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06/03/2008: "Filet-O-Camper"

I'm sorry to report that not all my farm trips are for useful farm development activities. The last two trips, in fact, have been to deal with a messy situation that has been festering down at the farm for the better part of two years: Bill T*'s abandoned camper.

You may have seen an old camper in the background of a few pictures. Here it is behind the apple tree in the orchard review post:



And here it is behind Hank and John in the pruning post:



Mercifully, we somehow managed to keep it out of the field of view of most pictures, for it is/was an eyesore, slowly sinking into the mud of the south yard...

Bill T* approached me in the summer of 2005; he'd heard that I had a rural property with a barely habitable outbuilding, and he wanted to know if he could trade labor for shelter. Be a caretaker, do chores around the place from time to time, plant a garden, etc. I knew about his barely-above-homeless past, and his prior drug use, but I was assured by Bill and a common friend that he had gone straight. And he did seem relatively sincere and straight in how presented himself and in what he wanted, so I said yes.

The part that Bill left out, and which I didn't think to ask about, was that he was a junk collector. Specifically a junk car collector. He came in near midnight, towing an old GMC camper, and took out a good 20 foot section of picket fence along the driveway when he didn't make the driveway corner. In short order he managed to haul a couple of other vehicles down to the farm, leaving them scattered about the farmyard. I surveyed the damage a week later on a trip down to the farm, and he assured me that he would repair the fence and gate. He also filled up the shop with junk, and put his own lock on it, which annoyed the heck out of me; I could sense then that things probably were not going to work out in the long term, when I had to keep a valuable rototiller in the open barn while his worthless bicycle parts and broken TV's were under lock and key in the shop.

Bill lived in the cottage on the farm for about the next year and a half. He did put in one hellish day of work mowing the whole pasture in 2005, but that was about all he ever did around the place. He never did repair the fence; I had to do that myself a year later. I did nag him incessantly about the junk cars, and eventually the T-Bird and the Cutlass moved out. But the camper remained. Eventually I got a lawyer involved, and went through the paperwork of having him evicted (he seldom paid his share of utilities). Even in moving out he annoyed the heck out of the neighbors, who told me that he burned a lot of plastic that stank up the neighborhood. "No more burning," I said. I talked to him about getting the damn camper moved off the property. "That's a valuable vehicle," he said. "89,000 original miles, engine's fine. I'm going to restore it." Weeks passed, months passed, and I would send him notices at the homeless dining hall in Portland. Finally I declared it abandoned property, notified the police of my intent to tow it, and started looking for some way to pay someone to haul it away.

I contacted a couple of towing companies in Albany. They came out, looked it over, and declined to bid. "Too dangerous," I was told. They would have to dismantle the camper from the frame, and then recycle the vehicle, and it looked too difficult. One wrecking yard down the road said they would take the truck for free if we could deal with the camper first. So I was stuck with it.

Nate and I talked it over. We would have to get a dumpster in, slice the camper into panels, clean out the inside, and tear out the inside structure. Two weeks ago we got a start on it. I picked a corner on one side, jammed the DeWalt reciprocating saw into a hole, and pulled the trigger.



By luck, that first cut went pretty well, well enough to give me hope that we could accomplish the task. It did, however, rile up a massive ant nest that had taken up residence in the siding of the camper, and that was annoying. I had to stop frequently and shake off the ants that were crawling up my arms. I made two more cuts to free up the driver's side panel, and then we were free to pull it down.



This exposed the seamy interior filled with soggy trash, thus solving the twin mysteries of what the ants were feeding on, and where Bill threw two years of household trash while living on the farm.



We moved over to the other side, and made similar cuts; these were a little more difficult to make, and I ran into nails and aluminum braces. Eventually, we got it cut. Pulling it down was more difficult for some reason; the panel was attached more securely to the truck frame at the bottom on this side, and we had a moment of excitement when a glass window popped out in a shower of glass shards while pulling the wall off.



That was far as we got on the first attempt. We didn't have the dumpster yet, and we really couldn't do any more until we cleaned out the trash inside. I left and drove home.

Coming back a week later, we tackled the barn reinforcements and did a little rototiller repair. Then as the day cooled off Nate and I knuckled down to the dirty, smelly job of emptying the camper. Anyone who has been to the dump knows the smell: it smells like carpets left out in the rain, with coffee grounds and old soda bottles and cans of ravioli thrown on top. It took us the better part of two hours to empty out the camper and get the contents transferred into the dumpster. It filled a significant portion of the 8' x 7' x 18' dumpster, too; by the time we get the mattresses and bike parts and pickup canopy put in the dumpster, it's going to be full, I think.

The next step was to somehow get the roof off. Nate had the good idea of splitting the roof lengthwise; we thought we might be able to use our leverage then to just pull the roof off to each side, taking the supporting infrastructure down by leverage. With some trepidation I got up on the roof and started cutting from the skylight going toward the rear.





Then I made a cut across the back of the camper (see photo at the top of this posting). Theoretically, it was free. We tugged on it with some rope, but it wouldn't budge. I cut the interior wall at the rear, which seemed to free that up, and then stood in the cab to do some cutting on a cabinet that seemed to be holding up the front. As I finished the cut, the whole roof sagged ominously, and fortunately I was able to step back. We went back to our ropes, gave a heave, and down it came! I got a chain on the other side of the roof, made a couple more strategic cuts, and down that side came, too! We had filleted the camper.



Here is a shot of the dumpster, showing the contents from the inside, and the two side panels. We haven't put the roof pieces in yet, and there is still some bashing to be done to demolish the interior walls and cabinets. Then there is the abandoned furniture in the cottage, the pickup canopy beside the barn, the giant pile-o-bicycle parts in the shop, and miscellaneous other crap strewn about, still to be loaded into the dumpster.



Nate and I will be glad when this job is done.