Motor Homing Through Alabama

The summer after my first senior year of college found me without a girlfriend for the first time in seven years.  I was not looking forward to the annual family vacation with the usual excitement, because I had grown accustom to having KE with us.  She had been with us for the last four years, so for her to suddenly not be there, was like losing someone from the family.  It wasn’t going to be the same. 

But that’s where God had other plans for me, because during the previous school year, I had met JT.  He would quickly become my best friend and my soul brother just when I needed him the most.  So, when the annual family vacation came around, I asked if I could bring JT instead.  Knowing how devastated I had been over the break-up with KE, my parents didn’t even hesitate to agree.  So, on our way to Alabama, we stopped in Gulfport, Mississippi and picked up JT.

My parents were between RVs at the time, so they decided that for this trip, we’d rent a small motor home.  This way we’d have enough space to sleep, cook, and hang out without paying a lot of money for hotels and restaurants.  When we picked up the motor home, the sales guy gave us a tour, showing us where we could find things and how the various gauges and accoutrements worked.  Everything was going along smoothly until he got to the sewage monitor, which currently showed the tank as half full.  He told us that it was broken and would be replaced when we returned the motor home.  In the meantime, he assured us that they had dumped the sewer several times, and he was certain that it was empty.  Figuring that we could deal with a faulty sewage gauge, we settled in and headed off in our newly-rented motor home.

The first camp site that we stopped at was in the Talladega National Forest.  If you’ve never been there before, it’s absolutely beautiful.  With mountains, trees, rivers, waterfalls, and scenic view points; it’s a nature-lover’s dream.  But it also didn’t have individual sewage hook-ups at the campsites.  Knowing that we were only staying for a few nights, and figuring that we could always drive down to the dumping station if needed, we set up camp.

Sometime later that night, we started to get faint whiffs of sewage smells emanating from the bathroom.  The gauge on the wall showed it nearing full, but since we knew it started at half full, we didn’t pay much attention.  It wasn’t until the next morning, when it actually backed up into the toilet, that we knew something was wrong.

So, we strapped everything down, unhooked all of the cables and hoses, and drove down to the dumping station.  We dropped the hose into the dumping pit, pulled the valve on the trailer, and we waited.  There was only a very small amount of waste released and then nothing.  Checking the gauge revealed that it had barely moved.  Something wasn’t right.  My father shone a flashlight up into the pipe and saw something, maybe some sort of plastic, covering the opening.  He tried shoving various implements up into the pipe, but the bends and turns prevented him from dislodging the obstruction.  And that is when he came up with his brilliant plan…we were going to use physics.

So, we all piled into the motor home and headed for the mountains.  The Talladega National Forest is located at the southern edge of the Appalachian Mountains, harboring Cheaha Mountain, which is Alabama’s tallest point.  At over 2,400 feet tall, it’s an imposing site…especially when you’re sitting at the top of it in a motor home and a madman behind the wheel.  My father’s brilliant plan was to race up and down the mountains, hoping that gravity would move the contents of the tank around enough that the obstruction would dislodge and flow down the pipe.  So, down we plunged.

As we careened down the mountain, picking up speed with every passing minute, rocking and tilting as my father maneuvered around the tight curves and bends of the winding road, I suddenly heard a high-pitched scream coming from the back of the motor home.  I looked over at JT who was sitting next to me, but he wasn’t screaming.  In fact, he seemed to be enjoying this death race down the mountain.  I thought perhaps that it was a trick of sound, and that it was really coming from the front seat, but neither of my parents seemed to be screaming either.  That’s when it dawned on me that the scream was coming from my own mouth.  I was the one making that high-pitched noise.  I was the one screaming like a little girl, gripping the arm rest and seat with a white-knuckled exuberance. 

Every alarm and alert in my body was blaring that I was too young to die, but that death was imminent.  When we finally reached the bottom, I was exhausted and in pain.  My whole body had been tense.  I don’t think I had breathed the whole way down.  But it had all been worth it.  Somehow, this absolutely ludicrous plan had worked.  When we pulled up to the dumping station again and released the valve, we were relieved to see a plastic bag flow out the pipe, followed by a lot of other things. 

JT has never let me live down that scream of terror and assured fatality, even to this day; not because I was scared, but because of the octave level that I reached that day.