USA: Constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing Steve, Walter, and me

What to do when you realize what you thought was your best just isn't

Better. Stronger. Faster.

Those three words may have instantly whisked you back several decades to a floral sofa surrounded by shag carpet. Did you, like me, spend many a 1970s evening in front of an enormous television set like these?

I think ours was similar to the one at about 10 o’clock, if the picture was a circle. Did you have something like this in your home?

Better. Stronger. Faster. Remember Steve Austin, astronaut, a man barely alive?

It was fiction, but how could we forget? The destruction was horrific. That crash. The scenes from the hospital. He should not have survived. In addition to his extensive internal injuries, he lost both legs, an arm, and an eye.

But . . . gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability. . .

Yes, he was mostly dead, but while he was yet unconscious, an intervention occurred. Not only was his life saved, but after extensive physical therapy, he was even better than he was before.

Better.

Stronger.

Faster.

Those were the glory days of television, I’m telling you.

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WE INTERRUPT THIS POST . . .

I was definitely a TV kid (as opposed to now) and I had some favorite hour-long dramas. Were you and I watching the same shows? Play along with these two polls, below, then hit me up with your other 70s faves in the comments, just for fun.

Sorry for the distraction. I did love TV as a kid.

WE NOW RETURN TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMING, ALREADY IN PROGRESS

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Steve Austin, though he was fictional, was rebuilt at great cost. The name of the show, of course, was The Six Million Dollar Man—a fantastical amount of money back then, beyond the scope of anything we could even imagine. Six million wasn’t just the cost of an expensive house in an incredible location; it was more like the cost of a private island.

Ooh, Fantasy Island. I loved that one, too. Boss! The plane!

Grrr . . . more distractions. I’m like a cat at a laser pointer convention this week.

Back to Steve Austin, astronaut. In addition to money, so much time was invested in monitoring his progress and fine-tuning his bionic replacement parts. Bringing him back from the brink and making him even better than before took a significant investment.

Steve’s upbringing, his own life experiences, values, and desires, combined with NASA, was responsible for his initial construction—his development into an astronaut.

A painful turn of events, of course, led to his sudden, unplanned deconstruction.

Then a slow recovery supported by a resourceful team of people set him on the path of reconstruction. The reconstruction made him even better than he was before. It elevated his potential far beyond what it could have been without the awful deconstruction process.

Steve’s story reminds me a little of Walter’s, and my own.

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First Walter

Meeting Walter for the first time and deciding to give him a new home, a new life, a ticket to adventure

The beginnings of the initial construction phase. First, take off the service body, add new wheels and better suspension, then build a subframe and a flatbed, followed by a sturdy camper box . . .

We built the Snuggery in the barn last winter and spring, then pulled it out and set it on the subframe with a giant crane.

Walter, you’re getting to be so handsome.

We named our travel rig. Of course we did. We’ve always named our vehicles. Let’s see, there was Pepe (I and II), the Vette (Chevette, not Corvette—whatEVER), the Great Pumpkin, the Twins (Hector and Dorf), ManBug, Gracie, the Brick, the Starcraft, the Fruit Bat, Dodger Blue, the Temp, Iris (my current little Honda in the last photo), and probably others I’m forgetting. Yeah, we like to name things.

But I’m getting distracted again.

Our beloved Walter is a 2010 Mitsubishi Fuso medium-duty work truck. We found him, an unassuming telecommunication service vehicle, two years ago at a used car lot in the humble town of Enterprise, Oregon—a definite misnomer. We based his name on the title character of the 2013 Ben Stiller movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. If you’re not familiar with the film, I suggest you at least watch the trailer below. I recommend the whole movie, too, when you get a chance.

Walter Mitty, meet Walter Mitsubishi.

Both characters lived quiet lives, just showing up for work, day in and day out, both dreaming of adventure and travel, but resigned to live ordinary lives. But for both Walters, something dramatic and unexpected changed everything and they entered a new phase of life—one chock-full of adventure beyond their wildest dreams.

We are big fans of Walter, our big yellow truck, and have high hopes for the adventures that lie ahead.

Andy, the engineering half of our build team, designed and crafted the camper box, aka the Snuggery (don’t even get me started on the names of the many domiciles we’ve lived in over the years). He built it from scratch—with only Tua the Welder Friend, and me (yikes) as his part-time assistants. He spent hours—no, days—NO, WEEKS designing the layout before even beginning the initial construction.

So much went into the design process to make this tiny home-on-wheels truly our own. We needed a kitchen that would support the way we like to cook, without wasting any cubic inches on non-essentials. The garage (the term for the large pass-through storage unit below the living space) needed to be just the right size to accommodate our bicycles and our inflatable kayak. The shower and toilet needed to somehow blend, unseen, into the walking space of the entryway (yes, this is absolutely doable and much better than it sounds).

But the biggest design challenge of all was our bedroom area. Ideally, we wanted what’s known in the camper world as a north-south bed, meaning it goes front to back, in line with the vehicle rather than side-to-side. An east-west bed is more common in campers, vans, and small RVs, as it is often the most efficient use of space, but an east-west design means one person has to crawl over the other if a middle-of-the-night bathroom need arises. Let’s just say we are no longer as young as we once were.

Mr. Creativity designed us a north-south bed that included an RV-style slide out, something fairly rare in the world of beefy overland expedition vehicles. That extra 30 inches meant we got a fancy little bedroom with a north-south queen bed and plenty of cabinets for clothing. It was pretty cool, to be honest. I married a freaking genius.

A 30-inch slide-out is rarely seen in the world of rugged overland expedition vehicles. It created a luxurious bedroom—at least for a tiny home-on-wheels.

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Walter’s little weight problem

Although we are not yet at the six-million-dollar mark, we have invested a fair amount of money, time, and energy—alas, even blood, sweat, and tears—into Walter’s construction over the past two years.

He’s a real head-turner when we drive him on the road, but he’s still far from finished. Recently we took him to a scale to get weighed. Andy was nervous that he was getting too close to his maximum gross vehicle weight rating. We exhaled when he came in about 2,500 lbs. underweight for his axles and stated GVWR. At first, that seemed like a relief, but then we began to consider what still needed to be added.

Andy made a video about the process (he makes lots of videos—you should subscribe to our YouTube channel, hint, hint):

So, yeah. Some of you just watched the video above and already know the ending of this part of the story. For those of you who didn’t click play, here’s the gist of it: Like a high school wrestler, we suddenly realized we needed to cut some weight before we could go any further and running a few laps wearing a trash bag wouldn’t be enough. We could trim a little here and there—Jenny Craig style—but the most significant single action we could take would be more akin to bariatric surgery.

We decided to abandon the slide-out.

Ugh.

This was a really difficult decision. Andy had spent so much time on the design, so much money on the materials and hardware, then so much more time on the meticulous construction process. But in cutting out that one major design element, Walter lost about 600 pounds (272 kilos). We will not finish the project overweight now.

But our north-south bed . . .

Yes, a redesign is in the works. Our bed will be more like a daybed now—folding up into a loungy sofa-thing during the day and folded down part way over the dinette at night. It’s much more simplistic and not at all luxurious after all, but it is what it is.

We spent so much effort on the original design and construction, that questioning everything and then ripping all that effort apart was incredibly painful.

To add insult to injury, it was even a lot of hard physical work to remove the slider. We spent a significant amount of time just disconnecting everything, cutting things apart, then driving to a friend’s construction business where the right equipment, manpower, and open space was available to pull poor Walter apart.

Deconstructing is painful. That slide was so innovative, so well-engineered . . .

Andy tries to stay positive.

This is a photo we never thought we would take. That is not where our bed was supposed to be.

The construction was good—or so we thought with the information we had at the time. It seemed perfect. We just didn’t know.

The deconstruction was painful, but necessary.

Now, the reconstruction begins.

It’s the right thing to do. Walter will be better, stronger. (He won’t be faster, like Steve Austin, astronaut, a man barely alive. Mitsubishi Fusos were never designed for speed.) He is 600 pounds lighter, going into his future as a global overland expedition vehicle. His center of gravity is lower. The axles will not be overburdened. His transmission and brakes will not struggle to make him go and stop. Neither the insurance company nor the licensing bureau will have anything to squawk about. He’ll run better down the road. He’ll get better gas mileage. And there are fewer parts to break down or get clogged with dust.

Overall, Walter will be much improved after this deconstruction and reconstruction process.

But it still hurts to take apart something that took so much effort to build.

And the reconstruction feels so tedious, patching the hole and rebuilding what seemed just fine—and finished—before.

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Then there’s me

The same process is true for me, in many ways. I’d spent a lifetime constructing a particular life of faith, built on particular themes and principles, traditions and habits, only to take it all apart over the last several years.

There was definitely some grieving involved in the realization that the faith I’d been so sure of was actually full of thin spots and non-essential cultural baggage. I didn’t really want to take apart my faith, brick-by-brick, to see what level of damage might be rotting the foundation, and why. Deconstruction is messy and time-consuming—not something to take lightly. It would have been easier to just ignore the warning signs and go on as if everything was fine or go to the other extreme and abandon my faith altogether.

But I knew everything was NOT fine. And I hadn’t reached the point where I was willing to abandon it. I’ve invested so much over the years, and in my heart I know it is based on truth. I’ve seen too much.

Of course, I’m not alone. You’ve likely seen the term deconstruction thrown around a lot in the last few years. There are a bunch of us who are asking fresh questions, dissatisfied with the trite answers and zippy one-liners that are supposed to somehow patch up all the heartaches of this human experience. We want more than the meme and GIF equivalent of the Christian faith. Life is really hard sometimes, and if Christianity can’t stand up to some basic scrutiny, introspection, and sincere questioning, then what good is it?

Yikes. Some of you are probably getting uncomfortable just reading about questioning the traditions of your faith—the way you’ve always known and practiced it. The concept of stripping it of its unnecessary baggage and tracing it back to its roots might ring of sacrilege. For me, though, it’s a strengthening process.

When people realize there’s a problem, they have two choices. 1) Just ignore it and hope it doesn’t cause bigger problems down the road. Or 2) Investigate, find the source of the issues, and begin the process of fixing and rebuilding, hoping to come out better and stronger on the other side.

Over this past year and a half or so, I’ve steadily grown in the conviction that my faith is worth saving, worth reimagining, worth rebuilding. I’m starting with the basics, studying to emulate the life of Jesus, and working up from there. This last couple of weeks have been particularly important in my reconstruction process. As I recently wrote about, Easter this year hit me hard. Something about that resurrection story has got me ready to be done lying in a grave with all this crap. It’s time to rise, even if it has to be all human and awkward.

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It helps if you have a team

Steve Austin had a whole crew of gentlemen anxious to rebuild him. Walter at least has Andy, Tua the Welder, and me.

But what about me?

Many have grown uncomfortable with me, my endless questioning, my frequent cynicism. As I wrote about last week, some of my Christian friends even turned away completely as I refused to toe the party line—both evangelical and political. Facebook got downright ugly. Some friends just went silent. But not everyone in my faith community has abandoned me. Some have stayed, walked alongside me, and are now helping me rebuild—whether they realize it or not.

Their steady presence has meant so much to me.

It takes a lot to construct something great—like an astronaut, or a global expedition vehicle, or a person of faith. The decision to deconstruct, then, is not an easy one to make, and often comes about as the result of great hardship or a dramatic turn of events. If the next decision is to reconstruct, please know that it is often a long and difficult process, but a worthy endeavor.

Don’t be afraid of those who toss around the term deconstruction—as if it’s an entirely negative thing—and certainly don’t abandon them. Instead, come alongside them. Maybe they are barely alive and need some help. Maybe they are ready to patch the holes and rebuild.

Reconstruction just might make them better and stronger than before.

Until next week,

Sherry

Andy made a frame to support the gaping hole that was left after we removed the slide. It fit perfectly. We are moving forward with a new plan.

Little Iris and big Walter, at Walter’s current workshop—a cramped storage unit 15 minutes from where we are temporarily living. Note the patch. Reconstruction is underway.

P.S. Remember to tell me your favorite 70s TV shows. It’s silly, but it amuses me. Feel free to drop other comments on this post, too, of course, even if they’re not meant to be amusing. We’re in this together, friend. Hit that little comment button below.