Hovel Hunters International, Ep. 9. A Crummy Little Trailer in Grand Bend.

Some crummy little trailer.

I got a tip about a trailer for sale at $15,000.00. It's probably not worth that much according to the info. Assuming I could sweet-talk my way into a private debt, rather than bank debt, I still don't want to pay too much. I still don't want to take advantage of some little old man of 98 years, either. Yet old George was king of the low-ball offer in his day, a real horse-trader who bought and sold quite a few crummy little houses in the area, including Kettle Point, and now he’s just outside of Northville. All of them sat on leased land.

I lived up there in 1997-98, and it is damned dark and cold in winter. The people that owned the place were truckers. When they went away for ten days or two weeks at a time, I was completely on my own. My dad was still alive, and I ended up going to Sarnia every two or three days to see him…I had a few friends in town. Stuff like that.

From where I’m sitting, this trailer is forty miles up the lake. The easiest way to get there is two-lane blacktop. To take the 402 might seem faster, until you turn off and go through places like Forest or Parkhill, or whatever. In winter, the place is a ghost town with maybe eight hundred residents, in summer it's a party-town with ten, or maybe twenty thousand on holiday weekends. You would need a very good, very economical car to go back and forth, as I know absolutely no one up there. I don't hunt or fish, I don't own a boat and I don't have a snowmobile. I don’t X-country ski or anything like that.

It's a given that the ODSP is always going to freak out, no matter what you do and that is a consideration.

Where did you get the down payment? That would be their first question. But, theoretically, on a private sale, you could give sixty days’ notice on the apartment, and then you have the next two, three ODSP payments that you could use for a down payment, also whatever fees apply to the actual park when you move in on day one. They would want post-dated cheques or more likely automatic bank payments. You also have to live in the meantime, and to make a down payment of much over $1,000.00 seems pretty unlikely.

It’s nice country up there. There are the dunes, Carolinian forest, and the Ausable River cuts through the backbone of the county in the area of Arkona and Thedford. There are parks, trails, and campgrounds and conservation areas. There are public beaches, golf courses and other amusements. There must be some literary group or other culture up there.

What I remember about Grand Bend is that the grocers are very suspicious. They'll take a five dollar bill into the back room and scan it with microscopes to make sure it's real. When you get home and open up that ground beef, the centre part is all grey inside, as it was getting old and they re-packaged it. Who's the fucking fraud now, asshole...???

The Foodland in Forest is a much nicer store, albeit a long drive.

Looking at the pictures, there’s quite the variety from one lot to the next in some of these little parks.

The other thing is my own lifestyle—there are three food banks in Sarnia. I use the Shared Services Centre downtown for photocopying. There must be similar things up there somewhere, but it’s going to be a long drive because the little park in question is out in the boonies. My mother, step-dad, brother, nephews, sister, aunts and uncles and cousins either live in Sarnia or they live at the other end of the country. I don’t see all that much of them, but at least they are here.

According to my information, the monthly costs including lot fees, heat, power, phone, internet, and insurance, would run about six or seven hundred a month. There’s not much slack there when you consider an ODSP pension of about eleven hundred a month. It’s been sheer hell trying to keep the Trillium Benefit coming in. If you're late with the tax return, the HST rebate shuts down as well...

And you still have to buy the place, somehow. No one is going to sell you a trailer for fifty or a hundred bucks a month. Not when all they have to do is wait, knowing that sooner or later, someone with an actual job will come along, make an offer, and then the thing is sold. They have their money and they don’t have to worry anymore.

Anyways, I’ll keep thinking, keep looking and who knows: something might turn up.

Thank you for reading.