RVs, as in Road Views: Three Perspectives on America

Two summers back, my family piled into a rented RV and drove 22,000 miles through 46 states. Since then, I’ve paid attention to the steady trickle of books written by people who have done something similar.

Most aren’t very good. Some authors are insufficiently open to the characters and experiences that road life pitches at travelers like bad retreads. Others just can’t write a lick.

But three recent releases capture the peculiar realm of RV exploration beautifully, if from very different perspectives.

For 12 years, Crotty and Lane pingponged around the U.S., first in a van, then in a motor home, publishing “the world’s only mobile magazine,” an eccentric, energetic blast of words and images they called Monk.

The magazine was a classic. So when its creators blasted through these parts a few years ago, a couple of friends and I hopped aboard for a lunch-hour look at life through the bug-splattered windshield of the 26-foot, faded pink Monk mobile.

It was an unusual perspective--one all travelers should at least glimpse. And now they can, as Crotty and Lane have compiled their New York City adventures into as astute and oddball a guidebook as that heavily over-guidebooked megalopolis could hope for.

The Monks’ descriptions of trying to drive and park their monstrous vehicle in the city will bring tears of recognition to anyone who has done the same. Their tale of getting it fixed--by the tough grease monkeys at Joe’s Truck Repairs--will evoke sobs.

Ultimately, though, the RV is incidental--if not antithetical--to the Monks’ pop-cultural anthropology approach to travel.

These guys are not Ma and Pa Potatohead, just boppin’ by in the Winnebago to see Lady Liberty. Their viewpoint is odd, assured and amusing, with little patience for “fratheads, stockbrokers, bridge and tunnel creeps” or “mindless Neanderthal breederdom.”

And yet their post-hip take on the city is also full of heart and offers convincing evidence to support their introductory premise: that the city’s underground, or counterculture, or whatever you want to call it, has been a moribund poseur since Andy Warhol polluted it with smug, cold-hearted cynicism in the ‘60s.

“A true underground,” the Monks opine, like Ginsburg on a howl, “does not come from advertising culture or fashion mags or Hollywood. A true underground is not overpriced and cruel. . . . A true underground has humor, often outrageous and absurd humor, and a genuine passion for authentic people, places and events. Above all, a true underground is not phony.”

It seems unlikely that Bill Graves would know performance artist Annie Sprinkle (a typical Monk interview) from Annie Oakley. Which only goes to show the modern nomad life’s broad appeal.

Graves, as it happens, is a retired naval officer and technical advisor to movies who, after a divorce from his wife of 24 years, hit the road solo in a motor home. He is also the kind of guy who doesn’t bother to stop in Santa Fe, N.M., but waxes eloquent about tiny Mountainaire a few hours off. The 73 chapters of his “Back Roads” chronicle places most guidebooks disdain, from Amboy, Calif., to Kemmerer, Nev.

Never cute or sentimental, Graves writes with a straight-ahead style that is immediately engaging and as hard to step away from as a rambling fireside chat with newfound campground neighbors.

I can’t say whether the Monks would react differently than Graves does to certain encounters--say, the beer- and sun-addled, ne’er-do-well nudists he meets at Oh My God Springs, near the Salton Sea. But I can’t imagine them coming up with a more apt assessment:

“ ‘There is always hope,’ you might say. But only if you look for it. The ghettos, the mud holes, the pits of the desert are filled with those who have quit looking.”

For the most part, Graves’ view of small-town humanity is generous and kind. Perhaps that stems from his early encounter with an 83-year-old vagabond named Emmy. After sharing a few desert sunsets with the retired teacher, Graves moves on, having learned this:

“It’s not too late. It never is. A man becomes his attentions. It is all he has, or ever will have. His observations and curiosity make and remake him.”

A similar philosophy, coupled with a touch of “just do it” thinking, is what nudged the Grahams to sell their house, quit their jobs and hit the road for a year. And so the author and her husband, Craig, and their children (Collier, 3, and Courtney, 11) set off in a custom van conversion.

As always, the nature of the travelers dictates how they see the world. The Grahams’ view is family-centric, and their kids provide entree to a slice of pint-size society.

And although this travelogue is more riddled with “You betcha’s!” than the others, it is never cloying. Any temptation to go too gee-whizzy is surely mitigated by the fact that the author, when she was 15 and her brother 17, made a similar 50-state journey with their parents in a Volkswagen Beetle.

If the Monks and Graves and the Graham family were to meet in a KOA outside Wolf, Wyo., they’d likely fire up a barbecue, and toast ol’ Woody Guthrie and sing a few rounds of “This Land Is Your Land.” They’d also squabble about politics, generators and the best route from Laramie to Sheridan.

All in all, though, I’ll bet they’d get along with one another as well as they got along with all the other unusual types they met on the trail. It’s called tolerance, and it’s what makes their views from the road so interesting to read.

Books to Go appears the second and fourth Sunday of every month.