Occupation of Independence

Or, Eine Kleine (uber)NachtMusik for Kampers. Most of what you can read about RV travel is just promotionalism, even when it's a blogger who is not being paid to sell anything. Why this is so is the subject of another essay. Today I merely want talk about a challenging reality of RV life. (Wannabees will want to push the "channel" button now; this is not the "RV Dream" channel.) It's a brutal truth -- and most truths are brutal -- that sleeping on top of noise is something that an RVer has to get good at. This is probably more difficult for an urban boondocker, all in all, than for an urban RV park camper, and it's worse the older you get. I've been advised to use silicone ear plugs -- not those useless yellow foam things that won't even stay in the ears. I bought some, but haven't tried them yet. In the summer it helps to run a vent fan, and not just for ventilation of course! I used to generate "semi-white noise" by run

You needn't have too scary of a misadventure outdoors to develop a sudden interest in the "wilderness survival" genre. It's an interesting sub-cult. These books emphasize how deceptively dangerous it is to go out for a sunset walk in the desert, alone. "But it's just a nice stroll," the victim says, "to take some pretty sunset pictures." What happens to somebody who twists an ankle or runs out of light and gets lost when the sun goes down in the winter desert and the temperature plummets? In contrast, the morning misadventurer has all day to get rescued by a motorized or foot-powered passer-by. We should all be as lucky as some people, who have a trail-chewing spouse to share their outings with. Those who go adventuring with dogs should not be so naive as to think that Lassie will really run back to get help when that blockhead Timmy (once again) falls into a well. In reality the dog will just be one more worry, as I found out the o

Going to bed too early can destroy the quality of a night's sleep for some of us. Sleep is a big part of life, so this problem can't be laughed off as a small annoyance. It probably afflicts RV boondockers worse than other lifestyles, since using fewer lights and gadgets tends to shut a person down at night. The Early Bedtime Syndrome is a nexus for several lifestyle issues. An RV friend, 15 years older than me, once said that he went to bed at 8 pm, and "why not?; it was perfectly natural with the early sunsets in winter". The trouble with that argument is that it's also natural to wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. Going to bed too early when camping in town is a dreadful mess, since stores and traffic are still roaring late into the evening, and since you hear everything in an RV. How did this problem get started in the first place? Blame success. Traffic, wind, dry heat, monsoonal thunderstorms, and wildlife viewing are all good reasons why mornings are

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 h

A recent commenter was profoundly correct when he praised camaraderie as the best reason for going to that gawd-awful mess at Quartzsite in January. Recently I had a chance to go for a short, pleasant walk in the desert with three bloggers and their dogs, "somewhere in the Ajo" area. The Bayfield Bunch , Ed Frey , and I weren't doing anything difficult; it could be done almost any day. But that's just the thing. I can't remember doing anything like this before with other RVers! But why? Let's avoid my standard whine about RV culture and stick to the subject of what gets in the way of boondockers socializing with each other more. One possibility is the stereotypical image of RV boondockers as solitude-seekers: latter day Henry David Thoreaus or St. Simeon Stylites . I remember reading Walden , carefully, and was a bit scandalized to learn that Thoreau had to put up with a railroad track nearby. He also had neighbors and visited with them occasionally. There

Anybody who really expects to reach one of his Resolutions for a new year would probably be wise to choose something halfway achievable. Otherwise he will laugh it off by the middle of January. I was beginning to feel that way about my #1 goal for 2012: pushing the Sandman of the BLM desert back to 9 pm. Amongst RV boondockers 9 pm is the witching hour known as "motorhome midnight." Legends have grown up around the winter campfires of desert tribesmen on Arizona BLM land about what lies on the other side; 901 pm has always been an 'undiscovered country from which none returns.' Doctrines of the post-9 pm world have never been universally agreed upon, but they usually offer the vague threat of a shadowy netherworld. You can probably guess why this goal was chosen, not least of which is that it made me feel like I belonged in a nursing home. Old folks have a hard enough time sleeping through the night without sabotaging it by going to bed too early. The first coup

Ajo, AZ. This has been a remarkable autumn and early winter. The weather didn't become nice and snowbird-friendly until late December. Since then it has been postcard-perfect.  It was fun to enjoy calm, sunny, and warm days. Of course a yellow light starts blinking in the back of my head when I start to feel comfortable. You can't help but feel that you are becoming soft. This morning a cold wind is blowing. How are the nearby tent campers liking this? Seeing them reminds me how much I disliked tent camping way back when, and how valuable it is to have a hard-walled box to hide from cold wind. Talking to these tent campers yesterday, and visiting with my house-bound friends a couple days ago, I am reminded how carefully comfort-and-discomfort must be managed in order to make life both sensible and tasty. To the human animal, comfort is delightful prey that becomes a boring meal. The trick with comfort is learning how to consciously experience it. The best way I know of is

The challenge for me as a blogger has always been to gradually migrate my readership away from the pure travel genre and towards the topics that I'm interested in enough to write about, as given in the subtitle at the top of the blog. Somehow I have to do this without knowing much about my readers or where they come from; most readers probably still come from RV travel blogs. A cross-category blog is inherently difficult to match with readers. Perhaps that's why most blogs are "pure-breeds", such as news, politics, financial, vacation-like travel, sports, friends and family, etc. Imagine the disappointment of a the standard armchair traveler/RV wannabee who stumbles onto my blog. He wants escapist dreams and pretty pictures to help numb the pain of having four more years to go, in his cubicle prison; there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not what I do here. Offering anything but sugary fantasies will come off as being overly-earnest at best, or neg

I got on this "What is Art" kick because it seemed that I might find something in the general subject of art that I could apply advantageously to the Art of Travel, which is part of my job . Remember that this blog is not aimed at sight-seeing vacationers or RV newbies. I used to feel a bit disappointed that art, that is, beauty, had so little effect on me. But rereading Tolstoy's essay puts my mind at rest. Perhaps beauty is over-rated. If Tolstoy was correct there is a completely different way to approach the subject of art. Finally in Chapter 5 Tolstoy's What is Art? (Google books) gets to the affirmative side of the question. What is art, if we put aside the conception of beauty, which confuses the whole matter? But first, one last exclusion: A man may express his emotions by lines, colors, sounds, or words, and yet may not act on others by such expression; and then the manifestation of his emotions is not art. The peculiarity of [art], distinguishing it

In their heart's heart, don't most professional travelers know they are spoiled brats? The idea used to gnaw away at me, quietly and in the background. In the real world there are many things about the job, family, weather, etc., that people wish were better; but they're not , and an individual is usually powerless to change them, at least in the short term. All he can do is try to keep them from bothering him by using some mental discipline and creativity. Most adults accept platitudes like this, but practicing them isn't so easy. For instance I currently enjoy a rare driveway-sitting gig in a uniquely beautiful area, Ouray CO, while enjoying house amenities. Most travelers would consider themselves extremely lucky to have an opportunity like this. But the weather has turned against Ouray, for about ten days now. Remember that most people yearn all year for September and October, since autumn is usually the best time of the year. But this year, I'm missing it

It's interesting to watch my own habits changing, now that I can't walk five minutes to a grocery store. But at the moment I'm more interested in what effect Bernanke's intentional debasement of the dollar is having on people who live in places an hour drive from the nearest real grocery store. Here in Datil NM we are 60 miles from the nearest one. And yet people still talk about how they drove to the big city last weekend, even though it is 150 miles away. So much of the rural lifestyle involves driving long distances in giant pickup trucks. It's true they do more of the maintenance on vehicles themselves; that helps some, but the nearest real auto parts store is still far away. One tire shop told me he made a run into the big city one day per week to load up on tires. So maybe that's how a lot of survival takes place: you renounce the idea that everything must be available every day of the week. Say, maybe I should do that with the internet. I wonder if

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.

Relatively late in my RV career I discovered the van camping sub-culture in the blogosphere. They are especially fun when written by a young idealist. What is it that makes them so pleasing to read? Is it because, like the opening of a famous Dickens novel, they are wondering aloud whether they will be the hero of their own lives? Or is it that they see their life as a noble experiment? 

Downsizing is both a challenge and a source of great satisfaction. However, one must be careful not to get sucked into Asceticism. The travel blogosphere is full of Holy Prophets of the Desert (grin), who think that when they die they are going to Heaven to sitteth upon the right hand side of Thoreau or Gandhi. For folks not in the market for pseudo-religious emotionalism disguised as philosophy, let's look at the Downsizing mantra from a rational viewpoint. The concept of Diminishing Returns is one of the most universal and true ideas in life. The first bit of Goodie X is wonderful; the next unit does you less good, and so forth, until you are getting less and less for each additional unit of time or money.

How can I do things better than before? That is the main question as I tool up for traveling again. Essentially, my answer is to push harder in the camping direction, as opposed to stereotypical RV travel or windshield tourism. Of course an RVer need not adopt a "camping" orientation at all, and most of them don't. But let's not talk about that. There are some bicycle touring blogs who interrupt their routine descriptions of ride statistics or camping details with perspectives about the real benefits of what they are doing: what satisfactions are they getting that couldn't be gotten by a more conventional lifestyle. They enjoy consciously dwelling on the things that a person with a conventional lifestyle takes for granted. And they like being inventive.

I thought "one armed bandits" were slot machines. Yes, I've rejoined that elite group of people known as "motorists." My goodness there is a lot to do to restore to life an older van that has been quiescent for almost three years, outside, and exposed to the "Four Gentle Seasons" of this area. It couldn't be put off for long: I had to drive up to a gasoline pump and rejoin American culture. For a few seconds I just stared at the pump and thought "Do I really want to do this?" Finally, resigned to shame and defeat, I had to ask, "Let's see here, what do I do first? How does this work again?"

Can you read the label on the little white poodle's "uniform?" I'm on a streak with small service animals: I love how seriously these little guys take themselves.

It's so rare to have a success in the gadget world that I want to brag up LG, the cellphone manufacturer, and Verizon, the service provider. I managed to lose my old LG cellphone, after a run of six years. It had even survived one trip through a washing machine. I'll probably find it under a heap of something someday. But I couldn't call the lost cellphone with somebody else's phone, because the prepaid minutes had expired. It was a pleasant surprise to learn that I could keep the old service plan (which no longer exists for new people) and the old phone number. And all of this was explained by a nice young man who spoke English as his first language. I had another cellphone success, of a different type. Unaccustomed as I am to finishing a nice mountain bike ride with a coffee and cookie at a local coffee shop, I did so today. It was so pleasant just sitting there, thinking about the perfect ride and weather. Just then a woman had the effrontery to intrude on this

Considering the title and description line of this blog, it doesn't surprise anyone that the blog is implicitly hostile to the borrow-and-spend consumer culture of America. So it never seemed necessary to preach too much about it; people have heard the sermons before. And I never really aspired to go to heaven and sitteth upon the right hand side of Gandhi or Thoreau. But recently an excellent post has appeared on OfTwoMinds blog. There weren't any new ideas in the post, but it is an excellent summary of the idiocy of the American lifestyle. I got a kick out of the commenter who wondered, angrily, why consumers were good enough to buy the semi-useless crap sold by American corporations, but not good enough to be hired by them. 

People who succeed at turning volunteer work into a nice part of their lives should give the rest of us advice. What is their secret? For the second time I signed up to work on the continental divide trail, and then canceled out. It is frustrating. I'm not blaming them. Organizations such as the Forest Service or the trail association have their ways of doing things; cantankerous, independent people (like me) don't like being told how to do things. It's not that I'm unwilling to be a team player or to defer to any kind of supervision. But I just seem unwilling or unable to allow anyone else to impose their schedule or calendar on me; it seems like a type of rape. If so, then it is an example of how my fears were right all those years about early retirement and full time RVing undermining my moral character! The bigger the organization, the more likely it is to have some salaried, 30-year-old, volunteer coordinator who sits in a cubicle in front of her computer, p