Decamillis, Dori
Description
Two young painters in love sell everything they own, buy a 1970 Ultra Van and hit the road to seek their fortune. This is the story of their adventure
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With no money, no clear destination, and a vehicle just as likely to die crossing the Rockies as it is to make it over them, Joe and Dori DeCamillis set out, in the fall of 1991, to become rich and famous artists. They find work as housepainters, waiters, and even sell their own blood. Armed with a well-worn list of every other Ultra Van owner in Americamany of whom welcome the couple into their homesJoe and Dori face mechanical trouble, medical trouble, hunger, bankruptcy and occasional feelings of total hopelessness. They struggle with the impulse to give up and go home. They keep going instead. They also keep painting their small, lovingly- rendered paintings of the interiors of houses of the so-called ordinary people who befriend them along their way. Their paintings tell the story of the places theyve been on their travels and the places Americans call home.
Gradually, along the highways of America, in unlikely places like Gainesville Florida and Marquette Michiganthanks to the kindness of strangers and the passion they feel for their work, the road, and each otherDori and Joe begin to make their way, ultimately creating and selling hundreds of paintings and no longer having to wonder where their next meal is coming from. Theirs is a story about becoming a couple, about the search for a home more permanent than a Wal-Mart parking lot: not just an address, but a sense of roots, a place to build a family. In a voice as unaffected as the paintings she and her husband create, Dori DeCamillis tells the story of their two year long journey. Often funny, sometimes heartbreakingwith echoes of Huckleberry Finn, Jack Kerouac and Lucy and Desi in The Long Long TrailerThe Freeway takes a reader not simply across America, but to a place somewhere in the center of the heart.
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