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"Did you inspect it?" she asked, watching the tow truck deposit
my prize in the driveway.
Of course I had. I'd looked right at it, hadn't I? I'd pored over
the images on the Facebook Marketplace listing. Did I mention
that whoever owned this thing before me must have been a pho-
tographer because the photos were so good? They looked like
Ansel Adams had taken them or something, every dent and spot
of rust so artfully composed that they could have been on post-
cards. And the listing itself? No Japanese poet of the 18th centu-
ry could have composed a haiku with the same brevity.
Honey, I assured her, I can fix anything that isn't broken. Huh?
she said.
Having gotten the rig home and admired its (somewhat faded)
beauty a while, I set about trying to figure out what it would take
to get it running. It took me probably three or four days before I
had to admit that this thing wasn't going to be sailing down any
blacktop anytime soon. Maybe I should have been tipped off
when I had to tow the damn thing home.
Beautiful but immobile, majestic but inert, it sat in my yard. It
sits there still.
Note here that to work on a motorhome, a mechanic should be
young enough to get back up after crawling under the camper on
a creeper. It can take a man my age half an hour just to return to
standing position after discovering the bolt I'm trying to loosen is
a 9/16, not a 1/2 inch—and on the third-try-is-a-charm principle,
it eventually turns out to be a 14mm. You math wizards will real-
ize I just spent an hour and a half loosening one bolt.
After a few days of crawling in and over and under it, my back
aching and my eyes watery from squinting, I concluded that the
problem was that its whole ass was busted.
The problem, as it turned out, was that a 1997 RV is now 28 years
old, which is a good age to be, say, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader,
but a bad age to be an RV. Everything that could corrode had cor-
are 4 x 2.25"
B O Z E M A N
B R I N G I N G A W I D E R W O R L D O F F I L M T O D O W N T O W N B O Z E M A N
Ye a r - r o u n d m o v i e s , s p e a k e r s , a n d e v e n t s | w w w . b o z e m a n f i l m s o c i e t y. o r g
Flickering since 1978
406-635-5598 114 S Logan Ave, Terry, MT prairieunique.com
Corporate
Montana Gifts Since 1995
Montana-Made
Gift Baskets & More
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Take a walk through
Butte's History. Scan the QR Code to visit
storyofbutte.org or download the app.
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