10 MPG Boondock bus connects ‘divine appointments’
Above photo, the rough cedar siding covers the insulation Michael Bannister installed during the year he worked retrofitting a school bus transformed to home.
From The East Texas Journal, July 2022
By Hudson Old, Publisher
DAINGERFIELD STATE PARK — Oil income generated $250 to $300 a month, money enough to “live like a king” backpacking South America for better than two years, right up until oil prices tanked. When Michael Bannister came home to Texas it took time to wean himself off his backpacking lifestyle.
Day labor jobs fit his new standard of living.
One day when he’d blown out a shoe and checked in a cheap hotel, an on-line job posting lured him back to the conventional labor force. He worked as a construction contractor for a travel-stop franchise that put him on the road, living in motels.
He thought of living in a school bus one day when he stopped at a place that sold retired school buses. They wanted $8,000 for the oldest one on the lot, a 1993 model of Thomas manufacture with a straight six International motor, “as common a block as you’ll find,” he said. “Any part you need’s easy to find at wrecking yard prices.”
He’s from Fort Worth. He made a steel hanger and climbed the ranks until he was running the jobs.
He didn’t see things getting out of kilter until a divorce invited looking back, remembering a time before, an adolescent fantasy of working in a ministry. For a time, he believed the answer to the grief of a divorce would be joy found in a second chance to answer a call into a professional ministry.
That didn’t work. Conditioned by simplicity, in his new position he found a materialistic edge not unlike that ruling the world.
Determined to make ends meet on the trickle of state-side oil income, he walked away and discovered Central America, then South America where anytime he wanted his skill as a builder gave him a home base at a hostel always needing work.
Everything slowed down. And rather than organized religion, everyday intersections became divine appointments, a frame of mind that hasn’t changed.
Six months after he first saw the bus, when he saw it hadn’t moved he went in and offered $3,500 and after they settled at $4,000 for the next year and a half he worked on it. He built framework for a stove and a shower, rewired it, added solar panels for a “Boondock” design with a pair of hundred amp batteries that can run everything but the air conditioning.
“Everything’s 12-volt but the AC,” he said. The bus gets 10 miles to a gallon. He eats a lot of vegetables, an inexpensive diet developed during his South American training, where “meat is disproportionately expensive.”
Part ministry, part adventure, he spends lots of time in the driveways of friends who want him to come and stay and visit for a time.
“The big clue’s when somebody tells me they’re putting in an outdoor plug for me,” he said.
He’s living on savings, averaging $800 a month, keeping tabs just close enough to know when it’s going to be time to work and save so he can leave again.
