Dispatch Number 5 -RV Park

RV Parks are Cesspools. This RV park is nicknamed "Shit Camp". RVers spill their canned poop when they rush out for the next destination. In a pinch a tent camper like myself ends up at one of these places for reasons such as a hot shower, too tired to drive further or want a walled compound in a busy city. But with that desperation and need comes a high cost to the tent camper who is accustomed to primitive camping in clean air and fresh soil. The RV park is noisy. Dogs yap uncontrollably inside their trailers just like they do at home. The soil is compacted and damp with the odor of septic tanks. My tent is in it.

Conversation with these RV people varies from getting great travel info on remote hard to find spots, to the more common topic of where to find cheap RV camping. Cheap. The dull compulsion of the economic. In conquest of cheap. The American dream played out on another man's sovereign soil. To the Americans and Canadians, at least those who I have met, are driven by this compulsion to measure things by the penny. A world viewed through a copper colored lens full of penny ideas and places. My view of these RV people sharpened when I noticed they rarely ventured outside their trailer compounds and instead paid visits on each other with a can of beer in hand -I won't reveal the hour. While acting terribly cheap within their own group they feel very rich while surrounded by the colorfully poor.

One woman over seasoned her conversation with "It's cheap." Each time she let me in on some deal of deals, she would nod her head sideways with brightened eyes and say, it's cheap as if I had missed the other attempts to impress me with her knowledge of Mexico. While she let me in on some deal she lightened her camper for a return trip north and it was between those it's cheap insights that she gave me 30 pounds of fresh oranges, a COSTCO pack of string cheese, chips and salsa. She talked about cheap and I thought about waste.


The American taste for conspicuous consumption is strikingly obvious when you see all the gear they haul in their RVs and trucks while trapezing the Baja Peninsula- the material possessions they travel with while visiting is more than most Mexican families have in their entire house. It poses a question that I will ask throughout my travels, "Is a society more happy with an abundance of material goods OR is a society truly more happy with less material goods?" I believe it is more complicated than that, however, it does provide a starting point.


As I drove 50 miles to the next town I could hear her voice and words it's cheap and wondered what Mexico meant to her. Was mastering Baja Mexico to her a matter of locating the cheapest RV parks; knowing what cities Costco and Walmart were in; was it the food or culture; could she count to 10 in Spanish? When you learn some of these people have been coming to Baja for 20 or 30 years with stays of up to six months at a time and they do not speak Spanish it leaves one dumbfounded. It says so much and says so little about them. In conquest of cheap why eat, why talk, why walk? When they get food at grocery stores they stare at the digital readout to pay the bill. In many cases the checkout person will not even call out the amount due standing in sullen silence making it obvious that they are accustomed to this mute exchange -I find mild insult when this happens to me and ask, "How much?" in Spanish. Yes, the RV path has been blazoned by mute penny pincher's.


I started this piece talking about the smell at an RV park and ended up talking more about the people. Americans in Mexico. Does anyone speak Spanish? As much as I have pounded on the non-Spanish speaking Americans and Canadians with their isolated lifestyles and garrisoned compounds; their tendency towards cliques, and their culturally incurious ways I find myself feeling happy to be among them.


Weeks after the smelly RV park, I stayed at another one further south in the coastal town of Loreto on the Sea of Cortez. I know that when I feel "at home" in an RV park that I have been out in the bush too long. I need things common to an American, things easy to reference and to be momentarily where I come from. The American order, the walls, the rules; American privacy with closed doors; their unfriendliness; their shortness of conversation.


When I learn how long they have been in Mexico they dread the next question, "How is your Spanish?", the answers come as a confession that they don't speak it, usually accompanied by some twisting and sheepish embarrassment. It was difficult to watch their discomfort, so I don't ask anymore. Instead, I let it hang out there to speed the end of a boring conversation about stuff they own or how cheap something was. For me the most agitating comments they make are when they speak of how dirty Mexico is or how some standard was not met. The dull compulsion of the economic. Cultural imperialists without guts.


The separation of cultures could not be more extreme. Local language -the American can't be bothered. Local customs -the American dismisses it as a peasant and savage lifestyle. Local food - the American asks, Is that beef?


The exported lifestyle in a land nothing like theirs where they shop, live and move about like Americans. Mexican people are warm and welcoming if you talk to them, but I have seen few Americans do it. The expatriates who live here look lonely and doubtful; they look like they're cheating at something; they are darting, skulking figures that avoid eye contact and conversation.


Its cheap! Its cheap! is the Americans lingua franca and I have noticed we take it everywhere we go.