Читать книгу Motel Nirvana - Melanie McGrath - Страница 12

‘Where the earth is dry the soul is wisest and best.’

HERACLITUS

Memorial Day, driving into afternoon sun on what was once Route 66. On the opposite side of the highway two lanes bumper-to-bumper trudge towards the Continental Divide like a train of metal mules. Bowling beside me is a line of Recreational Vehicles also heading west. Now and then the aluminium pod of an old-style trailer passes by, cutting the air with reflections.

To an American, and more particularly to a westerner, the Recreational Vehicle must be an almost invisible part of the mobile landscape, but a European can only stare as the hulking trucks, passing themselves off as miniature moving idylls, lumber gracelessly along the freeway. We don’t have sufficient wide roads to accommodate them, our cities are too close together, the gas they require is too expensive, we are not rich enough to buy them, we go abroad for our holidays, and, most of all although this is changing – we do not recreate. Recreating is an all-American invention. Americans are compelled to possess their leisure as they are compelled to possess most anything, and to be fully the owner of their leisure, they must accumulate experience. This is why the American recreator will happily schedule in a dozen European capitals in a week, but still won’t hang around in the Sistine Chapel if the paper in the toilets runs out. For the American recreator it is the quantity of experience that matters, not its quality.

After two hours on the road I pull into a rest area, find a spot under a mesquite tree and doze a while with the air conditioning high. I wake up to a woman knocking on the window for two quarters to put in the soda machine. Quite a crowd has gathered in the parking lot, a line of RVs competes for space directly in front of the restrooms, map and vending machines. The woman returns, wanting to introduce me to her dogs. Jeez, dog-lovers.

‘You know,’ she says, ‘this place is full of Mexicans and Indians. Mexicans and Indians. Folks like us are outnumbered. At least it feels that way.’ We finish the soda in the ‘65 Scottie trailer she bought six months ago with the redundancy payoff from a marketing job in Pennsylvania. ‘Came out here, followed the myth,’ she says, ‘and I liked it.’ She doesn’t know how much longer it will be before she settles down somewhere and builds another life.

‘This dog here’s too old to be on the road,’ she says, ‘he needs a place where he can feel comfortable enough to go ahead and die.’

Pinned up in the Scottie is a portrait of Ross Perot taken during his presidential campaign, still looking like a VE-Day vet after all these years.

The rest area feels as though an RV convention pulled in; RVs piled high inside with kids and bulk-buy Kool Aid alongside modest little trailers with chromium trim and lines of rivets, looking like some by-product of rocket science. A couple descend from an ancient Winnebago with Illinois plates and sit under the shade of a cottonwood sucking Diet Cokes in silent contemplation.

Homelessness is a profound anxiety in the American psyche, a cyst buried in the deeper, more feral places of the mind. At the wheel of an RV you can travel a thousand miles and never leave home; there it is in miniature, rolling along behind. For American recreators the RV acts as a kind of mediator between the fear of homelessness and the fascination with freedom. Think of that couple eating up the miles in their mechanical homestead, raw with anticipation, drinking in the road, surveying with pride the empire unfolding before them – their empire. And think of that couple sitting watching TV or flipping cards or making out in a desert trailer park at the side of an indistinct highway on a blackened plain, pulled up alongside a line of other RVs bigger and newer and more expensive than their own.