Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads. ET Denver. She is 22 feet long, and looks like a box stapled on a U-Haul truck. Bed in rear queen! A sailboat-style miracle of space planning on a platform so jangly you wonder whether rivets will pop on the highway. But she is ours. And she is about to ferry me β with my wife, Monitor photographer Melanie Stetson Freeman β through four states in five days during our pandemic summer of We have flown at dawn from Boston to Denver, and now are relieved when our little recreational vehicle is handed to us smelling of disinfectant and open windows.
Without fanfare we are given a manual, some pointers, and solitude. So we wrangle her through surface streets to a supermarket for provisions, then turn west. Which means over the Continental Divide. Which means climbing. I pin the accelerator to the floor. We crawl on. For many Americans who longed to vacation this summer, motor homes served as mobile safe harbors.
But that gives us more time to look, which is everything. In just hours we pass through four kinds of landscape β from blond foothills to rock-strewn canyons to spruce-blackened mountainsides, and finally, cresting at 11, feet, to tender alpine meadows, where streams curl through stands of aspen, their tiny leaves shimmering like sequins. When we emerge from the Eisenhower Tunnel on Interstate 70 an hour west of Denver the world falls away in front of us, the highway clinging to a parapet while far below spreads a vast valley, its grasses lemon-green in the slanting late-day light.
Melanie and I just look at each other. From the doorway I gesture with my mask in hand and raise my eyebrows. Not required in our county. Come in! This is Chad Hodnefield, owner of the campground with his wife, Kristi. I ask him how business is. Reservations were canceled. Not so many one-nighters, more fours and fives. The RV explosion, I tell him. Americans have decided to hit the road, virus or no virus, with RVs their mobile safe harbor.
Our editorial mission, I explain, is to join the tribe. See what freedom feels like after confinement. Learn what our fellow travelers are doing, seeing, sensing, seeking. What would that feel like? Hodnefield says. He is eager to talk. I wonder how the guests feel. Lamkin, waving at her transportable homestead. John and Sue Pack are isolating, too β but en masse.
