Trailer Park
We had addressed all the single family houses we could in the central area and now only one row on my spreadsheet was colored green. It was in south austin, occupied by poor people, and needed basic repairs to restore cold water. We had avoided this place for weeks, even though it fit our criteria, because it was too big, with too many unknowns. A single person who had filled out the form and provided her phone number claimed to represent the needs of 100 residences. I assumed it was a multiplex run by a property management corporation who would chase us off.
Multiplex tenants had been reaching out to us from the start, begging for anyone to just come out there and try some shit. They couldn't flush their toilets and had nowhere to go and thought that I could just get in touch with their landlord and work it out. I tried to negotiate with the managers, who were desperate. It was against the rules to allow uninsured tradesmen access to their plumbing, but it wasn't clear what kind of crisis we were in. Maybe this was the kind of crisis where one sets aside the rules. They called their bosses who were running a business from a safe distance and always had the same answer. No manager I talked to let me set foot on their property. I get it. Someone who wanted to collect on an insurance claim would not want my work muddying the waters when the adjuster arrived. They would wait in line for real plumbers who were driving in from out of state.
We focused our efforts on people who were somehow poor and yet also owned their own house, or rented from a small-time landlord such as myself, with whom we could communicate. This disqualified most of our applicants but for a while we still had more than we could handle. Now, this green row was the only thing in the city limits that looked eligible. When I realized it was not a multiplex, but multiple mobile homes, it started to seem doable.
It had been submitted by a non-resident. I hadn't talked to the applicant personally, but they felt to me like a gatekeeper type, someone who felt the need to mediate and control the interaction between me and the person I was helping. I had run into this a few times and had ended up driving across town to learn that things were not as they had been described by helpful people. David and Colby finally went to work under one of the mobile homes and reported a rich seam of doable projects in very low income housing, in easy driving distance, next to a microbrewery which had just reopened.
It was a pocket mobile home park, hidden from view in the floodplain of a creek. I've lived here for about 20 years and never saw it. I felt like a logger bumping into the Awá tribe in Brazil, still living as they always had, somehow remaining hidden from us all these years. In my mind, the streets to the East and West had been adjacent to each other, stitched together, and this land between them felt magical. It was a little intimidating driving down the street, its a dead end, not many people go down there, and they look at you longer than is comfortable.
The residents were mostly a rotating mixture of migrant workers who were away at work most of the time. Kids played in the street under the big pecan trees. It was cooler here in the summer along the creek, a hidden gem of south austin. I assume the only reason it had not been developed was that it was obviously in a floodplain. It didn't take much flooding to cover the low water crossing in the driveway, and only a little more than that to tickle the pipes under the trailers.
Lucy, who had filled out our form, did not live there. I didn't get a complete history, but somehow, perhaps through a church or through the loose association of Austin Burners, Lucy and her partner Raoul had adopted the trailer park. At one point, a larger organization had come through providing clothes and food, but too many volunteers had visited and lingered. This was a pleasant place to be, and conveniently located, but many residents lived in fear of ICE raids, which were occuring at a brisk pace at the time. Lucy and Raoul learned to keep the location private and became like peripheral members of the community themselves. Privacy concerns became less important when they lost water.
In particular, they looked after an old man named Jay. He did not change clothes much and ate one meal a day, provided by the lady next door, who also let him use her shower once a week, which Lucy and Raoul encouraged him to do. He had dementia but could hold halting conversations on certain subjects including jazz, literature, geopolitics, and book printing. Lucy and Raoul had decided that he must not be fed into the machine of industrial old folks homes. Jay was on the same page with this and did not want to be institutionalized.
When I arrived, Colby was leaning on his truck in the small parking area outside the trailer park. It was in the 60s and sunny. A few melting piles of frozen gravel and thousands of people without water were the only reminder that the town had been mowed over by a freak winter storm. I knew Colby from dance and he had once come to my house to relocate a colony of bees that moved into my owl box and made so much honey it pushed the box apart. He is a man with varied interests and skills. I looked him over here, in this new context, tribal necklace and bones in his ears. I was concerned about how we would be perceived by these people but decided that, apart from not looking like ICE, what mattered would be what we did, and Colby knew what he was doing. We waited for a while for David, who was not answering his phone, and eventually just went in and started knocking on doors. Colby quickly found a trailer with broken pipes and was walking back to his truck for tools.
I parked at Jay’s place. Lucy had said his trailer was a larger project than just plumbing, but that if we could, it would be fantastic to get him running water. She had seemed apprehensive about it, self conscious, as if what was in there might be embarrassing.
Jay was sitting on his steps. His shoes, pants, and coat were the color of an oily parking lot and a few strands of greasy blond hair came down from under his beanie. He seemed calm, not gregarious or hostile, just sitting there, where it was his place to sit.
“Hi, are you Jay?”
He nodded and said that he was. I considered his hands, which terminated in nicotine stained fingertips. Covid had altered greeting rituals and it was potentially rude to offer a handshake. I kept a respectful distance.
“Lucy sent me, I’m going to try to get your water working in your trailer, ok?”
I have experience with the homes and nests of people who can’t think clearly. I’ve spent days making trips to rented dumpsters, uncovered squares of carpet of surprising color, learned where the cat really poops, cleared out kitchen sinks with ring-lines from a clogged drain that filled the basin and evaporated months ago. I've discovered caches of flashlights, scissors, catfood, the same item bought over and over but not crossed off a grocery list, repeating like a bug in code. And that’s just family. I worked for a year in a psychiatric hospital, where things were not allowed to accumulate, but were nevertheless found in ingenius places. I'm not easily grossed out by disorder and filth.
He was self conscious about letting me in. Through the front door there was the couch/bed, with blankets, an old sleeping bag molded around a Jay-shaped indentation. Across from it was the kitchen, where boxes and clothes were stacked. It was dark and everything looked the same color as Jay and his clothes. It was necessary to leave the front door open for light and ventilation, but this did not much affect the temperature inside. I did my best to focus my attention on plumbing, as the answers to unasked, intimate questions bombarded me. How long had it been like this? A very long time. Pieces of a security guard uniform, dark with dust, hung on a bent closet pole. Books, vinyl albums, plates and bowls… focus on the kitchen sink.
“Do you ever use the sink?”
Stupid question. The basin was dry and filled with boxes. “Ok, I’m going to take a look at the bathroom. Do you have water now?”
Red was unable to tell me if he had any access to running water in the trailer. His mind meandered around in the bathroom. He was not comfortable with me being in there, it was a part of his life he knew he didn't have a good a handle on. There was really no need for questions. Jay went back outside to sit on his steps. The smell was a unique, fermented shit smell combined with dust and mold. It smelled dangerous even though it was ventilated by holes in the floor and I dug a beat up N95 out of my pocket. The toilet, a lightweight plastic throne designed for a mobile trailer, was filled with soupy feces. The bathtub was filled with security guard wardrobe, stiff with dust. The sink was alive, dripping and making a hissing noise. I opened the cabinet under the sink and saw the ground outside. The pipes were all narrow, flexible trailer plumbing. A union had cracked open and was spraying water around in the wall.
Red showed me around behind the trailer, where a campground style water spigot rose up and connected to a hose that fed the trailer. The spigot was undamaged and I shut it off. Poking my head under the trailer, I could see up into the bathroom. The broken union was part of the line that continued up into the walls and on to the kitchen. It was all weird lightweight RV parts.
I called a couple RV supply places but there was no chance of finding a replacement for that union. If I bought it, it wouldn't get here for weeks. The trailer itself was totalled, roof bashed in on one side, holes in the floor, no electricity (thank god). Jay himself looked like he was overdue for that once a week shower, and likely the once a day meal. What, exactly, should I set as a goal here?
If we lived in the first world, I would want to get Jay into an assisted living facility. He looked to be in his 70s, there must be meds he’s not taking. He teetered on the brink of homelessness and starvation, relying on people who could leave his life at any moment. But sometimes assisted living is a hellscape of human storage. How you feel about it depends on how much money you have and your attitude towards institutions. Lucy and Raoul seemed like anarchists. They had decided Jay was going to stay out of assisted living, or maybe he had told them. I decided to think of them as his next of kin and that it was worth a lot of my time and effort to make this trailer safer and possible to live in. I wasn't here for a hoarding intervention or to enforce social services, but to restore cold water.
Plan A: bypass the derelict kitchen and scrounge a union to supply the bathroom. I crawled around yanking out line and clipped out a couple elbows and T’s. The line and the unions were flimsy, they didn't seem like real plumbing, more like something for a play house. I re-ran line to the sink, I tried a few things, but each time I re-pressurized, something broke or leaked. The bitchy faucet needed to be replaced and I kept looking over my shoulder at the toilet, which just sat there while I worked, holding half a gallon of evaporating human waste over a crumbling floor like a personal threat.
Allan, a forty-something guy in a cap and long sleeve button down shirt tucked into roomy, worn chinos, arrived in the afternoon. He had just driven his Volkswagen Westfalia from Vermont to stay with friends when the freeze hit. Back home, he had gotten lonely. His friends were quarantining hard and Austin seemed like a more relaxed place. Now he found himself hunkered down again, trapped in another home as weather that seemed perfectly normal to him caused everything to fall the fuck apart. When the temperature got up in the 40s and 50s, Allan was done with hunkering. He learned of our activities on Facebook and reached out to me. Of course, all his tools were in Vermont, so when he arrived, he was simply ready to do whatever was needed, which was to very carefully remove Jay’s toilet.
It was light for a toilet, but it contained liquid that could make the place much less livable than it was. After ensuring the connection to the floor was completely severed, he found two safe places to plant his feet and lift, trailing fragments wood and caulk. In a slow waddle, Alan made his way down the narrow hall, flanked by books and dust encrusted items that, so far, had not fallen on anyone, past the kitchen and “bed” and down the front steps. He emptied the thing into an open wastewater access, breathed a sigh, and counted himself a christened South Austinite.
With the throne gone, the bathroom was less intimidating. The predominant smell was the outside air and rotting leaves which could be seen through the floor. It was still necessary to be careful about where one stepped, and if Jay was going to stay here, that would have to be fixed too, but I felt my own situation had improved drastically.
Under other trailers, Micheal, David, and Colby were all occupied and now Coleman had arrived. I felt a giddy excitement that we were all here, doing stuff together. I went over to help Micheal wrap up a PVC patch where he also struggled with the scope of his mission. His trailer was a patchwork of different repairs from different eras, PVC, PEX, and galvanized. Where two plastic pipes connected, the connection was often made, not by crimping or gluing or screwing, but melting the ends with a torch and shoving them together. A woman who spoke only Spanish lived there with her three kids. She explained that she had paid a guy to re-pipe the trailer last year, but the pressure was still not very good and she had been aware of leaks before the freeze.
Parts were in short supply. The easiest thing to do would have been to rip it all out and repipe with PEX, which would never crack or freeze. We fantasized about new PEX systems as we raided a stockpile of plumbing parts in the dirt behind one of the trailers and hacked together lines with whatever combinations we could make work. It felt like completing a complicated algebra problem via a method other than what had been taught. Micheal was proud of his solution, a Rube Goldberg run of connections to bypass the excised piece. It didn't leak, it was strong, the water could come back on.
Inside this trailer felt like a warm, safe place where childhoods were happening. The table seemed like a good place to eat cereal before school. The kitchen looked functional and clean. A teenager could oversleep in the bedroom, everyone could crowd in to watch TV in the living room. I believed in this place. The bathroom sink didn't work and we repaired it. The kitchen faucet was broken and we replaced it. I felt an overwhelming wave of warmth, peace, and relief. It was the first time I felt sure I was in the right place, with the right people, doing the right thing for weeks. Or maybe years. Maybe decades.
Walking back, I saw a professional plumber’s van and a big black pickup parked across from Jay’s. Two men stood in the street wearing office clothes, one held a clipboard. The sight terrified me. I had consulted with an attorney about the possibility of lawsuits from real plumbers. He seemed confident that the fact that we were not charging money and were clearly doing good samaritan stuff during an emergency would be a strong defense, but the cost of the lawsuit could hurt me. The fact that I had money made me a target and I feared for my privilege. Even now, as I chronicle these events, I weigh my exposure. What if one of my hack jobs leaks and damages something? If an attorney looked around for someone to sue, I might be the most likely. Then I would become a leak in the system of my family’s resources; college, retirement, mortgage, medical savings… there is no curb shutoff for me.
I walked up and introduced myself. All three of us were middle aged white men, but these guys wore clean polos tucked into pressed slacks, their hair was combed back and shiny, while I wore the same muddy carharts I'd worn for three days and smelled like the underside of a trailer. The one with the clipboard’s polo had a logo for the local plumber’s union.
They shook my hand and said their names. They explained that one of them attended a local church in which a call for help had gone out for this trailer park, and he had mobilized the union. They were here to assess the situation before sending in some apprentices. These guys did not look at all like they were entertaining the thought of doing physical work. They seemed wary of me, as I was of them, and left without saying much else.
The next day I was back in Jay’s place. Restaurants were opening again so I went to get Whataburger for Raoul, Jay, and I. We ate that glorious lunch on Jay’s steps, listening to Sonny Rollins on Raoul’s truck. It felt civilized, a strong sign that things were getting better. The old plastic toilet worked and I had re-mounted it, but we would have to re-build that floor. That could happen while the sink was getting fixed. Allen made a trip over to Habitat for Humanity and found a used faucet for cheap which fit perfectly and worked when pressurized. The leaks proved evasive. I cut out or bypassed all the old supply line and ran red PEX from the spigot to the bathroom. Someone had a crimping tool and I found some unions rolling around in one of Coleman’s hand turned bowls that got me from the red line to the toilet, but I was missing something to connect the sink. I might have been able to cobble together a device from the random PVC parts in people’s trucks or from the pile behind the trailer down the road, but I just couldn't bear to build another PVC system that was exposed to the wind. Jay’s trailer was condemnable and anything I built would probably outlast it, and maybe outlast Jay, so maybe it didn't matter. I bit my lip and made it all PEX, gambling that I could find the connectors.
I was packing up and calling it a day when the Union Plumbers rolled in. Two big pickups with roof racks and a big white van parked across from Jay’s. A guy walked over to me, introduced himself, and asked which houses needed plumbing. Jerry was a journeyman, leading a group of about a dozen apprentices. Tonight was their shop night, ordinarily they would be doing something in the Union Hall on the other side of town, having a meeting, learning something, sharing stories about what they had seen this week. Instead, tonight the union sent them all out to this trailer park, loaded up with parts and equipment.
I gave Jerry access to the spreadsheet I made, but he wasn't able to open it. With some impatience, he offered to just send some lads door to door to offer help, and I agreed. Within an hour, guys were swarming under five or six different trailers. I tried to track where they were and what they did, but it was dark and I questioned why I felt the need to be a gatekeeper now. Three guys followed me back into Jay’s to look at the connections. I was worried they would be weird about the drama of Jay’s situation. They were young, almost high school age, but they seemed to take it in and accept it. They joked at each others’ expense and sent the junior most out to search through trucks for connectors. Jay’s bathroom was up and running that night. The flushing toilet was a joy to see, but the floor was still a rotten mess and a dangerous place to stand in the dark.
The next day, Raoul came by after getting off his regular job as a carpenter and put in improvised floor joists that stretched between non-rotten parts of the trailer frame in an improvised radial pattern. He brought a stack of surplus ⅛” plywood and nailed it down over the joists. The raw plywood floor felt like a huge improvement. Running sink, working toilet, steady floor, it was luxury. The bathtub was still filled with old security guard uniforms. Maybe it could be cleaned and repaired as well, and then Jay would be able to bathe; another key ingredient of first world life. But then there was the kitchen, which no longer had supply lines, and then there was the rest of the floor, and the roof. All it would take was for someone to complain that this old man was living in inhuman conditions and an adult protective services worker, or a fireman, or another public servant whose job it was to protect us, could come and pull the pin and Jay’s living situation would collapse under the assumption that there was a better alternative for him. Jay would go to assisted living and the trailer to the landfill. It would make perfect sense if civilization was real and evenly distributed, but, for some reason, people who cared for him seemed to want to let Jay’s situation slide with minor improvements. The plumbers had no questions about it, they were just there to fix pipes.
Cats visited with us. I asked Jay if any animals lived with him in the trailer. Most certainly, he knew them by name. There was a cat that slept on the bed with him, a racoon who shared the living room, and a possum that was often in the kitchen. I may have the order wrong, he may have slept with the possum. There were openings in the floor that allowed them to come and go. Jay assured me that, from time to time, when it was cold, they all slept together on the bed.
The long term plan was to get Jay into another, newer trailer. Maybe one Raoul would build, or buy used with proceeds from a gofundme. That didn't seem far fetched. Money was flooding into lots of hastily assembled community organizations, as the nation watched Texas with amazement.
I went out to the creek behind Jay’s trailer to pee. It wound behind the concrete trailer pads in a gently curving canal of gambian blocks; huge cubes of cyclone fence filled with rocks and sewn shut with wire. There was enough water for perch and turtles. On the other side was a ligustrum forest dense enough to block the view of any neighboring structures. It was “woods”, next to a creek, walking distance from hipster restaurants in a part of town that was gentrifying faster than most of Austin.
A large object was covered with a blue tarp against the side of the trailer. After a few days of walking around it, I lifted up the tarp and found a printing press. I asked Jay about it over burgers. He and his wife moved here from the northeast in the 70s to start a small publishing company that produced a socialist newsletter and another one about art. To make ends meet they started a private security company out of this trailer. Of all these things, he most liked to talk about her. She was the one who organized things, the smarter of the two, according to Jay. I wondered if he had started losing some of his mind before she died. Based on dust and grime, I placed the date sometime in the 2000s. Though he liked to talk about her, Jay was unable to think beyond the death of his wife when it came to organizing the trailer. He had no idea what was in here, he said. It had been organized by someone else. There were no dresses or ladies’ toiletries, she might have worn the same t-shirts and pants he did. Some couples who partner closely and cut their own path through the world can end up looking like each other. I couldn't see her face but imagined her dressing practically. After a long night in a security guard uniform, she would crack open a beer in boxers and a t-shirt.
I was looking for a place to relocate his bed and I asked if I could look inside the bedroom. Jay professed complete ignorance of its contents. It was filled with things that were once practical; boxes of books, a projector screen, canvas bags of tools, containers and equipment for various enterprises, embarked upon at distinctly different phases of their lives, now covered by a uniform layer of dust and stacked on a queen sized bed.
I closed the door and asked myself, again, what I should try to accomplish here.
The second night of the apprentice plumbers was even more intense. There seemed to be twice as many of them and they came with all the parts they had wished they had the previous night. I worried that they might be getting too cavalier, diving under trailers without introducing themselves. They had a list of where the work was and they just went and did it without worrying about things like tracking their hours, billing, or parking carefully. Some of the trailers they had gotten underneath the previous night had galvanized pipe, which had all corroded together and sprouted pinholes. They brought a hand held bandsaw that sliced through it and were soon dragging out pieces through the opening in the facia. They were rolling around in mud and cat shit with headlights. It made me so happy.
This essay series is part of a project to document Texan’s experiences during the 2021 freeze. Do you have a story to share about the 2021 Texas freeze? Share it with my publication, Freeze Stories, on Medium. If its not filled with filth, I’ll publish it. Ok, I’ll publish it even if its filled with filth.