30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Nineteen: Shut Out

Time to see if I can get another episode in this play written. The action is about to take a radical shift, bringing this chapter near to a close.

The date is Tuesday, July 1, 1975. The Country Fair is over, and it's time to settle back into "life as normal". This particular normal afternoon, Woodley and I returned home from a trip to the grocery to find that the electrical power to the Housetruck was off. When I asked Sarge about it, he told me that his dad, Jeep, had turned it off while he was working on a circuit in the office building.

My purchase of the wood stove the previous weekend meant that we now had a means to cook food without the use of the rental trailer's kitchen, and we had bought food with which to prepare meals, hoping to further extract ourselves from the discord over menus and diet. We put the food, which included some fish, into the ever-warming RV refrigerator in the Housetruck, and waited for the power to be restored.

Late in the afternoon, I began to be concerned about the food spoiling, and went down to the office to see if Jeep needed help figuring out his wiring problem. He was never very proficient at electrical jobs, and I frequently had to bail him out after his circuits proved defective. I found him noodling around with something not related to electrical wiring. When I asked about the power to the shop and my truck being turned back on, I got some vague excuses that didn't mesh with what Sarge had told me, and which didn't indicate that there was really an electrical problem to begin with. Jeep then launched into a diatribe about several unrelated subjects, the most distressing to him was the fact that I had done laundry that morning and hung it on a clothes line next to the Housetruck to dry. "What will anyone driving by think if they see your clothes hanging there?" he asked. Several replies came immediately to my mind, including "That I have clean clothes?", but what I said was what I thought he was thinking: "That a bunch of hippies had moved in" I didn't hang around waiting for a response from him, but headed up to the trailer to let Sarge know that things were awry.

At the trailer, Sarge asked me what I had said to Jeep to piss him off. I told him and said that I didn't understand why the power was still off, either. Sarge replied that his dad had just called up to the trailer as I was walking up the hill and said that he told me I was evicted, then both Sarge and Terri began to laugh.

Well, that was it then, the old man had cut the power, then let his son do the dirty work. I told Woodley that I was evicted, and his response was that if I was leaving , so was he. Of course, now that the cat was out of the bag, Jeep locked us out of the toilet and shower room. Sarge and Terri came down and made unconvincing sympathetic noises, like "Oh, you can still use our shower, and the kitchen too", but we all knew that it was over and done with.

I think that night, Woodley and I cooked up the fish on the new wood stove, using a fry pan set into the open top of the stove where the eye had been removed. Made sense to salvage the most perishable of the food goods first. I believe that I also tried to wash my hair in a basin, and had a pretty miserable time of it. We were going to have to find another place to live in short order, because neither of our housetrucks were completed enough to sustain us yet.