Covid campers -or- The Folly of Youth: cower in place 29

ig Brother Zuckerberg is definitely still listening in. Kathleen and I were driving one morning recently, and Kathleen says out of the blue, “I think we should get an RV! I’m sick of staying at home, and an RV is really the only way we could safely travel around and see things!”. We were in my pickup truck, which has no internet or even a fully functioning radio, but somehow he heard, because the very next day on the internet was an unsolicited article from Bloomberg, “Scared Americans Desperate to Travel Are Buying Up ‘Covid Campers’”.

Jeff Green explains in the article:

Cooped-up Americans desperate to get out after months of lockdowns are dreaming of doing something—anything—that resembles a vacation. But a majority of them worry a second wave of the coronavirus is coming, and think politicians have pushed too fast to reopen. Unsurprisingly, when it comes to getting out of Dodge, the close-quarters of an airline cabin are a no-go. That’s where the “Covid camper” comes in.

Too true! Kathleen’s argument for a Recreational Vehicle made sense to me, as it apparently has done to stir-crazy covid shut-ins all across the country. Though how to implement such a step right now, when we haven’t even gone into a building other than our home since February, will take some thinking.

But there’s nothing to stop me from taking a trip down memory lane to times past when we’ve worked or played in mobile digs. As Toad says, “Oh, the open road!”

Back when Kathleen and I were first courting, we decided it’d be a lark to go camping on Asso­teague Island. And by camping, I mean driving there in her new Chevy Vega hatch­back with the back seat folded down, and when we were done frolic­king on the dunes or what­ever, we’d just sleep in the back. And it worked, in theory.

In practice, by the end of the day of fun and sun, one of us was completely bright red with sunburn (who knew that could happen?) and the other was covered head to toe with mosquito bites. And the back of a Vega hatchback with the seat folded down is (a) so cramped that two people couldn’t lay side by side in the back, (b) not really flat, and (c) hot, if you didn’t want to open the window and let the insects in. But we were young and in love, so everything worked out all right in the end.

Note on pictures: none of these are the actual vehicles from my past. In fact, they might not even be the same models. But they are a good likeness for what I see now in my mind's eye.

A bit later when we had settled into married life, we bought a big hulking used Jeep Wagoneer station wagon, which we called “the Whale”. One of its chief selling points was that our girls would someday be of driving age, and I thought it would be useful to have a car which when they said “Daddy, I need to borrow the car”, I knew they really needed it. The thing screamed Family Car—it even had fake wood exterior paneling, as I recall.

This was our vehicle of choice for our camping excursions when the kids were young. It was our first 4-wheel drive car, and we were immensely proud of that. I remember once we had gone on a jaunt to somewhere in Virginia, where they let you park and pitch your tent anywhere, and we decided that the best place was at the top of a grassy meadow only accessible up a 45° grade (I am exercising dramatic license here. I call the slope 45° to give my story credibility, but I distinctly remember it was at least 75°, maybe even 95°. Especially on the way down.)

We were too tired to think clearly when we arrived, but hell, we had 4-wheel drive, so up we went! By morning, we weren’t nearly as tired or careless, and the prospect of driving down the slope we drove up the night before was positively terrifying. But there was no way around it, so eventually we did it. We backed down, because (a) we couldn’t turn around or I was sure halfway through the car would start rolling down sideways, and (b) anyway I sure didn’t want to look down the slope we were driving on.

On the way back to civilization, we lost the rubber on one of the tires and had to limp back on the steel belts because we didn’t have a working spare (Did I mention I was still in my “foolish” phase? This was the same road trip where I hopped out of the car at one point to pick up a snake skin on the road to impress my woman with my man skills, only to realize that the snake wasn’t done using it yet).

My parents had taken us on several extended driving-camping trips across the country when I was a youngster, and I wanted to recreate something like that for our own girls. One year, back in the 1980s, there was one of those gas-shortage summers we used to get back then. But there were some signs that it wasn’t as bad out west. We reasoned that this was the perfect year for a driving trip, because (a) maybe there wasn’t really a shortage out there, and (b) everyone will stay home because of the gas shortage, and we’d have Yellowstone Park and the Rockies and the Grand Canyon all to ourselves!

So we did it. To maximize our out-west time, we flew into Denver, where we rented the biggest car on the lot for our trip. It was a shiny new Chrysler Cordoba with genuine Corinthian leather interior! We packed our family tent and all our supplies (which we had cannily mailed ahead to save on airline luggage) into the spacious trunk, along with the rented snow chains that were de rigueur wear for some of the places we planned on going. The thought of driving such a posh car through the rocky wilderness just added to the adventure!

The trip was a great success. We saw all the best western parks, we made friends with a chipmunk in Yellowstone that turned the Cordoba into his mobile home for a one-way trip to Arizona, when we finally flushed him out, and his hoard of our chips and sunflower seeds, during a trip to a laundromat. (Hey! I was obviously still not out of my foolish phase, and hadn’t yet heard of invasive species, or plague squirrels.)

The girls liked it for the most part, but sometimes bemoaned the lack of such amenities as curling irons and flush toilets. (This happened before cell phones were invented, so no one complained about not having one of those.) One of the girls’ favorite stops was late in the trip, when we were tired and dirty from camping and decided to just crash in a motel. With a pool! I can’t blame them for liking it. Though this didn’t occur to me at the time, for them a motel was as big a novelty as a geyser or a gorge. Bigger, since they had now already experienced those.

This motel stop presaged a new phase in our lives, where the kids got too busy to come along, work made for short vacation windows, and our bones grew increasingly achy. This caused us to transition away from camping and other mobile-house trips to vacationing at hotels, motels, farm­houses and hostels.

We returned to the caravanning life, sort of, when Kathleen’s job as a nurse included a regular mandatory on-call weekend, where she was required to stay within 30 minutes of St. Mary’s Hospital (which was about 60 minutes from our house). We got ourselves a beat-up old trailer, and set it up on a friend’s property down on Breton Bay, MD, 20 minutes from the hospital. Here Kathleen would stay when she was on call. Sometimes I’d stay too.

A third of a century later, my memory can classify those times as fun. The trailer was snug, even for just two. It was almost warm enough if you kept under the electric blanket, and staying there gave off an aura of adventure. If Kathleen wanted to make a phone call, she had to climb a nearby telephone pole à la Green Acres. (If you aren’t familiar with the Green Acres telephone pole meme, then you are clearly not old enough to be a Third Ager, and what are you doing reading this?) Incoming calls weren’t an option (still no cell phones), and more than one night’s sleep was interrupted by a knock on the door by the State Police bringing word to Kathleen of some medical emergency. Good times!

Let me close with a link to my favorite mobile-home cartoon, Mickey’s Trailer, even though I’ve shared this before (here). I’ve got to put it up again because (a) it’s just so good, it bears watching twice, (b) it perfectly captures the whole mobile home vibe, and (c) when I was young and my parents took us on those cross-country roads trip in our popup tent-trailer, one of my most vivid memories was going to Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and seeing this movie short playing at the nickelodeon arcade there.

Thanks! Happy trails!
Dorn
June 2, 2020