Living in this trailer park, we were close enough to the Yucca Plant that Simone could bike to work. I’d hang laundry on the community clothesline with the baby in a sling and watch Simone as he faded into the distance in his welder’s cap, a baseball-hat-spun-around-backwards-on-the-head look. He shrank into the distance on that no-gear two-wheeler, into cantaloupe fields that wafted a heady perfume on warm days. One advantage to working outages was that the plant’s smoke stacks were asleep for the duration of the repairs. He worked long hours, six day weeks, twelve hour days, which paid good overtime but made us lonely for more time together.
My aunt said Simone reminded her of the witch in the Wizard of Oz when she visited and spotted him pedaling through the cantaloupe fields, coming home from work. It was the bike, I think, an old-fashioned version with a basket in front. We had borrowed the bike from an elderly neighbor: most of our RV neighbor’s were elderly. Retirees are the demographic group that purchase and drive RV’s most. They are often known as snowbirds in the vernacular of the southern towns they descend on in winter. Not only for their snowy hair, but because they drive down from colder climates in the northern U.S. states and Canada. As they age, many of them start to fly down rather than drive back and forth, choosing to leave their RV parked in a snowbird trailer park at their permanent winter home.
As a child, I grew up seeing these snowbirds in Yuma, at least for the first six years of my life. They ballooned the town, crowded the stores and restaurants. They always seemed to move in pairs, like swans that mate for life. Never did I dream I’d be living among them. Those years living in our Hitchhiker I noticed that they were always outside, watering plants or strolling around the snowbird courts. Recreation Vehicles are too small to stay inside, cooped-up all day, so one tends to see more of their neighbors than in normal neighborhoods. Our elderly neighbors had odd hobbies, enjoyed playing bingo and bocce, and loved to tell stories, mostly about the wars. One old guy told us, “Sometimes a man needs a story more than food to get by.” They loved our babies, as we added them through the years, and loved to hear the story of how Simone and I met. We had a string of grandparents waiting to greet us no matter where we moved.
The overhaul at the Yucca Power Plant lasted just under a month, and then we were off with our traveling group of Navajo welders to Rock Springs, Wyoming. The day before leaving, a WWII veteran called us out to watch a desert succulent bloom, a once annual event. It was evening. The bud opened in response to the sunset. We stood and watched. He said it was a Reina de la Noche and that in twelve hours—just after sunrise the following morning—daylight would wither the flower and it would be dead. I stared at his cactus bed in order to avoid his eyes, I think because his voice trembled notably as he spoke.
Several American films have made a splash with the RV as a centerpiece. The earliest being Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in The Long, Long Trailer, about a couple and their screwball antics on the road. In one scene, Lucy tries to cook as Desi drives. She is jostled around in their kitchen in a bit of terrific slapstick humor. Likewise, the movie Lost in America is a 1985 comedy about some wealthy yuppies who decide they are fed up with their bosses and their materialistic lifestyle. They buy a Winnebago and escape with their nest egg only to have the nutty wife gamble it all away in Vegas and foil their plans.
About Schmidt stars Jack Nicholson as a widower, depressed and emasculated by his discovery that his wife had a lifelong affair with his friend. He sets off in a Winnebago to visit his daughter and convince her not to marry. He returns home a renewed man. Something about the RV, about getting on the road and experiencing a physical change of landscape, reminds us that life is and should remain an adventure.
Simone’s grandfather, Nonno Marcello, the wealthy patriarch of his small family, sent us five million lira in those pre euro days (about four thousand dollars) so we could purchase a truck to pull our Hitchhiker out of that horse-shoe shaped snowbird park in Yuma, Arizona. We added another four thousand to this and bought a sand-colored, 6.2-liter diesel (a piece of shit, Simone tells me to write) from Vicker’s Used Cars in my parents’ hometown of Farmington, New Mexico.
It took us a few years to figure out that the truck was a lemon. It was personally disappointing as the Vicker kids were my friends during high school. In Farmington, the kids with parents who had been in the Peace Corps, worked at Indian Health Services in Shiprock, practiced Asian martial arts, or were seen eating any ethnic food other than Mexican were considered strange. Everyone admired the Vickers because they came from Texas and their dad owned the used car lot. They drove classic convertibles off their father’s lot. The girls won homecoming queen titles. They were gracious and polite. Our town chose two separate homecoming queens per year, one from the Indian population, another from members of the mainstream population.
Vickers Used Cars was in Farmington in the Four Corners region, and after purchasing our truck, Simone had to drive back to Yuma to retrieve our Hitchhiker. I stayed with the baby and my parents, while he embarked on the job: a ten hour drive, followed by work. He had to mount the hitch with the help of his friend Miguel. They fabricated brackets out of angle iron to connect to the chassis of the truck. The bolts that came down through the hitch to the truck bed had to fasten to the frame of the truck otherwise the hitch would rip right off the metal. He had to purchase and install a plug, wire the blinkers and the brakes. The first time our Hitchhiker took to the Interstate it was with Simone alone.
It’s important to note that Simone didn’t ask Nonno Marcello for money, it came as a surprise when he offered. We could have made payments. On average, it cost us ninety dollars a month to rent a space for our Hitchhiker. We were making between four and five thousand dollars a month and our bank account seemed to be piling up fast. We took gaps of time between outages to do fun things: go to Yellowstone or the Grand Tetons, stop in Laughlin, Nevada to stay at a hotel and swim, or head to SeaWorld in San Diego.
I remember our Hitchhiker now—can see it clearly in my mind—especially the way it looked while it was hooked up and towed like an obedient, oversize pet. Especially since much of my time was spent following Simone in the Isuzu I-mark my father bought me for my first year away at college. I remember its giant body sliding back and forth on icy mountain passes, perilous as a scene from The Long, Long Trailer, Simone as Desi Arnaz. I waved and directed Simone back into tight spaces when we visited majestic forests and beaches. It had a wood window one winter; we wanted to order a new one but were moving from outage to outage so often that there was never a stable address for the Nuway factory to ship the part. There was a sun roof in the bathroom where I looked up at night when I stepped out of the shower and saw stars.
I bent a gas pump over (they are surprisingly flexible) one time in the middle of the night at a Giant station in Bernallilo County, coming off of Insterstate 17 south of Santa Fe, across the street from a Lotta Burger. Simone was asleep in the upstairs bedroom when he heard the screech of metal. We had been driving all night from New Orleans and he was tired. I turned too sharply as I entered the gas station and the Hitchhiker rubbed up against the pump. The truck and the Hitchhiker sat jack-knifed together at a severe angle and I could see Simone clearly from the driver’s seat of the truck, since the cab and the rear were bent close. He pulled back the bedroom curtain, his eyes humongous and staring as he saw what I had done. Nothing exploded. He simply came to me, slipped behind the driver’s seat, pushed me out of the way, and backed us up. The gas pump returned to its normal position.
Simone says Nonno simply offered the eight million lira because he wanted to help us out, to reach out and be kind—remarkable since the lifestyle Simone was living was completely out of order with his wishes for us and his sensibilities in general. It hurt him that Simone had rejected the grand houses, the fur-coated women, the Mercedes Benz lifestyle, in order to wander around with me, our expanding family, and a gang of migrant Navajo welders. It hurt him that English was dominating Simone’s life. Simone wa
s in fact learning English well, with a beautiful Milanese accent, though every once in a while, on certain words, I heard a slight hint of Navajo accent slip in.
Not everyone associates Recreational Vehicles with nature, an experience of freedom, or a way to break away from stiff societal standards. Take my friend, Jonathan, for example, when I asked him what he associated Recreational Vehicle’s with he said, “Meth labs.”
“You’re joking.”
“No. In the Midwest they’re used as meth labs, I saw an article in the River Front Times.”
“How odd. I guess it makes sense. What else?”
“FEMA trailers for Hurricane relief…”
“That’s right…how depressing.”
“Oh, and Warren Oates, the B movie actor…”
Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, and Loretta Switt—the actress who played Hot Lips in the television series M*A*S*H—starred in Race with the Devil, a 1975 horror flick with humorous elements. They play a group of friends headed for a ski trip in Aspen in their Winnebago. While camping in Texas they accidentally witness a crime, a killing, a human sacrifice by cult members. For the rest of the film they are chased. The sheriff they approach for help, as well as the Texas community whose help they try to enlist, seem to be in cahoots with the psycho cult members. Little by little their Winnebago falls apart, as they are attacked in chase scene after chase scene, and the movie ends with the evil cult members trapping the innocents inside the Winnebago in a circle of fire. As far as horror movies goes, it’s half creepy and half goofy. Simone and I joke that of all the Recreational Vehicle movies to come out of Hollywood, Race with the Devil may be the most apt comparison to what we thought we were doing in our Hitchhiker all those years ago.
We were young and romantic and needed a place of our own where our parents, friends and family couldn’t meddle. The Hitchhiker we lived in was an egg, a protective environment to live in, and argue out our goals, plans, and lifestyle. We were in a complicated mating ritual, trying to figure out which traditions and values to choose from his side of the family, and which to choose from my side of the family. He talked about running from the devil of materialism, excess consumerism, and status concerns of northern Italy, and what he considered close-minded provincial thought. He had read the Bhagavad Gita, and wanted to believe that life is, at the core, a spiritual adventure.
For my part, I was running from the pressure of traditions, fatalism, and the dysfunction often seen in post-Indian boarding school families. I was enthralled by Thoreau’s Walden, and the Hitchhiker presented opportunities to both live in nature and hike every chance I got. Migrant work made life simple, the small space we called home made it impossible to buy junk, and there was an independent quality to it that I enjoyed very much. We relied on pay phones to call our parents collect and traveled so frequently that it was impossible to forge lasting friendships. Occasionally a Navajo welder would come to our fifth-wheel for a home cooked meal. His worldview was as separate and marginalized as our own. We liked it that way. We had seen in our respective hometowns, a limiting vision of freedom and life, and though we knew we couldn’t escape it forever, we knew that we were buying time. The longer we stayed in hibernation, the longer we delayed our indoctrination into society, and pressure from our families to conform to some dead-end office job. The longer we lived in the Hitchhiker, the longer we could retain a sense of our childhood, and believe whatever our imagination led us to explore.
I admit that much of our speculation was simply the romanticism of youth, but in retrospect I see how, in many ways, our life in the Hitchhiker had an impact on our lives that can still be pointed to today. We are still not big shoppers. We still remain independent, and more immune to peer pressure than average, or the idea that we have to keep up with the Joneses. We only recently had cable TV installed and still have only a vague idea about what is going on in pop culture.
Simone worked. Every town we moved to I had to locate four things: the grocery store, the library, the park, and the post office. These were the essentials of life and they point to how I spent my time, reading to myself and the kids, walking at trails in parks, and cooking homemade meals that we drove out to Simone on his lunch break. I didn’t bother signing my oldest daughter up for school, even when she hit Kindergarten, I just schooled her at home though we both knew, as the kids grew older, that it would soon be necessary for our years in the fifth wheel to come to an end.
I would have never expected to own or live in a fifth-wheel for as long as we did, a total of five years, not including the three months every summer when we parked our beloved Hitchhiker at a storage facility and took a flight to Simone’s parents in northern Italy. I think our summer abroad each year made it possible to maintain our migrant-welder adventures because it helped Simone avoid burnout. I am certain that going home to relax gave him strength to return to the long hours and grueling work when we got back to the States. For my part, I saved every penny he earned, even baking our bread from scratch. After five years of Hitchhiking adventures, we had earned and saved enough money to start our own business, which put an end to this phase of our life.
Looking back I remember the many trips, the travelers, the snowbirds we met, and the woods, beaches, and deserts where we set up home. The cyclical pattern we moved in, the same seven states, the same seven or so power plants, reminds me now of the ancient hunter gathering societies. We met plenty of homeless people, hoboes catching trains, refugees camped out in America’s wealthy backyards. During those years we couldn’t help observing as if from the outside, looking in. All those people who think of themselves as tethered, who cling to the idea of society and place, people who live with an illusion of permanence and safety, people we have joined. Simone and I are stable now, middle-class with five kids, we only go away for Christmas break and summers. However, we still do not have that luxury of centering and place, because our family roots and individual cultures are important to us and they stretch to two different continents. When one of us arrives home, the other is necessarily traveling.
We went back to my birthplace on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation to sell our Hitchhiker in the end. We put an ad in the Thrifty Nickel, a classified section that contained RV’s for sale and that features the Buffalo head nickel on the cover.
A lady with frizzy split-ends and a harried expression answered our advertisement. No, she did not have the total amount we were asking. No, she did not have a truck to pick the Hitchhiker up. She planned on parking it in a permanent location for herself and her adult son. Between the two of their jobs they’d be able to make a second balloon payment. She could give us one thousand today and another thousand-five-hundred in a month.
We hooked up the fifth-wheel and drove it out to her. It had its scrapes and bruises. Our oldest kids got teary-eyed watching it go. When we arrived at the designated meeting point we discovered that the woman was a squatter on a section of land between Yuma and the reservation known as No-Man’s-Land. The shoreline of the Colorado River has changed occasionally through the years, mostly due to earthquakes. Since the Colorado River creates the boundary of ownership between the city of Yuma and the Yuma Indian Nation, this creates disputes: in the late ’40s a man looked to increase his real estate and farm land by using dynamite blow a new bend in the river’s shoreline. The resulting section of land, No-Man’s-Land, is still disputed today.
We dropped our Hitchhiker off at the squatter’s park on No-Man’s-Land and collected the money the woman had on hand. As we drove back down the dirt road, I looked back in the rearview mirror, at the white paint, the red stripes, the frilly pink curtains of our first home together in America. I suspected we would never receive the balloon payment, though I didn’t mention it to Simone who tends to be gullible about the goodness in people. Ten years later, it doesn’t matter. It is a consolation that the Hitchhiker sits steady in a place that belongs legally to no one.
Deborah Taffa was born for the Keepers of the Water clan on the Fort Yuma Indian
Reservation. A writer of mixed Yuma/Laguna/Latina ancestry, she has backpacked in rural Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Her work reflects both her roots and wings. She is currently an M.F.A. candidate in the CNF program at the University of Iowa.
SABINE BERGMANN
Death Road
If you have a death wish, this is a ride for you.
ILEANED CAUTIOUSLY TOWARDS THE ROAD’S EDGE, WHICH gave way to a sheer cliff, a gashed rock-face stretching towards the distant earth. At the bottom, a mere speck of yellow on the floor of rocks, lay the tiny carcass of a yellow bus—tiny from here, at least. Squinting, I could see spray-painted designs covering the bright yellow shell like psychedelic graffiti. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think some 70s hippie collective had taken an ill-fated road trip out here to the Bolivian cordillera. But I recognized it as one of the micro buses, the kind that rushed haphazard through the city of Cochabamba, tiny indigenous women crammed against their dusty windows. They lurched around corners in a blur of color, pedestrians leaping from their path, occupants swaying like the bobble-head Homer Simpsons and Catholic crosses strung from the rear-view mirrors. This micro had lurched too far. It looked like a toy, a little plastic truck thrown carelessly aside by a bored toddler. But another squint revealed rusted edges and missing doors, missing windows, the glass blown out and scattered among the rocks. These rocks, boulders I should say, were nearly the size of the bus itself, stark and bare in the dry of the Andes. Lying among them, the bus looked like a colorful fossil.
A sharp cliff and a crushed vehicle are not the sort of things one wants to see at the beginning of a mountain-biking trip. They are especially not the sort of things one wants to see before biking down this particular mountain. The road doesn’t seem all that dangerous, its medley of names sweet and inviting: North Yungas Road, Grove’s Road, Coroico Road, Camino de las Yungas. These are the sorts of names which conjure up images of meandering paths into chirping tropical woodlands. You feel like you could saunter along these trails with binoculars in hand and a Nutri-Grain in your pocket, stopping occasionally to snap photos for your I’ve been to the Andes! slideshow. You are deceived. The truth is that this is a boulder-strewn chute plummeting 11,800 feet in half a day’s bike ride. The lucky ones start in the bone-chilling cold of the Andes, shivering through their ten sweaters and five pairs of mis-matched socks. Their fear is magnified by the adjacent precipice, which, unlike their fellow travelers, stays by their side the whole way down. For several hours they descend at a near-vertical angle, passing bus memorials such as this, imagining their parents’ faces when the consulate calls to inform them that their child hurtled over the edge of one of the highest mountain ranges in the world, until they find themselves at the bottom, where they swelter in their shorts in the middle of the rainforest, thanking God to be alive.
The Best Travel Writing 2011 Page 26