30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Twenty One: Short Circuit

July 3, 1975

Morning, we took my car down into town to buy last minute supplies, check the bulletin boards again, and stop by the University to shower at the Men's Gymnasium. No new housing adverts, so our eggs were still in the Creswell basket for the time being.

Back at Sarge's, we gathered up the last of our belongings and made arrangements to return to pick up my car once we had settled somewhere. Not for the first time, I longed for a method of hauling the car along behind the Housetruck.

Since Jeep had turned off the power, and because his electrical acumen was so miserable, I decided to leave him a little going away present. Before we left the shop completely, I reached up and unscrewed one of the exposed 100 watt light bulbs from the ceiling fixture, placed a penny on the tip of the bulb's base, and screwed the combination back into the socket. Now he had an actual electrical short circuit problem to figure out when he turned the power back on, and I wasn't going to be around to help him find it!

By early afternoon, we had completed our packing, and prepared to drive away. As I passed Jeep and Kitty's house, I honked the horn, and they waved. I waved back. The difference in our salutations was that they were waving with all of their fingers raised.

I don't remember how we arrived at the idea of spending a couple of days at the Oregon Coast, but we pointed our trucks more or less west, and drove for a while, intending on taking back roads to the beach. A few miles west of Loraine, Woodley pulled off the road and talked me into camping there for the night. I wanted to see the ocean, but we didn't have a map, it would be dark soon, and we didn't really have a lot of money to be spending on gasoline. We pulled off the road near a bridge over the Siuslaw River, and set up camp for the night, assembling the wood stove and stove pipe on the ground behind the truck to cook dinner. A Forest Service or BLM ranger stopped to see what we were doing, and was only concerned that we wouldn't be starting an open campfire. I had installed a couple of shelves in the back of the truck, and mounted stereo speakers on them, so opening the back doors of the van body gave us audio entertainment.

I didn't know it at the time, but we were only a mile or so from Siuslaw Falls, which offers some pretty nice unofficial camping and is well off the road. It was probably a good thing we didn't try to go all the way to the coast that day. The road does eventually go there, but it's a lot of back road driving, and steep and twisty as well.