The Melmac Years

I think of them as the Melmac years. That makes them sound like a lifetime — my lifetime — ago. In fact, only about twenty years have passed, and the whole thing began innocently enough with the purchase of an already ancient class C motorhome. It might be kinder to describe the vehicle as “retro”— its upholstery, curtains, and decorative exterior stripes all in the orange and brown so characteristic of its early 1970s vintage. Typical of its class and age, our GMC Aristocrat had a small gas-powered stovetop and oven, a small refrigerator, a small furnace, and a small bathroom with a shower hose. To bathe, you locked yourself into a space the size of a telephone booth, ran the plastic curtain across the door, plugged the rubber hose into the tap in the sink, and sat on the closed toilet lid. The water ran down through a drain in the floor into a tank under the chassis. We also had a little microwave oven, which, like the shower, was very rarely used.

We almost never...