Can You Escape?

Scene from The Great Escape

Yesterday I pulled into a crowded NC gas station, and started my routine— pumping, grumbling, and pumping. I wasn’t alone in that routine. Suddenly, something pulled up that caused every last person at the station to turn their heads and start drooling. One man stopped pumping his gas, looked into his car at his wife and said, “Baby I’ve got to get one of those!” Another, watching the owner of this vehicle pumping gas, made his way over, examined closely and remarked, “Beautiful. Love that wood trim around the odometer.”

Within minutes, several were standing close to it, hands in pockets or scratching their foreheads with a longing so palpable, I wondered if they felt mine as well. I stood at the pump nearest to it trying to be cool, but totally unaware that I had gone past my intended $10.00 on 10. When I realized this I stopped my pump and looked at the owner who was still pumping, watching with a smile all of the men and women enraptured. I thought, “I guess he gets this a lot.” Then surprisingly, one brave soul called out to the owner, “Hey Man. Can I get in it?

Was this station stopper the shiny new Camaro, having virtually leapt off the movie screen a few weeks ago from The Transformers ? No. Perhaps one of those smart cars that seem to actually be half of a car but have such good gas mileage that people are willing to risk instant death from a 25mph bump in trade for 40 mpg? Was that what had excited all those who were budgeting gas at this station? No. Was it the latest BMW, Porsche, Lamborghini, or maybe even the hottest Harley on the planet? Nope.

It was a gas guzzling, nice but virtually unassuming RV. I was struck by what it seemed we at the station had demonstrated. We longed not for the shiny, the efficient, or even the prior status symbols of BMW or Mercedes. We longed for escape. Thirteen years ago Hope Dlugozima wrote in “Six Months Off-The Sabbatical Book,” “ The need for big chunks of time-to think, to recharge our emotional, creative, and spiritual batteries, to learn critical new skills, to simply gain the perspective necessary to make sense of a rapidly changing world-has never been greater.” It may have never been greater then, but it’s pretty powerful today for sure.

Let us not forget that while other countries routinely take months off, work shorter days, and have shorter yet productive weeks, Americans don’t. Add to that the fact that as children and young adults in college, we were allowed to imagine June through August as off time. For a full 22+ years of our life we could just “be.” Then the work world came and vacations got smaller, weekends became pressure cookers to prepare for the next weeks work, and the idea of time off has become so desired that we have come to salivate over an RV– draining $140+ in gas in the middle of $3.00 a gallon days.

I was tempted to walk around in the 40 foot RV like my station friends, but it was so crowed in there I just stood back and watched. I guess I could have hopped in there for a moment. Why not get caught up in the dream? What would I do…where would I go with my own RV? Probably somewhere similar to the idea of one guy who had just stepped out of his self guided tour. Totally giddy, he excitedly said to his wife, “Baby we need one of these to go to the beach…in California!”