Edisto Island, Live Oaks Campground
Last night it rained like crazy and at 5 a.m. I woke up and put my feet on the floor into a puddle. The camper has a little slide-out section, and the water was landing on the top of the slide-out and sliding right back into the camper. This hadn’t happened before, apparently because I’d been on more level ground. Now, the camper was leaning and the slide-out was the high side. It’s still not supposed to happen, because there is a seal there, but evidently it’s not perfect. I mopped up the water and then I was out cranking on the leveling adjustments in the rain with a flashlight. It didn’t fix much and I went back to bed.
In the morning it was still raining, and I called my guy and he said he was waiting for a break in the rain. It was supposed to rain all day so I called him back two hours laters and he agreed to head over. He was a Kris Kringle looking guy, all white hair, huge beer gut, about 6’3. He never smiled but he said a lot that had me laughing.
After looking over the electrical modifications my friend and I did, he said “I’m just an electrician, but I can tell time on a digital watch, and I don’t think your buddy knew what the fuck he was doing,” he said. He was able to test some things and we found out power was getting to the camper after all, it just wasn’t being distributed to where it needed to go. He thought maybe the converter had broken, then suggested I could bring it to his shop and he’d fix it for $1,000. But I need to drive to another campsite 90 miles away tomorrow, so I told him I didn’t have the time. When he left he said, “That’ll be 150, cash.” I said I didn’t have 150 cash. “How much ya got?” I started counting it and when I got to $50 he said, “Here, just gimme $50.” I think I had about $30 more that he could see, but he didn’t bother. He saw my fishing poles and said if I caught anything I should come on over. He’d clean them and we could have some dinner.
After he left I decided to completely remove the battery cutoff switch I installed, and suddenly everything started working again. So I probably screwed something up even worse when I rewired it yesterday, but that doesn’t explain why everything worked yesterday before I moved. In any case, I really don’t think I should be allowed outside of the house, honestly. I don’t understand what was broken, and I don’t understand what fixed it, but here we are. And that’s kind of my life.
After that I went into the camper to dry off and slammed my thumb in the door, hard. I think I pulled a muscle in my leg behind my knee at 5 a.m. in the rain last night, too. It hurt for a second and now it feels weak. At one point today I said to myself out loud, “I wanna go home.”
After the electrician left, I hooked up the camper and rolled the low side onto two boards to get it about 3 inches higher. That seemed to really slow down the water coming in off the slide-out. Then I went fishing in the salt marsh. That’s when the wind kicked up and it really started pouring. When I casted, my line snapped and I saw the nice lure I had on sail across the sky and plunk down rudderless into the marsh and float away. I knew I’d had enough of today and I went back and made chicken noodle soup. It’s still raining like crazy. Tomorrow I drive to Hunting Island State Park.
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