The Fifth Wheel and Big Red

 Journal of Our Journeys

Chapter 17 - The Fifth Wheel

 For years, Dad had been looking at fifth-wheel travel trailers. In the 1970s, they were still a novelty in camping. Also called goose-neck trailers, the style was more commonly used for horse trailers at the time.  

I will never know what Dad's fascination with fifth wheels was. We looked at so many of them over the years that I never really thought that my mom would cave and let him buy one. When we first got the pickup camper, we thought that it was so amazing. You can't even believe how excited we were by the prospect of getting a fifth wheel.

I was excited anyway; by the time Dad really got serious about getting a new, larger camper, Pat was a senior in high school. Her days of camping with the parents were numbered. I would be the lone child to continue the tradition.

After all the dreaming, Dad found someone he knew who was selling their practically new fifth wheel. The couple had bought it a year or two before, and after only one trip, the wife decided that camping was not for her. Obviously, she had never camped in a tent. The fifth wheel was more like a motel room on wheels.

So, camping in the fifth wheel really wasn't like camping. Besides the private bedroom over the bed of the truck for Mom and Dad, this thing had a full bathroom with a shower. The refrigerator was practically as large as the one we had at home, and the kitchen even had an oven. We didn't do much baking in it, though, using it mostly for storage.

Several weeks after returning from one trip with the fifth wheel, Mom was looking for one of her cake pans. It dawned on her that she had left it safely in the oven in the trailer. Ever the helpful daughter, I scampered out to the camper to retrieve it.

Well, not only had Mom forgotten the cake pan in the oven, but she had forgotten that there was still rhubarb cake in it. Ooh, it had gotten all moldy. Not only was it moldy, but the acid from the rhubarb had actually eaten holes in the metal cake pan.

This next part I will never be able to describe accurately; you would have to actually see it to picture it. When we had the pickup camper, Dad always parked it in the sixteen-foot-wide spot between the garage and the house. The area wasn't long enough for the fifth wheel, so for the first year, Dad parked it next to the garden in front of the house.

It soon became apparent that that was not going to work. When he retired, Dad had built a large pole barn behind the house and the garage. The mastery came when Dad backed the fifth wheel between the house and the garage and then angled it into the red barn.

(See the red barn in the back and that narrow space between the garage and the house? Yikes, is all can say.)

The best part was the clothesline poles along that route. People who had never been to the house could not fathom how he could not only back the trailer between the buildings but also navigate it past the clothesline poles, which were directly in his path. Little did they know that the poles easily pulled out of sleeves buried in the ground.  

The year after buying the fifth wheel, Mom and Dad decided they needed a new truck to pull it. The teal pickup that had come with the original camper had been replaced years earlier with a forest-green Chevy. Now, it was time to replace that one.

Mom and Dad went to Wausau and ordered the new pickup from the Ford dealer downtown. I even got to go with them, though my input was not taken into consideration. They picked out a bright orange truck to match the orange strip running down the side of the fifth wheel. The new truck also had an extended cab, so that there was room for someone to sit in the back seat. That was usually me, as the dog sat in the front seat between Mom and Dad.

Remember, this was 1976, when few pickup trucks had an extended cab, and hardly any had four doors.

(The AMC Matador was one of the ugliset cars built.)

        We named the new truck Big Red, and believe it or not, it is the vehicle I learned to drive on. Sure, I practiced on Mom's white AMC Matador and used it when I took my driver's test. But I drove Big Red as much as the car. Dad even would occasionally let me drive it while pulling the fifth wheel, only on back roads, though, at a slow speed, such as our road, which was fraught with ninety-degree turns.