This year for Truth and Reconciliation Day, I plan to winterize my 50-year-old trailer in Shelley with the help of a few friends, including putting up skirting to keep the underside of our mobile home free from flora, fauna, and frost.
While materials are often expensive, I did catch a break at Dollar Saver on a lift of studs as well as plywood. What tools I lack my compadres will bring along, and together we will partake in that most ancient of rituals: preparing for winter.
I hope to ready the site before they arrive with trenching and poly to keep out mouse and moisture. The edge of the mobile home stands 42 inches above the soil, which is made up of sandy loam that holds its shape perfectly, hence the ants all summer. A spade, flat shovel, and rake ought to make short work of the border, building up in places where access points will be fitted or the slope dropped too low. Thankfully, I don’t believe in radon or I’d need a lot more plastic.
Trailers being pulled at 60 miles an hour through December weather experience a bit of wind damage at times. Ours fared rather well, but a few shingles are in need of replacement or repair. Roofers are good friends to make, and mine has promised to fit and fabricate as needed where necessary to ensure the snow stays outside where it belongs. Perhaps while he is up there, he will be so kind as to tar down the furnace stack that keeps blowing away in the wind.
A skill I don’t often brag about is my ability to install septic pipes from trailer to container. The key is to do this all above ground but for the final drop into the tank, so as to save time later when Jack Frost visits your workmanship. As extra insurance, I affixed a thermal line to the pipe that can be turned on when it is cold. So far, my septic system has cost about five percent of the going rate, which I attribute to my Archimedean insight that solid waste flows downhill at .25” per foot.
Of course, there are more complicated aspects to property ownership in the country as well, such as proper lighting. Our electrical shed has been impersonating a haunted house for a few weeks now, with motion sensors going off randomly at night. This is likely due to the fact that we moved that sad 8’x12’ windowless, wheelless tiny home in all three dimensions because we forgot to level the land before building on it. I should really apologize to the poor thing.
But it wouldn’t be a proper mobile home without a bootroom and deck, both of which were provided by the sellers to us at no extra cost. That seam with the roof will need patching as I’m certain my roofer will see, and the bolting together of the two will need torquing. But all in all, we did ok considering that we bought the place sight unseen. Indeed the Anabaptists who sold it to us included the steps and screws they used for the veranda, which are in use again.
It will be a long day, with the sound of power tools and human effort punctuated only by the train as it goes by spreading my favorite crop, CN thistle. But there is nothing quite like outdoor work, especially as a cohort. In our disembodied world where all of us are separated, it will be a refreshing reprieve to complete a task as a team, each of us acting with a unity of body and spirit. Perhaps that sounds overly philosophical for something like winterizing an old trailer.
But verily, verily I say to ye, one cannot obtain Truth or Reconciliation with false goals or premises. The truths behind our shared history are far more complicated than the soundbites, and lasting reconciliation requires forgiveness. Coincidentally, the reason that I have brothers to call upon for help this weekend is precisely because we have voluntarily committed to a set of values that demands confession, repentance, self-improvement, and serving one another.
No one wants to hear that, least of all those who benefit from the continued division of our populace. But as for my household, surrounded on three sides by land subject to the Indian Act, we will live out Truth and Reconciliation in the ancient way: participating in our community.
Nathan Giede is a Prince George writer.
