Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 9, 1993 TAG: 9308090278
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Bill Cochran
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
This is not criticism. After all, the title warned us it was a motor coach gig.
From the Darwinistic sense, coach is about as close to camping as a frog is to a man. Most likely you can trace its origin back eons when some poor wretch spent the night "camping" by sleeping on an oak root with mosquitoes tearing into his flesh.
"There's got to be something better," he said, attempting to get the wrinkles out of his back. That something turned out to be a pup tent, which later evolved into a wall tent and then an umbrella tent with windows.
Next, somebody managed to put wheels onto a tent. They called it a pop-up camper. Then came the travel trailer. Still another soul slipped a camping unit into the back of a pickup. That was followed by a motorhome, and RVing suddenly was getting into high gear. Before long, people were converting worn-out Greyhounds into campers. Then one day somebody drove up in a three-quarter million dollar coach with full bathroom, Jacuzzi, hot-water heater, microwave, stereo, cellular phone, TVs - notice that is plural - satellite dish and cable hookup - you never know which you'll need when roughing it - VCR, electric bug zapper and remote-control security system to protect more worldly goods that most of us manage to cram into our home.
I have said all this without envy, animosity or sarcasm, because long ago I learned there are a variety of ways to enjoy the great outdoors and no one has established me as a judge to determine which is correct.
In fact, I have "camped" in all the ways mentioned above, with the exception of the three-quarter million dollar coach, and I lack that experience for two reasons: No one has invited me and I have not won the lottery.
The coach I did camp in was not that lavish, but it was big enough to wake up everyone in the campground the night we tried to back it into a narrow space obviously designed in the 1950s for a wall tent.
I am not blind to the fact that there is considerable contempt among campers. The people cruising down the interstate in a coach obviously snort when they pass my pickup towing a 14-year-old pop-up camper. They probably figure proverty has kept me from advancing much beyond the Stone Age of camping and say something like, "Guess they are headed for Hooverville."
And backpackers in a subcompact racing toward a trailhead for a low-impact outing surely wax indignant when they get behind a dinosaur-size RV on the narrow and curvy Blue Ridge Parkway. They speak through clinched teeth about the irony of taking everything with you in an effort to get away from it all.
The backpackers are trying as hard as they can to leave everybody behind, while the RVers have the pedal down as far as it will go in a hurry to barbecue beef with brethren of the Good Sam Club.
Just who has fallen from grace depends upon which windshield you happen to be peering from. I wonder, though. Deep down, is the purest backpacker really drooling with envy at the owner of the land yacht? Is the guy spending the last dime of his IRA on an RV troubled because he can not shake the shackle of his sterile glass and metal cocoon in order to be free to interact with nature like the backpacker?
I'm not certain.
I do know that years ago I watched a young couple spread a tarp out onto a meadow in the Glacier National Park. That would be their camp for the night. In grizzly bear country.
I must admit that I watched with certain feelings of superiority, because I would spend the night rather lavishly, high, dry and secure, in the back of a Nash Rambler station wagon.
But as the young couple embraced in sleep, I did not detect any envy cast in my direction.
I have come to the conclusion that any way you can camp, or go RVing or whatever you happen to call it is a very good way.
by CNB