The following heartfelt statement by Bob Wells is from an April 2021 interview with Bob Wells and Suanne Carlson that took place with Meetup CEO David Siegel. My thanks to Bob Wells for giving his permission to reprint it here. Bob is one of the early proponents of the VanLife movement, and he recently appeared in the Academy Award-winning film Nomadland. He founded and runs the popular website, cheaprvliving.com. The full interview is available at https://www.meetup.com/blog/episode-8-community-in-nomadland/.
Here is Bob’s statement, which I’ve titled here as “One Man’s ‘Why’”:
Right after the year my son had taken his life, I really severely broke my elbow and my wrist, really severely. And I was camping outside of Victorville, California, where I was going for physical therapy to recover. The doctor said if I didn’t work really hard at physical therapy, I’d lose all use of my right hand, my dominant hand. So I was working really hard. And so I was there, and that’s where I was there. I lost my son. I was facing the loss of all use of my dominant hand. It was a really, really bad time. I was in town one day, probably in for physical therapy, and there was a horrible accident and a person was killed. There was a big article about the accident, because it was a really big—actually, it closed the freeway, I-15 through Victorville.
And I was told that this guy was killed because someone, an older person who had driven, gotten on that freeway by accident, was driving the wrong direction. And I had just drove past it, that’s part of the story. I watched the accident happen in front of me. I was the last person to get past them before they closed the freeway. So it really stood out to me. It was an experience. And I’m going through all this other stuff. My life is coming to an end all around me, very powerful moment in my life. And so I read this guy’s, the story on the paper the next day or the day after. And they talked about this guy who was killed. They tell the story of… I mean, there must have been two dozen people talking about him, about how he had impacted his life. And he was no one, no one would know him from Adam.
And I remember thinking to myself that, what does that mean? This is the kind of thing I’m thinking about. I’m facing the loss of the use of my hand and my son has died. And I’m wondering if I should live. Every morning, I wake up and think to myself, “Why am I alive on this planet when my son is gone?” And I had to have an answer to that question every morning for a long, long time. So it was just this moment in time in my life.
And I read this guy’s story and I think, “This is a reason to wake up in the morning, every morning. That when you die, all these people come out of the woodwork and say, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. He was one of the good ones.’” And so that has been a motivating factor in my life.
What does it mean to have lived a quality of life? That it is, that when you die, people say, “I’m so sorry. He was one of the good ones. He impacted my life in this way.” That’s very, very important to me.
