By Natalie “Lee” Arneson
What first started you with sustainable living—why did you first decide to start that kind of lifestyle?
There were a lot of rolling blackouts in California maybe 15 years ago, and it turned out that it was people trading on the stock market. They were all messing with the electricity and basically turning it off and on to drive up the prices of the stocks. People were on ventilators and in hospitals and dying, and it was really hot. Elderly people and sick people couldn’t have air conditioning and people were dying of that. It was really, really insane. Originally it started that I just wanted to be in control of having my own power and electricity and not have to count on whoever it is that’s trading our stuff and the stock market people—just not rely on them to take care of me. So that kind of planted the seed.
What would you say was one of the first steps you took towards sustainable living—whether it be a small step or a big shift in how you lived previously?
I think, probably the first little easy step would be shutting off lights when I left the room and being mindful of not leaving the water running if I’m brushing my teeth or washing dishes. Not using air conditioning.
If you don’t mind me asking, what is your current living situation?
I moved into the bus on the Fourth of July—my independence from living in a house with a bunch of people—and it’s been really interesting. I live on the Key Peninsula in the woods and turns out the solar [panels] were really tricky to figure out. I just got it figured out at the end of the summer, so I don’t have it hooked up yet. I really focused on the water system right away. I have four 55 gallon barrels, like those big blue ones that you see, and the plan is to set up a way to catch the water in there. It’ll be like gutters running on the side of the bus that go down into the barrels and there’ll have to be a series of strainers on it. It’ll have a screen-type strainer on the top layer so that stuff doesn’t fall into it, and inside it’ll have another filter that filters any potential algae or grimy stuff in there, and then likely I’ll have a third filter before it hits the water pump, just to be safe. ‘Cause there’s different filters; some of them filter out chemical stuff, and some of them do more like live bacteria and giardia stuff. So from everything I’ve seen, it’s good to have both of those on there.
For now, I have it hooked up where I use the neighbors’ water from outside of their house, and I hook up this three or four hose situation, and then I hook those up to me and I fill the barrels up with the hose. I put together this tub that you stick in the barrel, and this accordion thing with a little knob on the top that you pump, and there’s a little hose where the water comes out. I got a water pump now, and so the water pump pumps it into the bus so I can get water out of my faucet. And then I have a water heater that runs on propane so I can have hot water too. So it just pumps it from the outside barrel, and when I turn it to hot it activates the propane heater, and this loud woosh sound goes on and there’s flames in there. Every now and again I’m like ‘is it exploding?!’ ‘what’s going on?’ It’s a really different lifestyle to get used to—all these open flames and containers of propane, and they make weird hissing sounds, and sometimes it feels like it’s maybe leaking. Yeah, a lot of things I didn’t think of. Y’know, you just turn your sink on at home and there’s the water, and it never crossed my mind ‘how did it get to my sink?’ It has really opened my eyes. I’m very appreciative of things a lot more now.
So living in the bus—setting all that up and getting it going to a place where you’re happy with it and it’s livable—is it expensive?
It has been a lot more expensive than I had planned on. But there’s some reasons why, and if you wanna buy all sustainable materials, it costs like three or four times the regular price. Like insulation, you can buy that cheap pink foam insulation and it works well, but it’s not decomposable and it’s not recyclable, and there’s chemicals in it. I went with the sustainable materials, which are wool and it was like four times more expensive to do it that way. And sometimes the sustainable way needs more. It can take more of the sustainable insulation to insulate than it would the crappy foam insulation.
I was also expecting there to be more stuff I could get at salvage yards and from the resale stores, but everything is real expensive at those places now because everybody is doing art projects or home projects with that stuff. Before, people didn’t want it, but now—especially since COVID happened and everyone is home—everybody is doing all the projects and so the prices have all gone up. Like at the junkyard, it’s stupid high. Also, the bus was pretty expensive. I made a mistake and just bought the first one I looked at, which after doing a lot of research that’s like the number one no-no. If I could go back, I’d definitely take at least a year to research what I’m looking for in a bus because there’s so many different things. Like, do you want it to be gasoline or diesel? Do you want it to have a front-engine or a back engine? What year do you want it to be? How many miles? There’s so many different things, but I wasn’t actually planning on buying a bus. It kind of just happened. I had a truck that I totaled, so I was on Craigslist looking for a truck/van/bus, that category. I set an alert for Craigslist to email me if anything came up, and so I get this message and it’s like ‘there’s this bus’ and I was like ‘why are they sending me this?’ And it was way out of my price range, I don’t know why it came through, but I was like ‘yeah, actually that looks awesome!’ That month, I hosted two events so I made some money from that, and I had just gotten my tax return, and I had just gotten my financial aid—like that was the only month in the entire world of my life that it would’ve worked out.
It’s been such a learning experience because Josh and I have no experience and have never even been in a renovated school bus and we just tackled it. He’s the woodworker, so that was really helpful, and I’m a ‘visionary.’ Basically I’m like ‘this is what I want’ and Josh is just like ‘that’s impossible’ and I’m like ‘no it’s not, let’s do this!’ and then we kinda just talk until something happens in the middle of impossible and practical. Oh! Craigslist free section is the bomb. I highly recommend using that, especially if you’re down to drive. It took me to a lot of places in Washington I’d never been, like cool, little old towns and fun, windy roads. Just weird, in the middle of nowhere places, or cute little downtown areas, or people’s big fancy houses. It’s really neat, and then you get the backstory to the thing, and you get to see where it’s coming from, and you get to tell them what you’re doing with it. That was awesome when that was working out.
Is there anything you feel is most pertinent about starting to live more sustainably, or just any last remarks?
I would definitely say when thinking about sustainability, this was a lesson that I learned, it also needs to mean a lifestyle that you can sustain. An example would be, ‘I’m just going to go live in the woods, and I’m not going to have electricity or water, and everything’s just going to be just fine!’ And then it was like, ‘well, actually that sucks, and that’s not working, and now I’m buying jugs of water that are made of plastic from the grocery store ‘cause I’m not hooked up to a water source.’ That’s not sustainable—it wasn’t sustainable for me. I couldn’t sustain living that way without having to go buy jugs of water, and so it’s really doing a lot of self-reflection of what do I need? Okay, yeah, I do need running water, and that’s okay. Because I need to be healthy. Like, I was trying not to drink water and getting dehydrated and sick, and it’s like ‘okay, no. That’s not going to work for me.’ So yeah, thinking of sustainability in a way that’s not just good for the Earth, but in a way that you can actually sustain. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter anyway if you’re good to the Earth for a couple of weeks or months and then you’re like ‘I can’t live this way’ and then you stop. That’s not good for anyone.
Before I moved into the bus, I started noticing everything I did, like ‘oh, I leave the water on when I wash dishes, what would it look like if I had limited water?’ I might get a little bucket and put everything in there, and use that water, get it all soapy, wipe everything down, and then pour that water out, fill it up again, and rinse it and pour it out. And then I used hardly any water. Also, if you’re going to move into a tiny home or a bus or a van, it’s really important to have several sources of heat and ways to cook. Right now, I have a propane stove and I also have an electric hot plate. So, if I run out of propane and I have electricity, I can plug that in and that can work. Or, if I’m somewhere that doesn’t have electricity and I only have propane, then that works. And it’s for heat too. I have electric heat, so when I’m plugged in that works. And I also have a diesel heater that runs off a 12-volt battery so that I can use it without electricity. And if for some reason I don’t have diesel, I’m also installing a wood-burning stove. So, ideally, I’ll have either access to wood or diesel or electricity at any given point in my journey so I wouldn’t freeze and would be able to make food. That was a really good thing to learn.
Lastly, I guess would be, for me, when I was working on this project—I mean I’m always going to be working on it, I’m still working on it—but, doing the research, and physically doing the work on it, and figuring it out, gets really overwhelming and exhausting because it’s never going to be done. The second you do a thing you find out a better way to do it or you’re just always learning, and it’s just never done. So, it’s been really helpful for me to also be doing other small projects that can get finished while I’m also doing this big one. Because I wasn’t doing that, and it’s just really taxing and really frustrating and sad. I was getting mad at the bus, so doing smaller projects that you can see to the end in a shorter amount of time is really helpful. It’s a huge undertaking, and it can be very stressful, and ideally, it should be kind of fun. And, yeah, I guess that’s it.
