How and Why to Live in an RV Park
Part One
Chapter One, getting settled in
I arrived here in mid-December, being pushed out of the canyon due to heavy snow. It had finally begun to fall heavy like the Montana Almanac had claimed. Moving back into civilization, from three months in mountainous isolation, was an easy physical adjustment but a difficult mental adjustment. I felt like I was giving in and surrendering my newfound passion of living as a child. I had bivouacked in my favorite places and a few I had always wanted to visit. I was finding myself free from electronics and social pressures. I found that I wasn’t doing certain things on a regular basis as I had before, instead I was living for myself and what I wanted. I wasn’t checking my phone every ten minutes and I wasn’t thinking the same about life, I wasn’t even cooking the same way and I wasn’t listening to outside influences. But that all changed when I moved in next to the Always On Couple, White Power Ryan and his subject wife, and last but not least was One Eyed Greg.
When I left my home and my family I was thinking it would be easy to find other people who had done the same as I had. Worked their asses off for several years and relinquished all debt to institutions and had a positive outlook on life. That just goes to show my optimism; that I, at one time, believed I would find at least one or two others also trying my financially free vagabundo life style. Instead I find a spot next to a family (nobody even knows how many of them there are) that doesn’t find it appropriate to ever turn off their 1999 Chevy Impala. Who knows what their reasoning could be but that car has been on every single time I have gone outside, if they are at home of course. They also didn’t want to go through the trouble of naming their son, so his entire name is Bucko. For the automobile and the quick thinking on the name thing they were dubbed, by me, The Always On Couple.
They were the last RV in the row. I was second to last and the next guy over had two pit bulls, a Pomeranian, and a confederate flag all bundled up into his nice motorhome. It was long and looked not that old. His RV had the walls that expanded to give you a wider living space inside. He is obsessed with RC vehicles. He has a Parrot Drone, a truck that goes 4 mph and a Harbor Freight airplane. His dogs are the ones responsible for the dog poop I found literally three feet from my trailer. And the annoying thing about that is that his dog is on a leash while it was relieving itself, and he is on the other end. At one point in the dead of winter he bought an inflatable Coleman hot tub and set it up behind his trailer. It was so cold that it wasn’t able to get up to temperature so I don’t think he ever used it. He was White Power Ryan and he didn’t treat women like people.
The most interesting one of my neighbors was in site 110. He also had a dog but it’s a mix between several breeds. The dog’s name is Lexi and she is very sweet but very muscular. The kind of muscular dog who’s butt doesn’t hit the ground when it sits down. Unit 110 doesn’t have enough space for a young dog. His RV is only one of those Econoline vans with a camper on the back. He has to screw it shut with his screw gun when he leaves so that his psycho friends won’t get in. And to prove that he and they are all psychos he leaves his drill on the steps. His friends can’t put two and two together and bend down to grab the drill and open the door. And he can’t figure out that he is practically leaving the door key hanging from the knob by leaving the drill right there. That shows the intellect of the individuals they are (not trying to be condescending, just pointing out what I think most people would pick up on). He never sleeps and often times can be heard organizing his giant pile of crap at 3 am. By giant pile of crap I mean his giant pile of radiator heating units, foam pads, ironing boards, cinder blocks, bed sheets, medicine balls, roof trusses, and every other miscellaneous thing you can think of. He will constantly rinse and repeat and re-rinse everything, that isn’t water soluble, in sight. He receives revelations from heaven at midnight and praises the Lord in everything he does. When he needs help he asks another in the RV Park. But, if they don’t help him exactly as he wants he freaks out and yells at them about how stupid and shitty they are. He wears an eye-patch and is, therefore, called One Eyed Greg.
The three sites all provided me with thorough entertainment for a month or so. As the snow piled up and the temperature slipped into a free fall the winter was shaping up to be exciting. As the arctic winds blew down from Northern Canada and froze everything they made contact with I walked to the shower and back in shorts and sandals. I could make it the fifty or so yards to the facilities without having it affect me too much. But the nights when the wind chill was below -10 were harder to traverse the snow in sandals and a wet towel. But misery paints a fine picture for later reflection; comfort paints a blurry picture for self-reflection. Will-power and the internal strength of one’s own self can be seen in places and times like these. Putting myself into situations where I don’t know what the result will be is something that I feed on, I almost can’t be happy without. Because it is only then that you find out what you are actually capable of. It is only then that you can grow. Challenges make life a rewarding pursuit.
Chapter Two, enjoying the freedom of life
After settling in I joined a gym and made it a policy to go for at least one hour each day to exercise. My philosophy was that I would at least powerwalk for an hour and then do weight lifting. This way I got my heart up and was not being completely lazy. I had never worried about this in the mountains because I would go on 15 mile hikes every day. I would make myself a stew or steak when I got back to the camper. I only eat whole foods. I don’t like a lot of fake foods in my diet and always enjoyed simple, but strong, flavors. So returning to civilization was hard because it meant I couldn’t just wander off wherever I wanted anymore. The city surrounded no summits which one could conquer. But I substituted it with my frequent visits to my new friend’s treadmill and bench press.
What was I doing with my time? I think about it when I look back and see how fast the time has flown by. I think that what I did with my time is the same thing I would do if I had to go back and do it again. I had earned my time off, I had worked overtime for years in order to do this. Flipping houses by yourself is not an walk in the park. I had people come over and help mud a couple of walls and move counter-tops, but I had done the majority by myself and it took ten years off of my life. So what I did with my time now was whatever the hell I wanted to do whenever I wanted to do it. If I wanted to watch a movie I did, if I wanted to read a book I did (I probably read 30 books in 5 months), if I wanted to go to the movies and eat the shit out of a barrel of popcorn I did. And I think I will look back on those months as some of the best I have ever lived. I didn’t worry about paying the bills and I didn’t worry about tomorrow. I had forgotten what stress felt like. I got out and saw the world around me. Even after the gym I would go on long walks, just to see what was around me. I didn’t like the idea of the world revolving without me being a witness. Dick Proenneke said it best when he said: “it seemed a shame for eyes to be shut when such wonders were happening all around me.”
I was getting some early morning sleep, as most people like to do, when I heard shouting coming from outside. When I say early morning it couldn’t have been later than five o’clock AM. I looked out to see White Power Ryan, on his side of the camping unit line, threatening One Eyed Greg. It turns out that the Arctic winds, of the freezing night previous, had blown a piece of scrap plywood that One Eyed Greg had in his junk pile into the inflatable Coleman hot tub owned by White Power Ryan. When White Power Ryan asked for damage costs old One Eyed Gregg claimed he wasn’t at fault and refused pecuniary compensation. This outraged the tattoo artist and sent him into the mentality of death threats towards One Eyed Greg. I hadn’t witnessed anything before this so I’m not sure what really happened. But when the RV park attendant got involved it looked like the most awkward situation they had ever been in. They froze like a solid piece of ice, which was incidentally the world in which we lived. One Eyed Greg never helps himself when his mouth is open. So when he burst out “I bet you feel really tough picking on an old, blind, cripple.” (I later found-out he was neither blind nor had his back broken, they were just fakes) White Power Ryan turns to the RV park attendant and explains that he used to live under a bridge in Las Vegas and has worked for what he has today. That includes an RV with running water, a brand new Cadillac, more RC vehicles all the time, a Coleman hot tub and a lot of body ink.
I thought not about his life circumstances as a homeless man but about his choices after he made money. In my train of thought I would have invested into something that would have hopefully benefited me later on. Instead White Power Ryan spends his money on a hot tub to put behind his RV at the RV Park. I’ll admit that I’m not good with money either, but living in an RV has taught me that I don’t need possessions to make me happy, I need experiences. And the experiences I was having by living around a bunch of crazy people in a frozen wonderland was enough to keep me satisfied, at least for a time.
It was the coldest winter I had ever experienced. It would frequently drop into the -15 F. range and one time got down to -38 F. I could feel the fire go out because as soon as there were no more flames left the room temperature would drop by several degrees. If I didn’t get up and feed the greedy fire its hourly meal I would not have heat enough to survive. At night I slept under three blankets and getting out of bed in the morning was the longest part of the day. I never once felt cold inside of my blankets, I am very fond of that memory. I would lay in bed and watch my breath form ice crystals on my blanket and still never feel cold, apart from my face. It was thrilling to say the least, to try something so new and so honest about its dominance over your best efforts. I had no doubt that Mother Nature was in charge here and that if I didn’t keep up my end of the bargain I would soon be just another one of her countless conquests. I had to work for my survival in a way I never had before.
During this time I thought about life a lot and the origins of life in a broad sense. I had found a different reality in the dimensions of atheism. Staring at the stars late at night and listening to the ice in Red Rocks Lake crack and expand was a mesmerizing and thought provoking experience. I had just read the week before about the fight to set up national wildlife refuges and why we have them. So when I moved to one of the very first refuges without knowing it I was very amazed when I learned where I was. Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge is a pretty long name but back then they seemed to like that kind of thing. This amazing place was one of the last known breeding grounds for the critically endangered Trumpeter Swan. So when I arrived to find them everywhere and all around me I felt as though I was looking at a primitive time. It was a federally designated wilderness which meant no human improvements of any kind. Luckily, the road and campsite were just on the outside border of the Wilderness area. I stayed here two weeks and felt more connected with the land as a part of nature than at most any other time of my life.
I was looking back at a time when the west was unsettled and wildlife was the main attraction. Where I was camped I saw only one or two other people each day. There wasn’t a building in sight, unless I went on my daily long walk. The horizon was all I saw, all day every day. The animals were the same as before white man raped it of its glory. This was one of the last known places to see the trumpeter swans and listen to their distinct and melodious songs. It was as if I had taken a step back in time. Let me digress from my own history and tell you a thing or two about the Journal of Meriweather Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In his journal he narrates the amazement of the entire exploring party that the wolves would approach so closely to humans in a non-aggressive way. He said that while riding through the Dakotas the wolves would walk with the party for miles on end, walking in between their horses even. When the men would wash their dishes in the river every night the wolves would come to investigate, not from meanness but from curiosity. No wonder they were domesticated! One night as Lewis was sitting on the shore of the Missouri River a wolf came down and sat next to him. A thought flashed through his mind that he needed specimens of all the animals he finds for the museum and science. So he took out his rifle and there and then he killed the wolf, but he didn’t kill it with a bullet. The trusting animal was so close that Lewis killed the wolf with his bayonet secured to the end of his rifle. Historians say that that is the moment our relationship in America changed with wolves. No pack ever traveled in their party again, and no pack approached them either. And that alone makes me wonder about the power of communication amongst animals.
As I sat that cold breezy night and listened to the ice cracking I could hear animals all around me. I love listening to animals sing and cry out as I sleep in my bag. I could hear coyotes in the distance, and their yips and yells to each other are some of my favorite to listen to. I could hear the swans and their swooning and crooning. I could hear insects and their millions of peculiar sounds. How amazing is it that every creature has its own distinct way of communicating? As I sat under the stars I listened to the sounds of nature. I had sat there for probably an hour or so when I heard the infamous cry of the returned master the wolf. You can tell the difference between wolves and coyotes very easily by their howls. Coyotes yip and make several howls in a row, but wolves only ever do a long single howl (a masterpiece of natural creations that is only rivaled by the sound of a sexually charged screaming bull elk). When the wolves rang out the entire landscape, minus the insects, came to a dead silence. Not a coyote, bird, deer, swan or anything else could be heard for quite a long time. Nobody wanted to be dinner. From my location I determined that they were on the other side of the lake and I didn’t have anything to fear, I didn’t go inside until I felt tired. After the wolf howl it took a good half an hour for animals to start making sounds again.
Chapter Three, new facts
I didn’t meet Prepper Jim or Trucker Jim for the first two months of being in the RV Park. I know that Trucker Jim is named Jim but I have only added the Jim to Prepper because I get the feeling that is his name. People refer to him and talk about him and sometimes they say his name. So I think I know who they are talking about so I call him Prepper Jim instead of just Prepper. But I really don’t know his first name. Trucker Jim on the other hand seems to be in the public facilities quite often, I see him most mornings I go in there. He was excited to realize that it meant that we were probably waking up at the same time. Although I didn’t tell him that I didn’t shit until after breakfast and maybe a cup of Joe. He lives in 108 and drives the oldest truck in the RV Park and had the oldest trailer as well. He is 78 years old and often times complain that the Department of Transportation won’t give him a CDL because he is so old. Boy did he love driving trucks. He often tells the stories of him behind the wheel as he combs his hair in the mirror. When he comes to an interesting part in the story he pauses and smiles at himself. I think that he isn’t all there upstairs. We have had the same conversations many times and he is a little crazy. He is very nice though, unless he and One Eyed Gregg are talking about the Bible, the Lords holy book.
As I approached the bathroom one night, towel and shampoo in hand, I heard some talking coming from the inside. I hesitated a little to punch in the door code, but I’m glad I went in. One Eyed Gregg and Trucker Jim were in an adamant dispute about the book of Revelations. As I opened the door I startled Trucker Jim, who had his hand firmly wrapped around the inside version of the door handle. He said he was on his way out and turned to leave when One Eyed Gregg continued his rant about the Four Horsemen. I got in the shower and proceeded to lather up and listen to this incredible clash of the titan minds. The battle of facts known and facts pretended went on for several minutes. At one point I thought about crying out that I got soap in my eye, but I just laughed to myself instead.
Finally Trucker Jim left and One Eyed Greg’s shower turned on. I had already washed everywhere accept my face so I lathered up and paused for a moment to let the soap do its chemistry. When I rinsed my face off I didn’t really have the strong desire to stay in the same room as One Eyed Greg alone, with both of us naked. So I turned off the shower and realized that his was also already turned off. That’s impossible I said to myself. Then as soon as I open the shower curtain I head One Eyed Greg say slowly “You know Matt, the problem with people like Jim is that they just don’t listen to what you have to say.” “What do you mean?” I eagerly replied. “It just seems like he can talk and talk and talk and never let you get a word in when all you want to do is have a civil discussion and a reasonable talk. You give a guy an inch and he takes a mile, I couldn’t get a word in the entire time.” I cut him off from his rambling and said “There seems to be a lot of that around here.” He graciously replies “Oh is there? I haven’t really noticed it that much I guess. But and you know what we talked about? We talked about the last four chapter of the book of Revelations and he started out by saying that we will all be saved in the last day and…” He goes on to explain to me the conversation in its entirety. In the mean time I never say another word. I dry off and put on my clothes. He exits the toilet stall and returns to the shower stall. I still haven’t said a word. I dry my shampoo bottle and put my soap away. He gets in the shower and I step out of the stall. I still haven’t said a word as he rambles on. I dry my nose and turn to go, I still haven’t said a single word as he rambles on about not being able to get a word in. As I recall, when I entered the door, it was Trucker Jim who had his hand, tense, on the door knob ready to go. It was One Eyed Greg who had his shirt off and his feet up on the shower stall, camo pants and military boots and everything. It was One Eyed Greg who talked the whole time then and it is One Eyed Greg who has done all the talking now. “Ok, well we will finish this conversation later.” I said as I grabbed the doorknob. I didn’t wait for a response but as the door closed I heard him say “yeah, well probably not.”
Life was fun, I didn’t have a care in the world and I could think about what I wanted to think about. I didn’t worry about offending people in the RV Park because I felt like if they were offended it would only increase the tension, making it an even more entertaining place to live. I wasn’t scared of anyone and I wasn’t putting on a façade. Life was bearable and enduring. It was beginning to change the way I look at people, and in a positive way.
Chapter Four, helping hands
Craig was the new maintenance guy who was hired for free room and board. He was a certifiable nut case. He had been in and out of prison for 2 months one time and seen a lot of crazy things in his day. “System of a Down!” I heard him yell out one day as I walked home from the public facilities. I looked over to see him leaning on a shovel looking into a hole he had just dug. He was wearing gigantic earphones and seemed to be listening to music. As I continue walking I see him, out of my peripheral, grab his shovel and turn his back to me. After taking a few steps he plays the most emotional air guitar ballad One has ever witnessed. He would talk on his phone and talk to you in the same sentence and it was therefore impossible to carry on any coherent conversation. But, he somehow seemed to keep track of it all. One thing I have to give Craig the Crazy Craig credit for is that he found a way and drained the parking lot of its water reservoirs. I have looked almost every time I pass by where the water apparently went to. I have no idea where it actually disappeared to. There were no drains, and the ground wasn’t much lower. The water simply evaporated because this crack head dug a four inch wide ditch leading to nowhere. I honestly can’t understand it even still and I am completely amazed that all that water could simply vanish into thin air. There were no drains he directed it to, there were no low spots, there were no canals, it was simply another section of the lawn. I imagine that well over 3,000 gallons of muddy water disappeared in a single afternoon. Why am I rambling on about this? Because I was that amazed, and I obviously still am. Because, now that the snow is completely gone I can investigate things much closer and take my time to look at the slopes of the grass and angle of the pavement, and I can’t find anywhere the water would have gone. It’s ok to pace back and forth talking to yourself and trying to figure things out on the lawn, all the other residence do it too. There were no drains and no friendly hills. All I can see is record numbers of dog shit.
When you live next to people Like Craig the Crazy Craig you see them as living entities instead of just crack heads you bump into at the gas station. You see them interact with their local world and see things they point out that you would have never noticed before. One thing Craig the Crazy Craig pointed out to me was that he is a good multi-tasker. “I have noticed that actually” I replied sarcastically, thinking back to his conversations with me and someone on the phone. People like Craig the Crazy Craig make me think about how fortunate I was to receive the education that I have in this roller coaster that we call life. I am not a smart guy by any stretch of the imagination, but man am I grateful for the ability to form a rational sentence. The crazy people seem to teach you the most about love and happiness. They aren’t connected with reality enough to know that they are invading people’s private space just by the style of their glances. They see the world as they see it and that’s the way they think everyone else does too. If you can’t learn to see that everyone goes through hard times you probably aren’t very mature. One thing about why to live in a trailer park is because you become a lot more humble when you realize your problems are completely societally driven, and crazy people help you realize that. If the queen of England came for a visit Craig the Crazy Craig would have no problem dropping a few F and C bombs at dinner and giving her a little nudge on the shoulder to show he’s having fun, or whatever reason he hits you on the shoulder.
Life turns out to be much more rewarding when you gage it on the meter of experiences instead of possessions. I could see for the first time that life was to be lived and not bought. And part of that living should be in areas that make you very uncomfortable, not unsafe but uncomfortable. These are the times you grow the most. These are the times you find out who you really are. I was only going to write a sentence down that had popped into my head, now I have exactly 4,701 words. So,
To Be Continued…
