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There was something a little bit off about the Toyota Highlander parked across the street. A sunshade blocked the front glass, and were those garbage bags over the passenger windows? The side mirror dangled limply from a cable, and a roof rack (or maybe it was just a tarp covering an amorphous blob of belongings) lay soggy and tired over it all.

Wallingford Avenue N, up where we live in Tangletown, is pretty idyllic. Everyone on the block takes care of their houses and gardens, cats scout the bushes clear of rodents, and, what with the nutty maze of streets, there’s not much through traffic. We moved here from lower Wallingford (well, with a stint on Bainbridge, a downtown penthouse, and a Lake Union floating home crammed in between) just last year and couldn’t be more delighted. Our living room has floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over a tree-lined street, and I’ve got a comfy swivel chair set in the perfect spot to enjoy a morning cup of coffee.

And now, in the middle of that view, someone had apparently set up a homeless encampment. I’ll admit that my first reaction was less than charitable, but it didn’t take long for me to pull back from that view and see myself, sitting in my comfortable chair in my expensive house looking down at someone without a house, and I didn’t like what I saw. So I thought that maybe I would do something about it…at some point.

It took a few weeks, but eventually it turned out I wasn’t the only one who had noticed our visitor. A neighbor added me to a text thread asking if anyone knew what was going on with the woman who seemed to be living in her car; he said he thought she had dogs. Nobody knew. So one afternoon, when I saw her down there, I walked over and introduced myself.

She was nervous at first, which I understood. She was well aware that people on a street like ours might not appreciate having someone living in a car out front, and for all she knew, I was there to deliver her eviction notice. I was honest with her: I wasn’t thrilled about the situation, but I wasn’t there to kick her out, either. I just wanted to know who she was and to have something to tell the neighbors who were asking.

Her name is Elysia, and I share her story here with her permission. She had been living in the car for about six months, with her two dogs, Taboo and Akasha. The car didn’t run. It had been sabotaged, she told me, by an ex-boyfriend. A mechanic had looked at it and said it couldn’t be salvaged. So it wasn’t transportation anymore, but it was still a roof, and when you don’t have any other options, a roof on a car that doesn’t move is still a roof.

I reported back to the neighborhood text thread, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. What came back, from one neighbor after another, was the same question: what can we do to help? One neighbor had worked at a dog grooming business and got the dogs cleaned up. Another dropped off dog food. Another took the dogs for a walk while Elysia cleaned out the car, and I ran an extension cord across the street so she could vacuum.

Over the weeks that followed, the extension cord turned into conversations, and her story came out the way these stories do, in disjointed pieces and out of order. One thing surprised me: she’s from here. Not “here” as in Seattle, here as in here here. She grew up by the Zoo, and her family ran the Green Lake Pitch & Putt, the little nine-hole course at the end of the lake that’s been collecting duffed chip shots since the late 1940s.

Her father was a stagehand, Local 15, working the operas, the concerts, the conventions. Her mother sewed the outfits for groups like Queensrÿche, back when they were Seattle’s biggest export in spandex (“…seamstress for the band” ). Elysia remembers being a little girl, hiding behind a chair during a late-night fitting, finally working up the courage to step out and ask the assembled band which one of them was the queen. Geoff Tate pointed at his girlfriend.

She went to Nathan Hale High School, followed her mother to Texas when Nordstrom sent her to open their first Dallas store, did a few years at Austin Community College, then came home and finished at the University of Washington with a degree in Environmental Studies in 2012. Along the way, she worked the jobs this city runs on: the golf course, waitressing, working the espresso machine at the original Starbucks in Pike Place. Maybe you’ve had a cup of her coffee.

So how does that person end up living in a dead Highlander with two dogs? Not through one catastrophe, but through slow attrition, one closed door at a time. At the end of 2019, she was living in Austin, with her own apartment and her own life, when she decided to move back to Seattle for a boyfriend. She moved into his apartment sight unseen, no job lined up, no car. Within a week, she learned things about him she’d have wanted to know before the moving truck: the drugs, the cheating, and the fact that he’d spent months telling his friends and family that she was the unstable one, so that her reputation arrived in Seattle before she did. A few months later, the pandemic drew up the gangway, and Seattle was where she’d stay.

The years that followed had the same shape over and over: every time she got a little traction, something knocked her off balance. Cars bought from men in the boyfriend’s orbit had a way of developing sudden, fatal mechanical problems and ending up back in their sellers’ hands. Somewhere in there, her own body decided to take up arms against her, as well: she developed Wegener’s, an autoimmune disease that, among other things, eats away at the cartilage of the nose, and a year and a half of reconstructive surgeries put her plans to leave Seattle on the shelf. The belongings she’d put in storage down in Shelton were carted off by a “cleanup” outfit that talked her landlord into opening the gate. By June of last year, the list of things she still had was short: two dogs and the Highlander.

On the Fourth of July, she loaded the dogs into the car and tried to leave Seattle for good. She made it nine miles. The Highlander died in Georgetown, and from there, eventually, it found its way to the curb across the street from my house. She slept upright in the backseat, dogs in the front and across her lap.

The Van

By this point, I’d learned how she’d been getting by, or had been until recently. She’d been driving for DoorDash, which, it turns out, is one of the few jobs that fit her life, because the dogs can ride along. Nobody minds two dogs in the office when that office is the back seat. When the Highlander died, that ended. A dead car didn’t just cost her a place to sleep; it took away the one kind of work she could actually hold.

So when a Facebook scroll slid an ad for a yellow camper van ($1,500) past me a few weeks later, something clicked. A vehicle that ran wasn’t only a better place to sleep than the back of a packed Highlander, it was a way back to earning a living. Fifteen hundred dollars isn’t nothing, but missing it wouldn’t be life-changing for me. Having it could be life-changing for Elysia.

A van you can drive is a roof over your head, is a flat surface to sleep on, is a room you can change your clothes in, is a paycheck. I’d been trying not to think too hard about the logistics of her life over there—where everything goes, where everyone sleeps, what you do about a bathroom—because thinking about it too hard didn’t lead anywhere good. A van started to look like an answer to several of those questions at once.

The van, however, had issues. Sure, it was beat up, but beggars can’t be choosers, if you’ll excuse the expression. But it wasn’t just that it was beat up. The seller said it leaked radiator fluid whenever it drove, which, according to Claude, might be a $50 fix or might be a “don’t walk away, run away” kind of problem. So I posted a photo to the Wallingford & Fremont Community Facebook group asking if anyone knew cars well enough to drive down to Federal Way with me and look the thing over. The neighborhood’s verdict came back fast and unanimous, and it was, roughly, stay away. John Luethe, for example, said he had owned 1970s trucks in high school and remembered the maintenance simply never stopping…fan motor, brakes, starter, alternator, something new every month…and pointed out that a 318 V8 from 1973 gets somewhere between 9 and 12 miles to the gallon, which was fun when gas was 99 cents, but is considerably less fun now. He was right, and I let the yellow van go.

But I hadn’t let go of the idea. If the yellow van was the wrong van, there was a right one out there, and figuring out what it looked like meant being honest about the two things I’d been steering around: the dogs and the price of gas.

Let’s start with the dogs, because they present one of the uncomfortable aspects of this story. They were the reason a regular job was off the table to begin with: two dogs and nowhere to leave them, and you can’t lock two dogs in a hot car for an eight-hour shift. Animal Control had already come around more than once, checking on them and making noises about taking them away.

Now, a reasonable person can hear that and say: if the dogs are the thing standing between you and a paycheck, then you don’t get to keep the dogs. I understand that argument. It’s not wrong. But when I asked her about it, she said, “They’re my family,” the only family she had here, and I couldn’t sit in judgment of that. When I was younger, I remember someone spending a thousand-some dollars on surgery for their cat and thought that was insane, the kind of thing I would obviously never do… and then some years later my own cat got sick, and I realized the decision is more nuanced when it’s your own pet. Somewhere on Maslow’s hierarchy, stacked just above food and shelter, there’s something about loving and belonging. So OK, dogs.

The dogs, plus the price of gas, actually settled the question of what kind of van to look for. What with the war with Iran, the Strait of Hormuz had been closed since the end of February, and gas around here was nosing above six dollars a gallon, with people throwing around numbers like seven if it dragged on. A vehicle that gets nine miles to the gallon is a poor foundation for a career that consists of driving around all day, hoping for a $5 tip for handing over a box of Pad Thai, and the last thing I wanted was to saddle her with something that would die in a month, leaving her exactly where she’d started. So the requirements were clear: reliable, decent mileage, and roomy enough to be a halfway humane place to live with two dogs.

I did some research (again, thank you, Claude), and two options were the clear favorites: a Honda Odyssey or a Toyota Sienna. Both were boringly reliable, low twenties on the highway, and a nice big box in the back that, if you jump on Instagram or YouTube, you’ll learn is perfect for conversion into a camper. I went looking, found a Sienna listed at three grand from a lot on Aurora, took it for the obligatory pre-purchase inspection (at Northwest Automotive, who agreed to do some of the work at cost, thank you!), talked the seller down just enough to feel like I’d played the used car game right, and we were on our way.

I was grateful to my neighbors Jason Fontenot, Dan Thane, and Christopher Chow, who all chipped in handily towards the purchase. [Longtime readers may recognize Dan Thane; this is his second life-saving credit in these pages, setting a Wallyhood record. The first was in the comments of a 2015 post about a Halloween house fire, where Patty credits him with extracting her from an inferno.] The Sienna needed a timing belt and brakes before I’d trust it to go anywhere, work that nearly doubled what I’d paid for the van itself, but in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess.

Then came the fun part. I reached out to my friend Matt Schoenholz, a UX designer and talented craftsman who’s converted a number of vans into campers, and he offered to build it out with me. I put up a wish list on my local Buy Nothing group, and my wishes were fulfilled: a mattress that fit our space almost suspiciously well (Cody), an electric cooler that runs off a DC battery (Dan), offers to run errands, and a little cash here and there. Matt raided his own stash of parts from old projects, and Jason from Sunergy, the solar outfit over in Ballard, donated a used 200-watt panel for the roof.

Before we started, we had Elysia come look at the empty shell and tell us what she wanted, since it was going to be hers. She was endearingly apologetic about asking for anything, but the one thing she really hoped for, she said, was to be able to lie down: she’d spent the better part of a year sleeping sitting up in the back of the Highlander. Yes, we told her, we were fairly confident we could manage lying down. Then, a little more shyly, she added that if there were also some way she could sit up, just sit upright, in a chair, like a person, that would be wonderful. She mentioned she’s working on a book. We said we’d see what we could do.

Matt is the kind of builder who can see how things fit together before they exist. He framed out custom cubbies sized to her storage bins, with a lip so they slide in and out easily but don’t come flying forward when she brakes. He installed an old sink and ran it off a USB-rechargeable pump with a couple of five-gallon jugs underneath, so she’d have running water. I dug up some rechargeable lights. Piece by piece, over a few days, the empty box turned into a small, tight, genuinely livable home, a place to lie down, a place to sit up, and a place to keep the dogs.