Yeah, Typhoid Meadows. How the hell did I wind up there?
I think it was the result of my perennial habit of dealing inefficiently with conflict; which is a fancy way of describing cowardice.
Before the Meadows I had an idyllic RV site which backed on to a quiet area on a not very busy golf course. Then I helped out a no-hoper who had no transport to go and buy cigarettes. Then the no-hoper turned into a moocher and I had to say no and that caused a kind of quiet resentment.
He was in a broken-down motor home next to my Jayco trailer and that poisoned the atmosphere and made the whole thing awkward.
So when Bobby and Estelle told me that Hamish Turtleneck had a vacant spot on Camino del Rey, I paid Bobby to take my picnic table over there in his V8 diesel pickup truck, and then risked the transmission on the Xterra one more time to pull the Jayco over there.
The pitch was at the front of the lot, conveniently close to the dumpster. It (the pitch) already incorporated a front deck comprised of several wooden pallets.
The pallets were covered with a ragged but genteel plastic outdoor carpet. You could picture the rattlesnakes enjoying political asylum among the platform’s weathered stratified layers.
That’s why normally I don’t do front decks or fancy front steps on trailers; not in Arizona.
Things didn’t start badly; I didn’t actually see any rattlesnakes.
However, there were rustlings in the remote reaches of the trailer, and signs of gnawing on freezer bags (in the cupboards, you understand, not in the refrigerator).
I don’t remember why I lifted the hatch on the utilities locker where the water heater and the freshwater tank were. I may have been looking for mouse droppings.
Sitting on one of the terminal boxes was a five inch long rat. The five inches did not include the tail. The rat looked vaguely confused; perhaps because of the sudden incursion of daylight.
I dropped the hatch the way you would drop it if somebody had electrified it.
“Fucking rat!”
-Don’t they eat babies or gnaw your face off while you’re asleep, or spread bubonic plague, or something? Or is that hyenas? -Fuck rats.
I replaced the single courtesy retaining screw on the utilities cover with one screw in each corner. I also went back in there and set up a large ugly rat trap. You had to remove all four screws every time you reloaded the trap with peanut butter.
The first night I caught a brown and white deer mouse. Since the trap was designed for his larger and uglier cousins, the deer mouse must have thought a building had fallen on him.
On the second night the rat succumbed, and in the morning I threw him and the trap into the dumpster.
It occurred to me that if rats could make it into the trailer then rattlesnakes could too. None ever did but the sneaking anxiety that they might didn’t make you rest any easier at night. Now I think it unlikely that rattlesnakes would have bothered to make an appearance. Rats and mice are more adventurous as climbers, and they like cereals. Rattlesnakes are carnivores; nothing much inside the trailer would have attracted them (except perhaps the rodents, or staying warm when winter came).
The second plague was insects. Between the dumpster and the road there was was a half-acre patch of vegetation. It was neither alive nor fully dead, but seriously debilitated. It got baked during the early months of summer and then boiled when the monsoons arrived.
Insects of every kind and size thrived on the ailing plants. In August and September the air was thick with them.
If you went outside after dark to switch off the water heater or to empty the black water tank, you walked through a fog of diminutive organisms that assaulted your eyes and ears and nostrils. The insects took up residence in your eyebrows and facial hair.
Some of the midges were so small that they penetrated the screens on the trailer windows and infested your bedding.
The most bothersome effect of this infestation was that the rims of your eyelids were constantly inflamed. In the end that became a condition of everyday existence. I wondered vaguely whether the inflammation might be related to trachoma, the eye disease that deforms people’s eyelids and leaves them blind. It was not. Trachoma is an infection related to a strain of Chlamydia found mostly in Africa and Asia. The infestation at Camino del Rey was nonetheless egregiously unpleasant.
Around June or July I made the fateful decision to buy Bobby’s motor home. It seemed like a good idea at the time but it wasn’t.
Bobby and Estelle had heard me say that the Jayco did not provide enough space for me to keep my HP printer permanently set up.
Bobby had picked up a 1989 Tiffin Allegro motor home and he and Estelle had made a couple of local outings in it.
They brought it round to Camino del Rey one Sunday morning. Estelle had added some feminine touches to the décor and it looked pretty respectable. Everyone said how much more spacious it was than the Jayco; there would be room in the Allegro to keep my HP printer permanently set up.
Bobby texted me and told me that he planned to advertise the Allegro for sale at $6,000 but would give me first refusal at $5,000.
And I bought the rotten Tiffin Allegro motor home. Jeff gave me $3,800 for the Jayco.
Hamish parked the motor home next to the rattlesnake refuge. For a week or two after its arrival the engine would start but after that the battery got drained by some device in the bus that I never identified.
So I was stuck at Camino del Rey with a defective motor home. Hamish chuckled triumphantly.
“Looks like you’re here for good,” he said.
The cesspit access for the motor home was not up to code from the start, assuming that code required a screwed sealed union between the flexible sewer hose and the port on top of the cesspit. That is what is usually provided at respectable RV parks. At Camino del Rey the straight tube on the hose elbow just dropped into the cesspit port.
Then Hamish Turtleneck decided to introduce a second trailer into the equation. The black water tank on the second trailer would now discharge into my cesspit access port via a tee-piece. You could tell sewage was leaking from the union. While the rest of the lot was parched sand and gravel, fresh young grass was growing knee-high around the tee-piece, which was five yards from my living room window.
That was the point at which Hamish Turtleneck’s little RV paradise became known as Typhoid Meadows. -At least by me.
Hamish and I had had a couple of arguments already. It was pretty clear we didn’t like each other very much.
It was pointless to protest about the squalid state of the surroundings. It was pointless firstly because Hamish had no filters and no discernment by which he could perceive squalor, and secondly because he believed I was the kind of over-privileged middle-class popinjay that needed cutting down to size.
So escape was the only option.
I was appalled by the array of obstacles that confronted me. The motor home was dead in the water. The ignition lock was now spinning in the dashboard; you could not even get the key round to the position where it energized the starter solenoid.
It may have been about this time that I started making lists. There were six main obstacles standing between me and the escape from Typhoid Meadows.
Firstly, I had to find some alternative dwelling. The bus was a slum.
Secondly, the bus had to be made to run.
Three. The bus had to be registered in my name so that it could be driven legally.
Four. The wifi dish dish had to be taken down from the motor home roof and returned to the service provider.
Five. The mini-split air conditioner had to be decommissioned and transported.
Lastly, the propane supply had to be disconnected from its 20 lb. bottle and reconnected with the large integral propane tank that came as part of the bus.
Oh is THAT all?
1) FINDING AN ALTERNATIVE DWELLING.
The amenities on the motor home had been breaking down as if part of a routine controlled by an inexorable algorithm. The microwave was so ancient that it had a clockwork turntable rotating whatever you were cooking. First the turntable broke down; then the microwave stopped working.
Then the water heater stopped working, and electrical outlets went dead one after another. I think that the hot dry weather had over time baked and fragmented the plastic insulation and the electrical circuits had shorted out one after another.
There was very little advantage to having room to keep the HP printer set up; soon there would be nowhere to plug it in.
A wet patch appeared on the carpet. I think one of the under-floor PVC tubes supplying hot water to the bathroom had sprung a leak. Since the water heater no longer worked I could limit the seepage by not turning on the hot water faucet in the bathroom. No hot water was going to come out of it anyway.
And that is how I spent the last winter at Typhoid Meadows.
Jimmy Goldsworth and I had been friends at Mesquite Ridge RV Park, back when I had first pulled the Jayco down from Port Townsend WA.
He was visiting someone at Camino del Rey; some deal with a motorcycle.
“Long time,” He said. “Didn’t know you were here. You should come to dinner.”
So that was how, when I bought the used RV trailer on Facebook Market, Jimmy towed it back from Huachuca City. Jimmy had an old 4.6 liter V8 Ford pickup. I was surprised at how much better it was at towing than the Xterra, especially in view of the fact that the Xterra put out more horsepower. Must have been a gear ratio thing.
I stored the new trailer at Mesquite Ridge RV Park for $30 per month.
Now I had a new trailer waiting for me at Mesquite Ridge. In the interests of full disclosure I should acknowledge the new trailer was not new; it just wasn’t as old as the motor home.
All I had to do now was move the motor home out of Camino del Rey.
2) GETTING THE MOTOR HOME TO RUN.
We were all up at the Friday fish fry in Elfrida, eating at the tin tables in the permanent marquee outside the restaurant.
“I bet I could get it running,” Walter said. It was a magnanimous and altruistic offer of help, only tainted by a TINY hint of toxic bravado.
“You think so?” I said.
“How hard could it be?” he said.
So Walter came to visit on the following Monday. He brought a battery booster.
He removed the rogue ignition switch from its hole beside the steering wheel and laid it on top of the dash. Then he connected the battery booster, negative to negative and positive to positive, to the motor home’s battery.
But even with the key position all the way clockwise in the ignition barrel, the solenoid didn’t even bother to click.
“We need a hotwire,” Walter said. “Do you have a piece of insulated wire?”
I had a two meter charging cord for a smartphone and I cut off the USB plugs and stripped the insulation back from the ends.
We managed to feed the wire through the bulkhead beyond the dashboard, and into the weird empty compartment behind the radiator grille which housed the battery and very little else.
The clips from the battery booster were already in place on the main battery terminals and we attached the bottom end of the hotwire to the secondary negative terminal. The secondary terminal was a threaded shank with two hexagonal nuts on it; so making the connection was not difficult.
Inside the bus, Walter wrapped the other stripped end of the hotwire round the shaft of a small electrical screwdriver and jammed the screwdriver blade against the starter terminal.
Then he turned the ignition key all the way clockwise and the big Chevrolet V8 engine rumbled into the opening bars of a grudging mechanical sonata.
I left the battery on a battery charger for a couple of days, but even fully charged the battery did not put out enough charge to start the engine without the help of the booster.
Walter came back and said: “You need a more powerful battery; something that puts out say 850 marine cranking amps.”
So I went to O’Reilly’s, down by the border crossing to Agua Prieta, and bought a high end marine battery. It had a white translucent body and turquoise identification labels.
It fired the engine up first time and I left it in the battery compartment disconnected from the engine. A charger with maintain capability was permanently connected to the battery. The compartment had a shelf where you could leave the charger, separate from the shelf the battery sat on. That way the charger didn’t get rained on.
3) REGISTERING THE MOTOR HOME IN MY NAME.
I had taken the bus title to the DOT shortly after the bus came into my possession.
All my previous experience with the DOT had been uncomplicated. I had been impressed at how streamlined their processes were. But it’s only when you’re tired beyond imagining and low on morale that things go egg-shaped.
The girl at the DOT had been young and bright-eyed and conscientious; -and impervious to any charm I might have been able to deploy.
She had noticed a discrepancy between Bobby’s title and the original title, entered when the bus had been new. The original title said that the motor home’s model name was Allegro; the model name on Bobby’s title had been entered as “Unknown”.
The girl had insisted that I bring the bus to the DOT so that the model name could be verified. She was actually being a just a little pedantic The make of bus on the two titles was entered as Tiffin and the VIN numbers matched. The bus itself had Allegro emblazoned on the front and side. There was no way it was a different vehicle.
This meant that as well as moving the bus from Camino del Rey to Mesquite Ridge I now had to stop off at the DOT and verify the model name.
I could envisage a scenario where the bus would stall in the DOT parking lot and then refuse to start again. I would be homeless. Arizona DOT offices don’t let people boondock in. their office parking lots.
I went back to the DOT a couple of weeks later to get a three-day moving permit. It was my intention to drive from Camino to Mesquite Ridge and stop in at the DOT on the way. The permit would allow me to get to the DOT legally.
The pedantic girl was not at the DOT that day; so I took a chance. When I got to the desk, instead of asking for the moving permit I just put down the title and asked the clerk to transfer it to my name, which he did. Apparently he was less fastidious about model names than the girl had been.
So that was how the motor home got registered.
4) THE WIFI DISH.
The wifi dish was bolted to a mounting frame. The frame was anchored to the motor home roof with canvas ratchet straps and cinder blocks.
The motor home incorporated a ladder to provide access to the roof; so getting up there was not an insuperable challenge.
But the combined weight of the dish and the mounting frame was considerable.
The only real annoyance was that once the dish came down there would be no wifi and no phone access. There was no cellphone signal worth having at Camino del Rey; you were wholly dependent on wifi calling.
This meant that the dish had to stay in place until the last possible moment. So pulling the dish down was one of several exacting tasks which had to be crammed into the day of departure.
The straps holding the wifi dish in place were old, and rotted by the rain. I cut them free , threw down the cinder blocks, and lowered the dish and frame to the ground using a heavy duty electrical extension cord.
The wifi service provider, who ran a local one-man business and who was an excellent individual, came and picked up the dish, frame, and router as I was getting ready to leave.
5) THE MINI-SPLIT AIR CONDITIONER.
The motor home’s original air conditioner, like everything else on the motor home, had conformed to the preset routine of self-annihilation. At first it worked only intermittently and even after being repaired it would work for two hours and then trip the circuit breaker. If the circuit breaker box had been in good condition there would probably have been no problem, but, like everything else on the bus it had been the victim of time and extreme climate.
On Hamish’s recommendation I had bought a mini-split (state-of-the-art ductless air conditioner), and a friend of Hamish’s had installed it. The mini-split only drew four Amps, unlike the original air conditioner, which had drawn ten or eleven; so the geriatric circuit breaker box could handle it. Just so you didn’t try to run the microwave at the same time.
It was January when I was preparing to leave Camino del Rey; so you could actually function without air conditioning.
Thus I was able to decommission and transport the mini-split a little ahead of jumping off day.
One part of decommissioning the mini-split was the need to use the compressor to pump the freon from the wall unit and supply tubing, back into the reservoir in the compressor itself.
I had no gauges to verify that the freon had been completely transferred. However a video clip on YouTube indicated that if you closed the outlet valve on the compressor and ran the compressor for forty seconds, all the freon would be moved back into the reservoir.
So that is what I did. Afterwards I loosened the union on the supply tube and there was no hissing. That told me that all the freon had been pumped out.
After that I removed all the tubing and wiring from the indoor wall unit, and stored the tubes and wires inside the bus.
Because the people who had installed the mini-split had made a big deal of carrying its compressor, I got the idea that the compressor was heavier than it turned out to be. I was at Jeff’s for dinner one weekend and Jeff’s brother Tom offered to come over and help me move both the compressor and my picnic table over to Mesquite Ridge.
Tom had a hokey kind of midwestern charm, but it was rooted in a fundamental decency; so the charm was not the kind you laughed at. Somehow his unpretentious kindness commanded an instinctual respect.
Tom came over a couple of days later in a white V8 Ram pickup truck. The truck had a big chrome radiator grill that looked like somebody had combined Labor Day with FDR’s birthday and the Calgary Stampede. Tom had a problem with a hernia and he brought his neighbor Duncan along to help with the heavy lifting.
Duncan wasn’t that big but he picked up the mini-split compressor single-handed. That’s what made me suspect that it was not THAT heavy.
So Tom drove us the twelve miles from Camino del Rey to Mesquite Ridge. We unloaded the mini-split compressor and the picnic table and left them outside the new RV trailer.
6) THE PROPANE SUPPLY
It became obvious (after Jeff pointed it out to me) that the motor home’s propane supply was designed to be versatile. On the downstream side of the motor home’s integral propane tank there was an isolation valve upstream from a detachable section of flexible rubber tubing. So you could close the supply route from the integral tank and detach the flexible section of the tube. You could then bend the flexible section outwards so that the union was accessible for the attachment of a 20 lb. propane bottle outside the bus.
It had of course been necessary to have the propane system set up for supply from 20 lb. bottles. Without that configuration, it would have been necessary to drive the bus to a propane supplier each time its propane tank got low. This obviously wasn’t practical; nobody could have thought it was (if they had thought about it at all).
But now it was time to leave and the system had to be converted back for supply from the integral tank.
It was not a Herculean task; it was simply one more niggling detail which had to be addressed to make the motor home ready for the road. There was no propane in the tank; so I had to use a single burner Coleman stove for cooking on the night before departure. That stove had its own disposable 1 lb. bottle.
So January 31 dawned. Walter had a doctor’s appointment at 11:00 am but he said I could call him after midday if anything went wrong.
I collected Jimmy Goldsworth from Mesquite Ridge at about 10:00 am. After we got the motor home to Mesquite Ridge we would come back in Jimmy’s F-250 pickup to collect the Nissan.
I left behind the motor home's flexible sewer hose, connected to the tee piece on the septic tank connection. I staked the other end of the sewer hose four feet in the air, so that the effluent from the new arrival would flow into the septic tank rather than uphill to the raised end of the sewer hose.
I had texted Hamish Turtleneck to tell him what time I was leaving but he didn’t show. The worst case scenario, though unlikely, would, in the event of a blockage, be a five foot high shit fountain out of the raised end of the sewer hose. But that would be his problem.
Back in the bus I wound the bare end of the hotwire round the screwdriver shank, shoved the screwdriver blade into the ignition terminal, and turned the key fully clockwise. And the bus started up.
It drove like a large clumsy boat on its ancient suspension, and Jimmy and I rumbled south on Camino del Rey towards Arizona 80.
Jimmy was a retired truck driver; I felt the motor home would be in better hands if he drove. We agreed that he should and I pulled to the side of the road so that he could take over.
The bus stalled as we were changing places.
I went through the routine with the screwdriver but the starter solenoid only clicked.
That’s when I lost it.
“This fucking bus,” I said. “I KNEW the fucking thing was going to pull this shit.”
I’m not proud to admit that the motor home had driven me very publicly to my wits’ end. I think Jimmy was a little shocked that it had pushed me so far over the edge.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Let me check it out.”
He examined the bare end of the hotwire and pared off a little additional insulation. As well as the outer insulation sleeve, the hotwire had individually insulated strands and some fine string inside for packing.
Jimmy cleaned it up and held the bare end directly against the ignition terminal. When he turned the key again the bus started up.
Then Jimmy drove the bus down to Arizona 80. He put the transmission in neutral as he approached the junction, and let the bus coast up to the stop sign so that he could keep the engine speed high.
He drove the remaining seven miles to Mesquite Ridge without incident. When he turned in at the entrance, he changed down into neutral once again and let the bus coast into the park.
And that is how we got away.
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