Strange Bedfellows for a Camper

Full time RV boondockers are famous for sleeping around. Perhaps our most interesting bedmate is the industrial economy, which at times can be far more interesting than postcard scenery. 

One summer I squatted on a maritime pier on Puget Sound. I was awakened in the middle of night by the bellowing horn of a huge tugboat that had pulled up.
I quickly got dressed and staggered around on the pier, still half asleep. The crew was changing shifts. The tugboat's job was to escort football-field-sized oil tankers to a nearby refinery. My eye was drawn to the huge ropes that lashed the tugboat to the pier.

At my present boondocking campsite on the east side of Chino Valley, AZ, I am enjoying watching the macho equipment roll in to build another power line.

Have you ever thought of the technological miracles of the 1800's: the conversion of mechanical motion into electricity, and thence into so many things? People of a few generations ago went through bigger changes than we have, despite the cliche that Progress moves faster every year.

My full-sized cargo van looked petite compared to all of the equipment rolling in. The first morning here, a caravan of Caterpillar-colored ground-chewers rumbled by, equally spaced, and preceded by a tanker truck that hosed down the dirt road, like a drum majorette preparing the way for a marching band.

A crane had a weird, Tyrannosaurus Rex effect, when looking at it through the passenger-side mirror. Recall that famous scene in "Jurassic Park": objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

And so, off the power goes to the affluent home-dwellers of Prescott, who have never given a thought to what their standard of living is based on.