Day Four: Camp Walmart

Warning for the squeamish: this post involves a lot of poop and pee, including images.

Woke up at 5:51, 4-6 hours of sleep had become normal during my months-long marathon to get the U.S.S. Danny seaworthy. I wondered how long it would be before that would even out. Could take weeks, even months. Your sleep cycle is a precious thing, it prefers consistency above all.

Nice sunrise, wasn’t expecting such a vista when daylight struck.

I discovered that the panorama feature also works in portrait. Huh. The things you learn at 5 am in a Walmart parking lot.

I did my morning routines and headed to the shop asap. They said they couldn’t see me until the afternoon, but I figured if I got there bright and early they might be able to sneak me in sooner. Landed at 6:22, a mechanic told me to come back at 7:30.

Okay, back to Wally World for coffee. Not open. I thought these things were always open…

At least their wifi is always on. Good chance to start blogging.

The chair comes from another ersatz uncle, his name is Phil. When we were co-workers at the bike company he handed me these two small-ish rusty metal chairs and said “here, you’ll know what to do.” He was right, I blasted and powder coated them (boy, do I miss having access to a metal fab shop). Pretty pleased with the results. The other is sky blue.

As I wrote, swaddled in my new woolen blanket (thanks momma), a voice came over the loudspeaker and gave a friendly, yet ominous, canned message about the pandemic. Some trash blew, like a tumbleweed, across the mostly empty lot. People half asleep in their compacts fumbled to light their cigarettes. A child cried in the distance. Okay, I made that last part up, but it was eerily dystopic. Straight out of Black Mirror.

Or maybe this is just what it’s like to camp at Walmart.

7:15, they’re open now. No coffee. Not out of it, they just don’t sell it hot. What kind of bullshit is that? I want my money back, oh wait…

Get to the shop around 7:50, talk to the guys, they re-affirm 2 o’clock, but tell me to hang tight. Now, I’m going to, again, protect the identities of the shop and its characters. To be clear, I’m not protecting them from legal troubles, but, rather, from their own stupidity. When I left the next day, I said we were square, I’ll honor that: square is square. But I’m still going to tell the story. So, fake-names-r-us.

The guy who told me to wait a sec, let’s call him Porter, he was back now and told me to go turn on the van. A new character emerges, let’s call him Steve, who tells me to pull the van up under the awning. Needs to be closer so that the computer can read it. Internet signal. I oblige and walk away to take some photos while he has the thing running.

I notice the smoke.

Large, billowing, white sulfurous smoke. (Okay, I don’t know if there was sulfur in there, it just sounded good). I didn’t realize that this was on purpose, I just thought my car was acting up. “Christ, what now?” I held my breath and took plenty of pictures. A couple of videos too. (Working on getting video into these posts).

Years ago, (here comes a tangent) I had wanted to get into bio-diesel. I pestered a housemate’s cousin to let me check out his cook setup. I peppered another friend’s grandad, Bud, with questions. Not for the faint of heart, I remember him saying. Eventually, I used all my savings and bought an old diesel Mercedes, it was an epic waste of time and money. Just the car, I mean. Never even got to the bio-diesel part. (Ask me sometime to tell you the story of Uri, the drunk Russian mechanic). Though, years later, I did encounter a quasi-functioning bio-diesel cook operation at Aprovecho. One of the staff used it in his truck. I’d always heard that it smelled like french fries. At the time, face to tailpipe, I disagreed. Smelled like exhaust. However, by comparison to my rig, it smelled like Ronald McDonald’s golden french-fried butt hole. Regular diesel exhaust is caustic and awful. What was now coming out of my tailpipe was worse.

The photo doesn’t do it justice. Not sure the video would either.

Steve turns the van off and disappears. I wait outside. A lady from the shop wanders by and asks me a bunch of questions about the vehicle. You built it yourself? How’d you make that arch? Wow, that sounds like a lot of work. A couple brief pauses in her questions and I realize I’m being flirted with. Perhaps not consciously though.

Steve comes back. Need to take it on the road. Okay. He drives off.

Returns a few minutes later. Porter comes out and tells me I’m good to go. What do you mean? That’s it, we did a manual regen, which I’m sure I don’t need to explain to you, and it’s good now. Actually, I don’t know what that is. Oh, okay, so when the filter is clogged it overheats and tells the engine to slow down and cool off. We overrode that, told the engine to burn hot and just cooked it off. That was all that white smoke you were seeing. Ohhhh, okay, wow, that’s awesome! What do I owe you? Half an hour of labor: $67. What?!? That’s it? That’s awesome! (Grandpa Ernie, no relation, likes to hassle me for overusing ‘awesome’)

Go in, pay, have an awkward fist-bump-to-handshake moment and roll out. Time is 8:45 am.

I’m elated. I got my quick fix, it was cheap, and they snuck me in early. Heck, I’m going to Walmart to celebrate! It felt great to get back on the road and feel the full force of the engine. Vroom vroom!

I stopped by Denny’s for breakfast (and coffee) on the way back to Walmart. Used their wifi, drank entirely too much coffee, and left a big tip. I was on top of the world.

Back to Walmart to stock up on needed items. I’d learned over the last few days that there were some tech-peripherals that would make a big difference in my trip. One was a dashboard phone mount, the other a tri-pod, and the last an FM device for broadcasting audio to my van’s speakers. Turns out the froo-froo bluetooth speaker I already have is far superior to the car’s built-in speakers, so that FM thing got returned. Oh, and I got another bucket because I had a feeling, let’s call it a gut feeling, that I would be needing a composting toilet soon.

I brought my goods out to the van and in a flash of inspiration realized that I had all of the parts and tools I needed to MacGyver a urinal out of the pee bucket. A urinal would be an improvement in two big ways. One, smell: taking the lid on and off subjected you to a way-too-intimate encounter with the festering urine. Two, night peeing: fumbling around at night with a pee bucket just seemed like a disaster waiting to happen, minimally, I imagined myself missing and peeing all over the floor, worse would be the bucket tipping over.

So, without any hesitation, I set to work. Figured I’d videotape the whole shebang while I was at it, might be useful to anyone else roughing it at Camp Walmart. Posting up next to my rig got me some extra attention. Nowhere is my vehicle as popular as it was in that Walmart parking lot. All kinds of folks stopped by to say hi, tell me about their own aspirations to build a camper on their pickup, and generally ramble at me while I worked. Devon was the coolest, by far. He’d built several of his own already and came to say respect.

Oh, I forgot about the fan. It’s USB rechargeable. Total game changer, highly highly recommend for anyone doing vanlife without climate control. The little bucket is a saw dust scoop. See?

I laid out all the tools and materials. Pretty convenient that I had a number of things left over (which I was wise to hold onto) from the build-out. Chiefly, the PVC pipe with attached ball valve. I had intended this for cross ventilation. I was imagining that as I drove I’d need an inlet for fresh air to circulate through the camper and exit the small window to the left of the door. After already cementing the two pieces together (I weirdly love the PVC cementing process, it involves these little goopy poof balls on sticks and it’s bright purple) I discovered that it was completely unnecessary. Running the full length of the camper, right where the corrugated sheets meet the floor is a, roughly, one-inch gap. On both sides. That’s way more cross-sectional area than the two PVC pipes I bought to provide airflow. Good thing I kept them though, this was a much better use.

When finished, it would look something like this:

The construction took longer than I wanted it to. The sun was blasting me, and filming in the shade was too high contrast for a decent shot. Another preparative purchase made before leaving Eugene, which I’d highly recommend to anyone on a long road trip, was an electricity converter- goes into your cigarette lighter and lets you plug household items into it. So so useful. The one I bought claims it can do up to a 500w load, which is a floor vacuum’s worth of energy usage. Pretty impressive. Turns out it can only do that if it’s wired directly to the car battery. Fuck if I know where the leads are on mine, shit is not straightforward under the hood of my vehicle, as several non-European-motor mechanics have now demonstrated.

So, using the scroll saw wasn’t an option. Too bad, would have been pretty badass to bust that out in the Walmart parking lot. Thankfully I had a hacksaw in the van, took longer, but it did the job.

And, voila!

Works pretty well. Actually, let me walk that back. Some aspects of it work pretty well, others need improvement. Like the valve, that thing is hard to open and as I mis-discovered later that night it can really interrupt your flow. So to speak. The rest of it I’m pretty happy with, it allows me to not have to take the lid on and off, I’m not worried about “missing” in the dark, and the smell reduction is close to 100%. Not bad for an impromptu parking lot prototype. I’ll keep you posted for the video, and for version 2.0.

Once that was done it was time to bounce. Hit the gas station at 2:41 and on the highway at 2:52.

Free at last! Hold that job for me, I’m coming!

Not so fast.

Twenty minutes down the road and it’s limping again. No. No no no no no. NOOOOOOO

🤦‍♂️

Turn around and cruise in granny gear back to the shop. They’ve sent their guys home for the day. I can come back tomorrow.

I need to jump in some water. I bet Carla from Hought’s will know.

Sure enough, she does. Gives me perfect verbal directions to Perry, where there’s a swimming hole. Didn’t understand that Perry was back down the I-84. Oops. Here comes Limpy. Sorrrrrrrrry everybody 😬

Swimming hole was amazing and so needed. Though, right as I pulled into the gravel parking lot, it hit me. It was composting toilet time. Good thing I’d heeded my intuition. Made the first deposit of future-soil and gave it a dusting of wood shavings. Now, you might think that this is gross (it is) but it’s less gross than you’re imagining. Tangent time!

Back in the summer of ‘06 I got an internship at an intentional community in upstate NY, the Quaker Intentional Village Project Canaan, or QIVC as they call it. While I was there I got my first real experience doing house construction and homesteading. It was a great opportunity to learn and meet some wonderful people who I still keep in touch with. On a field trip one day I went with Paul and Dee, the eccentric couple who I was slated to work for (but never really did), to go visit one of Paul’s sons at a farm in Massachusetts. The farm he was working at belonged to another Paul? and his partner. They were regarded as local celebrities, they’d appeared in a Barbara Kingsolver book and could grow tomatoes in March. March, I say! (This meant very little to 21 year old me, accustomed to buying tomatoes year-round from the store). But, what I remember most vividly was their composting toilet. Legal in MA, which according to Paul (the Quaker, not the farmer) was the result of a member of the plutocratic elite taking interest in the novel bathroom habits of her subjects (one of the Kennedy’s maybe). Anyway, the point, which I’m taking forever to get to, is that it didn’t smell. Like at all. Got my face way too close to it- still couldn’t smell it. Filed that away knowing it would come in handy someday.

Fast forward to someday.

Before I go any further, I’d like to announce that this poop was courtesy of Reuben Burrows, who supplied several “highly fibrous meals,” with the express intent that they produce good poops. Thank you Reuben, you, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. I tip my lid to you.

Gave it about a 1/4” covering of wood shavings and, like magic, your nose would never know.

The real magic, however, was the swimming hole I’d been directed to. Holy moly, soooo beautiful.

After snapping a few photos, I jumped right in. It was colder than the Hermiston stream, but still not McKenzie-River-level cold (Brrrr). The current was strong and required maneuvering around the edges to make any headway upstream.

I saw a gal with a large sparkly inner-tube accidentally go for a ride through some testy waters. It looked like fun, though she didn’t seem to have enjoyed it. I asked her about the depth, she said it was a little shallow, she was worried about her coccyx. I stifled a laugh.

I decided to blow up my own tube, since I had one from the days of “Hippy Christmas” on the UO campus.

Okay, so Hippy Christmas is when all the students move out and the locals go dumpster diving for their perfectly good castaways. One year, my friend Rose and I took our bikes out (I had a beefy cargo bike setup at the time) and hauled off a literal truck bed’s worth of goods. Among them was this brand-new-in-the-package pink inner tube. It was love at first sight. Even just as a sculptural form, I love it. I’d like to turn it into a wall mounted light someday. This will require a modest vacuum to pull off.

As I’m blowing the thing up, sitting on a bench, I slowly disappear behind its luminescent bubble-gum pink form. This must have been an intriguing sight because before I can even stand up a little girl and her friend (7 maybe 8 years old) came over and said “Can I use your floaty?” I looked at the mom and said, “Sure, as long your mom says it’s okay.” Mom looks a little embarrassed and so I give her a wink. She agrees and off the little girls go. I jump back in the water and eventually retrieve my tube when the kids tire of it.

I decide to go for the rapids, despite the coccyx danger (it was deeper than she alluded). It was so fun, I start to giggle uncontrollably.

The last time I went “tubing” I had a similar uncontainable giggle. Though I didn’t actually have a tube at the time. I was at the rock water slides off of Triangle Lake in Oregon, a beautiful, well-loved swimming spot that boasts the best naturally formed water slide I’ve ever encountered. I hadn’t intended on swimming, so no bathing suit or tube, I just happened to be in the neighborhood. There are a group of very tan, very fit UO students there. Nothing to make you feel old and out of shape like a gaggle of twenty-somethings in peak physical condition. The dudes are going down sans tube, sometimes even in a train where they lock their legs around the guy in front of them. The ladies are using tubes and occasionally shrieking. I couldn’t resist, despite looking like a pale, aging idiot in his boxers, I went down the slide. Instant Joy! Uncontrollable giggling. There was a rock wall I had been advised to avoid, I’d clipped it on my first run, so I over-corrected for the second go. Mistake.

There was a fucking pothole, right in the middle section of the slide. Couldn’t see it until I hit it. Smack. All my weight came down on one hip. I tried hard not to yell in surprise. I was already feeling sheepish for being the oldest, whitest, and least prepared person there. At the base is a very deep and rather large pool. Gorgeous spot, big old-growth log fallen across it, perfect for reclining after a good run. I can’t feel my leg. I can’t use my leg. Hopefully, nothing is broken.

So there I am, struggling to swim (I don’t really know how to swim anyway) with a single leg, dragging a numb, unusable one along for the ride, trying so so hard not to let my panic show. It’s much farther than I could comfortably do with a single leg and 30 pounds of dead weight. God, please don’t let me drown, not in my underwear in front of the strapping youth. I make it to a large rock, intentionally out of sight, and struggle to pull myself up onto it. With some difficulty, I manage it to slither to safety and flip over to wait it out. The pain has kicked in.

I lay there for a while. Silently praying that no one sees me. But, sure enough, the girls do another run. All of them. All at once. They gather at the bottom, talk and splash around, and then climb out. Just my luck, they decide to see if I’m okay. DON’T DO THAT. Please, just pretend I’m dead. “Sir, are you okay.” Jesus, I just got sirred. If this wasn’t bad enough. Yes, I’m fine, thank you for asking. It was clear that they were experiencing some mixture of sympathy and amusement. I smiled, unconvincingly, to assure them that all was good, I’m just… sunbathing. OMG, please, please go away. They eventually did.

My tube run at the Perry swimming hole was, thankfully, without injury to leg or vestigial tail. I did, however, go farther than anticipated and had a mild moment of anxiety as I flippered my way to the river bank. I got out just in the nick of time, any farther and I would have been barefoot in the woods alongside the freeway. Where I pulled out was a small, formed beach. It clearly belonged to a private homeowner and I hoped to go unnoticed. No such luck. I was quickly greeted by Teri and her dog Freckles. Freckles, she warned me, might nip. Don’t get too close to the car, he’s friendly but he’ll bite you if you’re too close to the car. Duly noted.

Teri was understanding and friendly. Teri was a talker. Her husband (I’m assuming) milled about in the background, and aside from a quizzical glance, stayed mum. I got the feeling that he was the mono-syllabic type, even though he didn’t say a word. Teri could do enough talking for the both of them. That’s probably why she was so friendly, a fresh set of ears! She told me about the town, the swimming hole, the races that used to happen there, the baby goats she spotted on the cliffs, and she kept coming back to the homeless guy under the overpass living out of his car. She claimed that she didn’t have a problem with him, but the fact that he kept coming up said otherwise. I didn’t want to be impolite, but I also wasn’t terribly interested in being monologued. I gave Teri as much time as felt I owed her for the accidental trespass and then began edging back towards the road. It took a few repeated wrap-up statements from me to get Teri to let go.

I walked carefully back to the swimming hole. The road was the easy part, but off-road and man, those pebbles. I need to invest in some good river sandals.

Back at the swimming hole some bros had taken up the bench where all my stuff was. They were real friendly, offered me a beer, which I declined. We shot the shit for a while, commiserating about the cost of lumber, and talking shop about welding projects. Any suggestions of sites to see? Ice caves! In Belgian? No, Elgin, with an E.

After parting ways I sauntered away slowly, taking plenty of pictures.

Get out of my room, mom.

Shit, someone died. My bad, I guess I should look more closely before I mock. Even if I was alone, making fun of a memorial isn’t cool.

For a while, I’ve wanted to get an epic shot of my rig being dwarfed by a landmass. Several earlier attempts in Hermiston and Pendleton didn’t quite capture it. These didn’t either, though the opportunity was there. Just something about the angles wasn’t quite right…

Back into town, I catch the gyro place before it closes. I lost my mask somewhere and all my backups are buried in the camper. I try calling to place an order, say I’m standing outside and the guy on the phone says they have a walk-up window. I circle three times, increasingly confused. Am I being fucked with? I mean how many Yia Yia Nikki’s can one small town have? Two. And a third in Baker City. The guy was cool about me not having a mask, took my order and threw in a baklava, on the house.

Who are these characters? The owner’s three sons, working with them is like a 3 Stooges movie, they’re all really funny.

Really enjoyed the outdoor dining experience at Yia Yia Nikki’s.

Some of the residential wifi network names gave me and my friend Mia a good chuckle. Live Laugh McLovin was the best. FBI Surveillance Van 5 was also pretty good.

After a delicious gyro platter I meandered into the neighborhood behind Hought’s to look for a place to overnight. It seemed like a quiet enough spot that doing a single night wouldn’t ruffle any feathers. I chose a spot in front of a church. Something about the presumed hospitality of a religious space felt welcoming. Parking in their lot would have been a stretch, but on the street, right out front felt like I could still be sufficiently enveloped in their sphere of forgiveness to make it til morning without trouble.

The mechanics told me to come back first thing in the morning, they’d take a deeper look at it and we’d go from there. I prayed for a quick solution. Like the ever-watchful Eye of Sauron, the terrifying doomsday clock of possible joblessness ticked on.

Tick tock, tick tock…