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"He's got the American dream right now. He's got a wife and a home," says Turley, who now lives in the foothills above Chico but continues to watch Rickey's transformation with bemusement. "I think it's just having someone around who cares about him, someone to love him."
Rickey credits Alyson with his transformation, but he credits the RV park, too.
"I think the thing about the trailer park is that it has changed my perspective on the old Rickey. I know I need a mailing address, electricity, laundry facilities, a shower," he says. "Look at me, I'm completely clean. I'm such a hypocrite."
Picking up one of the silver-alloy hairpins he makes, Rickey recalls time he once spent in and out of Santa Rita State Prison more than a decade ago on domestic violence charges. He recalls his drug-addled dad who's now in an asylum, the fights he used to get in on the street. He's a jewelry-making businessman now, not a street hustler, he says.
"But I'm a lot different man now. The violent part, that's the one part of myself that I'm really trying to get rid of," he says. "You see this, this is me now. This is me, not all that other stuff."
The new Rickey is a man of generous spirit who will scramble to find a chair for a guest, even if it's just an upturned crate. He's someone who will josh with a loudmouthed homeless madman who comes barging toward his jewelry stand, give him a pocketful of change, and send him on his way with a collegial pat on the back.
"He lost his keys the other week. Before, it would be a huge fight and freak-out. But he just said, 'It's OK, I'll find them later,' " Alyson says one afternoon as she hammers out necklace links in their bus' living room. "I said, 'Hey, what's that?' And he just said, 'I'm tired of freaking out.' He wants to be settled.
"He's hinting for me to stop taking birth control pills."
Ten spaces to the south of the school bus that is home to Rickey and Alyson, Helen Robbins is realizing her dreams, too.
For Helen, a smallish, white-haired woman in her early 60s who lives in a 30-foot, orange-and-white trailer, the RV park has been part of the modest realization of a humble but enduring aspiration.
Helen Robbins, you see, had always wanted to be a woman about town. Not an opening-performance, Stars, or Top of the Mark sort of woman about town. Helen is a soft-spoken, modest woman of unpretentious tastes. She doesn't go for showing off, and she'll tell you so.
But long ago she decided she would settle for nothing less than being an operagoing, window-shopping-at-Union Square, and afternoon-by-the-wharf sort of woman about town.
And that's just who she has become.
It's taken 20 years of working overtime as a Dallas accountant and socking away two-thirds of her salary, but she's done it. She's retired early, bought a trailer, and parked herself right in the middle of the most citified city west of the Mississippi.
"That was my goal. I had no dreams of being a millionaire with a 50-foot yacht," she says. "I've more or less always been a fan of the symphony, of opera, and San Francisco has always had a good opera, good ballet, and a good symphony."
Helen traces her dreams of urbanity to the 1940s, when she was a child in Dallas. Her father was gone much of the time because of his job, and her mother would play the radio while she ironed, cooked, or took care of other chores.
"During the war there wasn't an opportunity to get out and do anything for most people. So we'd listen to opera on the radio," she says.
Before long, she was itching to get out of Dallas, and getting accepted to the University of Texas at Austin seemed the ticket. There, she dreamed of being an artiste, got an English degree, and got married -- to a man who took her back to Dallas.
She bore and raised his children to adulthood, and then he left her. So Helen Robbins started planning again in earnest to leave Dallas, this time for good. It was not a dramatic plan: She would save like a church mouse until she had enough money to retire, and then get out. But it was one she held to with a passion.
"The divorce made me realize that I'm not stuck in the same rut," she says. "So I started working extra hard to be able to retire early. I did what I called 'disciplined saving,' saving everything I could get my hands on. The kids were grown up, and I didn't have to spend it on them. I didn't spend it on myself. I just saved it. If you're making $50,000, you can actually live on $20,000."
Which she did for 20 years. About year 15, she got married again, this time to a fellow accountant named Howard, and with two years to go, they bought an orange-and-white trailer that is as long as two station wagons.
After a few weekend trips, Helen was hooked. RV living was the life for her, she decided, and by the time she had saved enough money to retire 12 years ago they hitched up the trailer, drove out of Dallas, and never looked back.
"I found out I enjoy it," Helen says. "You have the freedom to be able to pick up and go whenever you want. If it rains, you just move your home to where it's not raining. If it's cold, you just drive to where it's warmer."
