Last fall, right in the middle of hunting season (that’s what I do), I was minding my own business, coming up to camp. I rounded a corner on a perfectly nice, paved road that was easily wide enough for a vehicle and a half.
I was surprised to see another truck headed down the hill right at the turn. He was too. He swerved and I swerved, but not too much, as that’s a loooong drop down to the bottom. I had the good fortune to be on the inside of the corner, next to the mountain, and when I flinched, I pulled just enough to the right to bring the trailer along behind me on a tighter radius than I cared to.
The trailer wheels slipped into the small ditch between the road and the mountain, which yanked it further to the right. Right into the mountain, yee haw.
“Oh, hell,” I thought, when I heard that unmistakable noise. I’d seen the other guy’s face too, with a matching expression. I ground to a stop, and hopped out to see the damage. He did too; I’ll give him that. He actually hadn’t been doing anything wrong, really. That road is narrow, but I don’t think he’d been speeding. I think he was afraid that I’d freak out or cry.
I got around to the front of the truck and looked down the side, and was incredibly relieved to see that I’d kept the truck out of it. I touched a little rubber on the tires, but they stick out past the fenders anyway.
The trailer wasn’t so lucky though. I’d impaled the side of it, right behind the leading edge, right on a rock at about three feet off the ground. I’d peeled back a bunch of siding, stove in the compartment and the door, and ripped the awning support clean off.
Well, there wasn’t anything to do for it except to get back in the truck and yank it back out of the ditch, going, “screeeeee” all the way down the side. I got back out, still unnaturally calm, and started to look closer. By this time, the other guy was giving me a strange look, but I was oddly philosophical about it. Just one of those things, and now that it was done, there wasn’t much sense carrying on about it.
He helped me pull off the piece of awning that was flapping, and I got some well tape out of the truck and taped down the rest and the wonky siding. I must have been just a little rattled, because I never did get his name. And I went on up to camp, just a couple of miles up the road.
I was never so glad and so bummed to see camp empty as that day. I do prefer to get the trailer in when nobody’s there to witness my 53-point turn-arounds, but on this day, I could have used some help. But by then, the whole thing had sunk in a little, and I might have fallen apart on one of them.
So I got it parked, and looked at it. I sat. I thought. I could not open the door. I could not open the compartment to get out the tools that I needed to unhitch from the truck. Craaap. I fished a hammer and a big screwdriver out of the truck tool box (good thing I carry that stuff) and pried open the compartment door. That got me to a tire iron, and with that and the hammer, I went to whaling on the frame of the main door.
Once I got it open, I made me a sandwich.
I felt better after that, so I sort of wedged the door shut, put a note on the door that said, “I’m OK. Gone hunting,” in case my buddies got back before I did and thought I was hurt, and went out hunting (didn’t get anything though.)
The next time I came up, I brought me a can of expandable foam and some more well tape, and I fixed that puppy up so I could at least finish out the season with it. Sure, the door didn’t shut and I had to lift the awning up to get in, but it was still better than sleeping on dirt. After weeks worth of teasing, I finally brought it back down from camp when season was over, and turned it in to the insurance.
I had a feeling that it would be technically totalled, and after I got the estimate back from the RV place, I was right. Man, I agonized about what to do with it. I still owed on it, and I ddin’t know if the insurance payout would cover that or not, but one thing was clear, and that was that I wasn’t going to get enough to go buy another one, even an older one. Did I want to be trailerless for the next few years?
No. No, I did not.
So when my friend talked me into keeping it, saying that he’d help me rebuild it, I was sceptical, but willing to try it. I bought it back from the insurance company and gave myself a budget to fix it back up. Turns out, I had a couple of grand left over after the payoff.
After a lot of procrastination, we finally started on it a few weeks ago. We had some major rennovations to do, but at least I hadn’t broken any glass or damaged the steel frame. Wood, we can fix.
We peeled off siding, took out windows and replaced doors, re-framed the front corner, re-bent aluminum, and made a whole new nose piece, as the original one just didn’t make sense. Turns out that there was less dry rot than we’d thought, which was a nice surprise. We rearranged things on the tongue to make more sense too.
And this weekend, we basically finished it. My friend did 3/4 of the work, but I got in there and did my share too - mostly the dumb end of the jobs, but I was the one who figured out how the window goes back in, and I’m the one who put the door in. It was a joint effort, but I don’t have a table saw.
It’s sort of ugly, and the door is at least ten years older than the trailer, but everything works and is water-tight. Walking back inside it after it had been torn down to the bone was sort of like coming back home. I’ve spent a lot of happy time in this thing, and I’d had to emotionally write it off, but now it’s mine again. Besides, I didn’t want it to be too pretty; after all, I leave it in the mountains without me during the week fairly often. Ugly’s an asset in a hunting trailer.
I made a Flickr photoset of the whole process.
It was quite the educational experience, and I doubt that I’ll ever hesitate to dive into whatever breaks in it next. Oh, and I learned that I really, *really * like a pneumatic stapler.
So, who’s up for some camping?