Carson Vaughan

Special for USA TODAY

Under the pale lights of our one-room cabin at Pocahontas State Park, I stare at the ceiling fan. I watch a moth drunkenly search for an exit, trapped between the window and the screen. I watch a small beetle scuttle its way up my pant leg. My mind is numb. My face and hands are covered in grease. I lay still as a corpse, supine on the top bunk, fully clothed in filthy jeans and dirt-caked hikers. My fiancée curls up below me, choking back tears. We’ve been stranded now three days, the trailer jacked up and one wheel short in a campsite around the bend. I know what she’s thinking, and I am, too. What I wouldn’t give to be home ...

That we should end up here — floating belly-up in a tailing pond of shame and self-pity outside Richmond, Va., one of our favorite cities in America — is, though unfortunate, probably fair. We are five months into our year-long journey through the lower 48 states, and until now, the trip has been relatively conflict-free. Of course, two adults with a penchant for autonomy are bound to argue, cooped up as we almost always are in a 16-foot travel trailer. We’ve argued about everything — probably twice. We’ve fought wars over who should sleep closest to the windows, over where one should stand when helping the other back into a campsite. But we’ve also watched the wind whip up clouds of fine white gypsum over White Sands National Monument. We’ve sipped tequila with Pulitzer Prize-winning authors in Podunk border towns, eaten exquisite regional cuisine, shared a midnight kiss under a flaming fleur-de-lis in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve. All told, we land firmly in the “blessed” column, well aware of the fact that travel is — first and foremost — a luxury.

After a thrilling sojourn through “Wild, Wonderful” West Virginia, we parked our trailer in Norfolk and rekindled our relationship with two college friends from Nebraska. “Nor-fik,” they told us, chauffeuring us around the city. “They call it Nor-fik here.” Today, they’re crack reporters for the Virginian-Pilot, arrived from the Cornhusker State less than a year ago. They yoked stories from the buildings as we passed, dropped names and numbers like they’d been on their beats for a decade. They offered us a real bed — an entire spare room! — toured us through colonial Williamsburg and hiked us through First Landing State Park, where osprey nests cluttered the cypress trees and the raptors fed their young. Two young guys stood beside us, loosey goosey in a post-toke haze. “Eagles, dude,” one of them said, shaking his head and grinning wide. “Definitely eagles.”

Which is all to say that in some cosmic sense we probably had this coming. It started with a grind, a cyclical woosh, woosh, woosh, like a trowel cutting through wet sand. We first heard it as we pulled through the entry gates at Pocohantas State Park on a Thursday evening, and it only grew louder as we navigated to our site, windows down to monitor the damage. Mel, always our smarter half, stopped to film the noise on her phone should we later find ourselves — as we most often do — stuttering incoherently at the auto shop. After we unhitched, we stared at the wheel as if it were an IKEA manual, completely dumbfounded. “I’ve seen that look on my husband,” one woman told me, walking past with a small dog. “But I’ll tell you one thing: Staring at it won’t fix it.”

She was right, of course, but the sun was setting and we only had one trailer to sleep in. So we set up camp as if everything were fine, and unless we planned to move it again, everything was fine. We cooked dinner and carried on, stifling fears that we were out of our league, that we’d finally pushed our old trailer — we named her Elsie — too far. In the morning, we sent the video to our family, hoping we might Click and Clack our way out of trouble. After a phone call with Mel’s brother — a man of more practical skills — and some Internet consultation, we landed on what seemed the most probable diagnosis: a worn-out wheel bearing. “Of course,” we said. Then we Googled “What is a wheel bearing?” and scrolled through images of small metal rings we’d never seen before.

Too cheap still to admit defeat, we rallied. We jacked up the trailer so high on the violating side it seemed the slightest breeze would flip her over. I unscrewed the lug nuts, slid the tire off the axle, and then spent another hour figuring out how to free it from the well. The tire itself was too fat — too inflated — to drop free. I hugged it with both arms and wiggled it around until my legs gave out and I crumpled to the grass. I dug a hole beneath the tire, pumped the jack one more time. I kicked it. I cursed it. I hugged it again, threw all my weight behind me, and finally, it dropped free. I stood up to look around, covered in dirt and grease. The neighbors stared back at us like the Beverly Hillbillies had just rolled into Virginia.

With Mel’s brother on the line, we slowly disassembled the wheel until we found the bearing. Everything looked normal to us, not that we would know the difference. We tossed the slimy bearing into a plastic bag, drove to the nearest auto parts store (still 20 miles away), and asked the salesman to find us a replacement. An hour later, we were back at the campsite, ready to install the new bearing. Twenty more minutes of this hell, we thought, and we’d be back in business, headed into Richmond for a carefree afternoon in the city.

Twenty minutes turned into four hours. Well-meaning passersby — most of them retired men who prided themselves on a lifetime of DIY car maintenance — offered their opinions. One of them stepped in and offered us a hand, literally inserting the wheel bearing for us, and instructed me to “really smack it now” with the hammer. The new bearing didn’t fit. Storm clouds rolled in like cargo ships in the sky. Our help left and a sprinkle turned into a shower. I threw on the only raincoat I packed, an old camouflage I used to wear turkey hunting as a kid in Nebraska. My new look fit the reputation I’m sure we had already garnered in the campground. We raced back to the auto parts store again, just minutes before they closed, returned the first wheel bearing and purchased a second (this time making sure the part numbers matched). The clerk must have read the looming psychotic breakdown in our eyes. She gave us step-by-step instructions on how to replace the bearing before adding, “And whatever you do, stop taking advice from that man.”

I tightened the last lug nut in the dark. It took us all day, but we fixed the problem ourselves, and though Richmond would have to wait until tomorrow, we felt prideful, somehow, knowing we’d given it our all and saved ourselves a maintenance bill. Before lowering the jack, I gave the wheel a cocky spin. Woosh. Woosh. Woosh. I spun it again. Woosh. Woosh. Woosh. I threw my tools in the grass, too tired now even to be mad. “Well,” I said to Mel, who’d been at my side all day, enduring my short temper, “at least we know how to replace a wheel bearing.” She managed a robotic smile, an empty gaze, and walked off to the showers without a word. In the morning, we’d find a mechanic.

It turns out finding a mechanic who’ll take in a trailer built in 1968 is next to impossible, especially on a weekend. We spent Saturday morning sending emails and leaving voicemail messages at every trailer repair shop in the area before finally giving up. We’d wait until Monday morning, and try again. In the meantime, we toured Richmond, but it was clear the stress of the last few days hadn’t lifted. We tried to trick ourselves into happiness. Mel threw on a dress. I polished my Oxfords. We parked downtown and walked to The Jefferson, Richmond’s grand hotel. We ordered fancy cocktails at the bar, helped ourselves to complimentary smoked peanuts. The hotel was everything we’d remembered from previous visits — ornate and classy, smooth like jazz — but the whole evening felt like a staged reading, tiptoeing around the fact that we’d already been in Richmond days longer than planned, and worse, that we had no clue when we’d be able to leave.

Late Sunday evening, good news arrived via email. A place called Thurston Spring Services in Richmond could look at our trailer first thing in the morning. I thanked them profusely for the reply, and the next morning, we woke early and towed Elsie slowly into the shop. They jacked her up, and just three hours later, we were on our way back to the campground, wheels spinning in perfect silence. To top it off, the pit crew had seen the decal for our website, localcolorxc.com, on the trailer, and after reading about our cross-country travels, decided to waive the maintenance fee, charging us only for the leaves they added to the springs. They sent us out the door with armfuls of free swag from their shop, shirts and hats we’ve worn ever since in honor of our saviors in Richmond.

The clouds had lifted, literally and metaphorically. With the day already half-spent, we decided to spend one last night at the park, realizing we’d seen little more than our own campsite. We spent the afternoon hiking the trails with our dog, relieving some of the guilt we now felt for neglecting him all weekend. We crossed the spillway at Beaver Lake, walked out as far as we could on the floating docks. The sun lit up every corner of the lake, bright green lily pads strewn about like table confetti. All three of us sat on the dock’s edge, heads to the sky, regaining ourselves. We watched a heron lift up off the water with its giant pterodactyl wings. A metaphor, we concluded.

In the morning, all packed up and ready to pull out of our campsite, we discovered a flat tire on the same side. I chucked the tire blocks into a bush, rifled a series of expletives into the trees and started jacking up the trailer once again. Intuiting the plan, Mel started calling tire shops, finally finding one with a matching tire. We drove to pick it up after I wrestled the old one out of the well all over again.

A funny thing happened when we returned. The new one wouldn’t fit inside the well. I struggled with it for an hour. The campground host failed at it, too. And the campers next door. And the service technician AAA sent over. We paid extra for the AAA Trailer Membership, which made it all the more — let’s call it surprising, in lieu of a more derogatory term — when he stepped from his truck and exclaimed, “Huh! I’ve never worked on a trailer before!” He was gone within 30 minutes, completely stumped. They sent another. The new one failed, too. Somehow we’d reached sundown again, stranded at Pocahontas State Park for another night. And this time, without a wheel to let the trailer down on, we couldn’t sleep inside. Taking pity on us, the campground host talked the park into letting us stay a free night in one of the small cabins up the road.

So here we are, pushed to our limits. For the first time on this trip, we miss the comforts of home — of a home, anyway, a stationary one, a domicile that doesn’t rely on wheel bearings and leaf springs. In the morning, we return to the camper, still jacked up and marooned in our original campsite. We call the shop we bought the tire from, ask them to drive out and help us put on the new one. It’s an awkward exchange — a request they don’t get often — but eventually the owner dispatches his own son to Pocohantas State Park. He uses his hydraulic lift to jack the trailer up even higher. Like all the others, he struggles with it, but eventually — through brute force — he shoves the tire up into the well like a Strong Man champion. We shake his hand, thank every deity we can name.

Finally, we are in the clear, never mind the fact that — before leaving — he accidentally dropped the trailer with all its weight onto his jack and punctured a whole in Elsie’s underside. We can fix that later. Right now, we have a trailer that moves, new springs and a new tire, and we see our opening for Baltimore. We hit the road and don’t look back, credits rolling on our horror film, two survivors — bloodied and numb — driving silently into the night.

Previously in this series:

Road Trip USA: Pepperoni rolls, Google Maps mishaps in W.Va.

Road Trip USA: A walk on the wild side in Asheville, N.C.

Road Trip USA: In Savannah, heritage comes in many flavors

Road Trip USA: Seaside camping in Texas by the glow of the refineries

Road Trip USA: Rugged landscape, reclusive author enliven Arizona stop