RV Life: 90 day Check-in
Happy Birthday America!! It’s the 4th of July today. It’s kind of a special holiday for me as it really is the middle marker for the year. Not just a day to remember our country’s history or simply a reason to get drunk and play with explosives, but also a day when we should be looking at the last six months of our life and readjusting for the next six. It’s also the hottest part of the year and right around when I contest to all that will listen, every single year, that “next fourth of July I better not fucking be here!” Well that was the plan at least.
I woke up this morning to a loud pop, then another, and another. I’d taken a pretty sincere amount of sleeping pills the night before so I was disoriented at 7:18am, unsure where I was or what that cacophony of noise could be. I rolled around in my sweat soaked bed, purple stain all over my cream satin pillow from the immense amount of moisture my hairline had expelled during the night. The overhead air-conditioner kicked on and drowned out the pops and I suddenly remembered: ah, the shooting range. That’s right, I’d moved my trailer late last night from the luxury RV parking in my parent’s front yard to the skeet range at the Clark County Shooting Complex in order to mitigate the illegal street fireworks that descend on their neighborhood every year around this time. Don’t get me wrong, I love illegal explosives being handled by middle aged dads that have been knee deep in a beer haze since 11am but living in a tin foil box only reverberates noise and my little love bugs just don’t need that kind of terror in their lives right now; they’re already baking to death as it is.
We’re set to hit 118° this weekend and our trailer is now sitting on a south facing hill in a parking lot of dirt and gravel. No trees, not even a shrub. When I woke up the trailer was already at 83° and its anyone’s guess if today will be the day that these little A/C engines that could just can’t anymore. I imagine that after the next Civil War, this is where we’ll bring our prisoners to die, shackled to this very spot, left to succumb to exposure, a race between the blistering sun and extraordinary heat. If I were crowned governess of this neon flashing shithole, that’s what I would do. The next few days mark the real beginning of summer in Las Vegas, and unlike most places where monsoon season is upon them, this deep and depressive heat will only continue like a slow burn until fall, marked by the immediate drop in temp on October 31st. Trust me, I remember well how many naughty nurse and bad cop costumes were ruined on those frigid Halloween nights.
I prefaced with the degradation of my summer as an intro because I think it’s important to paint the picture for you. I should be in Montana right now, the precipice of my trip, my most northerly point of interest before I make a break for the northern west coast. I should be coming off the last ~6 weeks in the Rockies, swimming in alpine lakes, photographing snow capped peaks, and drinking millennials under the table in trendy bars in the Denver area. I should have sideswiped at least one parking lot pole and been through three Hinge heartbreaks by now. But, alas, I have not. I am spending this very important milestone potentially dying of heat stroke in my trailer on a fucking skeet range. My fridge is still broken, a big problem that I just can’t tackle at this point because I may not be living in the trailer much longer. Why spend a grand on a fridge when I’m probably looking for an apartment, right?
It’s really taken me the last ten weeks to fully understand what’s been going on with my brand new truck. I was upset before but now that I know the totality of the situation, I am realizing for the first time that being home simply as a pit stop is no longer feasible. That truck is on it’s fifth dealership, at the current shop now for almost a month, and is awaiting engineers to be called in to determine exactly what the fuck is wrong. And in my investigation, I have learned that the dealership I originally bought it from actually bought it back from someone after three weeks right before I purchased it. I’m also alleging after seeing the maintenance reports that said dealership falsified state documents and committed fraud by illegally smogging it. I know for a fact that every time a codes been cleared, that truck runs 150 miles before coding again and that is sufficient time to smog, sticker, and sell a fucking car. And without a truck to tow it, this mobile bitch-mobile is a-rolling no more.
As a recap, throughout the last 90 days, I was gone one day before I ripped out my auxiliary plug and had to return home to rewire the truck to the trailer (no small task). Cutie fell and hurt her spine, and black cat was diagnosed with kidney failure. We popped a tire on the trailer then popped the fuse on the DC/DC line (yet to be repaired) then popped a fuse on the frig (twice), replaced the thermistor, and have decided to live as savages with no fridge at all. The roller on the bed broke, rendering the slide almost useless but not as bad as that ottoman knob that got caught in the large slide and ripped a basketball size hole in the middle of the living room vinyl. The striped cat has decided to piss on every surface in the entire trailer and if we’re being honest, I’m not even mad about the low and constant tinge of ammonia in the air at all times now. The brand new lithium batteries keep dying, and I can’t seem to get the very powerful generator to ever fully recharge them. I ran (my entire body head first) into the hitch at full speed and knocked myself out in the driveway followed by falling out of the door onto the metal stairs. My ass is still recovering but the crack in my cranium may be forever. On top of all of that, there’s the truck that broke down: in Tucson, in Silver City, in Santa Fe, in Jemez, in Albuquerque, then finally in Holbrook, AZ when my parents came to pick the trailer up and I limped that piece of shit all the way home. I may have missed a couple mishaps but I think that brings us up to date.
I can’t currently give an honest opinion about RV life because in all the days we’ve been out RVing, we’ve really just been surviving through crises. I can say I think we got in a whole four, maybe five weeks of RV life before the snowball of shit I call Dodge began: Death Valley, Salton Sea, Tucson, and White Sands and just leaving White Sands, we were finally hitting our stride. We were finally gaining confidence in our towing and our trailer, learning to maneuver, and finally gaining some semblance of independence. I might have really liked it if we’d ever really gotten there, but we didn’t. And now my opinion is mired by dozens of break-downs and weeks and weeks spent in shitty RV parks in the middle of nowhere with no vehicle, no space, no privacy to only end up home three moths later, baking to death in a trailer just blocks from the home I once owned and loved. I traded a job I disliked in a home I loved for unemployment and despair in the exact same location but without nothing but a shitbox on wheels. I can’t help but feel like the entire thing was a fucking mistake that I will never escape or recover from.
So today, on this day of deep reflection, I look back on this huge leap of faith I took and will try to come up with a game plan for the next six months, licking my wounds and swallowing my pride as I move into my friend’s guest room and try to reenter my work field with a reputation I burned to the fucking ground just yesterday. If I’m lucky, my new dose of Prozac will have an adverse effect with the fifth of vodka (served room temp of course) I’m having for dinner and maybe, just maybe, when I clumsily climb up the 13 foot ladder of my trailer to view the fireworks and reflect, a hot, strong wind reminiscent of Satan’s asshole takes me by surprise and I’m found in the morning, twisted and tangled on the gravel below, with a bottle of Svedka in my hand and a smile on my face.
I sincerely doubt it though. I’d probably just break my leg.