The Great American Road looks fabulously seductive from here, at the tip of the bridge spanning the peninsulas, heading northward into a land of rugged wilderness where the first tinges of late summer`s burnished leaves are swaying beyond the toll plaza.
It is a gorgeous view of the sparkling straits below, the emerald bluffs of Mackinac Island in the distance, of the rolling ribbon of concrete ahead slipping into a resplendent cavern of trees.
So why, oh why, am I feeling ever so slightly stressed, my dripping palms latched in a death grip on the steering wheel, my eyes straining to simultaneously take in the sideview mirrors straddling the acre-wide windshield, the dash-mounted television monitor affording a shadowy view of traffic behind and the fuel gauge on its harrowingly brisk trip toward empty?
I find myself, unsteadily, at the helm of a rolling condominium-a 36-foot motor home equipped with enough luxuries to satisfy a self-indulgent sultan and at least a half-dozen of his favorite subjects.
To wit: A queen-size bed in the antechamber somewhere behind the rear axle. A microwave oven and built-in coffee maker in the dining alcove. A commodious bathroom complete with shower and ventilation fan. A ridiculously long couch for lounging and, of course, two color television sets. Two air-conditioning units. A refrigerator and freezer. A bar tucked discreetly in the corner of a hallway. Wall-to-wall carpeting.
Not to mention a spare tire.
There is a word for all of this, a word pounced upon and exclaimed with stereophonic precision by my two sons when I picked them up for a Midwestern odyssey in this fiber glass brontosaurus.
”Awesome,” Benjamin and David decreed upon bounding into the well-appointed belly of the beast.
Right you are, guys. It is absolutely awesome to be negotiating the road behind the wheel of a rig that seems to be only slightly larger than Rhode Island. Awesome, as well, to hear the chattering of swaying mini-blinds on a 65-m.p.h. rush toward nature and relaxation.
Mighty awesome, too, to trudge cotton-mouthed into the gas station, credit card in trembling hand, after pumping $85 of unleaded petrol into a tank the size of, say, Kuwait.
This was, to employ another usefully ambiguous word, an adventure.
I was, unashamedly, an RV novice, an interloper into a world of more mature pursuers of wanderlust, whose most devoted adherents cheerfully regard themselves as campground cultists and members of a subculture with a high sociability quotient.
”I compare RV`ers to the Boy Scouts,” asserted Larry Lebryk, a 37-year- old vice president at Coachmen Industries in Middlebury, Ind., one of the larger manufacturers of motor homes and other recreational vehicles. ”They`re people whose only purpose is to just get together and have a good time.”
”It`s the thrill of being on the road,” explained Rick Rouse, whose Southern California company, TL Enterprises, publishes a gaggle of magazines aimed at RV manufacturers, dealers and users. ”A lot of these people would be dead if they didn`t have this. We provide a lifestyle for these people.”
Ah, the lifestyle. It is not quite Club Med on wheels. Rouse`s motor home monthly, for example, is read by an audience whose median age is 60.7 years, more than half of whom are retired, and with an average household income of an estimable $54,500.
”We call it America`s `Second Youth` market,” said Rouse. ”And combined with this financial success are the personal independence and free time needed to best enjoy the RV way of life.”
Some industry officials contend there are as many as 6 million recreational vehicles that are highway-ready, although Rouse regards that figure as generously inflated.
”We can`t find more than 2 1/2 million of them out there and the industry is now producing about 200,000 new units a year, compared to 800,000 a year in the early `70s,” he said.
The dramatic shrinkage of the RV market came in the aftermath of the oil embargo in 1973, when fuel soared precipitously in price and shortages forced service station operators to close on weekends and evenings, a revolting development for motor home drivers who lumbered toward the woods getting only 3 or 4 miles to a gallon.
Although more aerodynamic-and lighter-body styles have been introduced since then, the gas issue remains fuel for sobering thought among the dedicated RV crowd.
My next-door neighbors for a night at St. Ignace`s Lakeshore Park campground, a sturdy couple in their 50s from Merced, Calif., towing a trailer behind a four-wheel-drive truck, were paralyzed with anxiety that their planned sojourn across the continent and back might be curtailed by the crises in the Persian Gulf.
For those of you keeping score at home, I coaxed slightly more than 7 miles to a gallon on my expedition, which was broken into a nearly equal division of high-speed miles and shorter trips to golf courses and grocery stores.
The mitigating factor in the oxymoronic question of RV fuel efficiency, of course, is the reduced cost of on-the-road lodging and restaurant meals. The $11.50 daily fee for electric and water hookup in the campground, for example, represents a fraction of the cost of even a modest motel. And a refrigerator and kitchen cupboards stocked with fruit, crackers and granola bars-not to mention soft drinks by the more economical case-made unnecessary those maddening stops at fast-food emporiums along the road.
”It`s pretty much a wash as far as costs, whether you take a car or a motor home,” insisted Kelly Cummins, an assistant vice president of sales for Coachmen. ”You put your motel bill into the gas tank. The benefits are that you don`t have to have a schedule. There`s a lot of freedom to exercise your vagabond spirit.”
Perhaps I would have felt that spirit more vigorously had I been driving a more compact recreational vehicle, one that balked less at the cross-currents blustering across the windswept lakeside roads up the western shore of Michigan`s Lower Peninsula.
Perhaps it is not yet time for a midstream Baby Boomer to feel at home in campgrounds with people a generation older.
At any rate, it was with some relief that I returned the RV a couple days earlier than planned, cramming back into my two-door sedan with the boys for the final leg of the sojourn westward to Iowa, to the preserved Field of Dreams in the cornfields outside Dyersville.
For such a sentimental journey into the mystical movie world of baseball and memories and fathers playing catch with sons, I selfishly wanted my kids within arm`s reach. And 28 miles to a gallon.
