Camp Dead End

How many articles do you remember from glossy travel magazines? Believe it or not, I remember one. The title was "Camp Dead End." It was a warning against holing up permanently in an RV park, instead of 'chasing adventure out there on the open road'. The article was in harmony with the RV industry's economic self-interest, of course. But the article was still eloquent.


Travel writing is not as dreadful as it is because the writers are all blockheads. It's bad because it can be. Travel writing is just a thinly disguised infomercial for airlines, resorts, cruises, boats, and RVs.

Travel adventure is a misused phrase. Real adventure is something that must be experienced; it takes patience, luck, and real guts. The average American is lucky to have two weeks of vacation per year. They are too weary and frazzled to experience anything, let alone adventure. The best they can hope for is to shoehorn in some frantic consumption of luxuries and distractions that have a travel flavor or image.

But back to the article about Camp Dead End. RV parks attract nice, normal, conventional people who are not very interesting. The RV industry has made RVs so comfortable and bourgeois that the whole culture has been dumbed down to a lowest common denominator type of person, of the kind who runs two air conditioners all day long, while sitting in an easy chair and watching big screen television. Take away satellite TV and most RV adventurers would drop out in a month.  I want to become a van camper type hard-ass.

And yet here I have reposed, for almost three years now. Every new day is just another circle scribbled around a common center, and whose diameter shrinks almost imperceptibly. My life is circling the drain of deadening routine. It becomes smaller. Camp Dead End is death in slow motion. Lately I've swatted an average of five flies per day. Maybe tomorrow's adventure will involve six.