It’s hard to know whether it’s best to start at the beginning and work our way forward, or start at the end and go backward. What would make the most sense? Not sure. I guess nothing makes sense anymore, so it doesn’t even matter. So I’ll just start writing and see where we go like the rest of you.

There was something rather monumental about our Airstream Interstate purchase. It was the first time since 1979 that the overwhelming factor in any vehicle purchase I was near was whether it would accommodate Blaine’s wheelchair or could be adapted to do so. This was a terribly emotional thing for me. Just as Blaine’s presence had directed my decision-making and purchases and whole life after his birth, so did his absence after his death. There were times I couldn’t move on something. We still have the Volvo station wagon I bought in 2001, a choice largely dictated by the spacious back where I didn’t have to break down his wheelchair to make it fit. It was so much easier to just swing it up and in. That car is still so closely associated with Blaine in my heart, I can’t imagine not having it and continue to pay out enormous sums to repair a 20-plus-year-old vehicle.

In our work refurbishing Toaster Moon (our 1964 Tradewind), we always made sure to include a way for Blaine to enjoy it. When Ric bought a Sprinter for his handyman business, we took the lift he had installed in his Astro Van and put it in the Sprinter so Blaine could go along. But now when looking at RVs, it was a reminder that Blaine was gone, and that reality loomed over every conversation and viewing and it took all I had not to fall apart several times during our journey. Up to then, everything we did or had was wheelchair accessible from the jump. Unless you have experienced the direct need for that, you have no idea how differently you view the world. It rather breaks my heart that our current house has a few stairs at every entrance. It feels so disloyal to Blaine. The same feelings happen when I see how inaccessible many places are around us still, or when I hear people refer to accessibility requirements as a ridiculous burden. Please don’t say those things where I can hear them. Or ever, really. It’s just disrespectful to expect that some people have no right to be and do things because they are inconvenient.

Oh boy, that was an unexpected detour. I told you I don’t know what I’m going to say til I say it.

We made a down payment on an Airstream Interstate in February 2016 and scheduled an appointment a few days later to take delivery, after they got it all ready. When we went to pick it up, we got our walk through lesson, you know, the kind where you don’t remember anything past the second thing they tell you. Well, after he finished talking and showing he asked us if we had any questions, which of course we didn’t because our brains were oversaturated and leaking onto the ground. But when we tried to close the side door, it seemed to be stuck. So the sales guy tried it, and couldn’t make It shut either, so he said, “Hmmm, looks like it’s sprung.”

He sent us back to the sales room to wait while a technician came to fix it. How could they not have figured out it was sprung when they opened it before we got there, I wondered. Details, details.

About a half hour later, he came to tell us it was ready, all fixed and to let them know if it gave us trouble, because the next thing would be for them to replace the door. You know, the one that takes up close to half of one side of the truck. Which would have cost them a bundle so of course you know they don’t really want to do that. Let me cut to the chase and say that in my opinion that door has never been all the way right. But we’ve made it work. Probably mostly because Ric has had the skills and the tools to make a lot of fixes. Like the time they fixed it with velcro and Ric had to do it over with something more lasting. Never mind the fact that we have not really been able to use the freezer because it is full of tools that Ric doesn’t really feel comfortable not having along on trips because one never knows. Did I mention he has a lot of tools? But I keep my mouth shut mostly because I have a lot of fabric and it’s not remotely useful in RV repair.

Before we left, I asked to make sure we had been given a user manual. Yes, it’s in the pocket behind the passenger seat, and it’s also online, we were told. Cool. 21st century all the way.

We were really excited to take it on our maiden voyage, so we went to what was Oregon’s newest state park at the time, Stub Stewart Park in the Coast Range, just over 30 miles from Portland. Stub was a lumber baron and my dad actually worked for him when he worked at Bohemia mill in Culp Creek. I think most of the campsites are on acreage that had been clear cut by his company or that of another lumber extractor.

Anyway, it was wonderful being in our new mobile. We decided to name her Rigby, after Eleanor if you get my meaning. Not really a car, not really a truck, not a van, but definitely a rig of some kind. (I was quite taken with the word after hearing several guys explain they had missed their court date in brother-in-law Judge Dave’s courtroom because “my rig broke down.” On second thought, I guess I should have paid more notice to the verb connected to the word rig!)

We had an issue the first night that was mostly newbie user error with a little design flaw built in. OMG, the learning curve on these rigs. The electrical system, the grey water system, the black water system with the macerator, the propane system, the house battery, the truck battery, the television system, the GPS system, the sound system, the inverter system that has something to do with some other system(s), the generator system, and on and on. What part is Airstream? What part is Mercedes? Who’s on first, what’s on second?

That’s when we discovered the user manual included with our RV was for the VCR/television. And there was no television signal out here in the coast range. And no cell service either. Alrighty then. The rig was 21st century, the places we like to camp are not. Got it. SNAFU.

But we enjoyed our excursion, Ric was figuring things out the hard way, without a manual, good old trial and error. It was so cozy and comfortable, stylish even. We felt safe and secure. The bathroom didn’t smell, the shower really did work. Our dogs were happy, we were happy. 

On our first few outings, we had a number of electrical issues, resulting mainly from the batteries (the house ones in this case I think) running out of power. Cutting to the chase, it turned out the batteries had “lot rot” because of course they did, it’s a known issue when rigs sit on the lot waiting to be purchased and never plugged in so the batteries basically rot. We bought in February, several months after it was delivered to the dealer. Of course we didn’t know this and they didn’t tell us at the time. Pretty much every single thing we now know we learned from other Interstate owners. The community shares its problems and solutions online, and a collective wisdom grows.

Over the next year, we took several trips. One of the first was to the Steens Mountains, Alvord Desert, Jordan Valley in far southeastern Oregon. On that one, we had a BIG problem, which made the toilet and bathroom inoperable. Ric said it was his fault because he hadn’t been careful enough winding the black hose back onto the reel so it broke. I wondered if maybe it should have been designed to be a little more durable. This experience contributed to Ric deciding he needed to bring a lot more tools, because he didn’t have along what he needed to fix this issue. Now he does.

It happened on the second day of our trip. Our week long trip. But goddammitohell, we had planned this trip, I made reservations along the way, we were counting on this! We were not about to abort on account of a damn hose. Kind of like the Griswold’s trip to Wally World. 

We would just have to find bathrooms and make do cuz we were finishing this sucker. And we did. The scenery was beyond remarkable, of course, and the skies were clear at night for star gazing, one of my most favorite things in the world. 

We were also happy to return to Jordan Valley, having been there a few years earlier when I was exploring the outcomes of several grants the foundation I worked for had made to health clinics in small rural communities. That visit had been especially memorable, and not just because of the guy in the cafe wearing a shirt that read, “If it’s got tits or wheels it’ll give you trouble.” There was also the branding we attended, where our escort was a very short person who could barely see over the steering wheel but got sick if she wasn’t the one driving, so we took two rigs for miles and miles and miles on dirt backroads, where people lived off the grid, and we met Frankie who made the most amazing McCarty ropes and families who had to run their generator to watch television. We ate a meal at the cafe in Rome, where we and everybody else in the place were subjected to an hour long diatribe delivered at maximum volume by a very self assured man about, well, pretty much everything but especially how politics mainly consisted of people “gettin tooken to the woodshed” when they didn’t do what they were supposed to do and of course Ric got a song out of it. Then there was the flat tire we got on the main road. We had rented an SUV for the trip and it turned out not to have all the parts for tire changing on board and of course my cell phone didn’t work there and nobody stopped to help us until finally James Farmer came along, his business card said “Body and Soul” because he was a preacher who also worked on cars and he changed the tire for us and wouldn’t take anything in thanks because he was doing the lord’s work and we got to the gas station before it closed so they could fix our tire and we were so late getting back to the BnB we were staying at that it was already dark. The host wasn’t there because she had decided we had to be lost and went looking for us but she didn’t leave a note so we didn’t know that so after about an hour I called 911 to see if she was missing or had reported us missing and she wasn’t and hadn’t and by then the 911 operator and I were both really confused so when our host finally walked in four hours later at 11:30 at night and said, as if nothing was amiss and the promised dinner was exactly on track as planned, “How do you take your steaks?” and by then, that felt exactly like it was supposed to happen.

Did you stay with me through all that? Is your life like this too?

Do you ever get the feeling there is maybe a laser pointer or mis-crossed star or black cloud hovering over your head, yelling out “Pick them, pick them!!” when weirdness or trouble or ridiculous coincidence is looking for a place to land? I’m happy for you if you don’t. I really am. Because I feel one or all of those are over me a lot of the time.

Back in Rigby time, there we were, licking our unbathed wounds, in a little park in the hamlet of Jordan Valley, sitting with our dogs at a picnic table, eating lunch, when two guys spotted us and eagerly came walking our way with very VERY friendly greetings, as if they had just walked out of a parched desert and we were their mirage. Apparently they had been looking for somebody like us and just about to give up when our paths crossed.

“Hi! We’re from Oregon Public Broadcasting. Can we please interview you for our radio show?” Well quite frankly we were not in the mood but we don’t like to disappoint people and live to serve others so we agreed to do it. And they might still be playing it because from time to time people tell us, hey, we heard you guys on the radio yesterday. (Our part begins at 18:38) My big takeaway from the experience after I heard it was to stop chewing while answering questions on the radio, especially when your meal includes Nacho Cheese Doritos. 

So sorry for all these side trails, I’ll try really hard to stick to the topic now.

We got home and Ric fixed the hose. Over the months that followed other things happened, so we had to take it in the Airstream dealer a few times. To be honest, we increasingly lost confidence in them. Like the time we got it back and there was a crunched-in bumper and nobody was willing to take responsibility. 

When we moved to Washington, we thought, great, we will use the Seattle area dealer, they’re probably better than the one in Portland. Hahahaha. Sometimes I am so funny I forget to laugh.

Now I know the theme of this post is ultimately to explain why we didn’t get to bring Rigby home yesterday, which means I am focusing on its problems. But to give you a complete picture, I need to sing its praises. 

When we decided to move here to the North Beach, we couldn’t actually move until our house was built. But we had to put our Portland house up for sale way before the new one was finished in case it took a long time to sell. Well, it sold in a few days, then we had to figure out what to do for the next several months. Because we already had to rent a storage space to stash the things in the house the realtor said had to go because they were too personal or had too much personality or were too many. And that’s where Rigby came in. We’ll store the things we want to keep, then have a huge sale and donate stuff to do away with the rest and we’ll hit the road in Rigby. We’ll go visit people, we’ll see the Grand Canyon together like Ric has dreamed of his whole life and told me the first time we met.

And that’s what we did. We went riding in Rigby. To visit my mom in Cottage Grove, then to Medford to visit cousin Sam and related second and third cousins. To California, across Nevada, to Utah, a bunch of national parks, New Mexico, Arizona to visit Sandy and Jim and related cousins, to California to Visit Velvet and Alex and Ian, many more places along the way until we got back to the Pacific Northwest and finally at the end of January, could move into our new house.

And in all those months, for all those miles, everything in Rigby just worked. We had no issues Ric couldn’t easily fix. We were living the dream. The one with the mom and the dad and the two little white dogs seeing America. This was why we had her, she really was our ticket to ride, our passport to adventure, our stairway to heaven. So bear this in mind when I tell you about the later troubles.

Soon after we arrived in our new home, in fact while we were still unpacking and equipping it and shuffling things about, which frequently involved trips to the hardware store or lumber yard, we had a visitation from the community standards committee, informing us that parking Rigby outside our home was a violation of the CCRs (basically the rules we had to live by). We hadn’t actually read the CCRs, we got them on a thumb drive but our computers don’t take thumb drives and somewhere there must have been a print version that got buried in our move. But we were clearly in violation of the part that prohibits RVs.

Since we were still in the process of moving things from my sister’s home in Longview, they gave us two weeks grace to finish the job, then we would have to find some other place to park it. 

When we asked around, we found that all the storage places in the area were full and there were waiting lists. And I’m talking about outdoor places. There was a possibility that someone who was renting a large indoor storage space nearby might move out so we could use it, but that would cost $200 per month, and that was way beyond our budget. We were, to put it bluntly, house poor at the time. Our monthly budget was funded entirely by our Social Security income, and I don’t have to tell anybody over 65 what that means.

While we tried to find a solution, we got permission to park her temporarily in an out of the way parking lot, mostly used by employees of the company that owns the development. But one day when we were walking through the town, one of the guys who had visited us ran us down and asked how much longer we were planning to keep it there, his boss needed an end date.

So we were stuck. No place for Rigby. We would have to sell her. Which would create another whole other set of problems when you have dogs that are so bonded to you they need you close nearly all the time. But that was a worry for another day. 

We contacted the Airstream dealer nearest us (90 miles and more than two hours drive away) and of course they would be happy to sell Rigby, and it would surely sell very quickly, these RVs are in great demand. After they took their cut, we would get hit with a big financial loss, but we didn’t see another choice.

So we drove two cars to the Airstream place, me in the Volvo, Ric in Rigby. Ric asked them to detail her and try to sell her as soon as possible. Oh yeah, they assured him, we’ll do that, have her looking great, and be in touch, it won’t take any time at all. Ric took cookies he had made for the sales staff there, he has a cookie philosophy of life… basically since everybody loves cookies, if you take really delicious cookies you make by hand with a real baker’s touch wherever you go, everybody will love you and remember you and give you extra special attention and service. And he is right, people do remember he is the cookie man, all he has to say is, I’m the guy who brought you cookies, and everybody responds, oh yeah, I remember you, those were some great cookies, my kids loved them too. I have no evidence, however, that this translates into better service. In fact, I would have to say that I’ve seen no evidence of even adequate service. But to be fair, cookies aren’t my favorite thing, I’m more of a fruit pie woman.

Days passed. Weeks went by. We didn’t see it listed on their website. I was really irritated but Ric was sure the cookie philosophy was going to kick in any day now and he will do just about anything to avoid possibly offending people, so he resisted calling to find out what the hell was going on. Still nothing, so after about a month he finally called and I can’t think of any possible excuse except they had parked it on a back lot somewhere and forgotten about it. They finally added it to their website, but still nothing. He called periodically, and yes, they remembered the cookies, but no action on the RV. This went on for months. Finally, we reached our limit of owning an RV and paying insurance in order to never use it so Ric talked to a person in charge of community storage here, and she basically assigned us an outdoor space where we could park it for $35 dollars a month. And yes, cookies may have been involved. We picked up Rigby and had she been detailed as promised? Hell to the no. Was there any apology and explanation about what had happened over the months she was there? Of course not. And the lot rot was back.

We were glad to have her nearby, but unfortunately, mice had already been living in her assigned space and somehow they found their way inside, so we had to get assigned another $35 space a safe distance away. And that’s where she stayed between our next trips. We went on a jaunt to eastern Washington (visiting grandson Colin at WSU and picking up some Cougar Gold) and Idaho, had a great time, saw some sweet sights and visited some family we hadn’t seen in far too long. Rigby did well by us, and we were so glad we still had her. We traveled to Montana to attend grandson Joe’s graduation, and all was well.

Every time we went to visit daughters and sons-in-laws and grandchildren in the Seattle area, it was so convenient to just pull into the driveway and not disrupt their households with ourselves and our pups overnight. We felt kinda free.

A series of horrible disasters befell members of my family of origin, resulting in three deaths a little more than a year, and Rigby enabled us to travel to where we belonged and stay as long as we needed. That’s another kind of freedom an RV offers, and I really can’t imagine what we would have done without her. One of the best things about the Interstate is that it’s big enough to stay in and meet your needs, even with dogs, but small enough to drive around in cities and usually find places to park. 

My mother passed away in December 2019, the last of that particular bundle of family tragedies. And we all know what happened in early 2020. Covid came calling. And let me tell you, Rigby was a miracle during a pandemic. Not only were we able to travel inside our own little bubble, we always had a bathroom with us. We were able to safely isolate, and precious daughter Amy did our grocery shopping for us because she had a mask she got at work.

Well, it didn’t take long for the masses to realize that RVs were a miracle solution during a pandemic, so the demand shot up like a bottle rocket, just when workers were getting sick and businesses shutting down and supply chain issues emerging. There were shortages of RVs pretty much across the board and wait lists for Airstreams (and I guess every other RV) got really really long. 

Which is as good a place as any to pause before beginning the next part of the story…