It’s nearly eleven in the morning at the Rimrock Grocery Store located unsurprisingly in Rimrock Washington. To say it’s a grocery’s the same kind of store you’ve undoubtably seen scattered across the landscape, located in the towns between towns. Where inside you’ll find photographs of hunters pinned to the walls and a sign that reads plainly, “Defend the 2nd amendment. Defender of the rest”. The groceries stocked aren’t from a supplier, but instead the owner takes a trip to another nearby chain grocery store to buy a few things and re-price them back here. Not an illegal, or even immoral business model. And it works well enough supporting campers who pass through in the summer. Or in our case, kicking off the next 48 hours in the Washington backcountry. This is the meeting point, where following a post on the US based Delica Forum (the other, more popular sites are all for the UK or Canada) Roland, the founder of Delicas Northwest and organizer of this metope has intended for everyone to come. But it’s nearly eleven, and no one else has come to join us.
Roland, his girlfriend Cara, and their six month old Australian Shepherd, Moss met up with us the night prior. We had intended to meet a few minutes up the road at the Indian Creek Campground. But it just so happened that as I was walking out of the gas station bathroom in Packwood the night prior, they were pulling in. The coincidence was a good one. The Delica I was in alongside Ben, and his 2 year old Doberman, Miles was running late. We had planned to get in to the campground around seven that night, even with daylight savings still in effect it would have been long dark. But it was now nearly nine, an hour and a half after Roland was supposed to arrive. And getting to an empty campground would have left me unsettled.
This wasn’t my first time meeting Roland. We’d first met about a month ago at Descend on Bend. A gathering of vans in central Oregon that I’ve heard referred to as “Burning Van”. Weather that is said with love or distain I wasn’t able to figure out, but since then we’d met one other time just three weeks earlier right down the road as we kicked off another camping trip on another section of the Washington Backroads Discovery Route. That’s what we were here for. The 575 mile long series of forest roads connected by the occasional two-lane highway or Rimrock-sized town reached from the Oregon border at White Salmon and winds its way Northeast to the Canadian border. Roland’s previous expedition was more or less successful than this one was shaping up to be, depending on how you measure achievements on the WABDR.
The first trip through this route we had a total of nine Delicas throughout the weekend. Impressive in many regards, but most of all was the centralizing of community. That was an aspect of Delica ownership that I hadn’t, and still have not come to grips with. In past lives of owning Volkswagen’s and Subaru’s, community and those who live and die by the emblem on their hood is the norm. Delica owners fall in to other subsets of enthusiasm though. You have your #vanlife groups who are using the Delica as a vessel to visit national parks and enjoy life. There are those who purchase it because of it’s unique-ness in the world of Japanese imports. Bridging the right hand drive and boxy designs of the 80s stateside. And lastly you have those who buy them for offloading, or overloading as it has become more popularly known as in recent years. And with such a fractured community, getting the word out to all these groups proves to be a hard task. But the route we would take this first time only skimmed portions of the first section of the WABDR. From Packwood we would head southwest, jumping on and off the trail as needed to reach our determined campsites and viewpoints. But weather you look at these events from the lens of challenge or community, success is a matter the quality of time spent. And to better do that, enter Delicas Northwest. Started in 2017 as a way to get owners together, Roland has since taken on liaison for the Pacific Northwest Community. Socializing and planning events to make sure no one gets lost along the way, or can meet up with the group at any point, he had identified three campgrounds for the night prior just incase the first two options were full. Incredibly unlikely when it’s November and you’re sitting 6,000’ in to the mountains of Washington, but that level of preparedness was something we had grown accustomed to.
So as we sat in the small parking lot of the Rimrock Grocery Store, the lack of other vans wasn’t a question of, “Did someone get lost?” but instead, “Are we the only ones dumb enough to do something like this?”. Eleven rolls around and I stare up at the grocery store sign standing tall in the trees. “Oysters” it offers proudly as the first thing you can purchase there, and I begin to answer my own question.