Prep Work - “Tales from the Campsite”

(Fall 2023)

It had been four years. Our Flagstaff pop up camper was sunbaked and perhaps— beyond budgetable repair. Amidst the headwinds, I decided it was time to take the mini-RV out again. First step, address the things that were broken. I knew they were probably beyond my pay grade, so I began researching. At a minimum, I needed a hole in the roof patched better than the duct tape I had on it, a door leveled out and properly mounted, and the bent lift pole straightened out. I found an RV mechanic in the area and reached out offering detailed descriptions of what we needed repaired and requesting a quote and rather than get a response, the crickets just chirped, mostly inside the camper as we’d later come to find out. Time went on, and another few months went by. (I’m a little too laid back sometimes.) After calling the RV guy a couple of times and leaving messages with no reply, I gave up.

It was time for an audible. When it comes to repairs, many of us get better at something by necessity and a desire to accomplish something economically without a lot of outside intervention. Outside intervention can be good. And sometimes it’s not. The last time I hired someone to do something as a “professional,” they poured drain-o in our bathtub drain and it began to eat it up and seep into our homes’ original wood floor, meanwhile, I’ve got a mess of plumber’s blue gunk on my walls, tub, and beyond, and the end result was a mostly untidy and frustrated situation. Unsatisfied and annoyed, my trust factor for those guys went out the door.

My father-in-law is quite the handyman, and I owe a lot to him in the things he’s shown me along the way and helped me to repair. I looked at my wife one night and popped the question. “Can we just call your dad and let him have a shot at it?” She agreed. A short time later, I asked him and he committed to assisting. A few weeks later, we’ve got the camper mostly patched up and in better shape than it was thanks to his ingenuity and budget-minded resourcefulness.

A month or two goes by, and I quickly realize, we need to get something on the calendar to motivate us past this final hurdle, to squash this camping anxiety. With my father-in-law’s birthday on the horizon and Garner State Park a convenient 48 miles from our front door, I propose a plan to invite him and take our children camping.

54 months of weathering isn’t exactly nothing. With a date on the calendar and the deadline looming, our next course of action, cleaning up the mess that accumulated. We knew that there were going to be new… developments. It was just a matter of assessing how many of those there were, and if we could make the mobile domicile inhabitable for a weekend again.

Our small children were out for the weekend with my folks and a Saturday morning came along— The Saturday the weekend before our planned trip. Yep, you know where this is going. I wake up early. I’m ready to get out there and work, preferably on my own knowing that the wear and tear on the old RV’s going to be overwhelming and that perhaps the ‘PG” rated version would be easier for the misses to pallet than the “R” Rated version it was presently. I tell my wife my plan softly hoping to get a jump on the September heat, and on the way out the door, she tells me to watch a few YouTube videos to refresh my memory on properly popping up the camper. I agree, make a cup of coffee, and plop down. YouTube it is. The videos were helpful, and I was ready to rock and roll. I get outside and look the camper over and quickly decide the outside could use a good washing. The videos suggested making sure things were nice and level and so on. I level out the crooked pole on the front and then pull out the crank for evening out the two stability stands on either side of the camper. I get the first one down in a cinch. This is my kind of start! Things are going well. Then, I come around to the other side. It doesn’t budge; it seems at some point between moving and sitting unused its either rusted or stripped. After pondering a few ways to jar it loose, I start to break a sweat. It’s already been an hour and I’m on my second cup of coffee. No progress made, but the twenty-eight-year-old me that last took the camper out years ago has gained some experience in counting the cost of choices and their repercussions. I took a deep breath and paused and opted to ask the wife. She and I deliberated and decided to place some cinder blocks beneath the post to stabilize it rather than force it. Wise move. She leaves me to it per request.

Perhaps I was paranoid, or maybe it was just the excitement was up. Walking around the camper I notice another hole in the roof near the AC unit and conclude that we probably have more undetected water damage on the inside. I highlight the concern to the misses and then get ready to clean things up. If only it were that easy. I needed a water hose to hook up to the power sprayer and the one I had available is wound up on one of those hose mobile rolls which would have been fine if I’d rolled it up properly to begin with. Long story short, well past an hour later, I have the hose properly unrolled less a sledgehammered hose wheel roller. Ready to roll, I get spraying. And we get this sucker looking pretty nice on the outside. As the day starts to run away from us, my wife and I opt to take a break and work on the interior the next day. We’d set aside the weekend to offer ourselves a tuneup as a couple. Meanwhile, I contemplate how else I may fix the other hole in the roof without breaking the bank. You might think this section is a lot of throat clearing and rambling, and maybe it is, where’s the story here? But that’s the nature of taking care of things. Often times, when we want to do something well, it takes a lot of grunting, hemming, and hawing before we get to do the activity we’re working towards and often times, it may even exceed the amount of time than the forthcoming actually will. That’s not always bad, as long as you level-set your expectations. One thing a few years of experience has taught me is that concept. If you level-set, you are a million percent less likely to explode in frustration or be eaten up with anxiety either with yourself or anyone else. It also clears your mind and willingness toward humility, and dare I say, asking for help on occasion. Cough. Cough.

We get the camper popped up successfully and begin working on the inside the next morning and it’s pretty treacherous. That leak by the AC unit has caused mold, lots of bugs, and water damage to curtains and beyond. Determined to make the most of our situation, my wife and I agree to just tackle it in stride and not allow ourselves to be discouraged. Like I mentioned, that level-setting. It was rated “R” on the inside… “R” for rancid… roachy… and rotted. To get to the “PG”— “pretty good” rating, it was going to take a lot of partnership, sweat, and legwork. We cloroxed, we vacuumed, we sprayed, we wiped, we swept, we mopped, we emptied out everything, we threw out a bed. We cut out a curtain. We went to Wal-Mart and had the fabric department lady cut us a special piece to make our own curtain. We bought an air mattress. We doused the thing in Cat Litter Box deodorizer and let it air out. And as goofy as some of our methods, the plan was fool proof. We’d let it air out for the week. And then we’d go camping the next weekend. 60 straight days of no rain. We’re talking pure drought here, folks. No rain in the forecast. Perfect plan! We pick up our kids at my folks’ house and share that we have the camper popped up and exposed to the elements, and my brother makes a comment about a storm coming. I blow it off. I just checked the forecast. Nothing all week. We take the kids back to our town, Taco Bell in the Walmart cart, and we go through the store and stock up on supplies. On our way out, there’s a big flash of lightning in the sky. I roll my eyes. We get home and tuck the kids in. My wife makes a comment at bedtime that night and I disregard it.

“We’re good,” I say, without hesitancy.

3 AM rolls around, and the wind is howling. I mean, like shake the windows bad. Big bad wolf blows your house down bad. Then I hear the rain. And then I think of the camper. I check the radar on my phone. Yeah, it’s a gnarly thunderstorm. And it’s headed our way. 60 days without a drop of rain, and boom. The first night you’re letting your camper air out and Stephen King’s Storm of the Century hits like clockwork. Murphy’s law. I don’t remember if I got a shirt on or not, but we hustle outside in the rain and start cranking the camper down, quickly but cautiously, because you never know, you might catch a door, you might crimp a wire, you might get hung up on tent fabric, you might mash a finger, the list is endless.

And here we are yet again shuffling and building up our chops to pop up and take down the camper in a jiffy. We get it down. I’m running around like a cartoon character looking for some tape. Anything to cover up the hole to keep the rain out after all of our cleanup efforts, and the best I can come up with is duct tape and cardboard envelope. Good enough, but the camper roof is damp, and nothing wants to stick and your half asleep, and your spouse is a perfectionist and your feeling lazy, and you have to go to work in an hour, and blah, blah, blah. When it rains it pours. We get it covered up. A wet day ensues and for the most part the camper remains in decent shape with the patchwork roof. Dries up and we get it back up the day after and we’re able to keep it up. We get back in to clean up some more and get more organized and discover the far side tent is stripping away from the wall and the screws are coming undone due to long rotting wood. My wife empowers me to come up with a solution. I think on it. I google it. I watch some YouTube on how RV shops repair that kind of thing, and there’s just nothing quite like our issue described. I am a man of imagination after all. I’ve written books, stories, and songs for years crafting something from nothing, what’s so different about finding ingenuity in repairing physical things? Stupid question. Everything’s different. I go into our garden shed and garage and look over the inventory. I only have a limited space to work with, and it’s got to be thin and fine wood. My wife has a planter. Correction, she “had” a planter. I yank it out and start prying it apart. The thin sheets of wood will work for what I need them for. A couple of wood screws in the camper between the rotting wood and this stuff and then at least the tent fabric has something to grab onto. I line the walls up and down with new screws accepting that the screws are going to poke through on the outside. And not long after, we have a repaired wall that actually looks pretty good considering the shape it had been in. Satisfied by the resolution, we break for lunch, and I get back to work for the afternoon. And as we prep for church that night, our kid gets sick, and then just like that, another shower comes out of nowhere and we’re shuffling again to set it back down right before it’s time to leave. That’s real life, isn’t it?

Practice makes perfect. The night before our trip, we make another stop at Walmart, and I’ve concluded I will patch the roof with a sort of spray on silicone caulking of sorts. My wife agrees to the proposal in the event that I take my time and not make a mess with it. I agree. I get up the morning of bright and early and lift up the hole filling in the styrofoam layer between the ceiling and the exterior roof with a special filler compound and I fasten the roof down as best as I can. Then I spray the spray on caulk, tidying up as I go and allow it to cure. We won’t know for sure until we run the AC unit which seems to be a culprit for storing the output from the condensate lines where the hole was in a light fixture just next to it inside. Naturally, we pop the camper up again for one final clean up in our driveway, and the fixture’s full of water. I remove it and empty it out. I allow the spray on gunk to dry. The day goes on, we’re packing, we’re cleaning, and we’re ready to go. And, you know to make the long story short, all of the legwork paid off. We got a PG rating. The camper was clean, it smelled decent, there were no bugs, and the roof no longer leaked. It was off to the campsite. All the cleaning, prepping and the popping up and down of the camper that week made the fruits of our labor all the sweeter as our children and father-in-law enjoyed it with us.

In closing, I share all the minutia of the prep work, because I’m a guy that hates prep work. And maybe, I even hate writing about the prep work, but that’s the point here. It needs to be documented, and I wouldn’t be giving credit where its due not doing so. If I allow it to remain the bane of my existence, I will continue to make costly mistakes in failing to prepare.

I’m thankful for a merciful and preparing spouse, a resourceful father-in-law, and a changed heart, knowing that with a little bit extra elbow grease, things that may seem beyond salvageable repair may just have a shot with the proper calibration, adjustment, and maintenance. And perhaps as people, we too should think that way in our relationships with others and the way in which we manage and approach one another day to day. The fine tuning sometimes makes all the difference!

Proverbs 24:27, 30-34

Put your outdoor work in order and get your fields ready; after that build your house… I went past the field of the sluggard, past the vineyard of someone who has no sense; thorns had come up everywhere, the ground was covered with weeds, and the stone wall was in ruins. I applied to my heart what I observed and learned a lesson from what I saw: A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest— and poverty will come on you like a thief and scarcity like an armed man.