from his studio on wheels. 

The man’s name is Ship. “Everyone seems to have weird names in the van life (community),” she said. 

She’s also become friends with a traveling poet whose mission is to live without the use of currency and instead gets on by bartering with other van-lifers to meet his essential needs.

It’s not just van-lifers she draws inspiration from. Sometimes it’s buck-naked revelers at the nude hot springs in New Mexico.

“I pull in and this [naked] 80-year-old guy throws me a handwave, and I’m like, ‘OK, I guess this is what we're getting into,’” she said. “But I found it very empowering that clothing is optional. To see women of all shapes and sizes just walking around comfortable and beautiful in their own way, it’s inspiring.”

Unexpected moments and relationships provided her with examples for how to thrive in the face of uncertainty. Before long, it was Anderson inspiring spontaneity in like-minded adventurers.

‘He Needed Me Just As Much As I Needed Him’

This summer she was gearing up to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) when she struck up a conversation with a man in the checkout line of an REI in Oregon. 

The man, 30, was freshly laid off from a job in tech. He’d also recently lost his father, best friend and girlfriend to different causes of death.

“He’s a beautiful man with this beautiful soul, ready for the next step of his life, but sad and going through it. He was on the verge of not wanting to exist anymore,” said Anderson. 

In despair, the man rashly decided to escape on the PCT. 

The problem was he didn’t have the experience or knowledge to do it alone. He didn’t have physical maps. He didn’t know how to properly use his GPS, and he gave the general impression of a man too emotionally unfit for any sort of consequential decision making.

Anderson had also been on the fence about making the trip. It was a bucket-list item, but at 50 miles she’d never attempted anything remotely as long. 

She also had fewer than three days before she needed to be on a plane to Atlantic City for a public speaking arrangement. 

But these two instantly connected on a personal level and decided they would do the trip together.

“I’d been feeling this sense that I was supposed to be in Oregon to focus on finding community,” she said. “There were just weird signs and signals, and then I met this complete stranger and he needed me just as much as I needed him.

“Because of our hike together, this guy was inspired to live life again.” 

An Intimate Experience For Followers

For Anderson’s social media followers, the last 10 months have provided an eye-candy collage of America’s geographic diversity. 

But what makes this undertaking so powerful isn't pretty pictures. Rather, it’s the intimate feeling of sharing in the emotional life of a 33-year-old woman during times of vulnerability and personal growth.

Her posts have a quality of earnestness that feels rare in social media.

She shares with followers about the psychological insecurity that caused her to get breast implants, along with the physical turmoil that led her to remove them.

“It’s been almost two years since I had my breast implants removed, and today, for the first time, I went swimsuit shopping. It was terrifying,” she explained in a post during her time in West Palm Beach, Florida. 

The post is accompanied by a selfie in her new swimsuit, which makes no attempt to hide the long scars beneath her breasts.

Across these 280 days, we’ve watched her perspective evolve as the van life inspired new attitudes toward life.

“This lifestyle … teaches you to live in deep gratitude for the simplest things,” she said on day 209. “Today, it was a warm shower. Hot water running over my skin felt like pure luxury. Funny how van life shifts your perspective — you stop taking the little things for granted and start seeing them as the gifts they really are.

“The more I live this way, the more I notice how extra stuff tends to bring extra stress. There’s something freeing about living with less and choosing what truly matters.”

In one post she responds to questions about how she manages loneliness.

“But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this — there’s nothing wrong with doing things alone. There’s nothing wrong with taking yourself out to eat,” she said. “Nothing wrong with booking the trip no one else will go on. Nothing wrong with going to that concert solo. 

“In fact, doing those things alone might be exactly what leads you to the community you’re looking for.”

Not only do we feel like we deeply know Anderson, we’ve also come to know her dog, a mini golden doodle named Snoop. 

We know that he loves to hike but can’t fetch to save his life. We know his curiosity can get him in trouble, as it did with that rattlesnake bite in Montana. 

And we know for sure that he’s photogenic and looks great in front of national monuments and sweeping vistas. 

Monetization

Her experience feels additionally wholehearted for the fact that she has not yet monetized her social media following with promotions and ads, as have so-called  “professional van lifers.”

Although that day is likely to come, it's something for which she has ambivalence.

“It’s always sad at some level to see things monetized. And I haven't monetized it yet, but I'd be lying to say that on some level that's not a direction that I hope to get to at some point,” she said. “But I think there's a good way to do it and a not-so-great way to do it. 

“It boils down to intention, and I think people can tell if a [sponsored post or ad] is coming from an authentic place or if all it cares about is getting them to buy something.”

Wyoming Looks Different From A Van

Growing up in Cody, Anderson said her life had always felt small. By high school graduation she was redlining with desire to experience the big world beyond. 

After college, she worked as a personal trainer and then in the real estate sector, which took her from Las Vegas to New Jersey and then to Colorado and Florida. 

It took a rock-bottom moment before she finally decided to give van life a go. 

A big part of this was to move through and process things like her separation from a longtime boyfriend as well as her altered sense of self following the removal of her implants, which she’d come to believe were causing allergic reactions like hives.

Yet one of the biggest lessons of the experience has been a new appreciation for Wyoming.

“It's funny, when I was a kid growing up in a small town, I just wanted to get out and go to the city and experience life. And I thought that I was better than people because I left and went to bigger places,” she said, adding how passing through Wyoming after seeing so many other places has given her a new perspective of the Cowboy State.

“But through all of this I’ve realized I'm no better than any of the people here,” she added. “I re-fell in love with it again. I've traveled so much, and I've been to all 50 states at this point. 

“And all in all, there's nothing like a Wyoming sky, and there’s nothing like community there. I'm beyond grateful that I get to say that I'm from Wyoming.”

With insights like these still rolling in, she’s inclined to call an audible. 

The initial plan was to do van life for one year. But that was an idea hatched by her type A self, which doesn’t have the sway it once did.

“I think it'll go longer than a year, to be honest,” she said. “I’m kind of just going with the flow at this point. I’ve stopped trying to figure everything out all the time.”

Contact Zakary Sonntag at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com

Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.