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After living for less than a year at two apartments when she moved to
Colorado, my mother finally found herself a mobile home to buy at a
mobile home 'Community' at the far east side of town. While she was
able to get that sense of ownership and permanency purchasing the
mobile home, she was still stuck renting a slot for it to be parked
in. Six years later, she felt the latest price rise in her lot rent
was the last straw and she began searching for a new mobile home park
to move it to. By the Nineteen Eighties, more and more new mobile
homes were assembled on site and while still called 'Mobile Homes'
they were actually stuck in place unless torn apart. Mother's was
from the Nineteen Seventies and still had its trailer hitch on the
front and tires in back, so she didn't suffer from such limitations.
Despite there being many established and good looking parks closer to
town, they all had the same level of lot rent and my mother wanted
something cheaper. And she found it to the far south end of town
in an empty field.
A new mobile home park was being set-up there and they had built the
surrounding fence-wall and plowed and paved half of the planned
roads. Utilities to the first third of the lots had been put in
place, though land line phone service was tenuous and this was before
the age of cell phones. Still, it was the right price for mother and
she went to see it and asked me to come along. I hated it.
It was built next to a partially filled suburb with one of its
residential streets having been extended to be the park entrance.
The intermittent north-south dirt road on the east side of town just
barely reached it before running out and it was going to be the other
entrance to the park, some day, once the park and the road were
completed. Our current park had a nice club house, grown trees, and
a 7-Eleven & Domino's Pizza within walking distance. This
new location, at the time, didn't. Whereas the current park had
roads wide enough for cars to park on the side while still having two
lanes of traffic pass between with full sidewalks to either side,
this new park had narrow paved ribbons between the lots which would
barely allow two cars to pass each other, any cars parking on the
side just left the road wide enough for one car to drive through at a
time.
And there was no private phone line!
Given the amount of time I spent 'connected' online, having a shared
phone line for several people in the park meant that I would not be
able to dial-up and have fun until the wee hours past midnight,
otherwise the phone line had to be kept free for the others who
shared it in case they wanted to make or receive a phone call. The
only saving grace for this new location was that it was close to my
grocery store where I worked and closer, though not by much, to my
computer monitoring & tutoring job. It was further away from my
new College and the handful of friends I had.
Ultimately, it was mother's mobile home and thus her decision, and
the price was right. The arrangements were made to tow the mobile
home there. She found a company that specialized in towing mobile
homes and had them scheduled to come on her midweek day off to move
the home while I was at work. As it would be moved with everything
in it, against the recommendation of the towing company, we
had to take anything on a table top or hanging on a wall down so they
wouldn't fall and break during the trip. As my TRS-80 computer
was sunk into a specially built desk, I felt it wasn't going to go
anywhere no matter how bumpy the ride was. I went to work at the
grocery store that morning from the original mobile home park and
once done, I arrived at the new lot location...
To find it empty.
As it was in the early afternoon I assumed the mobile home was in
transit and debated if I should wait for it or drive toward the old
location and watch it as it crawled along the streets. I opted to
see it being towed along and drove to the original mobile home park.
When I got to the neighborhood, in the empty field directly across
the street from the 7-Eleven & Domino's Pizza shopping strip
was the mobile home, left there, no tow truck in sight and my
mother's car parked next to it. By the time I realized what it was,
I had already passed it and had to wait to make a U-turn and go back
to it. When I got there the trailer hitch at the front of the mobile
home was all twisted, mother was inside crying. As access to the
mobile home was through an elevated door on the side, which depended
on external steps and those steps weren't in place, it took me a bit
to figure out how to pull myself up to the door opening and into
the home.
While mother had scheduled the tow truck to move the home, it never
occurred to her to have it checked out before the move for 'road
worthiness'. When they came to hook it up to the tow truck, they
realized her home was still hooked up to all the utilities of the old
park, and the two tires at the back had long since gone flat and need
to be replaced. Mother had to scramble to find any company that she
could hire to rush out and unhook everything and replace the tires.
She hadn't planned on that expense but was relieved once that was
finally done, and they could be on their way. With the tow truck
hooked up to the trailer hitch, the mobile home was on its way and a
quarter mile later, with years of rust and the weight of the fully
loaded home, the hitch had given up and bent over, leaving the front
of the mobile home dragging on the ground. As that wasn't safe to
continue the move, the tow truck had struggled to get the mobile home
off the road and to the empty field it was now in. Mother had to
make arrangements to have another company come and replace the
trailer hitch the following day and, if
successful, the tow truck would return tomorrow afternoon and finish
the move. Mother pointed out the bend in the first third of the
mobile home where the weight of the trailer hitch end resting on the
ground, without any support in between, had caused the home
itself to sag in the middle and she feared it would be permanently curved like that.
While it had been recommended that she find herself a motel room for
the night as there was no power or 'facilities', my mother was going
to spend the night with the mobile home and guard its contents.
Checking my own stuff had survived the attempted move, so far,
I decided to just lie on my bed and rest for a while before
collecting my books and going to my night class. Mother took the
time to again cross the street and use the 7-Eleven's payphone
to make arrangements to have the following day off from work, then
returned to sit sullenly in the living room portion simply waiting in
the darkness for the next day to come. Once I was at College, I used
their phone to call my friend Jeff, tell him of the happenings and
ask if I could sleep on his couch that night. He said I could and
once class was done I returned to the mobile home and let my mother
know. She had gained that empty stare into space and had no comment
and so I left for the night, spent some time with Jeff before getting
some sleep for a few hours then going straight to my next day's work.
At the grocery store, Bud came up to me once he saw me and debated if
he should write me up for wearing the same clothes two days in a row.
But once I told him the story of what happened he decided to forgive
me and walked off, snickering.
Leaving work I skipped going to the new mobile home park and went
straight back to the field across the street from the 7-Eleven,
but the mobile home was gone. As it was nearest by, I checked
the old lot first to make sure it hadn't been moved back there, but
that lot was empty and I took a moment to notice the grassless
rectangle of where the home had once been, bare between the trees and
bushes that had grown-up around it since the mobile home had first
been placed there a decade or so earlier. Then I drove along the
route to the new mobile home park. Mother's home wasn't stranded
along the way, or in another patch of unused field and when I arrived
it was in its new lot. After spending all that money to have a new
trailer hitch put onto the mobile home, there was no sign of it as
the new park didn't allow them to be visible, so it had already been
cut off once the move was finished. The bend in the mobile home was
settling out now that the front had been leveled and concrete blocks
placed between to take the weight.
There was another problem as all of the utilities couldn't be
hooked-up as the necessary trenches hadn't been pre-dug in the
lot, so I spent the afternoon digging those so the utility company
could finish the following morning. Mother had to take a second
personal day off from work as a result, but I got the trenches dug
for her before I went off to my night class. Fortunately, there
was still a weekday left before the weekend, so we wouldn't have to
spend the weekend without full utilities. When I went to my
class that night, I washed myself up in a lonely bathroom at the far
end of the building as best I could and put on a fresh tee shirt I
had brought with me before classes started, then I returned to the
new mobile home lot for the night.
The following morning at work, Bud didn't come back to ask me about
the rest of the move or why I hadn't taken a shower in two days, and
once I got home all of the utilities were completed and I had a good
long shower and satisfying nap during the afternoon. That evening,
without classes to worry about, I helped mother put everything back
in place on the table tops and walls that she hadn't gotten to yet
and I took her out to dinner.
With all of the combined costs of the move, mother had spent three
times as much money on the move than she would save in a year on the
lower lot rent, and as it was all on charge cards, it would likely
end up being four years worth of lost savings before it was all paid
off. With a decade's worth of hindsight, mother had made the
right decision
as our old mobile home park was abandoned by most of its residents
due to ever escalating lot rents. Without enough people to keep it
in business, the park went bankrupt and fell into disrepair and
became rampant with crime. Another decade later it was bought up and
returned to its former glory. There were actually a few residents
that had stuck it out in the decade between, guns always at the ready
to protect their little lot like a wild west homestead.
That was not something mother would have been comfortable with.
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