Short Folk #12: Mullet on Wheels

We had a ‘85 Ford F-150 with a 10 foot camper mounted in the bed. One of those big winged setups that looks like it’s going to swallow the truck. You know, where from head-on the truck looks like a mule, carrying the weight of that camper on its back. Abby used to call it a mullet on wheels, you know, business in the front and party in the back. Huh. But it wasn’t for a while that she started calling it that. 

I remember once she was standing in that camper, dying her hair purple in the kitchen sink. It must have been the mid 90’s.  We had been bumming up the Rockies for a couple of months, sleeping in rest stops or camping in national parks. The national parks were the easiest, they’re all laid out like an explosion, you’ve got your city in the middle, your hub, and then the forest all around it like debris. When it gets near dark everybody heads back into the hub, that’s where the campgrounds are, the hookups, and I guess more than that you feel safer there. Well, our thing was to head out into the park in the dark, in the real wildness of it. It was Abby’s idea first I think. There was nobody was going out to the wildness in the dark like we could. Find a nice place to park, streamside or a road turnout, and you were home free for the night. Like I said, nobody strong enough to start out into the wild in the dark, certainly not anybody who would want to bust us for free camping like that. And we were early risers so we could be back on the road at dawn as if nothing happened. 

            We went up the whole Rockies like that, all the way into Canada. Making love nights in the back of that camper, bumming gas or stealing.  Never once had a complaint about the pace of that life, even though I think for a whole summer we ate nothing but canned beans and peaches. Sometimes fish I’d caught. Anyway, I feel like I was talking about something else. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Abby in the morning washing her hair in kitchen sink. That was in Jasper. Goddamnit if that doesn’t feel like five lifetimes ago. 

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Composition Notes:  Hopefully there's another one coming today. it all depends on if I get back to town before the internet cafe closes.  This piece is really an exercise in voice. I have been writing a lot of a-b-c linear type of shorts recently, at least that's what it feels like. and i wanted to write something that had nothing to do with the traditional mode of telling a story.  I like this type of voice. this nostalgic bum type of dialogue. I've used it a lot in other stuff. It fits my personality when I'm feeling nostalgic. But I don't know if I'll keep using it.  The trigger for this piece was seeing this couple yesterday at a lake. truck and everything. Sorry for the lack of photos on these blogs, there's just not enough bandwidth in this cafe.