Recently I had visitors from Arizona's Ant Hill #2, Tucson, who I was supposed to coach on the RV lifestyle. (They had a rental RV and were considering buying one.) I did a poor job of it despite being well qualified for the job.
Their main concern was in assessing the comfort and practicality of their mid-sized Class C motorhome. How can an experienced camper be useful when the other person's basic philosophical orientation is wrong? (I'm still searching for that wonderful quote from Aristotle about the tiniest mistake at the beginning of a project having the largest consequences.)
For instance, they thought that living in an RV was supposed to be just like living in a little house. The tiniest adjustments to their daily habits were purely negative aspects of RVing to them: partial proof their experiment had failed.
Certainly RV living is similar to house living, in ways. But not identical. The difference is subtle but important. They just don't get it: RVing has pretty much the same comforts as a house, but only after you work at it; and that has the effect of making you consciously enjoy those comforts. Eight units of consciously-enjoyed comfort add more pleasure to your life than eighty units of comfort taken for granted.
There is so much phoniness in the conventional middle-class notion of pragmatism. Their worship of comfort leads to hollow victories. Competitive status-seeking poisons everything they do. But a general sermon on this topic is best left to a book. My style is the short essay, the philosophical vignette.
Coffee Girl and I were coming back to camp from a long walk in the Sonoran Desert when I saw an unusual white object on the rocks just behind my campsite.
Since a pickup was parked nearby, I thought the white object was somebody's tee-shirt or windbreaker. But it wasn't. It was the white breast of a raptor that was just too big to be real. My gawd I just had to get a photo of this magnificent beast, whatever it was. I tried to be as stealthy as possible in photographing it. In the next photo I was "hiding" between two saguaro cacti. Raptors usually show an amused look on their face at this point in the "hunt", as if to say, "What sort of nonsense is this? Who does this impudent wingless two-legger think he's fooling!"
As it turned out, the mystery bird was just a red-tailed hawk of the type I've seen before.
After some amateurish imitations of ravens or owls I finally annoyed him enough to fly off.
I got so nervous trying to get that photo that I moved the camera too much and it's a little blurry. Well, my bubble was now burst. But with enough endorphins in the bloodstream it was easy to be a good sport about it. It was still delightful to see that big, white, raptor chest, warming itself in the morning sun. How bold and brazen he was!
But how could I explain to my friends from the ant hill the value of this experience? So I saw a hawk; big deal. Back in Ant Hill #2 they could drive (through 35 traffic lights) to a famous desert wildlife museum and see dozens of interesting animals (looking bored in their cages). There's an admission price and a busy parking lot at the museum -- proof that it has value. So what (!) if my encounter with the hawk was serendipitous and right outside my bedroom? Its specialness was important only to me. There was no money changing hands. From their point of view value and money-price are the same thing.
Or they could smash and bash their way through late rush-hour traffic to an evening lecture about raptors, by a famous wildlife expert at the university. Even if the value of that lecture didn't come from a monetary charge, the gravitas and dignity of the occasion would be established by the wine and brie served before the lecture, and by the sheer size of its well-educated audience.
The weekend with my visitors from the ant hill really brought out something that I barely notice most of the time: that a camper derives value from subjective experiences. He cares for it -- whatever 'it' is -- and consciously notices it, suffers its absence, and revels in its presence. He puts 'it' to use. He creates value just by effort and conscious caring, rather than by rushing around town to buy crap or using a crowd of people to establish value. The camper is simultaneously radically-subjective and radically-objective with the idea of value.
The cynical reader might say, "Well, Boonie, it's all well and good that you are enjoying your own little mental playground out there in the desert. But don't most insane people function that way?" In order to "prove" their anthill is more sane than me, they need only say that more people agree with their point of view. Naturally King Number determines all.
One of the modern classics is the book by Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences. From chapter 2:
Their main concern was in assessing the comfort and practicality of their mid-sized Class C motorhome. How can an experienced camper be useful when the other person's basic philosophical orientation is wrong? (I'm still searching for that wonderful quote from Aristotle about the tiniest mistake at the beginning of a project having the largest consequences.)
For instance, they thought that living in an RV was supposed to be just like living in a little house. The tiniest adjustments to their daily habits were purely negative aspects of RVing to them: partial proof their experiment had failed.
Certainly RV living is similar to house living, in ways. But not identical. The difference is subtle but important. They just don't get it: RVing has pretty much the same comforts as a house, but only after you work at it; and that has the effect of making you consciously enjoy those comforts. Eight units of consciously-enjoyed comfort add more pleasure to your life than eighty units of comfort taken for granted.
There is so much phoniness in the conventional middle-class notion of pragmatism. Their worship of comfort leads to hollow victories. Competitive status-seeking poisons everything they do. But a general sermon on this topic is best left to a book. My style is the short essay, the philosophical vignette.
Coffee Girl and I were coming back to camp from a long walk in the Sonoran Desert when I saw an unusual white object on the rocks just behind my campsite.
Since a pickup was parked nearby, I thought the white object was somebody's tee-shirt or windbreaker. But it wasn't. It was the white breast of a raptor that was just too big to be real. My gawd I just had to get a photo of this magnificent beast, whatever it was. I tried to be as stealthy as possible in photographing it. In the next photo I was "hiding" between two saguaro cacti. Raptors usually show an amused look on their face at this point in the "hunt", as if to say, "What sort of nonsense is this? Who does this impudent wingless two-legger think he's fooling!"
As it turned out, the mystery bird was just a red-tailed hawk of the type I've seen before.
After some amateurish imitations of ravens or owls I finally annoyed him enough to fly off.
I got so nervous trying to get that photo that I moved the camera too much and it's a little blurry. Well, my bubble was now burst. But with enough endorphins in the bloodstream it was easy to be a good sport about it. It was still delightful to see that big, white, raptor chest, warming itself in the morning sun. How bold and brazen he was!
But how could I explain to my friends from the ant hill the value of this experience? So I saw a hawk; big deal. Back in Ant Hill #2 they could drive (through 35 traffic lights) to a famous desert wildlife museum and see dozens of interesting animals (looking bored in their cages). There's an admission price and a busy parking lot at the museum -- proof that it has value. So what (!) if my encounter with the hawk was serendipitous and right outside my bedroom? Its specialness was important only to me. There was no money changing hands. From their point of view value and money-price are the same thing.
Or they could smash and bash their way through late rush-hour traffic to an evening lecture about raptors, by a famous wildlife expert at the university. Even if the value of that lecture didn't come from a monetary charge, the gravitas and dignity of the occasion would be established by the wine and brie served before the lecture, and by the sheer size of its well-educated audience.
The weekend with my visitors from the ant hill really brought out something that I barely notice most of the time: that a camper derives value from subjective experiences. He cares for it -- whatever 'it' is -- and consciously notices it, suffers its absence, and revels in its presence. He puts 'it' to use. He creates value just by effort and conscious caring, rather than by rushing around town to buy crap or using a crowd of people to establish value. The camper is simultaneously radically-subjective and radically-objective with the idea of value.
The cynical reader might say, "Well, Boonie, it's all well and good that you are enjoying your own little mental playground out there in the desert. But don't most insane people function that way?" In order to "prove" their anthill is more sane than me, they need only say that more people agree with their point of view. Naturally King Number determines all.
One of the modern classics is the book by Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences. From chapter 2:
The average man of the present age has a metaphysic in the form of a conception known as "progress"...
But since his metaphysic calls only for magnitude and number, since it is becoming without a goal, it is not a source of distinctions of value. It is a system of quantitative comparison.
Comments
I'm one of those guys who wants to live in an RV because it IS different than living in a house. The people who don't "get it" never will. To them, I'll always be "living in a van, down by the river" and I like that they think that way.
We need those people, to remind us of what we don't want to be, as much as they need us so they have someone to point at and warn their children about.
Just recently I ran into some folks who were excited about taking a jeep tour to the same place. They may have seen a few spots that I didn't see, but I got to walk in the footsteps of the Indians who had made this canyon their own for hundreds of years. It was a tremendous experience and one I will never forget. Not everyone can say that.