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By Root 946 0

They always seemed to move in pairs, like swans that mate for life. Never did I dream I’d be living among them. Those years living in our Hitchhiker I noticed that they were always outside, watering plants or strolling around the snowbird courts. Recreation Vehicles are too small to stay inside, cooped-up all day, so one tends to see more of their neighbors than in normal neighborhoods. Our elderly neighbors had odd hobbies, enjoyed playing bingo and bocce, and loved to tell stories, mostly about the wars. One old guy told us, “Sometimes a man needs a story more than food to get by.” They loved our babies, as we added them through the years, and loved to hear the story of how Simone and I met. We had a string of grandparents waiting to greet us no matter where we moved.

The overhaul at the Yucca Power Plant lasted just under a month, and then we were off with our traveling group of Navajo welders to Rock Springs, Wyoming. The day before leaving, a WWII veteran called us out to watch a desert succulent bloom, a once annual event. It was evening. The bud opened in response to the sunset. We stood and watched. He said it was a Reina de la Noche and that in twelve hours—just after sunrise the following morning—daylight would wither the flower and it would be dead. I stared at his cactus bed in order to avoid his eyes, I think because his voice trembled notably as he spoke.

Several American films have made a splash with the RV as a centerpiece. The earliest being Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in The Long, Long Trailer, about a couple and their screwball antics on the road. In one scene, Lucy tries to cook as Desi drives. She is jostled around in their kitchen in a bit of terrific slapstick humor. Likewise, the movie Lost in America is a 1985 comedy about some wealthy yuppies who decide they are fed up with their bosses and their materialistic lifestyle. They buy a Winnebago and escape with their nest egg only to have the nutty wife gamble it all away in Vegas and foil their plans.

About Schmidt stars Jack Nicholson as a widower, depressed and emasculated by his discovery that his wife had a lifelong affair with his friend. He sets off in a Winnebago to visit his daughter and convince her not to marry. He returns home a renewed man. Something about the RV, about getting on the road and experiencing a physical change of landscape, reminds us that life is and should remain an adventure.

Simone’s grandfather, Nonno Marcello, the wealthy patriarch of his small family, sent us five million lira in those pre euro days (about four thousand dollars) so we could purchase a truck to pull our Hitchhiker out of that horse-shoe shaped snowbird park in Yuma, Arizona. We added another four thousand to this and bought a sand-colored, 6.2-liter diesel (a piece of shit, Simone tells me to write) from Vicker’s Used Cars in my parents’ hometown of Farmington, New Mexico.

It took us a few years to figure out that the truck was a lemon. It was personally disappointing as the Vicker kids were my friends during high school. In Farmington, the kids with parents who had been in the Peace Corps, worked at Indian Health Services in Shiprock, practiced Asian martial arts, or were seen eating any ethnic food other than Mexican were considered strange. Everyone admired the Vickers because they came from Texas and their dad owned the used car lot. They drove classic convertibles off their father’s lot. The girls won homecoming queen titles. They were gracious and polite. Our town chose two separate homecoming queens per year, one from the Indian population, another from members of the mainstream population.

Vickers Used Cars was in Farmington in the Four Corners region, and after purchasing our truck, Simone had to drive back to Yuma to retrieve our Hitchhiker. I stayed with the baby and my parents, while he embarked on the job: a ten hour drive, followed by work. He had to mount the hitch with the help of his friend Miguel. They fabricated brackets out of angle iron to connect to the chassis of the truck. The bolts that came down through the hitch to the