Car Trek

Joining The RV Nation

By Ken Wright is parked in Durango, Colorado. He is the author of A Wilder Life: Essays from Home, and Why I’m Against It All (Raven’s Eye Press). , 10-25-05

By Ken Wright

We were boldly going where no one had gone before …

Well, in a way no one – or none of us, anyway – has gone before.

Where we were going was north. Our two-month mission: To explore the spine of our beloved Rocky Mountains, as far as we could get (and back) over the summer. How we were going, though, was the real adventure: In an RV.

RVs … I know. I curse them, too. Living in a mountain town that panders to tourists, vacationers, and silver-haired, white-knuckled retirees driving Greyhound buses converted to homes nicer than I was raised in, I, too, have suffered. I have been damned, dammed behind these tin-can condos as they’ve labored up passes like mastodons running a marathon. I’ve watched with a perverse mix of dread and lurid anticipation as they’ve wobbled unsurely down sheer switchbacks like poodles trying to run with the wolves. And I’ve displayed stunning restraint dodging their weaving ways as they’ve negotiated our city’s streets and intersections, stopping, starting, and turning awkwardly like whales schooling with mackerel.

The source of my arrogance is that my wife and I have long been outdoor purists: backpackers, car campers, river runners, and commercial guides. In all those decades, we’ve always slept – and, for several summers, lived -- under either canvas or the stars, and the biggest “motor coach� we’ve employed has been a 1981 Jeep Wagoneer. And we have endeavored to raise our two children – now 10- and 12-year-old backcountry brats and river rats themselves -- the same proudly primitive way.

Yet here we be. We be RV.

We therefore knew going into it that this summer would be about more than adventure and travel; it would also involve a cultural leap as new members of RV nation. So we went into it with the only attitude we could: we wouldn’t just explore strange new worlds, we would also seek out new life, and a new civilization.

Although my wife and I had sworn off camper-aided camping, when we decided to make some epic memories with our kids, an RV, for the first time, started to make sense. This summer’s trek would be four of us out on the road for eight weeks, covering a lot of miles and moving our camp a lot. And we would be frequently in grizzly habitat, so the hard shell around us was comforting.

Given those parameters, what we ended up with was a used 24-foot Fleetwood Mallard camper trailer. (The name is important here: Something inside me – perhaps that manly part of me that refuses to wear Lycra or walk around in clogs – wouldn’t let me drive an enormous vehicle called what some RVs are named: Swinger. Wilderness. Cherokee. Zeppelin. Chateau Sport. Frolic. Slumber Queen. To name a few.) Inside the Mallard’s thin tin walls are the usual RV amenities: gas stove, small refrigerator, kitchen area, battery (or plug-in AC) power, water, and a good amount of storage space. Getting one of such length also enough space so that over two months we didn’t end up living out some RV version of The Shining.

It worked. With the help of our RV, we spent this summer exploring our home mountains -- visiting our national parks and honoring our public lands (before the Bush administration turns them into Six Flags Over Yellowstone, McGlacier, and DisneyCanyonlands), and we got to do it in a way that was fun and functional. Over two months and thousands of miles, we were always able to pull up to a spot – a campsite, a side road, a pull out in the woods or along a river or on a grand overlook with a sweeping view of the Rockies – and immediately be there. Rain or shine, cold or hot, all we had to do was park, balance the “foundation� with four jacks, turn on the hot water and water pump, and we were home. And then, if we wanted, it took just five minutes to unhook the truck, and we were off exploring deeper into our new terrain. And on those rainy nights – or when the mosquitoes were thick as rain – we gathered inside, dry and chipper, playing cards or reading.

Not that we couldn’t have done it otherwise, but covering that much ground in such varied terrain and through all kinds of weather was made much easier, quick, secure, and comfortable.

Comfortable, but this has also been a deeply humbling experience. Actually driving an RV, and not just pointing and cursing, has imparted in me a surprisingly elevated stature for my fellow RV jockeys. As we all know, you don’t have to be an astronaut to pilot an RV -- but it ain’t for sissies, either. Even as a commercial river guide, I have to admit that for generation of sheer fear, whitewater has nothing on hauling a small house on wheels over a mountain road. Think of hours and hours of non-stop class III – no pool-drop rush-relax cycles on the highway – interspersed with frequent, unpredictable class IV pitches: hills, narrow roads, other drivers, potholes, etc. Even walking through grizzly country is less dangerous than sharing a winding and narrow Northcountry road with tandem tanker semis and ancient overloaded logging trucks careening toward you.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I also have to admit that while driving this beast through city streets for needed resupply stops, I came to understand for the first time the value of The Box Store That Must Not Be Named – let’s call it Valdemart – for the RVer. It’s with great relief that an RV captain spies that huge pavement harbor for throwing out anchor, knowing that this is the one port required to gather the provisions needed to set sail again.

Still, even if I have come to appreciate and empathize with my RVing brothers and sisters, there are some places that, after sharing campgrounds with all sorts of RVs and RVers, my Thoreauvian conscience (and, lest we forget, Thoreau passed his Walden wilderness adventure in a cabin about the size of our RV) won’t let me go:

• I will never camp in a Valdemart parking lot.
• No generators. There’s nothing more suburban than the camper that pulls into the campground slot next to you, then fires up a whiny engine so the occupants can sit inside by themselves all night watching TV.
• Also for us, no TV. Some campgrounds have cable-TV hookups, and some RVs even have their own satellite dishes that rise from the roof like Eyewitness News vans covering a prison riot. But even in campground, we’re still there to see the land and meet the people.
• No road hogging. When I drive, I always pull over when there’s more than three vehicles stacked up behind us. It’s a way of “paying it forward� for when I return to my RV-following life back home.
• And we refuse to get one of those spare-tire covers for the back of our camper that says “Easy does it!� or “We’re the Wrights! from Durango, Colorado!� Ours instead says “Hayduke Lives!� Hey, I haven’t changed that much.

Aside from those who indulged in those behaviors, I have to say, I really liked most of the fellow RVers we met on the road and in campgrounds up and down the great Rocky Mountains. While these are not people we would normally wouldn’t run into camping the way we usually camp, they were still fun. They were friendly. They were interesting. They were … well, travelers, just like us. And I think we found with these folks a deeper connection here than I, in my mountain-man machismo, was ever willing to admit before.

Look, even though I’m now officially an RVer, I still don’t think RVing as worthy of the term “camping.� No, this is more like … cabining. But if you think about it, the RV and its lifestyle comes from a longer lineage than perhaps we backcountry snobs care to admit. While Europeans tend to idealize exploration in unexplored terra incognita in small (and generally male) parties, the fact is, the way primal people for millions of years really did most of their traveling and migrating was in family groups – and in groups of families – carrying their complete homes along known trails to re-visited and shared camping areas, which minimized impacts, offered security, and guaranteed amenities.

I would like to posit, then, that perhaps the RV is a modern-day technological version of that ancient form of travel, reflecting the nature of the “trail� system we have today. Today’s RVs run like wagons or travois or carts or pack animals across the landscape – their occupants something like Bedouins, or gypsies, or the American prairie horse cultures. And RVers then rendezvous nightly in campgrounds or on back roads, remote byways, and roadside turnouts, gathering in tight little self-protecting circles, sharing company and space.

Perhaps the RV, seen in this new light, is just the evolutionary step between the tipi and the starship. I mean, isn’t that exactly where were are as a culture? Aren’t we all just a little RV?

Ken Wright is parked in Durango, Colorado. He is the author of A Wilder Life: Essays from Home, and Why I’m Against It All (Raven’s Eye Press).

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