Today was St. Patrick’s Day,
ostensibly commemorating the saint who drove the snakes out of Ireland. In actuality, though, I think it is simply an excuse to add green food coloring to beer and
get drunk. This weekend, however, we experienced a green of a different
kind, the green that one begins to find outdoors as spring nears.
Over the weekend, we made the season’s first
outing with our fifth-wheel trailer. The promise of nice weather this
past weekend (mostly delivered upon) made us decide relatively spur of
the moment to hitch up the rig and motor about 90-minutes
west to Farewell Bend State Park in Eastern Oregon.
Farewell Bend sits along the Oregon side of the
Snake River and was the last river stop along the Oregon Trail. It’s a
pleasant park that can get hot in summer and is often windy, making it
less than ideal for tenters. During the winter
off-season (through March), most of the sites are closed off leaving a
handful of available spots all lined up like a mini RV park.
For our purposes, though, Farewell Bend was a
perfect destination on two days’ notice. We had a chance to get the
trailer out for the first time in more than five months and make sure
some of the important components (refrigerator, oven,
microwave, furnace) were in operational form. Because of the nice
weather, we got to spend much of Saturday outdoors relaxing instead of
glued to this screen or that or dealing with household chores or home
project #47.
We also experienced yet again a phenomenon I marvel
at every time I encounter it. Many of the RVers we’ve met have tended
to be outgoing, friendly people ready to make strangers welcome at the
drop of a hat. They certainly have done so
on several occasions.
I do not include the so-called “weekend warriors”
with broods of young children still at home in this category of RVer.
These people often strike me as trying to cram seven days of
togetherness and family activities into a weekend and often
appear anything but relaxed. So I guess I can’t really blame them if
they aren’t that friendly or outgoing when a stranger passes.
However, I have encountered such friendliness often
enough to know it is a much more common occurrence in the RV community
than it seems to be in the general population at large. We first
experienced it not long after we bought our first
RV, a 10-foot Jayco tent trailer. A private message sent to someone on
an RV discussion forum led to us being invited into their full-time home
on wheels and a discussion of several hours about full-time living in a
motorhome.
This past weekend, my wife mentioned to the owner
of one of the motorhomes near our trailer that the brand they owned was
one we were considering a few years down the road. Next thing we knew,
we were being invited to tour their wheeled
home away from home and subsequently invited to join them around the
campfire, That led to several hours of enjoyable conversation about
favorite campgrounds, health, food, retirement, even skydiving.
They are the kinds of conversations that no longer
take place in many neighborhoods. It’s as if we have taken the idea that
our home is our castle to heart and created an imaginary moat around it
to keep the outside world at bay. Neighborhood
and residential developments have become so spread out that it becomes
somewhat daunting and intimidating to meet neighbors, especially if you
tend to be somewhat introverted, as I am.
Because an RV of any kind is much smaller than a
traditional home, there is a greater tendency to spend at least part of
each day outside. Therefore, the likelihood of interaction with other
people is also much greater. The couple we spent
several enjoyable hours with this weekend are people we likely would
never have encountered if it weren’t for our common ground of RVing. If
we lived in the same neighborhood, our paths might never cross.
This social aspect is one of the great things about
the RV life. Equally great, though, is the possibility of obtaining
complete solitude if desired. Especially in the western half of the
United States, there are numerous places where one
can get away from just about everything and everyone. That ability to be
around people when desired and get away from people when needed is, to
me, one of the greatest attributes of the RV lifestyle. It allows one to
maintain a balance between the social and
private self and to establish or restore a harmony between the human
self and the natural world. I’m just not sure it gets any better than
that.
