Читать книгу RVs & Campers For Dummies - Christopher Hodapp - Страница 23

In the 2021 film Nomadland, van-lifer Fern, on a visit with her family, has her lifestyle defended by her embarrassed sister, who says she’s like one of the pioneers. It’s not a terrible comparison, especially when you’re looking for a road to a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) campground out West, and you feel like a befuddled trail guide who got the whole wagon train lost in Donner Party country. But the far better metaphor is the Rom.

In the 19th century, the Rom were the remarkable Romany people, commonly called “gypsies.” Their roots are uncertain — a mysterious people without a country of their own, almost perpetually on the move. Typically, they hunkered down in winter. They lived in wagons called vardos, famed for their interior woodwork, and if you’ve peeked into one in a museum, the comparison with an RV is too obvious to miss.

One of the best books about them is The Gypsies by Jan Yoors (Waveland Press), a Belgian who ran away to live with the gypsies when he was 12. His academic parents permitted it, and it went on for years, while he came home often enough to keep them from renting out his room. Yoors wrote about the deep family ties of the Rom, but the other building block of life was the kumpania, the people they traveled with. A great prejudice existed against the gypsies, and so, to live on the road, they developed a complex set of signs for one another, to tell their kumpania who followed whether the town they were coming to was safe and what resources they would find when they got there.

But RVers today have the Romany code beat all hollow, with incredible amounts of information and mutual aid, in the form of resources like YouTube and the Internet. You don’t have to be Daniel Boone anymore, chopping down trees with your bare teeth and whittling snow tires out of deposits of snow. The refinement of the Internet and the invention of Wi-Fi has made it possible for improbable people to strike out for parts unknown, with the comfort of their own kumpania, a group of like-minded people who will help and support them.

If you’re walking through a campground as the sun goes down, it’s getting more and more commonplace to hear couples and families speaking a foreign language — Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Romanian, Chinese, German. These international travelers visit the United States to actually see and experience it at ground level. The rise in popularity of renting RVs over the last decade has made it easy for anyone in the world to plan their own uniquely American RV vacation. The American landscape is every bit as alluring to other people around the world, and the romance of Route 66 and the endless highway has been exported nearly everywhere by our pop culture.