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Sure Portland’s bike culture is cool, but have you seen our sick-ass vans?
We’re not talking about those $100,000 fancy-pants #vanlife Mercedes you see hogging the left lane, but like vaaaaaaannnns, man. Those vans that make you wanna crack open a cold one, hit the road, shag on the shag carpet in the back, and just live the easy life. We’re talking custom paint jobs, swivel captain’s chairs and big ol’ bubble submarine windows.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, you could buy vans with custom options like that, says Nick Schlabach, a member of Portland’s Rolling Death Van Club. “They weren’t work vans,” he says. “They were made to haul around motorcycles and women.”
Nowadays, Portland vanners often buy up vintage work vans to customize themselves. Schlabach, for example, has a 1974 Chevy G10, formerly of the Portland Public Schools fleet, which he’s painted Spanish gold, painted “Spanish Fly” in large letters on one side, with the image of an inebriated fly. Instead of a sliding door, he installed a gullwing blast door, and a pair of amorous flies are painted inside the gas tank opening.
“It’s kind of trying to recapture the romanticism of the good parts of the late ‘60s, early ‘70s with vans,” he says. “You can sleep wherever you park, party in it all day long, hang out. You can get in it, point it in a direction and say I’m going to drive to fucking nowhere today.”
Schlabach, 37, is one of about 15 members of the Rolling Death Van Club, one of several exclusive van-focused groups in Portland. There’s also the Cosmic Wheelers Van Club and the Grim Creepers, which specializes in 4x4 vans. Not just anyone with a van can join: You’ve gotta be approved by the gang in order to hang. There are more generalized clubs, including the NorthWest Van Council, founded in 1977, that are open to anyone with a vintage van.
“We are the 2% that ruins it for all the traditional vanners by doing hot rod shit, doing burnouts, listening to Black Sabbath, drinking and partying and playing music late into the night,” Schlabach says.
Of course, club or no, Portland is replete with sweet vans that are almost like landmarks for their neighborhoods: Hawthorne is haunted by both a Charlie Brown van and one with the Wu-Tang Clan symbol on the side; North Portland has The Crawdaddy; while The Brick Van, complete with a second-story loft, lives in Milwaukie. (This author chronicles cool vans on Instagram at @portland_vans.)
One of the best times to see all of the area’s finest will be at the Rolling Death Van Club’s annual Show and Shine next month. Set to run from 11:11 am to 4:20 pm on Aug. 26 at Level Brewing’s flagship, admission is free for anyone who wants to show off their van as well as for those who want to check it all out.
Of vanning, Schlabach says: “It’s a really cool way to express yourself in a really dumb way. Frogs, especially male frogs, will sit in a drainage tube, and ribbit in the tube so they ribbit louder than all the other frogs out there. That is what a van is: It’s an echo chamber for your personality, for your style, for everything you wanna reflect to everyone else. It’s a tube you can have sex in.”
He then paused, and thought about his van, Spanish Fly, and added, “It’s like putting horny goat weed on the side of a van. It’s like gas station boner pills, which, now that I think about it, doesn’t reflect my personality a ton, but it’s funny. It’s in the spirit.”
See the rest of Willamette Week’s Best of Portland 2023 here!
