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By Root 1352 0

only thirty miles long, but it is so steep and winding that it took me all morning to cross it. By 10 A.M. there was a steady stream of cars in both directions, and free spaces at the look-out points were hard to find. This was my first serious brush with real tourists – retired people with trailer homes heading for Florida, young families taking off-season vacations, honeymooners. There were cars and trailers, campers and motor homes from thousands of miles away – California, Wyoming, British Columbia – and at every look-out point people were clustered around their vehicles with the doors and trunks opened, feeding from ice coolers and portable fridges. Every few yards there was a Winnebago or Komfort Motor Home – massive, self-contained dwellings on wheels that took up three parking spaces and jutted out so far that cars coming in could only barely scrape past.

All morning I had been troubled by a vague sense of something being missing, and then it occurred to me what it was. There were no hikers such as you would see in England – no people in stout boots and short pants, with knee-high tasselled stockings. No little rucksacks full of Marmite sandwiches and flasks of tea. And no platoons of cyclists in skin-tight uniforms and bakers’ caps labouring breathlessly up the mountainsides, slowing up traffic. What slowed the traffic here were the massive motor homes lumbering up and down the mountain passes. Some of them, amazingly, had cars tethered to their rear bumpers, like dinghies. I got stuck behind one on the long, sinuous descent down the mountain into Tennessee. It was so wide that it could barely stay within its lane and kept threatening to nudge oncoming cars off into the picturesque void to our left. That, alas, is the way of vacationing nowadays for many people. The whole idea is not to expose yourself to a moment of discomfort or inconvenience – indeed, not to breathe fresh air if possible. When the urge to travel seizes you, you pile into your thirteen-ton tin palace and drive 400 miles across the country, hermetically sealed against the elements, and stop at a campground where you dash to plug into their water supply and electricity so that you don’t have to go a single moment without air-conditioning or dishwasher and microwave facilities. These things, these ‘recreational vehicles’, are like life-support systems on wheels. Astronauts go to the moon with less backup. RV people are another breed – and a largely demented one at that. They become obsessed with trying to equip their vehicles with gadgets to deal with every possible contingency. Their lives become ruled by the dread thought that one day they may find themselves in a situation in which they are not entirely self-sufficient. I once went camping for two days at Lake Darling in Iowa with a friend whose father – an RV enthusiast – kept trying to press labour-saving devices on us. ‘I got a great little solar-powered can opener here,’ he would say. ‘You wanna take that?’

‘No thanks,’ we would reply. ‘We’re only going for two days.’

‘How about this combination flashlight/carving knife? You can run it off the car cigarette-lighter if you need to, and it doubles as a flashing siren if you get lost in the wilderness.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Well, at least take the battery-powered microwave.’

‘Really, we don’t want it.’

‘Then how the hell are you going to pop popcorn out there in the middle of nowhere? Have you thought about that?’

A whole industry (in which no doubt the Zwingle Company of New York is actively involved) has grown up to supply this market. You can see these people at campgrounds all over the country, standing around their vehicles comparing gadgets – methane-powered ice-cube makers, portable tennis-courts, anti-insect flame-throwers, inflatable lawns. They are strange and dangerous people and on no account should be approached.

At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America – a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed