We Have a Guy for That. Unfortunately, It's Us.
Updated: Oct 5
There was a time in our lives when, if something broke, we called someone.
A plumber. An electrician. A mechanic. Someone who owned the appropriate tools and, ideally, possessed some understanding of what they were about to do with them.
That's not to say we weren't handy. I've always been pretty handy, and Jon was too, although living this way has definitely expanded his mechanical résumé. We owned a house in Lake Placid for years, so neither of us was unfamiliar with tools, repairs, or projects. There were plenty of things we handled ourselves.
The difference was that we generally understood the boundaries of the job. There were things we knew how to fix, things we could probably figure out, and things that resulted in one of us saying, “We need to call someone.”
We had a guy for that. Sometimes we even had a guy who knew another guy.
Then we sold our house, moved into a 36-foot fifth wheel, began dragging it around the United States, bought forty acres in the Arizona high desert, and decided that starting a candle company sounded reasonable. Somewhere along the way, Jon and I accidentally became the people we call when something goes wrong.
This was a significant oversight.
Neither of us remembers applying for these positions. There was no interview, no training period, and certainly no certification process. Nevertheless, over the past four years we have apparently become RV technicians, electricians, plumbers, solar installers, amateur mechanics, construction workers, internet technicians, water-system specialists, videographers, sound engineers, and operators of various pieces of equipment that probably deserve more qualified operators.
Our credentials consist largely of owning the thing that is broken and having access to the internet.
Moving into an RV introduced us to an astonishing number of mechanical systems we'd never had a reason to understand before. It also introduced us to the condition of America's roads.
These two things may be related.
An RV is basically a house experiencing a small earthquake every time you change locations. Cabinets shake. Plumbing moves. Screws work themselves loose. Tires encounter things tires shouldn't encounter. Appliances apparently reconsider their commitment to the relationship. Entire systems can function perfectly when you leave one campground and decide they've had enough by the time you reach the next one.
That's on a good road.
On some stretches of interstate, we've become convinced the local highway department is conducting long-term durability testing on our home without our consent. You hit a pothole and immediately start mentally inventorying everything behind you. Are the cabinets still attached? Did the television survive? Is the refrigerator still where we left it? Has the bedroom detached from the rest of the RV?
There are roads in this country where the posted speed limit seems less like a recommendation and more like a dare.
Then there's California.
Until this summer, we thought we had a fairly good understanding of what constituted a road. California challenged that understanding.
We knew the state had mountains. What we apparently failed to appreciate was the enthusiasm with which Californians had decided to put roads on them. There are grades, switchbacks, hairpin turns, roads carved into mountainsides with ridiculous drop-offs, and occasions when all of these features appear simultaneously.
This is probably exciting in a car.
We tow a 36-foot fifth wheel.
On our way toward Yosemite this summer, our GPS decided we'd enjoy an alternate route through a canyon with what felt like approximately forty switchbacks. We did not enjoy the alternate route. The GPS, naturally, was completely relaxed.
“Continue for twelve miles.”
Fuck you.
There is something uniquely infuriating about a pleasant electronic voice calmly providing directions while the two humans in the truck are beginning to question every decision they've made since 1997.
California also introduced us to the concept that a road can have a substantial grade, a hairpin turn, a cliff, no meaningful shoulder, and oncoming traffic at the same time. Apparently none of these conditions individually—or collectively—disqualifies something from being called a highway.
Kings Canyon was particularly educational. There are sections of that road where the passenger gets a spectacular view of the canyon and the driver gets a spectacular view of absolutely nothing because he is staring straight ahead and refusing to acknowledge what exists six feet to his right.
We've driven plenty of mountain roads over the years. Kings Canyon still managed to produce an entirely new category of “Are you fucking kidding me?”
At fifty years old, it's nice to know there are still opportunities for personal growth.
The roads aren't entirely responsible for the things that break, of course. Sometimes the RV manages that all by itself.
Eventually, you learn that when something stops working, the first stage of the repair process is denial.
“That's weird.”
This is followed by repeatedly trying the exact same thing that didn't work the first time. Then comes staring at it.
Jon is much better at this part than I am because his staring occasionally appears to involve actual thought. Mine is generally an attempt to intimidate the broken object into reconsidering its choices.
This is also the point where Jon and I begin having two entirely different experiences.
Jon has an extraordinary ability to look at a problem and see the problem. I look at the same problem and immediately see the problem, the six additional problems it may create, the parts we'll need, where we're going to get them, whether Amazon delivers wherever the hell we currently are, whether we can still move the RV, whether this affects our next travel day, what happens if the repair doesn't work, what the repair will cost if we screw it up, and several possible outcomes that haven't happened and probably never will.
Jon looks at the same thing and says, “No problem.”
I would like to live in Jon's brain for approximately fifteen minutes.
It isn't that he doesn't understand the implications. He just has a remarkable ability not to mentally live through all of them before they've happened. Meanwhile, I have already completed the repair unsuccessfully three different ways in my head and am now working through the logistics of a project that technically hasn't started yet.
Eventually, somewhere between Jon's “no problem” and my complete operational analysis of the situation, we begin troubleshooting.
Troubleshooting is a word adults use when they want to make randomly trying things sound like a process.
We check the obvious stuff. We check the less obvious stuff. We turn something off and back on because decades of technology have taught us that this is occasionally indistinguishable from expertise. Eventually one of us reaches for a phone, and within minutes we're watching a stranger on YouTube explain how to repair something we didn't know existed fifteen minutes earlier.
Sometimes we reach out to our road family too, which is one of the great advantages of knowing a bunch of other people who have also made the questionable decision to drag their homes around the country. Someone, somewhere, has usually broken the thing you're currently breaking.
A text goes out: “Have you ever seen this?” Then a picture. Then another picture because apparently the first picture was useless. Before long, somebody hundreds of miles away is asking whether we've checked a fuse, someone else remembers having the same problem two years ago, and another person knows someone who dealt with exactly the same thing.
We have, in a sense, recreated the system we used to have.
We still have a guy for that.
Our guy just happens to be parked in another state.
Between road friends, family, YouTube, internet forums, and whatever confidence we've accumulated from surviving the previous disaster, we usually come up with a plan. This has happened enough times that we've developed an alarming amount of confidence—not necessarily real confidence, but the kind that comes from watching three videos made by people who all seem to agree.
There is an important difference.
The RV alone has provided an impressive education. We've learned about electrical systems, plumbing, batteries, suspension components, slide mechanisms, water pumps, propane systems, seals, roofs, tires, generators, and an assortment of other things we once lived perfectly happy lives knowing absolutely nothing about.
Recently, one of the cables on our slide began fraying.
A normal person might read that sentence and think, I have no idea what that means.
We envy that person.
We now know entirely too much about slide cables.
The cable had frayed until only a couple of strands remained, which is not the ideal number of strands when the cable in question helps move a substantial portion of your living room in and out of the side of your house. This led to tools, research, replacement parts, considerable frustration, and the sort of conversations that occur when two people are holding pieces of metal in the air and each is convinced the other person is somehow responsible for the laws of physics.
At one point, we were trying to crimp a fitting onto the new cable and could not get the crimper closed. We tried standing differently, holding it differently, putting it on the ground, and finding enough leverage to convince a tool specifically designed to close that it should, in fact, close. At some point you stop repairing an RV and begin participating in a strength competition against a hand tool.
The hand tool was winning.
Boy, is fifty fun.
We eventually got through it, which gave us the tremendous satisfaction of completing the repair followed by the equally tremendous realization the next morning that apparently we'd used muscles neither of us had accessed in quite some time. Nothing says successful home repair like being sore for the next five days because you operated a pair of crimpers.
This is how our education generally works. I came into this life already pretty comfortable figuring things out with my hands, and Jon certainly wasn't helpless, but the range of things we've both learned to tackle has grown enormously. Jon in particular has become much more mechanical over the years, not because he decided to embark on an exciting second career in RV repair, but because the RV has been an extremely persistent teacher.
Something breaks, you learn about it. Something else breaks, you learn about that. Eventually you discover that you possess an alarming amount of highly specific knowledge you never asked for.
We've also gotten better at knowing when to stop. Living this way hasn't taught us that we can fix everything ourselves. It has taught us that the line between we can probably figure this out and we are about to make this considerably more expensive is worth learning to recognize.
Then we bought land in Arizona.
This dramatically expanded our employment opportunities.
D&H Crimson Sky Ranch is forty acres in the high desert, about twelve miles down a dirt road, which means there is no maintenance department, superintendent, facilities manager, grounds crew, pest-control department, road crew, IT department, or person at the front desk to whom we'd like to speak.
There is, however, wildlife.
We had envisioned wildlife.
Perhaps not all of it.
We have coyotes, tarantulas, pack rats, cattle wandering through, and an Arizona sun that can feel absolutely unrelenting. Most of it we genuinely enjoy. Hearing coyotes out there at night is one of those experiences that reminds us just how remote the ranch really is, and even the tarantulas are fascinating once you get past the initial realization that there is, in fact, a tarantula.
Pack rats are different.
Our first winter away from the ranch, a family of pack rats apparently decided the UTV would make an excellent seasonal rental. They moved in and, because apparently tenancy included renovations, proceeded to chew through just about every wire they could find.
When we returned, we had two jobs: evict the tenants and rewire the UTV.
There is a point in adulthood when you realize you are spending your day repairing rodent damage to an off-road vehicle on forty acres in the Arizona high desert and wonder exactly which decision in your life led here.
In our case, there are several candidates.
The pack rats also helped move another ranch project considerably higher on the priority list: a shipping container. It wasn't purchased exclusively because of them, but when rodents have eaten enough wiring that you find yourself purchasing a giant steel box in the desert, they deserve at least partial credit.
The cattle present a different challenge. The ranch is open range, so occasionally they wander through the property. This can actually be charming. There is something wonderfully Western about looking out across your land and seeing cattle wandering among the junipers.
Then you leave for a while and apparently they have a party.
We returned once to discover that one had gotten onto our picnic table and taken a dump.
We own forty acres. That's roughly 1.7 million square feet of available land, and the cow chose the picnic table.
We have no explanation for this.
We've decided to take it personally.
Then there is the Arizona mud.
We were warned about the mud.
People who knew the area told us very clearly that when the ground gets wet, you don't drive on it. Naturally, we listened carefully to this advice and then decided we knew better.
We have four-wheel drive, after all. A big GMC Sierra 2500. Surely that meant something.
It does not.
Arizona high-desert soil can go from something resembling concrete to something resembling wet cement remarkably quickly. Once it does, four-wheel drive simply means you have four wheels participating in the problem instead of two.
We've been stuck multiple times now, so at this point we can no longer classify what happened as an unforeseen circumstance.
The especially humbling part is that when you're twelve miles down a dirt road on forty acres in the middle of nowhere, nobody is coming to pull you out. There isn't much of a rescue plan. You sit there, look at the truck you confidently drove onto the mud despite being specifically told not to, and wait for the ground to become reasonable again.
Eventually the same Arizona sun we've spent all day complaining about does us a favor. The ground dries. The mud releases its hostage. You get back in the truck and simply drive out.
That's it. No heroic recovery. No complicated extraction. The truck has essentially been placed in time-out until the adults learn their lesson.
We did not learn our lesson.
That's why I said we've been stuck multiple times.
The ranch has plenty of other ways to keep us humble. At roughly 7,000 feet, the wind does not seem to view buildings as permanent structures. It views them as suggestions. We've had to deal with erosion where wind scoured soil from beneath parts of the cabin foundation, maintain water systems, install solar equipment, work on generators, run Starlink, troubleshoot batteries, and generally learn the surprising number of ways forty acres can require attention even when most of those acres appear to be doing absolutely nothing.
We've accumulated enough tools and equipment that our shipping container increasingly resembles the workshop of two people who know exactly what they're doing.
This is misleading.
Then there are the moments when something breaks on the road, which adds another dimension because you may be hundreds of miles from anyone you've ever used before. When the truck had battery problems in Oregon, there was no familiar mechanic to call. When an RV suspension component broke during our summer travels, we couldn't simply leave the house at the repair shop and go home.
The repair shop was working on the home.
That's one of the peculiar things about full-time RV life. When your house breaks, your transportation may be involved. When your transportation breaks, your house may be stranded. And when both are behaving themselves, you become suspicious because statistically something else must be considering its options.
Our accidental careers aren't limited to fixing things, either. At some point we decided to start making candles, which meant learning an entirely different collection of skills. Then we started taking YouTube more seriously, so we became camera operators, editors, audio technicians, thumbnail designers, writers, marketers, and analysts of graphs that tell us whether strangers on the internet found our faces interesting enough to click on.
We work remotely. We run businesses. We maintain an RV. We take care of forty acres. We film our lives while we're doing some of it.
Occasionally we also travel.
It's difficult to explain exactly how this happened.
We certainly didn't leave Lake Placid because we had an unfulfilled desire to understand slide cables, solar wiring, soil erosion, Arizona mud, or the digestive habits of free-range cattle. We wanted to see the country. We wanted more freedom and more experiences. We wanted to find out what life might look like if we were willing to do something completely different.
Apparently, “completely different” came with a substantial continuing-education requirement.
The funny thing is, we've gotten pretty good at it. Not qualified, necessarily—let's not get carried away—but capable. There's a difference between the two that we didn't fully appreciate before.
Four years of having things break in places where the easiest solution isn't always available has changed the way we both react to problems. Our first instinct now is usually to understand what's happening and decide whether it's something we can tackle. We know more than we did, we're less intimidated by things we don't understand, and we've learned that asking for help doesn't always mean calling a professional. Sometimes it means sending a picture of a mysterious piece of equipment to somebody you last camped with eight months ago and waiting for them to text back, “Oh yeah, mine did that too.”
Of course, “react” may be too generous a word for what I do.
Jon reacts.
I process logistics.
Jon sees the broken thing. I see the broken thing, the replacement part, the shipping time, the nearest store, tomorrow's schedule, the weather forecast, the campground reservation we're supposed to reach Thursday, the possibility that fixing this thing may require moving another thing, the possibility that moving the other thing may break a third thing, and a future in which we are living permanently in the parking lot of an Ace Hardware.
Jon says, “No problem.”
Somewhere between those two approaches, shit gets fixed.
And maybe that's why we work pretty well together. Jon keeps the problem from becoming the end of civilization. I make sure we have the part we'll need after civilization ends.
Our road family fills in some of the gaps. YouTube fills in others. Occasionally an actual professional arrives with the correct tool, identifies the problem in six minutes, and fixes something we've been discussing for two days. We love those people. We will happily pay those people. Depending on how long we've been dealing with the problem, we may hug those people.
But then they leave.
Eventually something else breaks.
At this point, we've accepted that this is apparently part of the life we chose. Jon will look at it and say, “No problem.” I will begin calculating the cost of replacement parts, shipping times, our location relative to the nearest hardware store, whether this affects our next travel day, and at least three catastrophic scenarios that have absolutely no basis in reality.
Jon will continue looking at it.
I'll text somebody from our road family. They'll ask for a picture. I'll send one. They'll ask for a better picture.
Jon will find a tool.
We'll watch a YouTube video.
We'll discover we don't own the one part we need, drive forty miles to buy it, come back, and discover that either it isn't actually the part we need or the problem is something else entirely.
We'll watch another video.
Eventually, probably much later than either of us expected, whatever was broken will work again. We'll stand there admiring it for a minute, disproportionately proud that this appliance, vehicle, piece of machinery, or substantial portion of our living room is once again doing exactly what it was designed to do in the first place.
Then we'll hear something from the other side of the RV.
“What the hell was that?”
Jon will look at me.
“No problem.”
Fuck.
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We Have a Guy for That. Unfortunately, It's Us. is part of Stories, our collection of personal writing about life on the road and everything we're learning along the way.
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