The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [112]
Even prior to the official Recreational Vehicles industry, in the early decades of the automobile, people in America used their creativity to independently fuse their living quarters and their transportation. The earliest versions of Recreational Vehicles were do-it-yourself systems. I’ve seen several RV Hall of Fame photos circa 1920 that were fascinating: one do-it-yourself weighed eight tons, stretched two-stories high, and was modeled on an English manor. Another do-it-yourself model used the body of a hollowed-out tree trunk. The stump in the picture is enormous. It was easily as big as the car that towed it. The inside of the stump-home was obviously round, with sloped inner walls. I imagine one had to stoop to get inside.
Our Hitchhiker years took off quickly. The impetus for the purchase was our first pregnancy, a wonderful gift as it turned out, but unexpected at the time. Simone and I had planned to be rounding the corner of West Africa, specifically the Ivory Coast, and instead we were on a plane back to the United States, where we would head to my parents and break the news of our recent addition.
My parents were anxious to see us. It was 1990 and they had been (in our minds) foolishly worried about us traveling during the first Iraq War, especially in Muslim countries. We didn’t think they had guessed why we were returning early because they were distracted by the fact that I had been hospitalized with malaria in Italy. Simone had had to change our return flight plans twice while I convalesced near his parents’ home and though his parents knew about the pregnancy, they couldn’t speak English, didn’t know my parents, and therefore could not have informed them of our situation.
Simone was twenty-one-years old. I was twenty. We were married, but without degrees or careers. We were unprepared for parenthood. We had eloped a mere nine months prior, the summer of 1989 when we were roaming in our own do-it-yourself system, indulging Simone’s (then) obsession with lakes and the great American West. My father teased, “You’re the only guy I know who has his house in a trunk.” The joke was a gentle prod to settle down.
The summer of our wedding, we were on the road in my old college automobile, an Isuzu I-Mark. Our living quarters were, of course, in the trunk. When it rained we leaned back the driver and passenger seats and slept in the car. We prowled dirt roads in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, California, Oregon, and Washington. We slept off the highway, in rural places, while we drove. We were always looking for free places to pitch the tent. Simone’s tourist visa expired. He was an illegal alien in the United States and so we stopped in downtown Winnemucca to be married.
We pulled into town and went to the best-looking of the three wedding chapels. They said we had to have a witness and wanted us to pay extra for one. Not knowing anyone in Nevada, and not wanting to waste ten bucks, we invited a man off the street to attend the ceremony. His name was Todd W. Bell. Mr. Bell must have been in his thirties. He wore a leather jacket and grumbled when he realized he had to sign paperwork. When his signature was done he gave us both hugs, went out the door, and disappeared down the street in his beat-up sneakers. To celebrate, we went to eat Mexican food then we jumped in the car and headed to Lake Tahoe where it rained and we slept in the car.
The woman who married us used road-trip lingo during