I Thought Buying a Trailer Would Make My Life Easier

Last fall, I bought a trailer second hand that was built by the now-closed Moby 1 camper company (its owner is in jail from embezzlement) and named it Moby 1 Kenobi. I slapped on a Ewan McGregor Jedi sticker next to the logo to make it official.

My pitch to myself and Jacob went as following: having a camper trailer meant we could just leave for the mountains at a moment’s notice; go powder skiing while avoiding traffic because we slept soundly in the parking lot the night before; I could camp alone on the road and feel safe in my little stainless steel box.

Owning this trailer has been the opposite of easy.

Ignorant bliss

Camping trip one: I didn’t check the propane tank, which we discovered was completely empty, right as we went to cook dinner in the back door kitchen. I drove 20 minutes to Leadville, begged for the Big R to reopen their propane refilling station so I could get my one gallon ($1.43), then we cooked dinner in the pitch black before going to bed immediately. Not a huge deal, but a definite hiccup in our plans.

Camping trip two was supposed to be 9 days in Moab over Thanksgiving. I knew Moby 1 needed replacement tires— we purchased it with glorified golf cart wheels— so I bought new tires and wheels online. The first giant box arrived with a tire-sized hole in the side and missing both tires (I should have known at this point that it was a bad omen). I emailed the company to request a rush order of replacement tires, which arrived within 24 hours of our expected departure time. No biggie, we had all the tools to replace the tires once Jacob got home from climbing.

Jacob got home right at sunset. We wanted to leave early the next morning and this was mid-November in Colorado (cold). We then also realized that the one fender still attached to Moby 1 was too small for the new tires, so that needed to come off. I spent the next 2-ish hours lying on my back with a headlamp, cursing as my jeans froze to the pavement, unfastening screws to get the fender loose while Jacob wrenched lug nuts left and right to wrangle the new wheels and tires on. Victory was near when we went to tighten the last lug nut and it just…snapped. Like clean off with the lug nut stud. Well fack. I did a quick check of another stud on the back of the wheel…and the backing came clean off in my palm. We defeatedly went inside and agreed we weren’t leaving until we went to AutoZone the next day.

Long story short, our trip didn’t happen because the lug nut studs continued to snap off, we took many trips to AutoZone to find the right length, width, etc. of replacement studs and by the time we replaced them neither of us trusted that Moby 1’s wheels wouldn’t come flying off on i-70.

Camping trip three: winter camping in Bozeman. Needless to say, terrible idea. We spent the first night shivering in a pullout on a random highway in Wyoming, the second night in a campground, surrounded by 10 foot snowbanks, in Jackson, WY, and the third, fourth, fifth, and rest of the nights in my friend’s place because we were sick of freezing our asses off (especially Asa). We didn’t camp again that trip.

Camping trip four was supposed to be a solo California roadtrip in May. Didn’t happen either, because my drunk neighbor crashed into my parked car and caused $6,000 in damage that took 3 months to fix. Couldn’t really tow a trailer behind a rental Chevy Malibu.

Camping trip five: Today. Car was packed up, floof was on the middle console awaiting his co-pilot to take the reins toward adventure on Guanella pass, and I just needed to throw the JetBoil in the kitchen cupboard. I opened up the back latch to an array of horrors.

Mold was everywhere and in every color imaginable: powdery green mold with an unnerving likeness to matcha doused the contents of the drawer, white hairy growths erupted from the ceiling like stalactites, and a black plague crept in every other crevice. It wasn’t only the wood of the trailer that was moldy, even my scissors, knife, and the goddamn matches in the kitchen drawer were caked. The knife was salvageable, the rest were not. The more I pulled out of the cabinets and drawers, the more repulsive it became. A bad seal in the top right corner had caused a leak that had been going on for who knows how long. Combined with 90-95 degree days this month, growing a science experiment was easy, unlike every other aspect of owning this trailer.

I was already packed up though, so I wasn’t going down without a wrestle. I spent the next two hours scrubbing the wood with a mixture of white vinegar, dish soap, and baking soda with the vigor of an Olympian cleaner. I called Jacob to talk myself up— I could deal with this, we’d just sand and repaint it when Jacob arrived home from Ghana. I joked that at times this trailer made me want to shove it off of a cliff. When I finally finished, I just needed to throw something in the bed compartment and we could finally leave. That’s when I discovered the leak didn’t end in the kitchen; it ended in the mattress.

I find myself to be a resilient person in the face of hardships, but the mattress broke me. I called Jacob again and started laugh-crying. “I give up!” I burst as he picked up. The mold penetrated the mattress to the core, so it needed to be tossed. It just kept getting better from there.

I fell flat on my ass pulling the mattress out, taking a quarter size chunk of skin off my ankle. The duvet was equally affected— that went straight to our wash. When I returned to move it to the dryer, the machine was pulled out from the wall in our communal laundry room with a note that read: “Turned off because burning smell and off rotation.” I gathered that the washer had been violently slamming against the wall. When I went to pull out the duvet, it looked possibly even worse than when it went in, and held about 70lbs of water weight. I knew that needed to go to the trash, too. I grabbed a black garbage bag and dragged that baby down the stairs, across the parking lot, and heaved it into the dumpster. It honestly probably looked like I was committing a body dump. Back up in the laundry room, water was leaking every direction from the machine, so I reported it to the maintenance crew through the phone app as I stood in the puddle of shame. I couldn’t push the machine back to place because it weighed too much and was so done at that point anyway that I just locked myself in my apartment and vowed to not leave the rest of the day. Which I didn’t.

So now I’m sitting here in my pajamas on my couch, typing this story with torn cuticles, a glass of Macallan Scotch within arm’s reach, and watching Season 10 of Bones for about the 7th time.

Moby 1 Kenobi, as soon as we fix your water damage, it’s your time to move on.