Perfect From Now On

It began the way all Travco adventures should. After the last things were stowed securely away, I fired up the engines, which roared the life. I sat down, grabbed the shift handle, put my foot on the brake… and it went straight to the floor. No brakes at all. Perfect start.

Travco brakes. You either hate them, or you don’t have a Travco. Actually they really aren’t that bad, but they do require regular attention. I knew what was wrong. Whenever I park with the wheels angled too sharply to the right, the driver’s side wheel leaks brake fluid¹. We’d been sitting like that for five days. I opened the master cylinder reservoir and sure enough, it was basically dry. I refilled it and started pumping the pedal. Still nothing. Well damn, so much for the easy fix.

I had to run the last of the trash to the dump (where we live there’s no trash service), so I did that and used the time to think about the brakes. Probably just need to pump them some more I reasoned, 26 feet of brake line takes a while. I got back and did that, but still had no pedal. Now it was past departure time. Well. Shit.

It started to rain. I watched the drops running down the windshield and tried to think of what to do. The yard was quickly getting muddy, especially right around the bus. Still, the next step was going to be bleeding the brake lines. I grabbed a strip of sockets and a socket wrench and got down in the mud. Corrinne pressed the pedal, the kids fetched my tools when I forgot them back at the previous wheel, and together we bled the lines all the way around. Wet and muddy, I got back in, and fired it up again. Nice strong pedal. Perfect. We hit the road.

I’ve had people ask if I am really as calm and collected in these situations as I make it seem when I write about them and the answer is… usually. I have a natural tendency to remain calm in stressful situations, and in fact I get calmer as tension increases, which even I don’t understand, but that’s a good starting point I guess. That said, I definitely lose my cool and do some swearing at the bus.

It’s not in the way you might think though. Whenever something goes wrong, the stress for me isn’t that something went wrong, I expect that, the stress for me is in figuring out the problem. I used to get very frustrated because I wouldn’t know what was wrong with the bus and you can’t solve a problem if you don’t know what that problem is. When I lost my cool in the past it was because I didn’t know what the problem was and that frustrated me.

When we left on this trip back in 2017 I knew very little about how an engine works and even less about the nearly infinite number of things that can go wrong with one. I still don’t know everything, but after three years of keep on keepin’ on, I’ve figured out a few things.

Thanks to my uncle, a mechanic in New Orleans, some YouTube channels, and that very powerful motivating factor — necessity — I know more about what might be wrong these days. Whether or not I can fix it is a different story. Not only are my skills limited, the tools I can carry and the places I have to work are also limited. I’m probably not going to be replacing a cam shaft at the side of the road.

Things I can’t fix will probably still go wrong, but at least now I’ll know when those situations come up. In hindsight, of the four major mechanical repairs I’ve hired out in the first three years, today I would only hire out one of them. Even that one I’m not sure I’d hire out. I might at least try to convince a Walmart to let me spend a few days in their parking lot redoing a head gasket myself.

This day though really was kinda perfect because something went wrong, our plans got thrown for a loop and yet none of us lost our cool. We figured out what needed to be done, did it, and headed on down the road. To me that’s what this life is all about.

The drive down to Edisto meandered through forests and farms, rolling hills giving way to the flatlands of the Carolina lowcountry. We drove a route that felt a little like going back in time, people sat on porches of what looked like hundred year old houses, waved as we passed.

It was a stark contrast to the drive to Edisto in 2017 when it felt like we were driving through a hollowed out, ruined land. It may be that it was just a difference in routes, I couldn’t really say. I’ve now spent enough time in rural America to know that I’ll never be a part of it, and should never try to speak for it. Still, it felt better out there this time around and that made me feel better.

The rain let up not long after we started driving, and I opened the windows and vents to get some air moving through. It wasn’t long before I began to smell burning leaves and trash, a smell that has, for some odd reason, always smelled like home to me, like life. That smoke for some reason always makes me feel like something good is happening nearby. There are people, living, as people do, as people always have. There’s a kind of vitality to that smell. It’s a smell I associate more with the rest of the world than with the US where such things are usually banned. Out here though, it was happening all over, banned or no.

I somehow take that as a good sign. Maybe that wrecked world is still there too, I don’t know, but this drive gave me a sense of hope and peace I haven’t felt much in the last couple of years. It may not be perfect from now on, but I think we’ll find a way to get by, and that’s all you need.