In Dubious Camper or Wearing Hubris Like a Medal (Part 2)

The search for a camper begins and you figure it must be like buying a used car: read up on the subject at the library, buy a couple of consumer magazines, check the classifieds, visit a few RV lots, maybe surf the Web, and it will all come together, especially since you intend to pay with cash and are highly educated and think that anything worth knowing can be mastered by reading about it first and tasting a little experience later for dessert.

You already own a big Ford pickup truck, which is an absurdity considering the timing of the purchase—when a former oil executive became President of the United States. But high gas prices will not abort great journalism and great literature, or a young man’s dream, and it’s hard to write in a tent anyway, so a camper it is.

You investigate a couple of possibilities, but they are too modern and too expensive. Great journalism and literature doesn’t need self-contained showers and toilets. Steinbeck had neither and he wrote a masterpiece. Same with Kerouac and Meriwether Lewis. And how about Woody Guthrie?

After a month of false starts and ad for an eight-foot, $2500, 1988, Lance camper appears. Model name “Squire.” Perfect. You make a call and talk to some dude who tells you a story: my uncle is dying of cancer and I have to get rid of this thing for him. It’s fucking sweet, in cherry fuckin’ condition and I got to unload it fast. People have been calling. It’s going to move. It’s $500 below book. You should check it out now!

You can definitely dig his advice. This rig feels hot. Luckily the wife is in Portland and you direct her to investigate and report back. She calls later and describes the camper as “small” and “shaky-looking.”

That’s not what you want to hear. You call the dude back and set up a meeting the next evening.

It’s a dark and stormy winter night when you pull your Ford F-150 into a potholed parking lot near a condemned donut shop. There it is, jacked up, just waiting for some aspiring gonzo writer to soak the interior upholstery with ether and blow those pussy university press memoirists and Granta short story writers away! That writer is you!

You meet the dude, who owns an auto detailing business in a very sketchy part of Portland. He twitches a lot and uses “fuck” as practically every part of speech. He has a lackey in tow, clad in a denim jump suit. The camper looks pretty good from the outside although it is dark and the dude apologizes for not bringing a flashlight. At least a weak light inside works and it throws a few beams to reveal the interior is dry, clean, Spartan, and utterly devoid of character. It also has no discernible smells that might reveal vices or traits from the previous owner, now allegedly in a coma. Of course the camper’s anonymity will change once you appoint it with the right trappings: mounted compass, weather station, old maps, altimeter, thrift store cookery, mediocre whiskey, coffee pot, arcane books, an 8-track player, beads, Jesus candles, poetry anthologies, stolen lawn gnomes, Rolling Stones’ album covers, and kitsch magnets from all over the West you will collect from the road.

It will be pretty much original these days as far as writing studios go. No one in New York, LA or in graduate school has this. It might even qualify as a tax deduction! Just like Steinbeck in Travels with Charley you’ll drink applejack after a long day’s drive, share your Cognac with migrant workers, and hole up in non-corporate motel every fourth day or so, soak in a tub and drink double vodkas. It’s all so cool a name for the camper materializes without any effort—Emotional Rescue. Keith Richards would definitely play guitar in here, maybe even take up smack again. Ramble on. Thunder prose. Born to write. All those particular places to go. Running on full. Smells like John Steinbeck’s spirit.

It’s all so flawless and outlined except the camper doesn’t actually fit the pickup—it’s too small and the jacks don’t hold it up high enough for you to back the pickup under it. No matter, this is America and these are your people godammit! The auto detail dude and his paroled fixers will fix it up, improve, make it happen right there, by building a platform for the truck bed to raise the camper precious inches so the overhang doesn’t collapse the cab. You’ll take it, without any haggling, because these Salts of the Earth are hustling hard for you to get Emotional Rescue on the road and into print.

The next morning you hand over the cash, and the auto detail dude arranges to have a forklift pick up the camper and set it down onto your pickup. It works. Was there ever any doubt? You shake hands, pull away, give the thumbs-up sign, and head west for home. The ten-disc CD changer you had recently installed is turned up to nearly criminal volume and early Tom Petty is rocking with twangy Rickenbacher magic. It’s happening and happening well, debt-free, on a straight, illuminated four-lane highway with a median. No longer a dream deferred for an American adult with a graduate teaching degree.

Out of Portland and through the franchised wasteland of the west-side suburbs. You start back over the Coast Range and gradually nervousness begins to gnaw. It’s a new feeling, one that apparently comes when driving on three black beers with an unsecured load of 1500 pounds shifting in the turns of the Wilson River Highway, a twisting, dark, road teeming with wildlife that William Stafford used to drive and wrote a great poem about. You actually taught it in class. Something about death you recall. Suddenly two deer bolt in front of you, brakes lock up, a fishtail commences. But the shoulder is atypically wide here, you slow the rig to an idle, check the front end for blood and fur, find nothing, and keep bearing to the sea.

You make it home and the wife is waiting. She remarks how the camper doesn’t seem to fit the truck. You explain and she seems highly skeptical. A week later you inventory the camper before the debut voyage—a one-day reconnoiter to the untainted Southern Oregon Coast. Here is the service report: you can’t turn on the heater and the camper fills up with gas. (Just bring more blankets.) Every lock is stripped. (Trust the proletariat.) There are no manuals. (Lewis and Clark never needed them.) None of the propane gauges work. (The tank must be full.) One of the hydraulic jacks is broken. (Fix it later with a Leatherman.) You have no idea how to operate the other three. (Ask a gas station attendant.) Two of the camper’s tie-down turnbuckles are rusted tight and will not attach. (Two is enough anyway.) There is no refrigerator as originally thought, but rather an icebox that requires a block of ice to cool your beer. (No freon to ruin the ozone layer.) There is no way to drain waste water because the truck’s side panel blocks the outflow pipe. (Fuck it!) You examine the title for the first time and even to an untrained eye it appears forged. (Good literary value in this detail.)

None of this is dissuading and you kiss the wife goodbye, load up Ray, load up the disc changer with the perfect programmed concert, and roll south down Highway 101 on the inaugural voyage. A storm is forecast but blow-dried meteorologists from Portland television stations are always wrong about the Oregon Coast’s weather and dire predictions barely concern you. Getting to the liquor store before it closes, that concerns you.

You buy the trusty Jim Beam Traveler, stock up on food, ice, and outfit the kitchen with the ugliest, grooviest, 70s-style pots and pans. At dusk you are approaching the lost-in-the-clouds, arcing-into-the-sky Yaquina Bay Bridge. Five cars hug your ass. The Who is blaring when the winds slam the camper. You can’t see for miles, only a few feet. The camper starts shaking like Tina Turner in 1969. It feels like you might pitch over the side, down 300 feet to the white-capped black sea below and die a truly ignominious, unpublished greenhorn death that might not even be noticed.

You hold the rudder firm, curse, scream, “Why does it have to rain and blow today in a drought winter?” It’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is to ask the bridge’s architect why the lanes are so narrow.

It takes what seems like an hour to pass through the green arches and make it across. Somehow it feels like a god intervened. You pull over, turn off the music, flip-off the ass huggers, reconsider this little sojourn, curse more, take a belt, look at Ray who appears scared…and decide to continue and brave other bridges and a barometer level now plummeting on your mail order weather station.

Four hours later you stop in non-Rock and Roll darkness at state park north of Bandon. The campground area is strewn with Sitka spruce branches. You are the only rig there. Your arms are cramping, head pounding, and the body odor emanating from your chest is pushing gag reflex levers. You need a double shot.

You get out of the cab, horizontal rain is now an afterthought, shine a flashlight, and notice two safety turnbuckles have vanished and the camper has shifted six inches in the bed of the truck. Inside, it looks like teenagers threw a party or the cops tossed the joint on a drug warrant. You take another belt, feed Ray, straighten up, try unsuccessfully for 15 minutes to turn on the heater, gas up the place, open the windows, read for 15 minutes, and go to sleep. You don’t even write a post card or in the special journal “log book” that was to record all the nuggets of dialogue and media fragments that would later end up as polished narrative gold.

The storm blows through that night. You eat breakfast in a packed Coos Bay diner and don’t overhear one interesting story. It’s mostly cracker bullshit full of double negatives about conspiracies so stupid they wouldn’t get aired on paranoid talk radio. The ride home in a drizzle is slow and uneventful. Ray sleeps the whole way. There’s really nothing to tell the wife when she asks how “it” all went.

Okay, so you took a few licks and the literary panning turned up nothing but gravel. It’s not going to happen all the time. But the camper is intact. Maiden voyage in the can. You have turned a lighter shade of green. Next time you’ll research the weather better and spot-weld the turnbuckles down tight if necessary. You will also avoid driving at night.

So, you deduce that you have the Right Stuff to take a Big Trip, the kind of Big Trip that will pre-sell magazine stories to the glossies, maybe even a book deal. It will be epic, a heart-palpitating work of staggering big-ball genius and “roughing it” that will translate to literary pieces full of “doing” and “action” with plot moving at the speed of a NASCAR race. No private reflection to the point of insanity like Edmund Wilson castigated Proust and Joyce for. They were weak and laid in bed or sat in cafes. You are on the road!

When the Big Trip is over and the ink has dried, Emotional Rescue will be parked in the museum of bitchin’ literary transportation right next to Che’s motorcycle, Hunter’s convertible, Ahab’s Pequod, the Merry Pranksters’ Further, Captain Nemo’s Nautilus and Noah’s Ark!