Curious Travelers

You never know who you might run into while you are RVing. It might be a couple of Yale graduates—Clarence Thomas, who was born poor and became a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, or Carll Tucker, who was born rich and became a writer, editor and publisher.

If you met Thomas, you would no doubt find someone far different from the scowling, implacable figure portrayed in the media. According to The Nine, Jeffrey Toobin’s entertaining and insightful account of the Supreme Court, Thomas may exhibit rage in his written opinions, but is universally adored at the court for his good nature.

So maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that he and his family have found joy in RVing, camping overnight in Wal-Mart parking lots and at campgrounds near NASCAR racetracks. Thomas even has kept a picture of his Prevost motorhome by his desk. As he told the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association back in 2004 when he received its Spirit of America award, “Being an RVer helps me do my job better.”

He explained: “The world I live in is very cloistered. The bulk of my adult life has been spent in Washington D.C. RVing allows me to get out and see the real America. In RV campgrounds, you wave at everybody and they wave back.”

Privileged Life
Carll Tucker comes from a background even more isolated from ordinary life. His grandparents had a 28,000 square-foot mansion on hundreds of acres in New York’s Westchester County, an hour from Manhattan. Tucker grew up with servants to see to his needs and grooms to take care of the horses, and then went off to Yale, where he graduated summa cum laude.

In Westchester County, he became editor and publisher of a weekly newspaper, trustee of various charities, and chairman of the hospital. For a while, he was also chairman and editor of the literary magazine Saturday Review.

As he came to his 50th birthday, life changed. His three children were grown and his 26-year marriage was breaking up. He had sold his publishing company and was looking for something new. So he decided to meander through the U.S. alone for nine months in a motorhome, visiting the graves of everyone who had served as President or Vice President.

The result of that journey is a remarkable book, The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Finding America, Finding Myself.

The title is from a nursery rhyme in which the bear goes over the mountain “to see what he could see.”

The Other Half
The book is as much an outsider’s account of America beyond New York as French historian Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was an outsider’s view of America in the 1830s.

As he began his journey, Tucker wrote his wife that although there are almost no campgrounds near Manhattan, there are thousands in North America, and millions of RVs. “You and I don’t know anybody who owns an RV,” he wrote. “But that makes us odd, not them.”

Tucker bought a 23-foot Class C motorhome, and set out with some trepidation since he had never driven an RV, and was the sort who had always hired things done rather than doing things himself.

One of his first stops was at a Wal-Mart. He had heard about Wal-Mart, of course, but he had never been in one. His first surprise was how easy it was to get lost.

“My second surprise,” he writes, “is the guys’ faces. They’re sad. Unshaved, in their twenties, with clinging shirts or a piratical earring, they’ve been dragged, this sunny Memorial Day, by the wife with tots in tow. The wives beam. They meet other wives and laugh and extol the finery of their daughters…The men grunt greetings, ashamed to be found here.

“I feel for the husbands. This is not where they should be—choosing this or that shower curtain on their day off. They should be in the open, banging a ball, buffing a truck, downing a convivial beer. Maleness used to be a big deal. But then something happened. Our strength wasn’t needed any more…A man’s use now was to lug groceries—if he had any use at all.”

Disappointments
Those are the kinds of observations Tucker makes as he journeys across America. He doesn’t find much to like about Mt. Rushmore, Hersheypark, or Cracker Barrel restaurants; he drives along listening to Beethoven and Bach, and he is offended that so many people are out of shape.

“Where I come from, people are slim, especially the women,” he writes. “The rich in any epoch want to look the opposite of the poor. Our poor nowadays are fat.

“I’m unused to seeing fat people. Here it was hard to find one svelte. Thighs and upper arms bulged; breasts and bellies sagged, jowls jiggled. Our national gait had become a waddle.”

You could make the case that Tucker is a snob, or you could say he has refined tastes. What makes the book more endearing is its honesty. Tucker can be tough on himself. He gets lonely on the road, and includes a passage about his clumsy, unsuccessful effort to find female companionship at a bar in Billings, Montana.

Interspersed through the book are Tucker’s observations about the Presidents and Vice Presidents, gleaned from visits to their graves and extensive reading. It’s a way to learn history.

But the book is mostly about Tucker trying to understand America and his place in it.

“For most of my life, I fretted about time,” he writes. “On every anniversary—of my birth, my marriage, my children’s births, holidays, religious and calendar years—I’d berate myself for slowness, laziness. I’d wake sweating in the night at how little I’d made.

“Then one day, as if by a wand, my fear vanished,” he says. He was free to do as he pleased, to follow his own dreams.

Much to Admire
As he tours the country, he finds inspiration in America, its history and achievements. He may have little regard for William Randolph Hearst and the castle he had people build at San Simeon, but he is fascinated by the towers the poor immigrant Simon Rodia built by himself in Watts. Malls may be boring, but vegetable stands are wonderful. And there are always surprises, like the amazing local history museum in Mobile, Alabama.

At the end of his trip, Tucker finds no way to sum it all up. “I cannot see America, it is too vast and various,” he writes. “Yet it shines, like the sun behind the clouds, lighting all.”

As for his own experience, he writes, “ I cannot, with assurance, claim a use for what I have done. But I know the doing has enlarged me, made me better somehow. Never have I felt more alive, more grateful to the men and women who gave me this chance, more in love with my time. To be glad in the morning may be the summit of accomplishments. My soul rises in thanks.”

We are grateful Tucker made the trip, and are reminded again of the greatness of America. You don’t need to be rich or powerful to explore this fascinating land, and as we travel, we all discover that there is so much to learn about this country and so much to learn from each other.