Nine weeks into our adventure, Lucy and I rolled into Durango, Colorado with Big Bertha running strong and our confidence at an all-time high. We’d survived Montana, Arizona, Utah, and a mud pit outside Moab thanks to Jenny and Pate. We were unstoppable.
“Don’t get cocky,” Lucy said, reading my mind.
“I’m not cocky. I’m prepared. There’s a difference.”
“You said that right before we blew a tire.”
She had a point.
We’d scored a spot at a small campground about ten miles north of town—one of those places that’s half RV park, half dirt lot with a view. Forty bucks a night, 30-amp power, water hookup, and a pit toilet that looked like it had seen better decades. But the view of the San Juan Mountains was incredible, so we weren’t complaining.
Getting Big Bertha set up was routine by now. Leveled her out, hooked up the power, connected the water line, extended the slides. Everything was running smooth until Lucy turned on the kitchen faucet.
Nothing.
She tried again. The faucet made a clicking sound, like it wanted to work but couldn’t figure out how. Then silence.
“Water pump’s dead,” I said, already pulling up YouTube on my phone.
“How do you know?”
“Because I recognize that sound. That’s the sound of something that used to work and now doesn’t.”
—
Our water pump—a SHURflo 4008 that had been working perfectly for nine weeks—had apparently decided that 6,800 feet of elevation was too much to deal with. I found it in the basement storage, confirmed it was getting power, confirmed there was water in the fresh tank. The pump just… wouldn’t pump.
“Can we fix it?” Lucy asked.
I watched three different YouTube videos. The consensus was: maybe, but probably not without parts we didn’t have. And the nearest RV supply store was forty-five minutes away in town, and it was already 4 PM on a Saturday. They’d be closed by the time we got there.
“We’re dry for the weekend,” I said. “No water pump means no running water. We can still use the toilet if we manually fill the bowl, but no showers, no sink, no coffee maker.”
Lucy looked at me. “No coffee maker?”
“No coffee maker.”
“That’s a dealbreaker. Fix it or find a solution.”
I grabbed a couple water jugs from storage and walked toward the camp host’s site to fill up, when I heard it—someone playing a ukulele. Not well, exactly, but enthusiastically. The kind of playing that says “I know three chords and I’m gonna use all of them.”
I followed the sound to the far corner of the campground, where a beat-up Nissan Frontier was parked with a truck camper sitting in the bed. The camper was one of those budget models that looked like it had been through a war—patched with duct tape, missing a corner trim piece, and leaning slightly to one side like it was tired.
Sitting in a camp chair next to the truck was a guy who looked like he’d been living off the grid for months. Full beard that hadn’t seen a trimmer since spring, wearing cargo shorts held up with climbing webbing instead of a belt, and a faded t-shirt that said “My Other Car Is Also a Piece of Shit.” He was strumming the ukulele and singing something about tacos.
“Hey!” I called out. “You know anything about RV water pumps?”
He stopped playing and looked up. “Depends. You got beer?”
“I’ve got a dead water pump and two empty jugs that need filling.”
“Even better. I’m Ian.”
—
Ian set down his ukulele and walked over to inspect the situation. Up close, he looked even more rough around the edges—his beard had bits of what might have been breakfast in it, and his breath suggested he’d been drinking tequila for lunch. But his eyes were sharp, and he moved around Big Bertha like someone who knew what he was doing.
“SHURflo 4008,” he said, looking at the pump. “Good pump. Tough pump. But it doesn’t like altitude. The diaphragm gets stressed, the pressure switch gets wonky, and boom—no water for you.”
“Can we fix it?”
“Tonight? No. You need parts, and even if you had parts, you’d need to rebuild it, and that’s a Sunday morning kind of job.” He scratched his beard, thinking. “But you don’t need a water pump to have running water. You just need gravity and a little creativity.”
“Explain.”
Ian grinned, showing teeth that probably hadn’t seen a dentist in a while. “You ever heard of a gravity-fed water system? It’s how backcountry campers do it when they’re too broke or too smart to rely on electric pumps. You put water above where you need it, let gravity do the work. Simple physics, zero electricity.”
“How do we get water above Big Bertha?”
“You got a roof, don’t you?”
—
Twenty minutes later, Ian had drawn out a plan on a napkin that looked like it came from a mad scientist who’d been living in the woods too long. We needed:
A large water container or bladder (he had a spare 5-gallon collapsible water jug) – A way to get it on the roof (ladder—we had that) – A siphon hose (he had 20 feet of food-grade tubing) – A way to connect the hose to our existing water line (we had that in our emergency parts kit) – Gravity (free, last I checked)
“It’s not pretty, and it’s not permanent,” Ian said. “But it’ll get you through the weekend until you can fix or replace that pump. Plus, it’s kind of fun in a ‘Mad Max meets RV life’ sort of way.”
Lucy was skeptical. “We’re going to put a water jug on the roof and siphon water into our system?”
“That’s the beauty of gravity,” Ian said, lighting a cigarette that smelled like it was mostly tobacco and partly something else. “It’s been working for millions of years, and it’s never let me down. Unlike water pumps, relationships, and truck transmissions.”
We climbed up on Big Bertha’s roof with Ian’s 5-gallon collapsible jug. I filled it using water from the campground spigot, hauled it up the ladder bucket-brigade style with Lucy helping from below, and set it on the roof near the front end.
Ian ran the siphon tube from the jug, down the side of Big Bertha, and connected it to our water line at the connection point before the pump. He used a simple valve to control the flow.
“Now for the magic trick,” he said, opening the valve. “Go inside and turn on a faucet.”
Lucy turned on the kitchen sink. There was a sputter, a cough, and then—water. Actual running water, flowing from the faucet like we had a functioning pump.
“Holy shit, it works,” I said.
“Gravity always works,” Ian said. “Unlike water pumps, which are complicated and expensive and apparently don’t like Colorado.”
—
That evening, we invited Ian over for dinner as a thank-you. Lucy made spaghetti on the stove while I grilled some chicken we’d picked up in town. Ian brought his own contribution: a loaf of bread that was growing an ecosystem of mold and a half-empty bottle of tequila.
“Want some?” he offered, holding up the tequila.
“I’m good,” I said, eyeing the bottle.
“More for me then.” He took a swig straight from the bottle. “So what brings you two out here? Besides a broken water pump.”
We told him about our sixty-day trip, the disasters we’d survived, the people we’d met. Ian listened while demolishing the spaghetti like he hadn’t eaten in days. Which, based on the moldy bread situation, might have been accurate.
“That’s the thing about RV life,” Ian said, twirling his fork. “Everyone thinks it’s about the destinations, the Instagram photos, the fancy campgrounds. But it’s really about the disasters. The tire blowouts, the broken pumps, the times you’re stuck in the mud wondering if you made a huge mistake. That’s when you figure out what you’re made of.”
“Wise words,” Lucy said. “How long have you been doing this?”
“Three years, give or take.” He gestured at his truck camper with his fork. “Sold everything after my divorce, bought this rig for four grand, and hit the road. Best decision I ever made. Second best was learning to play ukulele, because turns out, women love a guy with a ukulele. Third best was realizing I could live on about thirty dollars a week if I wasn’t picky about bread quality.”
After dinner, Ian pulled out his ukulele and played us a few songs. He wasn’t good, exactly, but he was entertaining. He made up lyrics as he went, mostly about RV disasters and the unreliability of water pumps.
“I’ve also got a mountain bike,” he said, pointing to a beat-up Trek strapped to the side of his camper. “You guys mountain bike?”
“Never tried it,” I admitted.
“Well, tomorrow morning I’m hitting the trails near Purgatory. You’re welcome to come watch me eat shit on some rocks. It’s educational.”
—
Sunday morning, Lucy and I drove up to Purgatory Resort where Ian had said he’d be. We found him at a trailhead, gearing up with a bike that looked like it had been assembled from spare parts and hope. He handed me his phone.
“Film this,” he said. “It’s either gonna be awesome or a hospital trip. Either way, it’s content.”
We followed him down a beginner trail that quickly turned into something way more advanced. Ian didn’t slow down. He hit rocks at full speed, hopping over them like they were speed bumps. Roots? Hopped those too. A fallen log? He launched off it like a ramp.
“Is he insane?” Lucy asked.
“I think that’s implied,” I said, still filming.
Ian wiped out spectacularly on a rocky section, went airborne, and landed in a patch of bushes. He popped up immediately, gave us a thumbs up, and yelled, “THAT’S HOW WE DO IT IN DURANGO, BABY!”
He brushed himself off, got back on the bike, and kept going.
After an hour of watching Ian defy death and physics, we headed back to the campground. Ian’s phone was full of videos of him crashing, jumping, and somehow staying alive through sheer luck and terrible decision-making.
“You’re gonna put those on YouTube?” I asked.
“Hell yeah. My channel’s called ‘Broke Bachelor Does Dumb Stuff.’ Got like forty-three subscribers. Living the dream.”
—
Monday morning, we drove into Durango and found an RV supply store that sold water pumps. Got a new SHURflo 4008 for $180, plus some extra fittings and a backup pump switch just in case. Came back to the campground and installed it in about forty-five minutes.
Water pump worked perfectly. Crisis averted.
We found Ian at his campsite, working on his bike and drinking what I assume was breakfast tequila.
“Got the pump fixed,” I said. “Wanted to return your jug and say thanks.”
“Keep it,” Ian said. “You never know when you’ll need a backup water system. Besides, I’ve got three more somewhere in this camper. I’m like a water jug hoarder.”
“Why do you have so many water jugs?”
“Because water pumps are unreliable, and I like having options. Also one time I tried to make wine in a water jug and it didn’t work out great, but that’s a different story.”
Before we left, Ian played us one more song on his ukulele—an original composition he called “The Ballad of Big Bertha and the Broken Pump.” It was terrible and wonderful at the same time.
“Stay weird, man,” I said, shaking his hand.
“Always do. And remember—gravity’s free, water pumps are expensive, and if you ever need to know how to live on basically nothing, I’m your guy. My email’s on my YouTube channel.”
We drove out of Durango with a working water pump, a 5-gallon collapsible water jug, some wild videos of a bearded lunatic doing bike tricks, and a new appreciation for the fact that RV life attracts the most interesting people.
Big Bertha now had five battle scars: a patched roof, a surviving awning, a replaced tire, mud from Moab, and a water pump that had been temporarily replaced by gravity and a collapsible jug.
More importantly, we had another story about the people you meet on the road—people like Ian, who lived on moldy bread and tequila but knew more about backcountry survival than anyone we’d met.
Sometimes the difference between a ruined weekend and a good story is meeting a bearded ukulele player who lives in a truck camper and knows how gravity works.
