The student-run community news site of Vermont State University - Johnson

Basement Medicine

The student-run community news site of Vermont State University - Johnson

Basement Medicine

The student-run community news site of Vermont State University - Johnson

Basement Medicine

Kevin and Cara’s Crazy Caravan

My name is Kevin Paquet. Let me tell you a story.

I graduated from Johnson State College, as many of you will someday do, in May of 2009. Our commencement speaker was the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan. I fell asleep during his speech. It was the first and only time I ever fell asleep in school. I was later told I hadn’t missed much.

I moved to Florida and ended up working at the Sears in the Florida Mall, a sprawling complex of stores in Orlando, including three Piercing Pagodas and an M&Ms store that sold colors of M&Ms that you can’t get in the bags. Still losing money and unable to find another job to supplement my income – being in both the wrong place and time to find work – I packed my things and went back to Vermont and lived with my mother in Randolph, Vt. She and I were both thrilled.

Time passed. I had different jobs. Working for Dollar General in the summer of 2010, I met Cara, the woman I would eventually marry. We moved to Bethel. Bethel is a heavily overgrown town just south of Randolph. We adopted some stray cats.

Through all this, however, I had harbored a desire to leave again. Florida was a catastrophe in so many intricate and hilarious ways I don’t have the room to explain here, but even as I limped back to Vermont at the end of 2009, I knew I didn’t want to stay. Mostly it’s because – no joke – it’s too cold here for half the year, but there’s still more to it than that. In 2009, I had driven through the eastern third of a country racked by economic convulsions. How could I not want to see how things turned out?

This is that story.

 

Going Mobile

 

My wife and I, and the cats, and all our physical possessions, now travel in a 1969 Woodsman Traveler camper hooked to a 1994 Isuzu Trooper we named Milo. By travel, I mean that we are currently in West Lebanon, N.H, attempting to acclimate to living in a space the size of a large hot tub.

I suppose my first suggestion to those of you who hope to travel someday is: Abandon everything. We had four or five yard sales between March and October 2012 trying to get rid of everything we owned, and it still wasn’t enough. I don’t know exactly how much stuff is the “right” amount for traveling, but it will be much, much less than you have. Every single person we spoke to told us not to take the cats, but it turns out that what I really needed to hear was, “Look: When the time comes, burn everything you own and walk away.”

I mean, yes, cats were a bad idea too, but at least they’re small. The only real shortcoming is that the male cat, Toupee, likes to use the nourishment we give it to spray urine into the boxes containing what remains of our old lives, and we needed to get rid of that stuff anyway.

Milo Isuzu is your standard 1990s SUV, a rust-worn holdout from an age in which the most sophisticated device in the dashboard is a cassette-radio, which Cara made replacement control knobs for out of Sculpey. Yet, even 1994 looks futuristic when held up to 1969.

I know next to nothing about the Woodsman Traveler line of campers, despite the fact that I regularly scrunch myself to sleep in one. My Internet searches have turned up little. Naturally, I got mine through Craigslist.

There’s a table with benches at one end, a couch that turns into a bed at the other, and a kitchen and bathroom in the middle. They’re both exactly in the middle, too, balanced on the axle. The bathroom (closet with toilet) is on the port side, and the kitchen (a burned-orange three-burner stove and a lemon chiffon sink basin) are starboard. You can’t quite sit on the toilet and cook, but it’s a very near thing.

 

Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind

  

Kevin
(Photo by Kevin Paquet)

As is always the case, the problems I’m having are not the problems I expected to have. A case in point is the quality of public bathrooms, which I’m finding to be terrifying, but not for the reasons you expect.

Sometime in the last ten years, it was decided by the vast, shadowy cabal of corporations that make industrial bathroom appliances that the people using them are not to be trusted. I don’t know why. One would think that most people would be familiar with bathroom amenities from casual but regular acquaintance, but that’s not enough here. There has to be some eldritch memo, written in blood, on file somewhere in the General Electric catacombs explaining why human beings are unfit to choose the temperature of the water that comes from the sink, or why paper towels are being phased out for electric hand driers that fire up like jet engines. Still, this isn’t about either of those things. It’s about toilets.

Having to use a self-flushing toilet even once is a harrowing experience; to use one over and over again is to gaze, unflinchingly, into a future in which human beings have been found unfit for the devices once built to serve them. Stand up from the toilet and the electronic eye that has been staring, unblinking, into the small of your back for the last ten minutes will send a wordless signal to an actuator hidden deep within the chrome pipework, causing a flush that sounds like the crack of doom.

Every time this happens, I expect there to be purple lightning coruscating around the edge of the bowl while acoustic ceiling tiles are torn down by the drop in air pressure. Then, in the howling silence that follows, I exit the stall, wash my hands with the pre-approved mix of hot and cold water, stick them into the jet exhaust to dry them, and run.

 

Requiem for a Taillight

 

 

Cara
(Photo by Kevin Paquet)

Equipment failures are great times to get to know yourself, as well as learn important life skills under the worst possible conditions. The end result is that, at any given time, I find myself looking up in a bleary haze, having expended a great deal of effort without having very much to show for it.

I spent a whole day – or, at least, an hour and a half of afternoon daylight, which is pretty much the whole day at this latitude in January – trying to get a taillight to come on. The taillight case had been cracked during some past accident and somebody had sort of filled it in with a substance much like rubber cement. The light stopped lighting because water had gotten in, and unable to get out again, had set about corroding the exposed metal.

It took me about half an hour to diagnose this problem. The rest of that time was spent trying to clean up the contacts enough for the bulb to come on.

Another time, perhaps a week later, Cara and I came back to the camper and found that it wouldn’t open. The key turned freely in the lock, but the knob itself wouldn’t turn. The door was fitted with a crank-open window bank which would open if you pulled on it, so my wife stuck her arm through, but to no avail. The knob didn’t turn from the inside, either. Some broken glass and duct tape later, I now know how to take apart and reassemble a doorknob.

 

Closing Opening Thoughts

 

Our next stop, beginning February (God willing), is probably Hartford, Conn., where Cara’s childhood friend Emily is attending school. Mind you, we’ve drawn up and thrown away so many travel plans that the very act of drawing up more is disheartening. As I write this, the area is heading into a cold snap that is not particularly kind to camper dwellers. Fortunately, I’ve duct taped the edges of all the windows, so that cuts down on the drafts. We have propane, so we’re not going to freeze, and we have a carbon monoxide detector, so we’re not going to smother, and so we watch video on my laptop every evening until the batteries give out.

As a “people watching” anecdote, nine out of every 10 men I’ve been in a public bathroom with don’t wash their hands when I’m standing at the sink. They see me washing MY hands and just keep going. Note that in all cases, soap and water are provided free of charge. Such is the might of human indifference.

Closing thought: Every adventure is, at its heart, a series of problems and the story of how the protagonist solved them.

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