Catalina Project Begins

The ad on craigslist was suspiciously brief, but the picture of this 1971 Catalina camper looked good, and the $200 price tag was irresistable. I gave the owner a call and left a message, rather expecting not to hear anything.

He called back in five minutes. The next day, I was in Beverly, Massachusetts to take a look.

I had been looking for a camper for about a month or so, and had become fascinated with rv culture, particularly vintage enthusiasts on the internet. Having grown up in the suburbs, I had no frame of reference from which to operate – in fact, I had never set foot in an rv before. The ones I had seen on the highway were generally boxy and beige, and often desperately ugly, with a depressing pre-fab feel, like they were made in the same factory as cubicles and dentist chairs. When I visited a dealership and stepped inside land yachts valued at double my life savings, my suspicions were confirmed – they had many appliances and accoutrements, and all the soul of a port-o-potty.

And so I decided to hunt down something vintage, for the price yes, but also for the clean and clever design, and for the challenge of making it livable, making it my own. This task would have been rather easy had I lived in California or Arizona, where the dry desert heat allows for Airstreams produced in 1955 to be sold today in near perfect condition, shiny and rust free. But here in snowy New England? It’s not uncommon to see older models in classified ads with descriptions like “Roof collapsed in 1982.”  One of these days, I’d like to drive down to the Southwest and pick up one of those good ones, like a 1960′s Shasta with a two-tone paint job and original wings.  I just think they’re so beautiful.

It only took one visit to Beverly for me to decide that I wanted to take on the Catalina, but in a great show of pseudo-grownup restraint, I waited almost a week to go back and buy it. I love the lofted sleeping area, because it provides more floor space for living, which is important when you only have 13′ by 6.5″ to begin with. I also like all the storage space under the benches. The exterior metal skin is a little dingy-looking, but it’s been caulked and is leak-free, and the interior has been stripped, reinsulated, an 90% repanelled with thin blond plywood.  It is a hodge-podge of old and new, a little off-kilter and far from finished, nothing that any retro refitters would be having a cat fight over.  But for me?  It’s everything I need and nothing I don’t.

A little kitchen (four burner stove, no oven).  A little dinette. Plenty of windows. And, of course, a place to lay my head at the end of the day.

The work it needs is substantial, but not particularly difficult. For starters, there’s no upholstery anywhere – no mattress, no cushions for the back benches. I threw away the ones that came with the dinette when my mother pronounced them as “dog breath smelly” and evicted them from the basement, and now I’m back at square one. I’m planning on taking care of all the upholstery before I move in – I’ll just buy foam and make covers myself. It’ll be a good test of my grade school seamstress skills and the sewing machine somebody gave me at a yard sale in Vineyard Haven two years ago. Skeptical? Yeah, me too.  Also, considering that 3′ x 6.5′ is not in fact a legitimate mattress size (in fact, it’s sub-twin), finding something to go in the loft is shaping up to be an adventure.  

Beyond that, the electrical wiring needs to be finished, as does the plumbing on the sink.  The dinette table is wobbly and cheesy in the extreme and could be replaced.  I’d like a little tile for the counter, a little linoleum for my beach-towel-size patch of floor.  A refrigerator.  Lamps.  Curtains.  A propane tank for the stove.  Pots and pans and mugs and spoons.  Maybe a space heater for the spring.  

When put that way, it sounds like a lot.  But young people in farming, we do this over and over again, setting up shop, chasing the new season.  Here in February, I like to think about the camper, sitting on the farm waiting for me, wrapped in white snow.