Roger’s Reality: The Camper Saga, Part 3

By Roger Owens

This is the bad part, with a very bright spot right in the middle of it. We’re in South Carolina, rolling down I-95 at a smart 63 miles per hour. That’s as fast as I can go without the transmission on my old Explorer shifting up and down, and it sucks gas bad enough without pushing it. Like I said, we’re not in a hurry. I reckon we’re getting about ten miles to the gallon, two hundred miles on a twenty-gallon tank. Just about right for breaks for old dogs, and old people as well.
    We have three tires, two on the road and the spare, that look like brand new. Why shouldn’t they? Like the rest of this sweet little camper, they’ve never really been used. Hold that thought. A few miles south of SC 570, a state road, wham! The left tire blows. Okay, no worries, we have the company with the three capital letters. Only, their process is so ridiculously slow that, in an area with bad reception, you invariably get cut off before they will dispatch a truck. Then you spend another twenty to thirty minutes waiting just to talk to someone. Then you get cut off again. Until they know to the inch where you are, they won’t send someone. Apparently, their agents are congenitally incapable of using Google maps to locate stranded drivers. When I get a chance to really talk to someone, I ask if they have a cell phone and a ten-year-old nearby. Give them the phone, God damn it, and they’ll find me in about thirty seconds. You built an American empire finding people with maps. Now, you can’t find us with GPS?

    After three hours of this crapola, I am battling to change this tire on my own, without the right tools, with eighteen-wheelers ripping by four feet away. One douche bag in a little white car is coming right at me, over the line, seventy-five miles an hour, and I wave him off. The tire iron in my right hand might have influenced his decision; I can’t say. Finally, using a socket set, a pair of vise grips, and the three-ton jack I had stowed “aboard” for just such an occasion, I do manage to change this tire. Of course, at the risk of my very life, and only with heroic effort on my part, if I do say so myself, and I do. Above and beyond, and all that, isn’t it? Everything’s right as rain again. I can relax. After three hours of brutal heat, terrifying behemoths of flying steel bearing down on me like iron monsters, and hard labor for which I am long since not suited, all I have to do is drive. In air conditioning. I drive for a living. I got this, I tell myself. Look how wrong you can be.

Truth was, even with using the jack to lift the vise grips attached to the socket wrench to break the lug nuts loose, a feat of physics over recalcitrant mechanical devices of which I am inordinately proud, I still didn’t have the tools to put them back properly. I also failed to see that the lug bolt threads were already stripped to smooth steel from the blowout. I didn’t know that I had no chance of tightening them properly. They looked tight, so off we went. I heard some noise and remembered that you were supposed to tighten lug nuts soon after changing tires, so I did. Then I had to do it again. And again, and again.
    Finally, we can go no farther. We have made it to the exit where a campsite awaits us, along with badly needed rest, but oh no, not yet. Cindy gets out and vomits onto the muddy shoulder of the road to the campground, purely from stress. It’s almost dark. We’re only eleven miles away. Eleven miles. I look at the spare tire, which is now wobbling back and forth crazily at the slightest move. The holes in the rim are now wide ovals that look like they have been reamed out with some kind of grinder. We call the alphabet company again; after nearly an hour waiting, I call a local tow company instead. He says he can’t do what we need but tells us who can. All Ways Towing, Summerville, South Carolina. Great people. Salt of the earth folks. I call them. A cheerful woman’s voice answers. I tell her what we need. She says it’s going to be a while. I tell her that’s pretty much how the day has gone so far, so we’re going to relax. We pull back around from the dark road and park under some lights at the nearby gas station, far out of the way, that tire wobbling horribly. I figure it doesn’t matter, that rim’s shot to hell anyway.

I hurt like
I’ve been beaten
by monkeys

    Some advantages of a camper are that you may have a kitchen and a fridge, and lucky for us, we do. We prepare for another long wait with cold cocktails and sandwiches. We are exhausted. I hurt like I’ve been beaten by mean monkeys with sticks. I have no business changing any tire, anytime, anywhere. I’m not supposed to lift more than twenty pounds. I can do it, but when I do that kind of work, I pay a heavy price. The dogs have behaved so well. We feed them and give them treats.
    After another two hours, a fabulous tow truck with blue lights all over shows up, shiny and impressive. The bald giant that gets out says he’s not there to tow us, he just brought the dolly. Okay, the dolly. Well yeah, I think. You can’t tow a camper with a bad wheel. If you could, I could tow it myself. I didn’t spend four hundred bucks on a heavy Reese hitch and more on electronic trailer brakes for nothing, you know. His dolly’s a framework he inserts and assembles under the trailer, then jacks the trailer up, and installs tires on the framework. Slick, I’m thinking. I offer the giant a twenty-dollar tip pressed on me by Cindy from her own money. It’s worth it just for him showing up this time of night. He refuses; we’re paying good money for this tow, he says, and he doesn’t need any more. Seems like there is more to it, but he doesn’t say.

My brain
is slow

    My brain is slow; it is way past time I was sitting down with a drink in one hand and a book in the other, my bed waiting expectantly. Even camping. Especially camping. Finally, the second truck shows up, a big flatbed. It is now a little before midnight. I have unhitched from the camper so the second truck can tow it. I have no business driving at this point either, really; dead tired and half bagged. I guzzle bottled water and get out to see what’s going on. And this is when we meet William for the first time.

William is in the second truck, to which his father is hooking up the camper. Dad’s a thirty-something fellow, classic modern redneck, short dark hair and short dark beard, all run together, ball cap with company logo, and the company tee-shirt, of course. I see William leaning out the passenger window over my head, and he is wearing the same shirt. I’m surprised; William looks pretty young to be out this late. I tell him my name. I ask him his, and he answers, “I’m William, and I’m seven, and my daddy never towed a camper before! Cars, trucks, vans, motor homes, even bob-tail eighteen wheelers, but never a camper!” Really, my slightly muddy but still suspicious mind thinks, but I like these people right off. I trust them to be competent. At this point I’m certainly not. William chatters animatedly for a few minutes. What a joy, skinny, blond, 50’s haircut with a touch of roll in front, a spot of light on this dark night. I tell him to stay in the truck and out of the way, and he screws up his bright little face and decides: “I need to help my Dad. We’ve never towed a camper before.” He gets out of the truck. I head him off with a suggestion of petting the dogs, and he does for a few minutes at the back of the Explorer, and Cindy comes out to meet him, as charmed as I am. But soon he returns to his mission. “I need to help my dad.” Cindy takes the twenty-dollar bill back to the giant and offers it again. Later she says he told her that we had already had a really bad night, and he wasn’t about to make it any worse. Like I say, salt of the earth.

A mile a minute
all day long

    As William skips to the back of the tow flatbed, Cindy and I look at each other, smile wanly and sigh. Some years back I described our wonderful grandkids as my “heart medicine.” This kid is five hundred cc’s of heart medicine injected directly into the vein. He’s like a spotlight, blinding you when he’s looking at you and leaving you night-blind when he looks away. We go over to the back of the flatbed and William is anything but out of the way. He’s right there, rattling on to his father, and Dad smiles indulgently. “You been goin’ a mile a minute all day, ain’tcha.” William’s arms fly around expressively as he speaks, throwing long shadows in the glare of the floods from the trucks. Over the growling diesel engines, I tell Dad William’s a “pistol,” an acceptable endearment from a stranger for an excitable child. At least in the South. He looks at me and repeats the same mantra. “He’s been goin’ a mile a minute all day long.”
    We convoy the eleven miles to the campsite, and I make a wrong turn, but they don’t. I turn around and follow desperately, so tired I’m ready to drop. We normally plan our trips to run no more than three to four hours. Two hours is better. That day we spend fifteen hours in that vehicle. Except for me and the time I pass wrestling tires with death rushing down on all of us at about eighty. Cindy and the dogs are better off, at least they have air conditioning. Getting down on baking asphalt to fix a car with death two steps away is something I’ve done many times, but I don’t recommend it. I feel like I’m broken in half and may never stand straight again. At the last turn they stop and the giant motions me out the window with a meaty hand to retake the lead. I feel like a dumbass, but I’ve only been here once, from the other direction, and that wasn’t at night. We weren’t in a hurry then, or broke down, and we weren’t beat to shit, to be honest. In an odd way luck helps us: due to Covid, the gates to Givhans Ferry State Park are not locked at night. We called and checked. Exactly how that helps with the virus is beyond me, but I thank whatever gods for small favors. It is nearly one in the morning before we pull in, the Explorer first, leading them to the site we have booked. Lucked out again; it was right next to the one we stayed at on the way up, and right next to the bathrooms to boot, so easy to find. You always use the park’s bathrooms and showers instead of your camper’s if you can. Saves wear and tear, and there’s less black and grey water to deal with, as in sewage and water from the sink and shower. Always lit up, too; campers are prone to going for showers late to avoid the rush.

We tried to
keep William safe

    Behind us are the flatbed and the first truck, both worthy of a Transformers movie, and I pull over at the bathrooms and wave them to the site, number seven. Next door in site five, where we stayed before, a camper is parked and a woman sits in a folding chair drinking Bud Lights from an eighteen-pack box, fire blazing, while two kids sit looking at the fire with bored expressions. By now the trucks have turned their backs on the campsite, and those slashing beams of light spear into the darkness so the men in them can do their jobs. Cindy puts the dogs on the run between a couple trees, a long cable with leashes, and tries her best to get William to come over to the other campsite, where the drunk woman offers her a beer again and again. Once more, we try to get him out of the way, so he won’t get hurt.

It’s going to be
a long night

Thing is, we have this boy all wrong. I’m talking about Civil War history with one of the drunk woman’s kids, trying to keep William’s attention, but two minutes in he interrupts. “I have to go help my dad. We never towed a camper before.” Off he goes. I follow, unstable in the shadows criss-crossed with blinding beams. I hear him tell his dad he’ll get the light bar and goes around back of the camper. He comes back with a hefty self-contained bar of LED lights, used to light a vehicle with no power for its own lights. He seems to set it perilously on the rail of the flatbed, and still, in my muddled brain, I doubt this kid. I pull at the light bar to, what? Set it on the flatbed? I don’t know. But it won’t come off. That’s when Dad really acknowledges me, twists up his face and says in his South Carolina drawl, “It’s magnetized. He knows what he’s doin’.”
    For the first time I realize I am in far more danger, being in the way of these men and this equipment, than is William. I step back by Cindy, and she tells William it is past our bedtime. “Mine too! I’m usually in bed by eight!” I consider that it is Friday night, and I say, no school tomorrow, right? William agrees. I ask him what is going on. “Well, first, we have to put the trailer’s tongue jack down, unhook from the camper’s trailer hitch, then drop the hydraulic trailer lift bar, then unhook and store the chains, then take the tires off and break down the dolly frame.” Then, in the most perfect moment, he turns to us, plants his little fists on his little hips, and twists up his face again, exactly like his dad. “Looks like it’s going to be a long night.”

We needed
shore power

    The grinding engines and the lights wake up half the campground, which isn’t that big. We find out the next morning that we’re the talk of the town. “That was you?” Yep, that was us, I think, and you have no idea how badly it sucked. The giant had asked why we wanted to go the hell and gone out to Givhans Ferry instead of some auto shop. I told him it was all I could think of to do. We were totally worn out, had two paid days at the park, and needed “shore power,” as all campers who are also boaters call campground electric hookups. Without it we could never hope to sleep in the heat, and you can’t park just anywhere all night. Abandoning the camper and staying in a hotel was not an option. For one thing, they probably wouldn’t like a shotgun in their establishment. Once we had gotten some food and rest, I told him, I would figure out what the hell to do with the camper. Find a shop that could help us. His parting comment was, “Not out here.”

We sleep like
the dead

    We fall out and sleep like the dead, nothing but power hooked up for the AC. The dogs wake us up at about ten, frantic to pee all over their new surroundings. The next two days, a weekend, I spend calling people, and a mobile repair guy tells me the lugs on a trailer are just like they always were, and you can knock them out and replace them if you can get the hub off. With the help of a fellow across the road, from Vero Beach, just a few miles from where we live, who loaned me a few tools, this turned out to be surprisingly easy. Considering that every mechanical enterprise I had embarked on while trying to get home had gone straight into the toilet, I was duly thankful. I can’t recall the mobile guy’s name, but he said go to Bill’s Tire, and despite the giant’s fraught warning, Bill’s was only about ten miles away. In country terms that isn’t far at all. You could get there on your hands and knees, so to speak. To speak Southern at least.
    Bill’s is along the same country road as everything else, not close to anything but not far away. I bring them the hub, and they huddle with it like the Bucs at the Super Bowl. I pet their gigantic black pit bull, who turns out to be a baby who cannot stop wagging her tail, and they take right to this old Florida hippy. Just like everyone else in South Carolina, I have to say. Soon they come back, smiling as if, had they had tails, they would wag them too. These lugs are from a Chevy 2500, they say, but they’ll work just fine. We have you a new tire and a new rim. What do you want to do with the spare? I say that rim is shot, I need another new rim. He says the spare is shot too and shows me the bulges and flat spots. I figure that’s from the beating it took getting us thirty miles down the Interstate. Lesson Number Two, NOT LEARNED. Why, I don’t know, but I never thought of that third tire. That this could be a pattern. I’m a dumbass.

We’re north of Mims, coming into Brevard county, maybe one-hundred twenty miles from home. We’re on the last leg of the race. We’re beat, but upbeat. And wham! The right tire explodes. We call the Florida Road Rangers, and before the alphabet company answers their phone, we have a cheerful young fellow ready to change our tire. Twenty minutes at the most. I check out the tire make; “Castle Rock.” We joke about how we want to remember so we never buy those tires. I tip him twenty, which he says isn’t necessary while he snags it without a hint of irony. We’re off. I have told the young man we’re going to get another spare before we go home. He agrees, having heard my story (no one escapes!) that with the luck we’re having we’d better.
    There is one store open, twelve miles the wrong way, and they have one tire like ours. When we get there, a gleaming muscle car sits dead in the middle of the lot, blocking the work bay doors. Asshole, I think. I’m not in the best mood. A young fellow with money is ordering a fabulous new set of tires and rims, and I groan inwardly. We’ll be here all night, if they take us at all. But when I tell the very young man behind the counter I’m the guy with the trailer tire, he says perfect timing. He says, I told him if you came in you were first. Someone is looking out for us. Or maybe the kid behind the counter just thinks the guy is an asshole too.

Tires degrade

    He gives me a lecture on how camper tire failure is endemic. People don’t use them, and the tires sit and get flat spots. I tell him the numbers on the tires indicate they were made in 2018; then I realize that that is old for a tire. Any tire. My father taught me in the ’60s that hydrogen in the air passes through natural rubber and similar products and degrades it. Tires that sit on the shelf for four or five years are no good, they’re rotten. In fact, I knew this stuff since I was a kid. And through all of this did I ever once think of what I should have known all along? No. They fix us up and we’re back on the road in maybe an hour and a half, total.

All the reviews
say they suck

    At a gas station at the Mims exit, we meet an amazingly self-contained woman in her fifties, dressed as if she were working at a bank. She has a brand-new camper like ours, same company and model, and we tell her we love it, but we’ve had some bad luck with tires. She’s going back to Maine and intends to sell her new camper because she prefers her “bed box,” an eight-by-ten pop-up, and only bought this one for her grandkids. Score another win for those bunks in the back! I think, dogs, grandkids, whatever. She says, did you get those crappy Castle Rock tires on it? Yes, we say wryly. “Oh, I replaced those pieces of shit right off,” she says. “All the reviews say they suck.” The only reviews I saw said the bottom should have been better sealed against insects and rodents. I’m not worried. I’m a bug man. I own a pest control company. But that’s another story entirely. And a damn good one, if I say so myself. And I do.

Copyright © 2021 by Roger Owens