Day 1: Power and a Toilet that Flushes (Part One)

This didn't happen on my first day back in the trailer. It was supposed to. But it didn't.

A little background.

The town of Mojave, where the trailer is located, sits on the western edge of the desert that goes by the same name. It's supposedly a Native American word for "next to the water." There is, as far as I can tell, no open water of any kind for miles. There's sagebrush, a couple of mesquite trees there and there, and a lot of hard-packed desert gravel.

I moved during the hottest part of the summer when the thermometer regularly hits 100+ by noon, and stays there til long after the sun goes down. For that reason, I'd also chosen to move in the middle of the night when, by mutual reckoning with the friend who helped me, it might have scraped the low 80's. We had to use candles to see. We unloaded as quickly as we could, were sweating like pigs, and made it bearable by turning on the hose spigot and waiting for the water to get cold enough to make any kind of real difference. It barely did.

I'd returned the moving van that night, gotten my truck, taken a nap, loaded the last of my stuff, picked up some more supplies, stopped by the bank, filled my tank with gas, and hit the road for Mojave around 2:00 the next afternoon.

My truck is a '62 Ford F-100. She doesn't look like much, but she's the single most reliable vehicle I've ever owned. She can go the 75mph speed that seems standard for freeway driving here, but she doesn't like it. If there's any other way to go, I take it. In this case, there's the Sierra Highway. It turned out to be a beautiful drive, actually, but it added about 30 minutes to my trip. Stopping in Rosamond to drop off my August rent check added another 20.

So it was 4:30 by the time I made it back to the trailer and opened the door to take stock the mess we'd made of the place the night before. The outside temperature was 102. Inside I'm pretty sure it was at least 110. I opened all the windows, stuck a 2x4 under the door to keep it open, and sat down in what little shade there was to wait until it was cool enough inside to get started on the work I'd been planning to do once I got back.

I was supposed to replace the shoreline first thing. I'd left it right next to the front door, and had even made sure, when we'd unloaded the night before, that we'd left enough space to get back to the breaker box without having to move anything.

Then, since I'd have light, I was supposed to reconnect the toilet to the septic line.

Then I was supposed to clear a space for my mattress, make myself a bed, eat, relax, and get a little shut eye.

It was just too hot, and I was way too tired to even want to try to make myself do any one of those things. I settled for waiting out the heat at McDonald's, using their power to charge my phone and kindle, getting a bag of ice in the hopes that my little refrigerator would act like a cooler, coming back to set up my bed, reading a little, getting some sleep, and just doing everything else the next day instead.