more poor..

Right around 1980 things kind of steered into a more eratic direction. I had to leave really early one morning-around three , and I forgot something remembering it a short way into my journey-so I had no choice to turn back and get it ( it was keys to a vehicle I had to drive that day at work) . As I cut through the woods to get up to my trailer I saw a fellows pick up truck in the yard…?? and going into the dark travel trailer I heard the voices starting out in shock that the door had flown open….and there at about four in the morning I learn that every morning I’m walking out of the woods to work and my wifes boy friend shows up minutes after I begin walking up the road. Glitch one.

I end up finding a place to stay in the city-but in two weeks time the owner of the steel outfit took me for a stroll parking lot and told me how thier son in law had gone to truck drivers school and they did’nt have room for two drivers. Glitch two.

So I find myself literally homeless-my wife and her boyfriend at my travel trailer and my job is someone elses. No transportation…and truthfully-in the 1980’s people were’nt as easy about picking up hitch hikers as they were in the earlier years and I found myself having to walk further all the time. The Dodge my boss gave me the money for parked itself like every clunker does and eventually I sold it to the junk guy for 20 bucks as scrap…and saw it running and driving around the area for a long time after that. I had no mechanical ability then.

Eventually Lynne did move in to her boyfriends place and I returned to the trailer here in the woods-but no electric or water…no job or money. I did have-and still have after nearly thirty years an old coffee percultar that is designed for use over a camp fire. So most of the time I sat out there with a fire going and some coffee brewing,it was about all I had-except the roof of the trailer to get in out of the weather. That old perculater is there on my stove right now- its coffee in my mug.

There was no phone-and cell phones were not yet around…so again the job situation was out of reach except working in the yard at the water tank company so thats where I ended up-painting scaffolding frames…hundreds and hundreds of scaffolding frames and day after day of the fumes from the paint and the stickey mess all over your body…all in a dust bowl of a work area. It sucked….and nobody wanted to give a stickey mess a lift. Like I said-hitching was as depressed as I was.