I Admit It -- I have become trailer trash (at least part time)

Early 21st Century Trailer RV Park

Recently I was sitting outside drinking coffee while the sun climbed into the morning sky.  As I was sipping my pre-breakfast cup I started thinking about something.  Let me set the stage.

When I was a preschool aged boy "the early 1950's" we lived in a house down a small unpaved side street across from a trailer park.  I remember clearly my mother telling me that I was not to associate with the children or the other folks who lived in that trailer park.  She told me that there was one nice older lady who had been there for quite some time that we considered a friend and who was safe, but the rest of the residents were off limits.  I don't think she ever used the terms, but she insinuated that the people who lived in trailer park were "transients" and "trailer trash."  The insinuation had very negative connotations that the people living there were not our kind of people.

As I looked around me that morning I observed that I was beginning my day right in the middle of a trailer park. And i was probably going to associate with the folks in that park.  It was a trailer park of the early 21st century and it was much different from the one I remember as a small boy.  There are thousands of these parks dotting the countryside and they are called "RV parks."  These RV parks do not for the most part contain people that fit the demographic of people my mother worried may be living in the trailer parks of the early 1950's.  But instead they are filled with people who have been reasonably successful at something throughout their working careers and who were considered upstanding members of established communities.  They are not people about whom mothers would warn their children not to associate.  In fact, a large percentage of them are grandparents who from time to time have their grandchildren with them.  Instead of one nice older lady like my mother told me about in the park across the street, the park is full of nice older men and women.  I am talking about retired people.

Perhaps the most interesting group of people I meet in these trailer parks are the RV "fulltimers."  These are people who live full time in their RV.  They are interesting to me because after spending a lifetime accumulating stuff and being a part of a fixed location community of neighbors, churches, schools, civic organizations, hospitals, etc. (you get the idea); they decided to sell, give away, or throw away 95% of their stuff, leave everything else behind and move into 200 to 400 square feet of space that moves around from place to place.  What would motivate people to do such a thing?  That is the question that makes them interesting.

Our economy is built on obtaining stuff.  Our society also has a huge group (town, school, community) spirit component.  But when these people retired they moved away from all that in a big way.  An extreme downsizing took place.  Were they rejecting their previous life style with its set of drivers?

I don't think they were rejecting their previous lifestyle.  But I believe they felt a need to retreat from that lifestyle to experience a life directed by a different set of drivers.  They felt the need to live life in a different way to achieve different things.  With their new lives they are making a statement that their past lives do not represent the only valid way to live.  These “fulltimers” are truly interesting people.

Note about the picture:  Our rig is the fourth one on the right.  It is the one with the dark brown front cap.  The park is in Jersey City, NJ just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.