"Turn Your Own Wrenches"

Six years ago, I moved my family into a 50-year-old RV-not just to see America, but to test my belief that anything worth fixing can be fixed.

- By Scott Gilbertson. Photographs by Briana Vargas

THERE'S NO TEMPERATURE GAUGE.

That broke several thousand desert miles ago. But you can smell trouble coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slipping in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know it's time to stop. This doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000-pound RV on your back will eventually make any small block engine overheat.

I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, and limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east, as far as I can see, the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way toward a desert valley floor, dust-swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. Without a pullout. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on Highway 168 somewhere in Eastern California, between the Nevada ghost town where we camped last night and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road.