The Trailer

Photo courtesy of the author

Sometime in late March the camper trailer appears: fifteen feet long with a crude black-and-green paint job, discarded on our property behind Starbucks, Little Caesars, and the AT&T store. It sits parallel to one of the metal outbuildings my father rents from my sister-in-law, my husband, and me for his woodworking projects, the front-end tongue jack balanced on a block of wood as if someone has planned to set up camp in our gravel parking lot. Zebra-print curtains flap in the open window. The door dangles from one hinge.

I don’t remember exactly when my father tells me about it or when I first mention it to my husband and his sister. My mother-in-law, the actual owner of the property, has recently, unexpectedly, died from complications related to diabetes.

“Don’t worry,” my father assures me, “I’ll get rid of it.”

He reports it to the police, who write down the license-plate number and tag the street-side window with a bright pink sticker. After a few weeks pass with no response, he calls again. An officer tells him the phone number linked to the plate is out of service. There is nothing they can do. The city does not tow abandoned vehicles from private property.

“Where in the hell do our taxes go?” he asks me.

Out of Idaho’s forty-four counties, our north-central town of thirty- three thousand at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater Rivers— touted as the gateway to Hells Canyon—pays the third-highest property tax rate in the state.

“And for what?” he complains.

He calls the local salvage yard. They will take it only if he removes the holding tank, refrigerator, and stove. He also has to haul it to them and pay a fee.

He refuses to pay. I do too, so I don’t even bother telling my husband or his sister. “It’s a matter of principle,” my father and I say to each other more than once. “The city should help us—why are we responsible for someone else’s trash?” We consider hitching the trailer to my father’s truck and moving it into the street—then the city will have to deal with it—but are hesitant to actually follow through. My father’s phone number is on police record. If anything, we rationalize, he’ll receive a citation. So the trailer stays, and over the next year a clutter of feral cats takes up residence, cascading from the window—an orange, white, and black rainbow—when they hear my father’s truck, before vanishing beneath a web of blackberry bramble.

Now March has come around again, and my father tells me that someone has moved in.

I don’t believe him at first. He’s seventy-three, suffers from intermittent blurry vision related to dry eye, and refuses to wear glasses.

“Who’d sleep in there?” I ask.

“I found a pipe by the tire,” he tells me, “when I was doing weeds.” He sprays the puncturevine a few times a year; otherwise, it spreads into the gravel lot and takes over everything.

“What kind of pipe?”

“That should hold back those damned goatheads for a while,” he continues. “I track them inside my truck, everywhere—”

“Dad, what kind of pipe?”

“A glass one, used for drugs.”

“What kind of drugs? Meth? Weed?”

“How in the hell would I know?”

My father and I have lived in Idaho our entire lives—our houses sit only two miles apart—but we still somehow inhabit different worlds. I teach English composition at the state college in town. He’s a retired paper mill foreman. At fourteen, I first smoked weed from a soda can in the bluffs behind my parents’ house. I discovered acid the next summer, asking “What does it do?” only after placing the white tab on my tongue. An insecure teen with a self-destructive streak, I huffed, snorted, and smoked everything I could. If someone...