Two months into our trip and a scant 200 miles from our home in Phoenix, I feared it was all over. Jill was studying for-sale flyers in front of houses and surveying plots in the community garden. The dogs were smiling and running loose on gravel roads. I found myself gazing toward the mountains of Mexico and imaging a life less transitory.
We were in Patagonia, Ariz., and we were in love.
Patagonia takes its name from the Patagonia mountain range south of town, which in turn takes its name from the Patagonia Mine that was discovered inside the mountains in the mid 1800s. How the mine got its name neither locals nor the Interweb seems to know. Patagonia’s historical tale features the usual Southwestern players (American Indians, Spanish missionaries, homesteaders, prospectors, cowboys) and props (open space, ore, cattle, train rails), and during its heyday the town was a supply hub for nearby mining camps and ranches. Nowadays, about 800 people live in Patagonia. The mining camps are ghost towns, and the old train depot is a city park.
Jill and I never planned to visit Patagonia, except maybe for a meal. Our intended destination was Patagonia Lake State Park, about 7 miles southwest of town. But when rain started smacking the windshield as we drove along Highway 82, we reached for our iPhones and began exploring other accommodation options. The option we settled on was a 50-foot trailer parked next to the Patagonia Public Library.
Listed on the Patagonia Area Business Association’s website as a “vacation home,” our room for the night was actually a 1958 Spartan Imperial Villa Travelcoach. The owners of this vintage trailer have christened it “Dos Palmas” in honor of the two palm trees that tower above its patio. When Jill and I arrived, these palms swayed in unison as raindrops pelted the trailer’s silvery hull. We looked at each other and laughed. Then we released the hounds and made a break for the front door.
This particular travel trailer
might no longer roll across America’s byways, but it is still transportive. To step inside is to step backwards through five decades. Floral carpet and bataan furniture adorn the living room. Fiestaware and Formica fill the kitchen. A vintage chenille bedspread with a needle-tufted peacock covers the bed. The principle design motif hails straight from “I Love Lucy.”
(In the interest of preserving my dudehood, it is necessary to point out that I heretofore had no clue about Fiestaware, chenille fabric or needle-tufting. Jill provided those details. I swear.)
Vintage ’50s décor typically doesn’t do much for me, but I have to say that Dos Palmas provided us especially cozy shelter from the storm. I felt like a raggedy tent camper waiting out the rain inside the neighboring trailer of some old lady — except the only old lady on hand was mine. And she’s super hot.
Here’s the thing about my old lady, though: When a place makes her happy, she starts dreaming and scheming. She starts envisioning a new future woven from the wispy pleasures of the immediate present. She starts settling in.
“We could totally live in something like this,” Jill said. I followed her voice to the back of the trailer. I found her lounging across the needle-tufted peacock, her own tail feathers figuratively fanned out in a display of self-assurance. We had barely unloaded the car.
“Are you serious? I would kill you.”
And I would. As I enumerated in an earlier post, The Universe of Jill, like the Soviet Union under Stalin, has a tendency to push its borders outward with startling speed and carelessness. This doesn’t jive with trailer life, where the mere act of not cleaning the kitchen after a meal can make you feel like a hoarder worthy of cable TV. No trail
er, even a 50-foot one, is suited to Jill’s ever-expanding menagerie of cords and hairpins and panties.
But a funny thing happened as we lingered in Patagonia and Dos Palmas for another night, and then another, and then two more: I came around to Jill’s point of view.
For one, the Spartan’s narrow confines and clever hidey-holes induced Jill to keep her things in fastidious order, which kept me off the precipice of claustrophobia and brought me great joy. More importantly, this long trailer in little Patagonia jelled with our new worldview.
If this trip has done anything for us, it’s increased our love for simple things and our desire to live more simply when we get back home. Dos Palmas had everything we needed and nothing we didn’t. A simple place to sleep. A simple place to cook. A simple place to bathe. Outside, the
re was a gas grill, a fenced yard for the mutts, and a shed with a washer and dryer. Next door was a magical public library where neighborhood dogs roamed the aisles and Gandalf-bearded old men checked their e-mail. (On my third visit to the library, a little boy in the children’s section belted out the entire lyrics to “Black Betty” by Ram Jam. If that’s not a selling point for Patagonia, I don’t know what is.)
Once the rain gave way to the Southern Arizona sunshine, Jill and I didn’t spend much time inside the trailer; but the time we did spend there — reading by the little windows, lunching at the little kitchen table, watching nightly movies on the little TV — was extraordinarily peaceful. Maybe there’s a theory to be posited here: that the simpler your home, the less time you will spend inside it — but the more rewarding that time will be. Big houses with lots of stuff in them only tie you down, make you soft, hinder you from meeting new people and seeing new scenes. Maybe the world needs more trailers.
Getting outside in Patagonia is a no-brainer. There’s a nature preserve, a national forest and a terminus for the Arizona Trail. And when the day’s done, places like the Velvet Elvis Pizza Company and Wagon Wheel Saloon conspire to keep you away from the trailer just a little longer.
Patagonia fit us. And neither pounding rain, nor a mountain-bike wreck, nor tales of Mexican drug-gang violence could dissuade Jill from pricing property near the Dos Palmas’ lot. It’s pretty cheap by Phoenix standards, even post housing bust. If I turned to Jill tomorrow and said, “Darlin’, let’s sell the house, buy a lot in Patagonia, and go live in a trailer,” I’m pretty she would do it. In fact, I know she would.
But I’m keeping my mouth shut. At least for another eight months.
—Scott