From West by Northwest.org Voices of Spencer Creek Norm's Notebook: A Winnebago, Motorhome That Is By Norm Maxwell Jan 4, 2005 A few years ago, Wes, our senior law enforcement officer (LEO) told me that he had a problem that was right up my alley as Eugene District's abandoned vehicle dealer wither. A year or two before that, Wes had arrested an individual who had been camping on federal land, for an assortment of outstanding warrants, most involving the production and distribution of drugs, felon in possession of firearms--that sort of thing. Anyway, the individual was back on the street now and Wes was unable to contact him to come and get his old Winnebago motorhome and Toyota sedan that Wes had thoughtfully impounded in a disused Bureau wareyard behind a Cyclone fence rather than having a professional wrecker haul them off and hold them for ransom. After trying every way he could think of to contact the released individual to come and deal with his vehicles, Wes finally told me to go ahead and handle the problem. I drove the twenty-five miles from Eugene to the site and unlocked the heavy gate with my official key. There sat a 70s Toyota and a late 60s 25-foot motorhome. The pair of junkers reeked of the phrase "seen better days." Some BLM employee had dumped a stripped pickup cab in the yard for good measure. Judging by the bullet holes in the cab, it had served target duty on some landing until one of our people got tired of looking at it and brought it in to the yard. I swiftly muscled the pickup cab onto my dead car trailer so the winch cable could pass through the missing windshield and rear window and load the old Japanese car. This went swiftly and I had the car and cab pulled tight with the winch and the whole mess ready to roll in ten minutes. I turned the unlocked knob of the one door into the old Winnebago. A sign at eye level told me USE OTHER DOOR. Whatever. There were at least a dozen car batteries piled at the entrance of the old Winnie. I stepped over them and was aware of a heavy rodent smell mixed with mold. The old motorhome had a wood stove rigged so that the pipe exited a vent in the roof. No effort had been expended to make this arrangement water tight so a couple year's of rain and snow had gotten in and pretty well saturated the forward part of the landwhale. The whole caravan was filled with junk. I swiftly deduced that the car batteries were to power a 12 volt television and VCR system that enabled the owner to view the dozens and hundreds of porno tapes scattered from hell to breakfast. Lurid porn mags with titles I had never heard of confirmed that the owner of the Winnie had no life. After loading the iron woodstove and car batteries in the front seat of the old car, I estimated the volume of crap to haul away and shut the door. After dumping the car and pickup cab the next day, I returned with a flatbed truck and an assistant to haul away as much of the squalor as possible before beginning the dismantling process. I was utterly amazed at the sheer tonnage of trash in the old Winnie. Jim and I wore black industrial strength rubber gloves and commenced to loading junk into the one ton flatbed truck. I found a photo album and hesitated. On the first page John Barleycorn's Missouri Correction Department's ID card was proudly displayed. There were old black and white photos from the 50s that were hauntingly similar to my collection. County fair shots with cotton candy and goofy cowboy hats that were all the rage for kids. Aunts, uncles and parents with new 55 Chevrolets and DA haircuts and back yard barbecues. People now dead or dying looked back at me young and happy and confident. The sky was the limit. The United States was the only place to be. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in the recent past and the Army Air Corp burned Tokyo and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki for good measure. Now the Japanese sold trinkets stamped out of American tin cans. The Russians might be a problem but if they messed with us, they'd glow in the dark too. American supremacy was the natural order of things and would be for centuries to come. A yellow news clipping folded between the pages described how John had flipped a dune buggy years ago and his wife had died as a result. I conclude that the scrap book's owner was a few years older than me and had spent time in Viet Nam in some sort of combat arms support field. I was pretty sure that he had grown up in Missouri and had children who were now young adults. How had John wound up living in a worn out Winnebago with nothing to show for his life except for hundreds of pounds of pornography and dozens of weird knives? What made us different? You could shuffle our black and white childhood photo collections together like a deck of cards and be unable to tell them apart. I put the album aside. The stake side truck was almost full. I wrenched the disgusting old boxspring off the floor and discovered a packrat nest. The rat had moved most of a forty pound bag of dogfood under the bed. He clearly thought that he must have died and gone to heaven. I was here to rain on his parade. We simply could not get all the junk into one truck load. We called it a day and locked the gate behind us and headed for the Lane County landfill. I pocketed an exposed roll of 35 mm film and a disposable camera to have developed. I souvenired a never worn Skookum baseball cap off a nail in the wall too. The next day, I was back with a vengence to wrap up the Winnebago and get it out of my life. I started in on peeling the aluminum siding off the drivers side with the axe end of a firefighting pulaski. I soon had the technique down and had an impressive pile of scrap aluminum by the time Wes and Mike showed with the flatbed to help. By this time I had weakened the tinfoil and matchstick construction wall to the point where I winched the roof of the motorhome off on the passenger side so that it landed upside down. Mike and Wes started bagging up the last of the crap and loading it onto the truck. I was on a roll now and soon had all the walls seperated from the water soaked plywood deck. I took my heavy 7 foot bar and commenced prying up the wood and carpet in jagged hunks. Wes and Mike were examining one of the Swedish porn mags. I tell them to go ahead and load up the skin mags and take them home so they can give me a hand now. They deny that they are really looking at them. I guess my eyes are deceiving me. The bar flexes and another chunk comes up. A frightened packrat regards me from his perch on the steel frame of the Chrysler chassis. I inform the rat that it's time to get a job and face the real world. He runs under the edge of the remaining deck. I heave that up as well. The rat retreats again but his cover is rapidly shrinking. Finally the rat is sitting on the bare truck frame with no more wood to take cover under. He scampers up the starboard rail and tries to hide under the big V-8 engine. I lean on my bar and let Mike and Wes remove the completely full holding tank and carefully load it on the truck. Special. I am now ready to load the steel skeleton of the landwhale on my dead car trailer. It is so long that the trailer tilts level before the rear wheels are on board. The packrat finally accepts reality and jumps off the Winnie carcass and runs for the woods on the other side of the cyclone fence. I give Wes the control for the winch and step on the end of the trailer hoping to weigh it down so the dual wheels will roll on. Nothing happens. I stoop and put a reverse lift on the frame and push on the trailer with my feet. It slowly returns to ground level and Wes reels in the winch a foot until the inner dual wheels are on the end of the loading ramps. It's a piece of cake now. With the front bumper an inch from the winch, there is at least seven feet of Winnie frame hanging over the end of the trailer. I take some hot pink survey ribbon and flag up its back bumper. I swap my hardhat for my freshly washed Skookum cap and I am ready to roll. Mike and Wes will dump their load of trash and come back for all the aluminum siding to recycle. A couple of hot Swedish babes french kiss on the cover of a porno mag as it flaps in the breeze. I head for town.  Norm Copyright © 2004 by Norm Maxwell Norm Maxwell is a regular contributor to West By Northwest.org. Norm Maxwell received the Best of West By Northwest award for his article, The Fire of South Canyon: Remembering Storm King. Tens of thousands of readers have "voted" with their mouse by their selection of this story. Visit Norm Maxwell's other pieces about land use, firefighting and life in the country and more at West By Northwest.org. Norm's Notebook: Measure 37 Fallout by Norm Maxwell Norm's Notebook: The Wayward Bus Norm's Notebook: New Bike and The Three Acre Wood Norm's Notebook: A Helicopter and a Hometown Norm's Notebook: A Different Kind of Pre-Emptive Strike Norm's Notebook: "Goodbye Dear, I'll be Home in a Year" Norm's Notebook: Dead Cars and the Six Million Dollar Manx (Editor's note–Norm's "Dead Cars" story inspired a feature story in the Register Guard, "Heaps of trouble in the woods.") A Homey Homage to the Homelite: The Stone Age of Powersawing Take Two: Jackson Road Norm's Notebook: Battling Broom Norm's Notebook: A Last Look from the Big Rabbit Norm's Notebook: From Forest to McMansion, How It Could Happen Here Norm's Notebook: A Few Acres, a Few Chickens–Who Is Living on the Land Now Remembering the 30 Mile Fire Old Men and Fire The Fire of South Canyon: Remembering Storm King Wee-wee for BB Norm's Notebook: The Story of the Spruce Tree, and Mosby Creek, a New Land Use Lot Adjustment> Mentoring Military Style Three Dollar Hammer Remember Fire Road Home, Home on Fire Road and more. © Copyright 2000-2004 by West by Northwest.org