U-Haul

U-Haul

Originally published in Apartamento magazine issue #34

 

I rented a 10-foot U-Haul to move to a tiny studio with a shared kitchen in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn in 2022. The apartment was $1,410 per month and about the size of the inside of the truck. I had to pay my deposit and first month’s rent in cash, which I extracted, sweating, from a constellation of ATMs in Trinidadian restaurants, because all my money still sat in a small credit union in New Mexico, where I grew up. It was OK, though. A few months prior, I had received an email telling me I was being kicked out of the house where I had just taken over a room because the owners were selling it for $1.5 million. I was only happy to sign a new, year-long lease, seeing as it was my ninth rental home in four years. And this place was right around the corner from not only a convenient subway stop, but a grocery store with a reliably wide variety of expensive, misted herbs.

Did you know that, in 1869, John Wesley Powell’s expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers explored the last great unknown within the continental US? My U-Haul told me that on the side of its cargo box, underneath an illustration of three men in a wooden canoe slicing through rough canyon waters. At the top of the decal was the word WYOMING. In 1988, U-Haul started plastering SuperGraphics on its cargo boxes, each one depicting some icon related to a US state or Canadian territory; since the company’s 1997 rebrand campaign, ‘Venture Across America’, the decals have advertised more obscure fun facts about the places, the illustrations sometimes charmingly dissonant with the locations’ public personas. ‘We could sell this space to corporate America, but U-Haul believes we must give something back to the communities we serve’, the website copy reads. ‘To this end we say, “Thank you, North America, for the mysteries you have revealed to us”’.

I wasn’t thrilled with the Wyoming truck, which lacked the charming flora and fauna of so many others: Tennessee’s red panda, or North Carolina’s Venus flytrap. But it wasn’t too bad according to my long-developed taxonomy. In college, I lived near a Stop & Shop that shared a parking lot with the local U-Haul rental facility. I would walk by the idle vehicles—so much like sleeping horses in a barn—and see one with the New Mexico decal: a chartreuse alien lurching out of the frame, a UFO downed on a desert landscape in the background. Roswell, the site of an alleged Air Force cover-up of an alien visitation in 1947, is one of the few things people bring up about my home state. But if the vast majority of facts about my past were always going to be flattened into two-dimensional associations by my interlocutors, this truck did the same thing, gracefully. The alien shone in the drab lot. I looked forward to seeing it while I aged, with each second, away from the place it depicted. That was me, that decorated box. A satisfying placeholder, parked in one place.

 

 

Over time, as I moved—to rural Colorado, then back to New Mexico, then to Texas, then to California, each relocation happening in the back of my Subaru—the U-Hauls I’d see on the road gained dimension, embodying or cartoon-ifying the itinerancy I gradually realised was shaping my life. As I gazed at them out my car window, I memorised most of the decals, and I formed attachments to a small coterie depicting those places I had left. Then, more strongly, I did the same with those that symbolised my lapsed human attachments. The first person I fell in love with grew up in Manitoba, whose brilliant decal depicts a phalanx of snake heads representing the writhing pits of garters that emerge from wintering dens in that province. Later, I’d notice Louisiana’s, a monarch butterfly for the rare land formations that house them during their migration. I would whiplash to catch glimpses of these trucks and others, trying to grab photos, always nearly sending them to the relevant person and never doing it. Within that communicative void the trucks were more like visitations. What did I know of these places? Not much, but also infinite things, seeing as I had known and loved entire individuals who came from them. But what did I still know of those individuals? Also less with each second, and more about the trucks.

U-Hauls infest New York. When I moved here with two suitcases, I at first found their constancy enlivening, as I do so much that swarms the city—people, confusing trash, overheard insanities, at-work TikTokers, doltish ad copy. But I quickly grew a little tired. The trucks clanged more disruptively outside my windows, and the orange logo lingered in my field of vision as a streaky phosphene. Some of the people behind the wheels wanted to move, maybe. But I assume that many just had to. Their rents were raised, or they needed more space in the relative boonies. Probably their landlords had waged idiotic yet effective wars against them, or they had gone through breakups. And the drivers’ measly comfort implied the forced failure of so many others who had no truck, nowhere to drive one. The churn of the vehicles was less its own funny zoo than a stand-in for the displacement it suggested would go on forever.

I also knew I would need to move a tenth time sooner or later. I was not magically making more money; I was not ascending floors to the prewar apartments where the good light gets in and the savings accounts get strengthened and the babies get born. I was going to have to pay hundreds more per month and go farther south than I’d like, just to have a place big enough for a couch. Then, less than two years after I moved into the $1,410 studio, a crack formed on my ceiling and grew alarmingly large over 24 hours. I purchased renters insurance in the morning, and returned later to a giant chunk of the ceiling collapsed, all my belongings furry with a thin layer of grey dust and unfamiliar, freed bugs crawling on my baseboards. Around this time, a Manitoba truck and its snakeheads would aparate every few days across the street from my office. I’d normally think it a good omen, but I wondered if I had been wrong about that sign, or about the person I pinned it to, or about my ability to have a relationship or anything stabilising at all. Maybe this was, in fact, malevolence. Mostly I was very stressed out and didn’t know what to think about the truck, which seemed to be a gnomic djinn operating on a distant protocol.

There’s an idea that the urge to mythologise an object or experience turns it into an emblem of our dread. Rainbows are a good example. On the one hand, they are delightful optical phenomena following rains, seen differently by each observer. But in the Bible, the rainbow is a symbol of God’s mercy after the flood—a reminder that, the next time, he will destroy the world with fire rather than with water. ‘In looking at it at every later moment we are meant to think of something else’, the theorist Philip Fisher writes. In that formation, we are soothed not by the delight of the colours, but by the supposed assurance that the flood they memorialise will not happen again. The reflex of their relief remains; our fear is, unconsciously, rejuvenated by the sign that’s meant to soothe. The U-Hauls were a version of this. Each one marked someone finding their new nest, and each made me wonder if I would again be driven out of mine. ‘Every rain as it starts’, Fisher writes, ‘brings on the imagination that it will go on and on, fill the river, cover the land, destroy everything’.

Once my ceiling fell, it seemed like the trucks had little to teach me, and that while I could enjoy their manifestations, I should not ask for their advice. The hole got fixed, and I decided to move anyway. I found a place farther south, on a new train line, with enough room for a couch and an affordable, stabilised rent achieved after a series of likely-illegal broker dealings. It is an improvement in some ways, but I struggled to construct a narrative. So I didn’t try to. As I write this, I’m scheduling my second U-Haul rental to move there. I’ve also started loving a new person from a new state. I don’t look too hard for that truck, because I can just look at him.

 

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Apartamento launched in 2008 with its namesake magazine, widely recognised as today’s most influential, inspiring, and honest interiors publication. Its publishing branch began in 2015 as a natural extension of the stories and ideas that have grown out of the magazine. In addition to its monographs and photo books, its catalogue also includes thematic cookbooks, architecture series, colouring books, and even a graphic novel.

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