80% of American RVs are made in Elkhart, Indiana. This is one of the many facts I learned when visiting the RV Hall of Fame & Museum in Elkhart, which was much too intriguing to pass several times on the highway without dropping in.
The museum encompasses two warehouse-style showrooms, one of which is finished out to be a timeline of manufactured housing in chronological order, beginning with a covered wagon and ending with a spaceship. The museum’s extensive RV collection is usually housed inside, but when I was there they were completing some renovations so there was a long, winding row of different trailers and motorhomes outside the doors of the building, as if people had arrived from every decade of American history since the 30s for some sort of convention. The final warehouse showroom is “RVs of today,” including one very modest number and a huge, looming one from a brand called FURRION that looks like an alien spaceship, with a helipad and an optional rooftop spa.
When you think too much about them, RVing, and its more modest cousin, camping, are a little silly. It’s odd to think that human beings have built living situations for themselves, replete with all imaginable comforts, and then said to one another, “this is nice, but what if we tried it somewhere else, and harder.” Glamping, another one of my favorite activities, is a similar principle. I recently went on a writing retreat to stay in a tiny cabin in the woods where the heater didn’t work to heat the room but was loud enough to wake me up in the middle of the night, and the bath tap yielded only rust-colored, odoriferous water. I had a completely glorious time and was about five times as productive as usual.
Of course, it’s easy to say that the appeal of camping and RVing is the chance to see nature that you don’t otherwise see—beautiful California mountains or beaches, the starry skies over the Great Plains. This is no doubt true. But I think that in a very important way it is the “but harder” element that appeals about RVing and camping. Roughing it, even just a little bit, brings one’s awareness to the details of daily life, making you appreciate water and stoves. It’s an experience of agency, of fending for yourself in small ways. It fills in a little empty part of our modern brains—the part that wants to know it can provide for itself, to know that it’s earned the warm meal and the sheltered bed. RVing affords this without really roughing it (waking up like I did the last time I went camping to a tent ceiling covered in spiders—awakening a part of my brain that did NOT want to be awake).
If you just wanted to see Malibu or Death Valley, you could get quite a few good hotel nights for the $100,000+ price of a decent RV. But you’d be a tourist. RVing is like a portable stake in the land, an insistence that you do belong there. RVs tap into the American ethos that the Bass Pro Shop so beautifully epitomizes—both one with and dominating the land, promising a tiny world that is all your own, a private declaration of independence.
The phrase “off-grid” is music to American ears. It means tapping into the only roots that Americans have in common—the willingness to get up and go, to rough it while you’re there, to pursue some kind of dream or vision or just survival in a way that the average British townsperson, for example, would find absolutely bonkers. “Off-grid” means that you don’t fear any of the big looming monsters on the horizon of the American metropolis—political upheaval or criminal mismanagement, natural disasters, even nuclear war. The new American dream is a solar-powered RV parked on the edge of the apocalypse.
The modern “van life” trend is, of course, an extension of the same thing. Long YouTube series chronicle couples and singles transforming transit vans into a livable homes with air ducts and windows and kitchen counters. Yes, kitchen counters, butcher block and subway tile. There is a certain level of Better-Homes-and-Gardens-ism to the RV or the van, a certain commitment to creature comforts and a simple yet generous aesthetic. In vans and RVs the American trend of public consumption meets the castle doctrine and the Oregon Trail.
The ideal world, for the American, is one where he is fiercely independent as well as comfortable, where he has agency and dominance, but is also well-placed in a consumerist hierarchy. The American people have never forgotten that they left wherever they were for independence, and because they believed that they could build for themselves a better life. For the American, having a beautiful house isn’t just a creature comfort—it is, in its own way, a defiant Patriot flag. It’s another experience of agency: you have pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, you have gotten yourself (quite literally) there.
RVs are often thought of as modern luxury items, on par with second homes in Florida and refrigerators with touchscreens. But in fact RVing is one of the means, like making your own sourdough bread or submitting oneself to the incessant nagging of Duolingo, of making one’s own life harder. This human impulse goes back at least to the Olympic Games. RVs, though they may seem to be modern means of luxury, are in fact an extremely classic form of making life harder in order to have more fun, of grasping at agency in a world that sometimes seems to be out of control.
On October 21, the release day of her new album Midnights, Taylor Swift broke Spotify’s record for most-streamed album in a single day. Midnights went on to break several more records, and Swift is now the first artist to have held all ten top spots in the Billboard Top 100, the most-streamed artist in a single day, and the holder of the record for the biggest streaming week of any album written by a woman, beside having 11 Grammys and 14 MTV Video Music Awards.
In Swift’s documentary, Miss Americana, she admitted that a key motivating force behind all this achievement was the sense that if each album didn’t outdo all the others, it would be seen as “a colossal failure.” This, of course, is an aspect of Swift’s career that shouldn’t be minimized, but it is also an instance of setting new hoops to jump through, RV-style. Taylor Swift’s net worth is $450 million. (She doubtlessly has many RVs in addition to her eight homes.) She does not need to outdo all her other albums. And yet she has.
When you are physically comfortable, you need other hoops to jump through, so as to stave off the existential edge of human existence. Nowhere is this so abundantly obvious as in the celebrity class. Like fourth-graders trying to fill a marble jar in order to earn a pizza party, celebrities compete for prestigious entertainment awards and recognitions, because, like all other human beings, they crave a challenge, something to activate their potentialities.
The motto of my alma mater was “strength rejoices in the challenge.” We used to cite it to one another wryly when completing term papers or sliding over the ice to class. Now that I’m an adult, in a life rife with unchosen challenges, I can see why, like celebrities or RV Hall of Famers, people set their own challenges once in a while. It gives us a sense of agency.
Come back in two weeks: for a patron-only newsletter on why Nappanee, IN is like Camelot.
A very special hello: to all my readers who are at a conference with me (do not examine the prose above for signs of conference-going).
In honor of: the plant I probably killed by being out of town for six days, here’s a podcast on regenerative farming.
emily Anne
you're the bomb