Occupation of Independence

We interrupt this story of embarrassing foolishness, and will leave the reader hanging in suspense about whether Ol' Boonie gets off the mountain in one piece. But we'll get back to it next time. Newbies to the RV blogosphere might be unaware how much silly nonsense they are about to encounter. Most of it is harmless as long as they take it with a grain of salt. Much of it is due to "boondockers", since RV park "campers" are so middle class/suburban/boring that they seldom blog. The blarniest of the blarney-ers are probably van campers, or worse yet, stealth van campers. The last thing the RV blogosphere needs is one more smelly fool bragging about how he hasn't paid to camp for years because he camps for free (next to railroad tracks) in cities or on public land. Or how he sleeps in the trunk of his Toyota Corolla, together with a week's supply of his own poopies in double garbage bags, and washes himself with Baby-Wipes by "rubbing a littl

South Fork, CO. There is a quiet, but profound, satisfaction when using a mountain bike for "foraging" and reconnaissance, rather than mere entertainment or exercise. The more business-like camping and exercise become, the more authentic they feel. That's what makes this a job, rather than a vacation. It's an under-rated pleasure to mountain bike on a perfect forest road; one that is smooth, graded, hard, and relentlessly, mercilessly uphill. The shade held up well, and it kept getting cooler. The forest changed into thick, overgrown spruce at 10,000 feet. Other than the shade over the road there isn't a single good thing to say about spruce forests. Finally I got an open view of the neighborhood mountain. Alas there was probably no way to hike above tree-line from this road without bushwhacking through that disgusting spruce forest. Finding this out was why I was there. Some automatic mechanisms clicked into place when I found the best dispersed campsit

Recently I was camped with a non-self-contained van camper. It was remarkable how much fine cooking she could do just with a Coleman stove, ice chest, and picnic table. Mind you, her creations were done in the face of New Mexican "horizontal gravity," the wind. Unlike me, she was also organized with packing and unpacking her van. Clearly she should just go on doing what she has become good at. Then there's the rest of us. I never liked camping when I was young. How ironic that I became a full time RVer who emphasizes dispersed RV camping. If I had to do it all over again, I would. But how did I manage to do it in the first place?! It was just dumb luck that I managed to distinguish some outdoor activities from others. You can love walking or bicycling in the outdoors, and dislike housekeeping, cooking, or reading in the outdoors. You can like living in a small, hard-walled box and dislike tent camping. Don't let me or anybody else oversell the Great Outdoors. T

Some time ago I joked about RVers who have been diagnosed with the Early Bedtime Syndrome . But actually, sleep is too serious a matter to joke about. If the problem were merely one of rising too early in the morning, that wouldn't be so bad.  But the real issue is that going to bed too early also detracts from the depth and quality of sleep.  Snuggling in early on a winter evening, in front of the catalytic heater. This problem becomes even worse if you need to camp in some noisy campground or city; there  you need to stay up as late as possible, so that the din has a chance to die down some.   Currently I'm basking in a week of success at overcoming this dreadful scourge, so perhaps it's time for an update. The long days of June are certainly the time of year to get serious about beating this sucker.  My earlier theory was that the Early Bedtime Syndrome was brought on by not running enough lights at night. The good news is that the LED lighting revolution has

...positive inches, when you're lucky. I've done a lot of back-and-forth about whether my next travel trailer should be a converted cargo trailer 6 foot or 7 foot wide. When we discussed trailer size a few months back, didn't an experienced RV camper say that width doesn't matter much? He wasn't necessarily wrong, of course. It all depends on your camping style. If you spend a lot of time camping in ponderosa forests, where trees are far enough apart to suck you in, width does matter. Note the driver's side mirror and the nearest tree. To heck with 7 foot wide trailers. Six feet is the width of the tow vehicle. But in this case, I was using a flank attack (where width mattered) rather than a direct frontal assault, where ground clearance was even trickier. It's an example of how logically-distinct design criteria blur together in the real world. At any rate, the campsite (near Luna, NM) was worth it. The forest fire last year near Glenwood NM. 

Baby Boomers should have something to say about consuming information as a way of life. When we came into this world, the great blight of television befell the world. Today, toward the end of our passage, the internet is taking over. These are two information revolutions just as big as, but far more sudden than, the invention of the alphabet or Gutenberg's movable-type printing press. Baby Boomers, destined to eventually become America's Worst Generation, started off life as the first generation raised on television. TV-haters (like me) would love to believe that that proves cause and effect. Whether you buy that or not, it is strange how uncritically many parents welcomed TV into their homes in the 1950s. Soon the living room furniture was all arranged around the TV set. Many children grew up with no restrictions on their TV habits. How ironic that many a traditional father in the 1950s kept a gun in the house to 'protect his family', you know. And yet he allowed th

It has been some time since I was camped at the right distance (say, 4 miles) from a train. A busy track lies beside Interstate 40. The overall route has been popular over the decades for many forms of transportation, and for good reason. It reaches the Pacific without crossing any mountain passes.   A ppreciating the quiet rumbl e of the train and its whistle is more intense if you frankly acknowledge how obnoxious they are up close. W hen you hear that soothing sound from 4 miles off , you have to wonder how it could be the same machine. In a stationary hou se you would be quite lucky to be at just the right distance for the train to have the optimum effect . In an RV park you would probably be squeezed between the interstate highway and the t rain track.  But a dispersed camper ca n easily move a mile closer or further aw ay. W ith that idea in mind Coffee Girl and I mountain biked downhill a ways yesterday until we could see over the last ridge. There it was, still a couple

After getting sick of looking at infomercials on the internet I finally had a chance to kick some tires on real cargo vans, which we have all agreed are the ultimate towing machines for a serious RV camper. The exciting news in the cargo van biz is the new Nissan NV cargo van. (And once again I thank the commenter who brought this vehicle to my attention.) I found a used one for sale. Unlike the usual Chevy Express on the lot, this particular Nissan NV had both an auxiliary transmission lubricant cooler and an engine oil cooler.  Notice how square and planar the inside of the van is. Down with those rounded and irregular ribs that are on older Chevy and Ford vans! This Nissan NV van looks so easy to convert. The planarity of the top and sides ensures that only a slight bend would be needed for insulation and Luann plywood.   It even has threaded holes on a regular basis so you can add shelves, etc. At 5' 11.5" I can stand completely upright in the van. But by th

On Mogote Ridge, near El Rito, NM. Would you smile about being woken up at 5 in the morning? No? Well I do, and remember, I'm the alleged curmudgeon. Hunters really do keep some strange hours. The funniest thing is when they go by at 5 am with six hounds in kennel boxes in the back of the pickup truck, all baying at full volume. One bear hunter stopped at my campsite today and told me that one of his hounds was lost or perhaps stolen. The dog had a GPS tracker on its collar, which went blank a couple days ago. He said the hound cost him $4000-5000, after training and other overhead. On top of that he has five other hounds, a thousand dollar rifle, a hunting license costing several hundred dollars, GPS gadgets, and a $50,000 four-wheel-drive pickup truck, which of course is a requirement for getting to the places the bears are or might be. That is getting to be one expensive bear. So much for my stereotype of male consumers as sensible, no-nonsense sort of guys. How strange an

At the beginning of Tom Jones , one of the first and most enduringly popular novels in the English language, Henry Fielding tried to give the reader a succinct and accurate description of what was coming in the novel, analogous to the bill of fare that a prospective customer might see on the door of a restaurant.  As a reader of blogs I can sometimes get annoyed with vague or misleading titles. They are used, presumably, by writers who want to harvest the greatest number of eyeballs, regardless of whether the reader's time is being wasted. It seemed long overdue to refine the subtitle on this blog so that readers can immediately decide whether they are barking up the wrong tree or not. So I've added "television-free" to the subtitle. Why is this important? A person can eat junk fast food on a frequent basis and not blimp out or develop health problems for a while, but it will catch up with you eventually. So too can you fill your eyeballs and brain with menta

And so my career in the RV Quest for Community Caravan is over. I left for another campsite in the same area this morning. It was a noble experiment and, I think, a successful one. By "success" I mean that it involved non-trivial interaction between members, resulting in certain changes in their behavior or daily lifestyle. Two raptors chase a raven around a thermal uplift. Whatever else, we avoided the standard malaise of intentional/planned Utopias: repression and stasis. Recall your Toynbee (*): For these works [planned Utopias] are always programmes of action masquerading in the disguise of imaginary descriptive sociology. Hence in almost all Utopias...an invincibly stable equilibrium is the aim to which all other social ends are subordinated and, if need be, sacrificed. The experience also required me to scrutinize my behavior around other campers, and then try to file off some of my sharp edges. Or one could look at it as a good little Hegel

I make no secret of having little faith in building a loose RV camping caravan/community on the basis of idealism, platitudes, hippie-dippie cultural values, or group therapy while sitting in chairs. Talk is cheap. For me what matters is common activities in the outdoors -- activities that really matter to people -- and then acknowledging that these outdoor interests are more fun when sharing them with other people. It is a great challenge to do this within an RV milieu because of mainstream RV culture's fanatical negativity towards using the human body for anything other than operating a motor vehicle or waddling down to the next potluck. And most of them are too old, too fat, completely out-of-shape, and have health problems.  I have an ex-RVer friend who now lives in Tucson, which has a huge hiking club. He has had many hours of enjoyment with them. He had little opportunity for the same success with RVers, and that's one reason why he abandoned RVing. Apparently h

Although there are boondockers who praise Solitude for the sake of itself, I disagree. Solitary camping for me is largely the result of two things:  1) most men are paired with a woman who thinks boondocking is uncomfortable and unsafe, as well as boring since it's a 5 hour drive to the nearest Coach or Nieman-Marcus.  2) most rigs are not designed for, or well adapted to, the needs of boondocking. (Point 2 is partly the result of Point 1.) Therefore if you want to boondock, young man, my advice is to stay single and get a good dog. Hence I usually had to camp alone, by necessity. But if we do manage to found a core group of boondocking outdoorsmen, it would make a great group project to "design" a suitable rig for our lifestyle. The RV industry builds rigs for a typical customer whose desires are very different from ours. There are two basic approaches: 1) Select and combine a system of mass-produced rigs/vehicles/appliances that are readily available and repairabl

Glenwood NM. This is the first area I stopped at last August when I got back on the road. I was very mindful of being a better traveler than before. This is harder than it sounds. An experienced traveler learns that some camping situations work better than others; and some places are better than others. As you follow an annual migratory cycle, you polish your technique so that it works better and better. The trouble is that you become a successful specialist, with all the narrowness and lack of variety that that brings on.  For example we usually allow wireless internet and phone service to affect our itinerary, at least implicitly. There is a real downside to giving in to internet addiction. The Glenwood NM area is a Verizon hole. The experienced and specialized traveler might just blow through the area, and barely stop. He has really lost something. Does he even bother to discover that there is DSL in the area! That surprised me -- it means that wi-fi and the "e

No doubt a couple people -- including myself -- have been surprised by me surviving almost three weeks in a mobile "intentional community," without being booted out. Another phrase for what we are doing is "an RV caravan with a difference." We are attempting to build a community, rather than one more routine RV group.    Normally RV Gatherings and caravans are about having a good time, i.e., potlucks, happy hour, local sightseeing, and maybe some how-to seminars. RVers -- typically newbies -- have paid dues to join some organization, and they see the gathering as a chance to recoup some of that money by plugging themselves into a standard product that is at least good for a little entertainment or education. You all arrive as amiable strangers, spend a few days playing "Ten Questions" ( Soooooo, where ya from...?) , and then depart as strangers, never expecting to see that group of bores again.    For the next few weeks I will learn what I can from o

The Continental Divide Trail, north of Silver City NM, was more rugged than the dirt roads that I usually ride. It frequently dipped down into ravines and creek crossings, which eventually took their toll. It wasn’t long before I regretted not bringing food. Why was I resting so much? Something was wrong. I was starting to feel light-headed. It was actually a little scary. Should I turn tail and head back to the van parked at the trailhead, or plod on? Hunger favored plodding onward, since there would be a small town and restaurant in just a few miles. Then I saw the Benedictine monastery peeking through the ponderosas, on the other side of a steep ravine. If only I could drag the bike across this ravine to the monastery, it would make for a huge shortcut back to the van.  The bell tower of the monastery seemed so close! I was half-crazy with hunger by now. Getting to that monastery was my best hope. But the ravine proved to be uncrossable; I had to face the grim reali

San Lorenzo, NM. I'd found a little slice of -- actually a big slice of -- camping paradise, but I didn't expect the Caravan of the Kodgers to come up here, since the state parks really are more comfortable as long as you have an air conditioner. It might be true that boondockers are real campers because they own dogs who want to be real dogs; and you can't be that in a campground on a leash. Another reason why a camper might like my current setting is the mountain biking. The road splits and follows dry creeks through canyons cooled with ponderosas and decorated with lupines. On top of that, the dirt roads were maintained by the county, and were rather smooth. Of course those two roads would be fun to drive with a nice "towed" like the Honda CR-V that many motorhomers have. But the motorhome never would have made it to this campsite in the first place.    There are other reasons for being a boondocker, such as noise or an appreciation for nature.

San Lorenzo, New Mexico. And to think that a reader/commenter thought that I was a coward for avoiding hiking, biking, or traveling near sunset! It has always been a good policy. But sometimes a camper has to push the envelope a little. I'm not advertising recklessness. But there's such a thing as going into the Unknown simply because you must . Although risks are unavoidable, they are not being pursued for the sake of themselves. It builds character to get yourself in a bit of trouble, fight to stay calm, and work your way out of the hole by solving one problem at a time. But even more fundamental than that is backing off before it's too late. In general the Benchmark state atlas shows RV-friendly dirt roads as heavy dashed red lines, and they have names. In general there is a big turnaround once you get into a national forest; big enough for pickup trucks pulling horse trailers, or for firefighting trucks. My Ford Econoline van and 7 foot wide X 21 foot long trailer

An old RV buddy and I got together for a hike up Red Mountain, which overlooks Patagonia, AZ. He isn't an RVer anymore. Long-time RVers like me are used to seeing people drop out. Normally I can tell before they can. RVing is just a transitional state for most people. He thought RVers were nice folks who sat around too much, and that the so-called RV Dream consisted mostly of dreaming of the next potluck. I don't know how he got that idea, but he did. Also he wasn't too handy with maintaining his motorhome and never made a serious hobby out of it. He was diagnosed with the Thin Man syndrome, and it appears terminal. You know the type -- gnarly, wiry old guys who refuse to blimp out in middle age or old age, like a decent person should. If the world were fair there would be a support group for men like this. Women seem to be mercifully free of it. He had another affliction; he was single. Boys will be boys and he hoped to meet a woman with a vestige of a femini

Let's hope this is the last spring storm. Maybe I've always misunderstood what was meant by a "windy day." Didn't it mean high average speed? But that certainly isn't what happened the other night.  The average speed wasn't unusual, but the gusts were violent and a little scary actually. Since air is a compressible fluid it shouldn't be able to produce the hydraulic hammering that my RV experienced. Sleep became impossible. And wouldn't you know it: the "ship" was parked abeam the west wind. What happened to sailors pointing the ship directly into the face of the storm? I was camped alone at the northeastern mouth of the Chiricahua mountains, where these vertiginous mountains debouch onto the lonesome horizontalness of high desert. Hmmm... sudden elevation changes seem like they could make large pressure gradients, i.e., wind. What does a camper do when wind becomes a hateful nuisance, besides staying indoors that is? I headed up