The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [114]
The enduring trend of RV ownership in America, the sight of those behemoths rolling down the highways, is evidence of the imagination modern families still have for freedom and wilderness. Perhaps this is the reason many people refer to Recreational Vehicles as “Winnebagos,” even when the make and model of their purchase is not from Winnebago Industries. The etymology of the world is rooted in the Sioux language and refers to the indigenous people of eastern Wisconsin. The word translates as “people of the murky water who eat fish,” an allusion to Fox River below Lake Winnebago. It did not appear as a term for Recreational Vehicles until 1966. It seems fitting—what could be more suggestive of wildness and freedom then living in a vehicle named after a tribe of American Indians?
After arriving in Yuma for our second outage, this time at the Yucca Power Plant, we headed down to the RV Peddler, a dealer on the frontage road along Interstate 8. We were living at my aunt’s house and hoping to buy some privacy. I was worried about the price tag, but Simone was very persuasive. He noted that the trailer-style RV’s without motors were much less expensive than the Winnebago, or motor homes. He ignored my obvious concern: we did not own a truck to tow a trailer and wanted to look at every used fifth-wheel on the lot. He asked question after question until the baby cried, my feet hurt, and I was desperate to go back to my aunt’s house. “You mean the refrigerator can work on propane or electric?” “How much extra for one of those swiveling hitches?”
We were exceedingly proud to pay nine thousand dollars—cash—for our Nuway Hitchhiker. We had saved for it and our new home was a jewel, pre-owned but clean. It had no smoker’s smell like some of the other used models we’d seen on the lot. The dealer at RV Peddler delivered it to the small thirty-space, horseshoe-shaped trailer park we’d picked out at the edge of town, and near the border with Mexico. The only existing Yoga Ashram in Yuma County sat next door. Their peacocks, considered sacred by Hindus, strutted over to our trailer park often and paraded through the court with their tail fans spread.
Living in this trailer park, we were close enough to the Yucca Plant that Simone could bike to work. I’d hang laundry on the community clothesline with the baby in a sling and watch Simone as he faded into the distance in his welder’s cap, a baseball-hat-spun-around-backwards-on-the-head look. He shrank into the distance on that no-gear two-wheeler, into cantaloupe fields that wafted a heady perfume on warm days. One advantage to working outages was that the plant’s smoke stacks were asleep for the duration of the repairs. He worked long hours, six day weeks, twelve hour days, which paid good overtime but made us lonely for more time together.
My aunt said Simone reminded her of the witch in the Wizard of Oz when she visited and spotted him pedaling through the cantaloupe fields, coming home from work. It was the bike, I think, an old-fashioned version with a basket in front. We had borrowed the bike from an elderly neighbor: most of our RV neighbor’s were elderly. Retirees are the demographic group that purchase and drive RV’s most. They are often known as snowbirds in the vernacular of the southern towns they descend on in winter. Not only for their snowy hair, but because they drive down from colder climates in the northern U.S. states and Canada. As they age, many of them start to fly down rather than drive back and forth, choosing to leave their RV parked in a snowbird trailer park at their permanent winter home.
As a child, I grew up seeing these snowbirds in Yuma, at least for the first six years of my life. They ballooned the town, crowded the stores and restaurants.