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By Root 945 0

the vows, “You’ve made a special promise to travel down the road of life together, etc.” We guessed by her condescending attitude that she didn’t bet on the probability of our staying together—it didn’t matter—we told ourselves a wedding’s size was no indicator of future happiness. We had chosen a private ceremony on purpose; standing in front of a room full of loved one would have felt too mawkish, besides which we didn’t have time to stop and plan. Yet here we were, cut off after only a month and a half in West Africa, standing in my father’s living room, expecting a baby. We had no idea what to do next. My father said he could offer Simone a temporary position on a welding crew at the Four Corners Power Plant if Simone could learn how to pipe weld well enough to pass the X-ray test. (High-pressure pipes are dangerous if air bubbles are left in the metal.) After nine months of stuffy and stagnant apartment living in Phoenix, Arizona, Simone had a pipe welding certificate and we had added a baby daughter to our team.

Simone passed the pipe X-ray test at the Four Corners Power Plant and was hired for the temporary chromaly position. A temporary welder is hired for industry “outages,” maintenance moments when electricity production stops for repairs to be made. He was paid twenty-five dollars an hour. It was now 1991 and we were both twenty-one-years old. We told ourselves it was fine, welding was a temporary situation, something to hold us over until our genius struck. What was really important was building capital for a future business investment and what we referred to as our ultimate goal: the financial freedom to travel to places off-the-beaten track. Four weeks later Simone was laid off.

We knew this would happen, my father had warned us that “turnarounds,” or “outages,” as they are called, are simply temporary shut-down periods for annual maintenance. Not knowing where to go next, Simone made friends with a few Navajo welders (the Four Corners Power Plant is on the Navajo reservation) and they told him where the next outage was: Yuma, Arizona. I say “next” because a welder can keep busy year-round if he is willing to relocate every month. Of course, most migrant welders leave their families at home while they travel, so their kids can attend school, play in Little League, and take part in religious and community activities. Migrant welders sleep in hotels and mail their checks home. They support their families from afar.

We refused to be separated. Simone became fixated on building a do-it-yourself style RV. He walked us through junkyards and used car lots looking for the perfect shell, an old school bus that could be rebuilt and painted over with soulful expressiveness. Though we talked about it constantly, nothing ever came of his dream to build a do-it-yourself RV because the right vehicle and engine never appeared. We packed up our bags, buckled our new baby daughter Miquela into her seat, and went to the Yucca Power Plant in Yuma by car, for the outage the Navajo welders had told him about. There was another X-ray test, as there would be prior to each new outage we went to, but at least in Yuma we didn’t worry where we would stay. Despite having spent the bulk of my childhood in the Four Corners region, Yuma was my birthplace and I had relatives living there: both in town and on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation.

Yuma also happened to be the RV Capital of the World. In 2009, a family willing to shell out fifty thousand dollars for a 400-square-foot “apartment” minus real estate and with a motor on wheels, is a family longing, perhaps ironically, for a return to simple living. They are often Americans seeking a set of old-fashioned values that include independence from society. They are sometimes on a quest for Nature. I say this because I believe that the average Recreational Vehicle consumer wants, at least in the beginning, to drive away in their purchase, rather than park it on a slab of concrete with full hook-ups, water, sewer, electric, and cable. They want to abandon, at least for a time, the urban lifestyle,