What I Learned Living In A Trailer In The Utah Desert For Two Decades

Wendy bought her land from a guy who had scooped up 15 acres and built a home with a swimming pool and an orchard. He stipulated in Wendy’s deed that she build a permanent home and not accumulate a compound of houses on wheels. 

And this had been Wendy’s intention. But now she and her husband, Jason, bought a house in Alaska. They planned to spend winters in Moab and devised a solution that would follow the spirit if not the letter of the covenant. Instead of building an actual house, she would make the trailer look like one.

In the winter of 1996, she and Jason installed a pitched roof of green tin on top of the existing flat tar roof. They built a wooden porch with a rough-cut pergola, where on mild days they could gaze at the towering old trees. But the element that was architecturally significant: they clad all four sides with cedar shake shingles, transforming the dusty white aluminum into something both rustic and avant-garde. 

I received an invitation to Wendy’s wedding in Alaska, but I didn’t go. The flight was too expensive, I told myself. We fell out of touch. Now 26, I moved back to L.A. to publish a magazine and go to grad school and write a book, a series of desert sketches, about which I kept silent as I spent summers in Moab working for Outward Bound, leading expeditions through rivers, canyons, and mountains. One night at the Rio Cantina, I found myself dancing with a girl I’ll call Q, who knew Wendy and who was spending the weekend at her place. She blew hot encouragement into my ear and invited me up for breakfast the next day. The trailer was pulling me into its orbit.

Sitting out on the porch, Q told me about a time she’d been waiting tables in New Orleans, serving a group of college kids. One of the boys said something lewd and then stiffed her, so she chased them to the street and pelted their car with wine glasses. She had grown up poor in a crumbling city where all the white families had long since fled, and after quitting high school she’d drifted around ski towns and the desert, pouring cocktails and falling in love. Here was someone who lived with the passion and risk I knew only from Kristofferson records and The Sun Also Rises. I saw in her a kind of redemption for my cushioned upbringing. She went home to Salt Lake City that day, commencing a volley of flirty postcards between us.

A few months later, Christmas of 1998, Q flew out to see me in California; I tied a red ribbon around Sadie’s neck and sneaked the dog into the airport to greet her. I had just finished writing my book in my garage-top apartment by the beach. Back at my place, she announced that she had decided to have sex with only one more man. She didn’t believe in birth control. I’d better be serious. I told her we’d wait until we were sure. For now, we laid a cotton blanket on the living room floor to see how our skin felt on it.

“What about this,” I said. “Allowed?”

“Yes, but me on top.”

We moved to the bed and drank red wine and blew cigarette smoke out louvered windows that even in winter didn’t have to be closed. She pounded little fists on my bare chest. 

“What’s inside there? Why are you holding it in?”

“I’ve never been in love,” I said. “I want to.” I was afraid of falling for someone as conventional as me, waiting to forge some classless path of the rough-hewn romantic. Now I leaped.

For what seemed like weeks, I read her the entire desert manuscript as we lay there. “You got dust in my mouth,” she murmured.

Q was not much of a reader, but the praise from this reckless woman and her pounding heart was all I’d ever sought. I wanted to be a writer without ever admitting that I wanted to be a writer, and now I’d won a wild soul who didn’t give a shit about books, proof to me that my book transcended the embarrassing bookish parts of books. 

If our peculiar abstinence was supposed to slow our free fall, it did the opposite, like snipping a flowering vine only to cause its lesser stems to shoot out a thousand new blossoms. 

Still, Wendy was on my mind. I wrote to her: “You’re off the hook. For so long, when I made a list in my head of women I wanted to marry, you were on top, but now you don’t have to worry, because I’ve met someone else who has displaced you.”

She replied in a hasty scrawl on five pages of scratch paper stuffed into an envelope, wishing me the best: “When I got married, the only hesitation was wondering what might have happened between you and me.”

As soon as Q left, I drove out to Salt Lake City to see her. At a party with her friends, we were the only ones dancing. She led me in a smoky tango through the kitchen, nuzzled against my cheek, then took me across the living room, where we collapsed on the sofa and howled for another song and sucked from the same bottle of beer. 

One night, she left me waiting alone for hours at her cottage. I almost called the police to ask about car accidents. I furiously packed my truck, only to quickly unpack it. She stumbled home from drinking with her boss from the diner who wanted to leave his wife for her and also lend her a couple thousand dollars. I told nobody. I felt a chunk of lead hardening in my chest.

Another night, when she whispered that it was time to end our prohibition, I told her I didn’t want her to break the promise she’d made to herself. It sounded true. We flew back and forth for the next few months. During a visit to Salt Lake, the day before I was supposed to go home, she dumped me. She didn’t want to be tied up, she said, she wanted to be single, but that was impossible, because she loved me. 

In a moment of inopportune timing, Wendy was passing through town on the same day. Q insisted that she stay the night. Wendy said she’d call from a pay phone when she got close. 

Q and I were naked and watery-eyed when the phone rang. If we missed Wendy’s call, she would simply keep driving. On the fifth ring, Q leaped out of bed and picked up. 

But it wasn’t Wendy. It was some guy Q had met snowboarding the week before. She took the phone into the living room. 

Wendy finally did arrive, Q and I made her dinner, saying nothing about our breakup hours before. In the morning, Q went to work and Wendy drove me to the airport to catch my flight home. I filled her in, the part about Q loving me too much to be with me. I didn’t tell her about the night she stood me up. Or about the snowboarder. 

“Well, if you miss your flight,” she said, “I could just drive you back to California.” 

I got on the plane.

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