I Nearly Got Strangled On My Way to the Mechanic
An angry RV park owner crashed into me on purpose
I don’t recall the exact words he screamed into my face, but I can still feel his hand around my throat. I see his frothing mouth and the trembling fury in his vivid blue eyes.
I’ve never been in a real fight; this was the most aggression I’ve ever received from another human. It didn’t happen in my thousands of miles of hitchhiking or in a lawless place like Slab City. I had to annoy a business owner in conservative, white, small-town Arizona to experience this level of unhinged rage.
I live, and travel, in an old airport shuttle bus I’ve converted to an RV. In late December, one of my starter-mounting bolts broke off and I tried for 3 weeks to fix it myself, but eventually I gave in and made an appointment with a mechanic.
The garage was in a remote section of Quartzsite, 5 miles south of the main part of town. Google maps gave me two possible routes. The first looked like it would take me down a gravel residential drive, so I skipped that option, staying on the pavement. The next option routed me through an RV park.
I figured all paths to the mechanic involved residential drives and that people must pass through there all the time, so it shouldn’t be a big deal to drive…
