It’s like a soap opera
romance, this ongoing affection of mine for the old-style single or
double-wide mobile homes, more commonly known as trailers.
To me, their appeal is strongest when I’m driving a
gravel county road, and out in a field I see one, perched like an
alien spacecraft on a few open acres. Or, I’m turning into
the shaded niches of a well-worn trailer park, and it’s
there, like a time machine, made of corrugated tin and glass.
Sometimes it’s been repainted, and never the bland
manufacturer’s color from 30 years ago, but a fresh swath of
purple, or yellow or even turquoise and pink.
I should
know: I’ve been parked since 1986 in a 1972 double-wide. I
don’t know if it was new when it arrived on the property. It
has no wheels, but when I have to climb into the crawl space
beneath the mobile home, I can see where wheels have been mounted.
There’s not much security down there, knowing that tornadoes
have a sweet tooth for mobile homes. They twist trailers and then
spit them out again, but it’s still a strange thought: A home
could roll in like a tumbleweed and then roll back out again.
My unit is also old enough to probably be illegal,
manufactured during the era of pressed board flooring and thin
galvanized metal roofing. I’ve done the mobile home roofover
(similar to a middle-aged male combover) and I flush with caution,
realizing that a flood could turn my floor into waffle wood.
Luckily, I live in a county that essentially believes: If you can
drag it here, we can put up with it, which is why the hardier of
these trailers should be preserved, designated as historic local
treasures, of no lesser magnitude than those infamous bridges from
that county in the Midwest.
The mobile home’s survival
offers us a reminder of a time when a family’s housing
ambitions were scaled back somewhat closer to, say, reality. No
median sales price hovering around $207,000. No floor space with
enough square-footage to hold a line dance for a football team.
Mobile homes are proof that people could actually live with less,
and did. I do now, and its constraint makes certain I continue to
do so.
Many others are still living that way, which is
why I always slow down to admire these domestic time capsules. The
vintage trailer is a covered bridge of sorts, spanning two banks:
One side rooted with working people who could at one time own their
own homes, and on the other side the current real estate market,
where a lifetime of slowly diminishing mortgage debt is the glimmer
at the end of tunnel. I know some people consider yesterday’s
trailers trash when compared to today’s modular, custom,
set-on-a-slab, instant triple-wide castles. It is fair to say that
a trailer does not have the investment potential of a ranchette
with a massively imposing entrance gate. Maybe so, but I’d
rather spend my days renovating the past than making payments on
someone else’s future.
I’ll admit that much
of a trailer’s styling, especially during the ‘60s and
‘70s, was a little too boxy, but it’s tough to argue
with a classic trailer advertising slogan, “Home is where you park
it.” For me, the idea of being self-contained has never lost its
appeal.
Housing needs are basic for all people, but
available housing has taken a nasty turn away from anything
approaching basic. In Pagosa Springs, Colo., for example, 15
homeowners in the Riverview Trailer Park have been evicted to make
way for a 39-unit condominium development, with some units starting
at a lofty $250,000. The same practice is happening all across the
West as an economic boom in real estate sends trailer homeowners
scurrying for cover. For our own protection as locals, before the
real estate bubble pops, we’ll all be wearing condos, the
only safe housing available.
Where’s a romantically
inclined professional photographer when you need one? Maybe a lanky
Clint Eastwood type, someone with an eye to show us the implicit
beauty in an antiquated hallway without wheels. And even if the
trailers look a little shabby by current standards, they embody a
fiscal fantasy we’re in danger of forgetting. They stand for
autonomy, at least as long as they’re allowed to stand.
David Feela is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia,
Colorado (hcn.org). He writes and teaches in Cortez,
Colorado.
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