The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [111]
DEBORAH TAFFA
The Year We Bought Our Hitchhiker
They left the reservations in which they were born, and made everywhere their home.
ONCE SIMONE DEVELOPS AN OBSESSION, THERE IS NO hope that he will change his mind. Looking back, I believe his obsession with living on the road is directly linked to one of the first family vacations he took as a child. In 1974, when he was a six-year-old, his parents took him on a monthlong road trip all the way from their summer home in Como to the toe of Calabria. They towed a tiny 3.2-meter camping trailer, about the length of a VW bug, behind their family car. They called their rolling home the “Roller,” pronounced in a stiff north Italian accent. His father says it was the perfect way to see Italy in the ’70s; it freed them up to explore remote areas that had no hotels. The tortuous Mediterranean Coast thrilled Simone and they stopped in village after isolated village, swimming, camping on beaches, and exploring the shoreline. It was a major adventure, unforgettable despite his age due to the natural beauty but also because they had to stop every ninety kilometers for his little brother Matteo to be carsick.
The Nuway Hitchhiker we purchased outstretched the “Roller” his family took to Calabria by thirty feet. It was an American behemoth, a super-size version of his childhood trailer, with white siding, red stripes, and pink frilly curtains. There were two entrances to the trailer. One door opened out from the living room, the other the kitchen, where we squeezed past each other to cook and prepare meals. It was like living in a long hallway and we spent every bit of warm weather outdoors, underneath an expandable shade-awning that could be opened and shut (and eventually ripped when it filled like a sail on a blustery day). The Hitchhiker featured a pull-out sofa and a wooden cabinet for our small black-and-white TV, a table that folded down into a bed, a bathroom with a step-flush system, and an accordion-door-closing bath-shower, but my favorite part was the “upstairs” bedroom.
To imagine us in our first family home, it is important to understand that our Hitchhiker had a unique design, referred to by industry insiders as “a fifth-wheel.” A fifth-wheel is towed behind a truck like a trailer, but it doesn’t connect to the bumper, it sits in the middle of the truck bed on a hitch. The portion of the trailer that sits above the truck is usually the bedroom. It bends like a zigzag, an upper-branch sprouting off the main trailer. Thus a fifth-wheel is not the average rectangular trailer, though the lower portion is stable on four wheels like a trailer. Neither is it a motor home with an engine, a converted bus, or a collapsible pop-up.
A fifth-wheel has steps inside, leading from the normal “trailer” portion of the home, in which a person can stand up, into the upstairs-bedroom portion that rests over the truck bed when the trailer is being towed. Once you climb the four steps from the main level bathroom into the upstairs bedroom it is impossible to stand up straight without bumping your head. This design lends a comfy feeling to the bedroom. It’s like a camping loft and makes the bedroom feel like a small hideout or cave. When there’s a storm outside a fifth-wheel, the raindrops on the aluminum roof sound like a thousand tiny feet dancing. The organic rhythm of raindrop music is especially peaceful at night. It makes you feel cozy and safe. This feeling of safety is important because when you are moving to a new state every three to four weeks, awakening in the morning sometimes means a moment of confusion before you remember where you’re parked.
It seems to me that one need only compile a list of Recreational