BOOK EXCERPT: Our Rig - The Purchase That Changed Everything

Note:  We are currently seeking representation for promotion and publication for our manuscript, "Freedom in a Can: A Mid-life Crisis in 72 Square Feet"

By David Hutchison with Shari Galiardi

Book Excerpt: The Rig – Our dear Hamlet, the purchase that changed everything
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.  -Maya Angelou

We ate pancakes at the little kitchen table in our tiny camper home the morning after it arrived in our driveway and into our lives.  It was cozy and almost quaint with a warm wood interior, but each corner and crevice revealed the cumulative toll of 55 years. Uncomfortable springs poked through the fabric of the ancient dinette seat bringing new clarity to what vintage really means.  The pungent smell of mildew competed with the reassuring aroma of pumpkin spice and maple syrup.  As we ate, we tried hard to imagine ourselves sleeping, cooking, or even just hanging out in here for any amount of time.  We conjured up memories from the remodel projects which gave us the initial confidence to make this purchase, but couldn’t seem to figure out where to begin.  If this was to become our home on wheels for our 2-year midlife, adventure across America, we had our work cut out for us and less than a year and a half in which to do it.  “What the hell have we done?” I said aloud.

My mind flashed to six months earlier when all of this seemed like a really good idea, when my wife, Shari, sprung her life-change elevator pitch on me.   While riding bikes through the rolling hills of our rural neighborhood in western North Carolina, she suddenly said, “I’ve got an idea, let’s rent out our house, buy a small camper, travel the country for a year or two exploring as many National Parks as we can, and then join the Peace Corps.”  I could hear in her voice that she was both serious and seriously selling me by dangling just the right bait.  Man, she knows how to play me.  There were so many parks and wild places I wanted to explore in this country, and Peace Corps was something we’d both always wanted to do.  Here was something worthy, self-sacrificing, and exactly the goal my ego needed to justify turning my back on my all too important career to go traveling.  This was an objective that even I couldn’t question, and who would?  

As we climbed the hill on that lovely summer day, with fresh air in my lungs and a world of possibilities before us, I paused, and the vision of an adorable little camper parked alongside a river somewhere out in the western desert, a brilliant sunrise turning the sky from deep blue to a fleeting crimson suddenly overwhelmed me.  Maybe it was my glycogen deprived muscles, or my oxygen starved brain, but I could almost smell coffee brewing on a camp stove.  I lost all hesitation and with a deep breath I told her that I loved her, loved her idea, and wanted that life.  Of course, living that life meant leaving the current one.

Our life seemed, on the outside, like the very definition of an “American Dream.”  With engaging careers at the same university, my wife and I slipped into a traditional, predictable track.  We bought a house and a little bit of land that fed our budding DIY and gardening habits, adopted cats who helped turn it all into a home, and started throwing killer fondue-inspired dinner parties.  I thought I was finally living like a responsible grown up.  We had nearly everything our peers, our grad school colleagues, and even we, wanted; so why was I so stressed out all the time?  Why was our health suffering?  Why when we should have been content with everything we’d accomplished were we feeling like we were slipping away from each other?  

After years of watching our lives click away in an ever-increasing rush of academic schedules, home maintenance, truncated visits with family and friends, evenings weekends and extended breaks sucked away by work responsibilities, and more time spent sitting in front of a computer screen than I’d ever bargained for, we began wondering if this was all life had to offer?   Without kids in our picture, why were we working so hard to create a life which supported a family?  With just the two of us, how much did we really need?

The life I imagined on that summer bike ride remained an abstract, far-off someday, until a few months later, when my wife put that someday on the calendar.  On a November evening, as I dragged myself into the house after another long day at work, she said to me without preamble, “Promise me you won’t be mad.”  Her equally exhausting day came to a crux, and a major life realization – she could no longer continue working in her current job, living our current life, without an escape plan.  Rather than draft her resignation letter, or begin a job search at some other university in some other community, she took a different step.  She returned home, poured a glass of wine and logged onto E-bay.  Selecting one of the vintage campers we’d been just casually browsing, (or so I thought) she entered her bid and hit submit.   She was leaving, and I was invited.  I just had to decide which was more important, my life as I knew it, or a life I could imagine that still had her in it.

I looked at the pictures of the camper we’d just “won,” and was not initially encouraged. Shari reasoned, “It’s not like we’re going to be out that much money, if we can’t fix it up.” She was right, of course, no matter how bad of shape it was in, we weren’t looking at a lost fortune; we were looking at an extended project.  “Think of what we’ll learn by bringing it back to life.  We’ve done so many house projects,” she persisted, “we can do this!”  Her enthusiasm for the purchase and the exit strategy it clearly defined began to win me over; and as I looked at the pictures again I did so with a new lens of curiosity, possibility and excitement.  I reconjured the quaint riverside camping image which struck me so powerfully on that summer bike ride.  “How bad could it be?” I thought, “Yeah… we’ve got this.”  

A $900 bid got us a 1957, 15-foot, canned-ham style travel trailer, made at the Orangeville, Ohio plant by the Sportcraft Trailer company of Cortland, Ohio.  It is a common style for travel trailers made during the post-war era, coming from the industrial northeast corner of the buckeye state.  Its shape, rounded at the front and rear of the trailer combined with its vertical sides inspired the comparison to the cured pork product found on grocery store shelves, and my Great Aunt’s basement pantry.  We found an original magazine advertisement for our model, the basic 15’, which claimed to sleep 5!  The lucky recipient of the last berth would have crawled above the main bed and spent the night in a hanging canvas cot.   Among its touted features were such technologies as “silvercote” insulation, 110-volt wiring, custom cabinets, and “speckletone” – which clearly needs no explanation.

As the real thing sat in our driveway, half a century removed from the slick ad-copy, the challenge of transforming it into a livable condition threatened to overwhelm my own enthusiasm and confidence.   But there was something about this trailer that invited me in from the first time I opened the door, something beyond its current state which conjured images of road tripping’s golden age.  As Shari put, “he’s got good bones!” and I had to agree.  The all-wood interior simply hooked me, and practically screamed its potential even from behind water stains.  No pre-fab paneling here, no poly glossy wall-board found in later models, but real wood walls which could be stripped, sanded, refinished and brought back to life.  Before the last drop of syrup cooled on our plates on that very first morning, we initiated the transformation.  

The fisherman themed curtains alone spurred me into action and within minutes we had them down and started in on the two layers of loose linoleum tile cracking on the floor.  The goal of this first phase, remove all the ugly.   There was a lot of it, even with the curtains gone.  Imagine purchasing a tiny aluminum dwelling, economically built during the Eisenhower Administration, then left in a barn or worse, outside, for the past 55 years -- you start to get the picture.  Even if this little baby was taken care of and well loved, time alone would have wreaked havoc.  And it did – plus some really interesting repair decisions.

Let’s begin with the outside.  The aluminum siding hadn’t been polished since at least the Summer of Love, and had oxidized to a duct tape gray.  Shari objected to this description because, as she pointed out, duct tape has some sheen to it, and our trailer was not that pretty.  Imagine rather aged peeling duct-tape gray.  At some point the siding and roofing rivet nails were replaced with sheet metal screws (now rusting violently), each of these brown hex heads were “protected” from the elements with a tablespoon or more of silicone caulk – this wasn’t the only place the former handyman had used this all-purpose fixit in a tube.  His philosophy, when in doubt, more is probably better.  The aluminum trim which held the siding together at the corners was pulling away in places, and gaps were filled in with spray foam.  There was a sizable “patch” over a section in the roof, and I could only assume that a tree must have punctured there, because it lined up perfectly with a scratch / dent on the side.  

However, the outside was at least holding together and made its delivery down from Michigan in one piece.  For some reason, which never fully explained itself during the remodel or thereafter, one of the axle suspension leaf springs rode lower than the other so that the trailer leaned to the driver side and we rolled down the road at about a 5-degree list to port.  People would wave to us at stop lights and kindly tell us that our tire was low on that side.  We’d smile and nod and assure them we’d look into it.  

Our friend who picked it up and brought it down to North Carolina, reported that the inside seemed livable to him but then quickly added, “considering I’ve been living in a basement with no windows for the last year, I may not be the best judge.”  The inside had lost nearly all of its vintage chic and cuteness and had been relegated to a functional bachelor hunter decor as if that was its only remaining option. The original dinette seats were long gone and had been rebuilt with scrap 2x4’s in what would have amounted to a “C” effort in shop class.  The replacement dinette cushions didn’t fit the space and were as comfortable as a buckboard.  There were obvious signs of wood rot, dry rot, wet rot, and any other kind of rot you might want to imagine.  The ceiling sagged in the middle near the vent where more signs of water-entry lurked.  The stove was missing but all sorts of detritus on the wall and floor indicated its previous existence.  Evidence of meal production left hints to the kinds of bacon that once sizzled there.  One conspicuous hole in the ceiling was filled in with caulk and wood putty – still gooey to the touch.  The bed was reminiscent of a bad roadside motel.  If you sat on its edge, you fell over and rolled to the middle.  The obsolete ice chest was still in decent shape, but the self-draining ice tray took up most of the usable space.  Drawer fronts were gone, the flooring was coming up in large chunks, and the largest storage space under the bed was only accessible from the outside access door – which was screwed shut.  In every crack and crevice, the former owner squirted a fat bead of clear silicone caulk.  It couldn’t actually stop any leaks from the inside, so for the life of me I have no idea why this was his go to fix it.  

With all that was wrong with it, I was tempted to argue that we needed to strip it down to the axle and replace everything from the frame on up.  I employed this tactic once before when our master bathroom shower needed a small repair.  Rather than just replace the broken fixture, we literally ripped out the entire fiberglass tub with a reciprocating saw transforming an afternoon project into a 2-month crash course in plumbing and custom tiling, in which we learned the crucial difference between deck mud and thin set.  But with this trailer project, we had a deadline, and lacked the time, facilities, and patience for a complete rebuild.

 I believed that our camper would only be a temporary “escape egg” to a short-term life of travel for 18 months to 2 years, so I focused on the most important problems.  My priorities included making it water tight, clean, livable, and efficient.  Shari focused on bringing back the vintage chic with a modern touch adding retro fabric and bright colors.  As we replaced the aluminum roofing, refinished every wooded surface on the inside, added a solar-powered electrical system and created usable storage where there was none, we began to draw out not only function but form.  “It” suddenly became a major character in our story and we christened him “Hamlet,” less in reference to Shakespeare’s tragic Dane, and more for honoring the vintage genre and cured pork product lending its name.  As the remodel moved along the cuteness and livability factors increased, practically leaping out of every dirty and over-caulked seam.  While we restored the shine to the exterior aluminum, we began to see ourselves both literally and figuratively in this space.   Like many great relationships, what began with curiosity and uncertainty was turning into a full-blown love affair.  This quirky, off-brand trailer with all its dents and scratches had stood the test of time for more than 50 years and slowly but inevitably wrapped itself around our hearts.      

Before we’d even taken him out for a test run, I was becoming a camper person, a full-time RVer.  For most of my life, I scoffed at these mobile dwellings, believing that they were not camping on a fundamental level.  Roughing it with my family in our well-used 6-person canvas tent was my childhood standard of experiencing the great outdoors.  This was the Hutchison way to camp – the right way.  Nothing says family-time like trying to get some sleep with the 6 members of my nuclear unit all snoring and squirming for more space.  Waking up to smells of coffee brewing and eggs sizzling in bacon fat on a portable gas stove mixed with that particular canvas-tent bouquet are powerful memories and a testament to what camping should be.  Anything more permanent than fabric was for others, the soft campers who couldn’t be parted from their televisions long enough to really experience the natural beauty around them.  As a professional in outdoor education and lover of wild and remote places, I’ve spent my fair share of nights in a tent, in all kinds of weather, and reveled in where those portable dwellings could take me.   Perhaps I was becoming soft, but something in my middle-aged bones told me that if we tried this long-term adventure out of a tent, it would come to an abrupt and bitter end.

If tenting is the pure backcountry experience, then a small, stripped down trailer is a happy compromise between authenticity and drudgery, which we pay for in poor gas mileage. While a tent offers a pleasant diversion from normal home life, it can turn into a recurring headache when needing to set up or break down day after day.  I tried to imagine myself stuffing a soaking and dirty pile of nylon back into its storage sack amid an icy downpour for more than a week.  Our trailer offers both dwelling and storage, like a sailboat -- everything has its place and it stays there until needed.  We wouldn’t need to unpack all of our gear just to cook dinner, go to sleep or get dressed.  More importantly, a trailer offers a permanent bed with a real mattress and the potential for quality sleep these 40-somethings need. Perhaps I was becoming soft; but with our Hamlet we can transition quickly from travel to campsite – within 15 minutes we can be parked, leveled and cooking dinner or going to sleep in our bed.  We can be at home wherever we are.  

Of course, having a portable home with solid walls, a kitchen and a heater doesn’t exclude shorter back-country excursions away from roads and powerlines. When I realized that our small, lightweight rig could be a rolling outdoor adventure wagon, I was all the way in. Our successful remodel confirmed that we were on the right track toward a different way of life. We knew we could enjoy living in Hamlet as a basecamp. While many other questions and concerns loomed over our uncertain future, I never once regretted the night when Shari placed that bid on him. In that moment she doubled-down on us, trusting in our ability to work together through the remodel and the inevitable challenges we’d face together on the next leg of our journey. We set our sights on September 3rd, 2012, our twelfth wedding anniversary, as the day we rolled out of town and into the unknown. No matter where we went and what happened next, at least our home would be cute.