The Camper and the Throne in the woods (we did this in 1996)....

My parents  used to be avid campers.  I have to tell this, because it’s really ironic when I think about it now. I grew up camping at Lake Alatoona with my family, in a tent, on the ground, in a sleeping bag. My Mom was not truly crazy about camping, but she loved us and indulged these kinds of things from her family. She was the chief cook & bottlewasher and preferred to do that while we went out adventuring or swimming. Not long after Ken and I had married, I was driving down the road and saw an adorable pop-up camper at a yard sale. I asked the price and it was extremely reasonable. I called Ken and asked him if I could buy it. He said, “Does it have a bathroom?” I said, “What?!!!! A bathroom?! It’s a pop-up, for heaven’s sake!” He stated that if it didn’t have a bathroom then he was not interested. I realized that this was something we had not discussed before we were married. The pastor who married us did not ask enough questions. This crucial piece of information was missing when I walked the aisle. To put it plainly, I suddenly realized that my man was a Holiday Inn kind-of guy…. How did that happen? He looked very much like a hunky lumberjack, he wore flannel shirts and hiking boots. He was tall, masculine and had the arms of a body builder. He played football and basketball like a whirling dervish. So how did I miss the memo?  Apparently it all worked out and I would have to now say that, I honestly do not miss sleeping on the damp ground in convulated ways, particularly when you have mosquitoes buzzing in your ears and then when it inevitably starts to rain, while your slightly-unlevel-campground begins to flood. No, I’ll take the Holiday Inn….I’ll even take the Motel 6, if truth be known. Thank you, Ken!

But when we decided on our Big Adventure and figured that we'd buy a used camper, Ken thought it would be helpful if my Daddy helped us buy one.  We looked at several, then we found one in Douglasville.  When we showed up to look at it, this incredibly short woman came out of the house.  She had to be about 4 foot 8  and weighed at least 300 pounds.  Later, we found out that she was a fortune-telling witch of sorts and had a tarot card reading business....she also must have had the gift of deception, because we certainly were blind to what was wrong with this camper.   My brother in law, Brian, lended us the money until we closed on the house so that we could go ahead and prepare it for what was to come.  When we pulled it to our house, we discovered many wonderful things about it.  The refrigerator didn't work.  The heater didn't work.  And in particular, the whole thing leaked like a sieve.  I hauled myself onto the roof, scrubbed and bleached it, waited for it to dry and then painted it with some sort of stuff that was like a rubber roof.  We cleaned the whole thing inside and out and then filled it with the clothes and things we would be living with at the campground.  I remember the last night in the house, before the final closing.  I had a huge yard sale a couple of weeks before we moved, selling everything that was extraneous or junk....all those things that you really don't want or inherited from the dump.... I even sold our kitchen chairs because they were awfully uncomfortable and had gotten beaten to death by all of us.  Ken's parents graciously agreed to let us store the rest of our stuff in their basement.  We hauled everything over there, squeezing it so tight that it only took up about a third of their basement.  My mother-in-law and other family members had bought me some beautiful Johnson Brothers china from England that arrived the day before we moved out.  It went straight into my Mom's basement.  That was tough.  In the camper, we only had room for a few things, so I packed a saucepan, a Dutch Oven, a couple of casserole pans, our old set of stainless, some detergent and toiletries and a few utensils and pot holders.  For the next two years we would eat off paper plates and from our laps.  I remember the last night in the house.  Everything had been moved to the appropriate place, all the furniture and beds were gone.  All that was left in the house was everybody's pillows and some bedding.  We camped out on the hard living room floor.  It was a sad and scary time, but also exciting because our adventure was beginning.  Who could know what lie in store for us?  How in the world were we going to do this crazy thing?  I am still in awe that our parents didn't absolutely freak out (maybe they did, they just didn't let us know about it).  Ken and I with four kids, ages 12, 10, 8 and 5, moving into a camper like a bunch of gypsies.  

We lived in that camper for almost two years (21 months to be exact). It is a strange thing, to live in a camper for that long. After a while, you adapt to all the little things you have to do to make it work. There’s no room, so you just don’t keep much stuff. You realize you actually only need a couple of pans to cook with. In a shower where both of your hips are touching the walls, you get quicker about getting done with your business. There were two very good things about that beat-up camper….one was that it had an abnormally large hot water heater, so you could get good and clean in the micro-shower. Two, the air conditioner worked really well…so once you were clean and in your right mind, you could crawl into the sack and sleep unmolested by sweat or mosquitoes. Those two things made it tolerable. If we had not had lots of hot water and lots of cool, dehumidified air, I am absolutely certain I would have lost my mind. As it was, we learned quickly how to cook, clean, eat, and sleep in very close quarters and without a lot of luxuries. In short, we realized how little it takes to survive. People all over the world live in small huts, small apartments, wee corners of homes….with no thought as to their “plight.” That’s all you really need to live. In America, we live in massive homes, with Sam’s cards to buy our masses of groceries, supersizing our McDonald’s combo meals, etc. and I am as guilty as anybody. In fact, maybe worse than other people. I tend to think if a little is okay, then a lot must really be wonderful. I’ve heard the expression “less is more” for many years now. I hate that expression….because I think, “more is a heck of a lot better.” Then I remember how we were able to live in peace, with a lot of fun mixed in, for two years in a tiny, beat-up old camper….and I wonder what I’m doing in this (relative) mansion.

Our plan, after selling our home, was to pull the camper up to a campground across the street from Six Flags over Georgia, an amusement park in Atlanta. It was around 30 minutes away from our land, and we planned to get the basic systems in place before we moved the camper to the land: electricity, running water, septic tank, etc. We moved into the camper in August of 1996. The Olympics had come to Atlanta the same week we moved in. Everybody thought Atlanta was going to be a crazy, swamped place….but the truth was that all the Atlantans either stayed home that week or left for other places on vacation. At the campground, we met numerous interesting people who were there for the games. It was fascinating to see all the hoopla surrounding it. My kids were given tickets and went with their Uncle Jeff to see an archery event, but Ken and I couldn’t afford at the time to see anything that was going on (much less have the time to do it). I have no regrets, ha! The campground owners were very kind people. They were tolerant of us planning to live there for awhile, and there were other people that were long-term campers as well. There was one family who had an elaborate cage system built onto their camper that contained their many cats (there had to be 10-15 cats in it). It was very humane, with places for the cats to perch, eat and sleep. I saw the cats constantly, but the people were very bashful and I never was able to speak to any of them the whole time we were there. There was a pool at the campground that we enjoyed cooling off in, particularly in the evenings. There were showers, a laundromat and a little store and we used all of those. The first time that it rained, after buying the camper, the roof began to leak all over the place. I found a product in Atlanta that was used for waterproofing campers, so I climbed on top of the camper and painted the roof with this rubber substance. It never leaked again. I was petrified as I was painting the roof, not quite realizing how often I was going to have those feelings over the next two years….feelings of falling, feelings of being overwhelmed by something I had never done before, feelings of being sure that my life was over and that I was never going to be clean again, and especially, feelings of being certain that we were warping our kids. But then, evening came and the hot shower, kids in bed, cold air conditioning and a sleeping bag…..and life was good. 

We stayed at the campground for around two months. I remember the first day that we went out to the land and began trying to clear some of the brush, just so we could get to the house site. We wanted to put the house in the middle of the five acres. People kept advising us to put the house near the road, to keep the costs down….and I was adament that we put the house in the middle. What would be the point of having 5 acres if the whole back of it is in woods and your house is crammed up on the road? Many of the folks on our road who have built on chunks of land have done that, and they do not use the backs of their properties. It’s just a bunch of trees and the people have acreage, but no privacy. Today, if you were to come to our property, you could walk around the house naked and none of the neighbors would ever know. That is a good thing (not walking around naked, just having that kind of privacy). On the other hand, we have the most wonderful neighbors. They are all salt-of-the-earth people that would give you the shirt off their backs. But when you have this kind of environment, it is made up of people who are like-minded. They have property because they are a certain type of people. They want some privacy too….and they’re just not into homeowner’s associations and covenants and who-didn’t-mow-their-grass this week. Back a few years ago a Yankee moved into the neighborhood, tried to start one of those associations up and it never really got off the ground. We were all too busy sipping lemonade on our front porches….

Back to clearing… I quickly realized how difficult it is to clear land, and also realized that we were going to have some major help in the form of equipment to do this correctly. We interviewed landscapers and heavy-equipment people to get quotes on clearing a driveway and digging the basement. We were shell-shocked and actually quite devastated to find out how much it was going to cost. It was way over our “budgeted” idea. I cried myself to sleep that night and begged God to help us. We finally found an old guy who did it for about half of what we originally got as a quote, but I also realized that we would have to hire him for complete days at a time, no “partial” days. He was about 5 hours into one of the days and I saw that he was really meandering and taking way too long….so I gave him something else to do so that he would be more efficient with his time. I asked him to knock down the trees in the front of the property, making me a big field…and also do the same in a back section of the property, making us a garden area. Ken still busts me up about that. He says that he would have liked to just have woods everywhere.  We have to have those areas bushhogged now, which costs money….but I wanted to have some illusions about a horse chewing on alfalfa in the front field, even if there never really was a horse. Plus, I get a little caustrophic if there’s too many woods and not enough sunlight.

Ken’s Dad and he built a wonderful shed on the property, to put the camper under. That was a great idea, because it kept the camper from even possibly leaking again….it also gave us a little porch and a toolshed to work from. I believe that Ken’s Dad paid for the lumber for it. It was a precious gift and it was another of those things that made all the difference in us being able to do the impossible. During the winter, we would completely wrap the camper and the porch with plastic, to keep out the weather. When we were finally done with building the house, the boys dismantled the whole shed and built a two-story barn with the leftovers! They insisted on doing it themselves and would not let Ken or any of the menfolk help them. It is still there and has been used to keep all manner of tools, puppies and chickens safe, warm, and clean for many years.

To get water to the house site, my Dad and Ken and the boys had to run piping all the way from the road up to the house site. They bought pipe and rented a ditch witch and ran the piping 400 or so feet from the road all the way up to the house site. It was a project that seemed like it should be simple, but of course it was not. They kept running into shale and rock.  I think they had to take the machine back to the shop two or three times before it was completed, and I thought they’d never get the water hooked up to it. Of course, the thing froze a few times before we figured out how much we had to insulate. Ken built a box around it and crammed it full of insulation. Finally we had water. It is now 15 years later and that pipe is still holding. 

Then the fun part of our life really began. The unmentionables. The things that really show us what the Fall of Man is all about. I am talking about the septic system. Poop is what makes everything in life difficult. We have raised myriads of puppies and chickens, cats and children. And the worst part of all that is all the poop. There are all these idyllic pictures of animals on posters and picture books, pictures of farms and hills and valleys. What they don’t show you is the barnyards, the cesspools, the diapers that are full of it. It does not just go away. It collects. It stinks. It amasses. And what are you supposed to do about it? Mankind has come up with a wonderful thing called a septic system. Some brilliant dude came up with one that snakes all through peoples’ backyards. They try to make us all think that the poop is not there at all…it’s buried and safely ensconced deep within the earth. But time and more time, and more people or animals, and it rears its ugly head. It cannot hide forever. It is coming for you.  This subject was the most difficult part of living like we were living. The septic guy that had the best price came in with a big tractor. The fellow could sure run that machine, but he could hardly walk. He had bad joints and nice long lunch breaks with “beverages.” He would show up after lunchtime with his equipment and several men. He would manage to climb onto his tractor and diligently dig. The other men would stare at his machine and him, leaning on their shovels and not doing much else. Eventually he had a long snaking hole tunneling through our backyard. To my amazement, he pushed down very few trees. But as to what he did, I am not so sure…  

We connected the camper’s sewage system to the septic tank via a big, long flexible pipe. Pretty much immediately, someone kicked a hole in the pipe, so we repaired the hole with duct tape. Occasionally it would work its way loose, so don’t let anybody tell you that the Nortons are not rednecks. Or that anybody in the world is truly civilized.

The very worst part of our camper days, for me, was all the septic system complications. Skip this part if you are squeamish. Every few days, I would have to run a special hose and attachment into the septic tank in the camper…and blow it out to clean it. We had to keep certain chemicals in the tank to break things down and use special toilet paper as well. Sometimes the system would break down. Towards the end of our time in the camper, it started leaking and giving up the ghost. Someone lent us a little porta potty that did not hold very much. One of my very-precious sons (should I say his name?) took it upon himself to empty said potty in a special place in the woods…sort-of an outhouse-hole in the ground. This was quite burdensome, to say the least. Finally, the boys took left-over blocks and built a virtual throne-in-the-woods, complete with a large hole in the ground and a place to put toilet paper, etc. At the time, nobody lived between us and the river a mile away, so you could enjoy the open air. When it was raining, not a very fun place to be. Actually, nothing about it was fun. This was extremely distressing for me, to say the least. Eventually the porta-potty was put into the big house, which by this time was dried-in but had no sheetrock on the walls. One day, I was in the makeshift porta-potty area, and one of the boys forgot to yell before they stepped into the house. They weren’t exposed to anything before I saw them and screamed for them to get out…but I was at the end of my rope. I got a little emotional and cried over it and the lack of privacy we were experiencing. Next thing I know, the boys constructed me a “bathroom” inside the house by taking old plywood and enclosing what would be the half bath. They made a little magazine rack and had a nice nail for the toilet paper. It was so very sweet and funny (now that it’s all over I can say that). Not long after, my Dad came over and helped Ken fix the septic system on the camper. That was probably to keep me off the ceiling and out of the crazy house, for sure. I was never so thankful for anything in my entire life.