Ed Fischer knows how to find bicycles, but he recently was in the market for a camper, so he put a post on Craigslist.
“I got some leads,” said Fischer, who owns Camas Bike and Sport. “Some were scams and some were misleading. I didn’t want something rotting on property and growing ferns off it with big leaks in it that was moldy. I didn’t want to bring down somebody’s trash.”
Fischer was looking for a trailer because he adopted a family displaced by the Camp Fire in California.
“I wanted to find something worth taking down there and that would be worth living in,” he said. “If it wasn’t something I could go camping in for a weekend, it’s not something I would want to ask someone to live in for a few months.”
On Wednesday, Fischer and a friend, Jeff Paul, set off from Camas at around 4 a.m. and drove down to Centerville, Calif.
“It was very rural, very remote,” Fischer said. “The place got devastated by floods after the fire. The road to get up there was trashed. It was surreal. Everything burns down because they haven’t gotten rain in a few months and then they get flooded right after.”
The trailer Fischer and Paul drove down was a 27-foot camper a man in Oregon City, Ore., offered to sell for about $2,000. Fischer put another few hundred dollars into it and fixed the water heater himself. He put some info about the effort on his website, www.logoffandride.com. People donated to help him pay for the camper and gas to drive it down to California. They also donated items for the camper, such as pots, pans, dishes, towels and linens. Fischer estimated that he recouped about two-thirds of what he paid to buy, fix up and drive down the RV.
“I was trying to get resourceful,” he said. “That’s the power of a community store that can get some people rallying behind it. On your own, it’d be hard to do. It was not the shop doing this. It was me on my own. I used the shop as a tool.”
They made it to the family right as it got dark Wednesday, and met them at the local DMV so they could gift them the camper and get all the paperwork done. Fischer said the man he was in contact with lives with his two or three teenage daughters. He has a son in his mid-20s who has three kids of his own, and they lived in a house on the same property. Both houses burned down in the fire, Fischer said.
“The property is theirs,” Fischer said. “They have a reason to go back and rebuild.”
Fischer talked to a few families in California before connecting with the one he ended up donating the camper to. Some, he said, ended up leaving the area completely or found other ways to buy RVs to live in. Fischer said the family he worked with used money from FEMA to clear the property and get utilities back, leaving them without enough money to buy a camper.
The idea for the donation came after someone asked Fischer for help fixing up a different RV. He got the idea to look for someone else in need after that.
“You want to make those live, real connections,” he said. “You don’t always really see where it goes or what it does when you make a donation. This was connected to the real, true benefit it’s going to provide for someone.”
