Unhappy Campers

A number of years ago my wife and I purchased a recreational vehicle, believing it would usher in a glorious era of family fun and togetherness. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, inspired by a magazine advertisement depicting a family gathered around a campfire beside a stream, mountains in the background, a full moon shining down on a motor home.

My life is a seamless chain of one impulse after another, a Pavlovian existence—the bell rings, the drooling starts, I lunge for the bait.

“Let’s get an RV!” I said to my wife.

In the hour it took us to drive to the dealer, I mapped a trip around the continental United States, highlighting likely destinations: Mt. Rushmore, Old Faithful, and the California redwoods, then drifting home through Cawker City, Kansas, to see the world’s largest ball of twine.

Motor homes, we discovered, cost serious money—$100,000-plus for the privilege of driving three miles before pulling over to make a repair. That knowledge didn’t keep me from wanting the first one I saw at the RV dealership, a 40-foot luxury coach. It cost $400,000 and had cherry-wood floors, a chandelier,
two televisions, matching leather sofas, a washer and dryer, granite countertops, a convection oven, and a whirlpool bathtub.

We adjusted our sights downward and looked in the newspaper classifieds. There, we found a tent camper with two beds, a plastic table, sink, stovetop burner, polyester settee, Formica cutting board, and a Maxwell House can to pee in, all for $5,000.

“Now these tent campers take some time to set up,” the owner said. “But they’re easy to pull and light as a feather.”

Even so, it took us two hours to make it home, the gas pedal pressed to the floor, the truck grunting
and straining as if we were pulling a dead pig by the tail.

That evening, I read the owner’s manual. “Here’s the problem,” I said to my wife. “According to this, our camper weighs 2,550 pounds, and the towing capacity of our truck is 3,000 pounds. That means we can’t have more than 450 pounds of passengers and gear.”

I looked at my wife.

“How much do you weigh?” I asked.

“A hundred and forty,” she said.

There are four people in our family. Distributed evenly, this allowed each person to weigh 100 pounds and carry 12.5 pounds of gear. My sons were young then and weighed 60 pounds each. I took the 80 pounds they weren’t using and advised my wife to lose 40 pounds.

My wife’s refusal to trim her weight down to a reasonable 100 pounds has made it impossible for us to take a trip of any duration, so we’ve not made it to the mountains that inspired our purchase. But once a year, in July, we drive south two hours to West Boggs Park in Southern Indiana and spend a week with two other families, the Buchanans and the Heltons, who also have teenaged sons and aren’t easily scandalized.

It takes me three days to set up our tent camper. This allows a day of relaxation before I have to start breaking down camp, which takes another three days. The Buchanans have a motor home they keep stocked and ready to go. A half-hour after pulling into their campsite, they are sprawled on lounge chairs beside the lake, fishing, relaxing, sipping cold drinks. The Heltons are right behind them, requiring an extra five minutes to hook up their cable television.