Shack on Wheels

By Vince Basehart

January 18 -- I remember reading about an eccentric adventurer who built an ocean-going sailboat out of nothing but discarded lumber and junk, who set out across the Atlantic with nothing but a few cans of beans, some bottled water and a fishing rig.

A similar, land-borne craft, looking much like a shack on wheels, creaks north on Lincoln, past the Lensmobile as it idles at Wilshire. I can make out the driver’s face behind the vehicle’s filthy windshield.

I discover the vehicle again, parked under a tree on California Street, by St. Monica’s Church. The driver sits in the front seat fiddling with something.

It is a Datsun pick-up, circa the Carter Administration. Arizona plates. Rust has chewed long jagged wounds along the wheel arches of the aqua-colored vehicle.

An oversized camper shell overhangs the bed by six inches on either side. Grafted onto the top of the shell is a homemade wooden hut, like a tree house. Oversized side-view mirrors hang off of either side like giant elephant’s ears. The whole thing looks too tall and too wide for its length, and top heavy. It squats low over tired springs.

On the back side of the camper is a constellation of reflectors. I count sixteen red shimmering dots in the kind of arrangement people report when seeing UFOs. Yosemite Sam has drawn his pistols from the mud flaps, warning followers to “Back Off!”

It is clear this is more than mere transportation. An entire life is inside this truck. This is someone’s home.

As I stand off at a respectful distance making my observations, the driver’s door opens with a creak. The man is tall, thin and bearded, with a tumbling cloud of beautiful salt and pepper hair around his head. Think John Muir in his later years.

“She’s been around,” I say, nodding at the truck.

He takes a long time to answer, and for a moment I think he’s ignoring me, which is, of course, his right. Finally he clears his throat and announces, “It’s been to every state in the Union, except Hawaii.”

I whistle appreciatively.

We talk about the truck. He’s gone through umpteen clutches; this is his third engine and it’s got nearly 200,000 miles on it.

“She’s been to Alaska many times,” Russ says, as he opens the hatch at the back of the camper. I peer inside for a moment and take in a stack of canned goods, coils of rope, a tool box, various personal effects. I realize I’m invading his home and stop taking inventory.

He is Russ. 65 years old. Ex-US Army Corps of Engineers. A resident, however impermanent, of Yuma, Arizona. He is a chain smoker.

Talk about the truck leads to talk about carburetors, which leads to talk about gas prices. He remembers his work on the Alaskan Pipeline like it was yesterday.

“They got their pound of flesh out of us, alright,” he says, without an ounce of bitterness. “They paid us right, fed us right,” he remembers. He shoots his hand out straight ahead of him like the trajectory of the great oil-bearing vein.

On the cracked dashboard I see a Dunkin Donuts bag and a Styrofoam coffee cup.

I walk around to the front of the truck, and beyond the hood’s peeling paint, through the windshield, I notice for the first time a well-fed orange tabby in the front cleaning himself. He sits regally in a custom-looking seat covered in shag carpet, most certainly made by Russ.

Russ talks about daughters in Tempe, who he will be visiting soon. He wears a folding pocket knife in a sheath on his belt.

After a while I can feel that I’m prying and I bid him adieu.

For a moment I dream of somehow setting Russ up with a shiny new Toyota Tundra and cell phone and AAA card in the event he breaks down. But that would be like giving Woody Guthrie an itinerary or that junk-boat sailor a GPS system. Somehow it just wouldn’t fit.