Cathedral City, California
The RV park where we're staying is pretty nice, as these things go. Last year we stayed at a place that was much more redolent of trailer park than RV park, if you know what I mean. There were permanent residents, as there are here, but many of them had converted their small pull-behind trailers into tiny houses, complete with little plastic picket fences, lawn trolls, and Japanese lanterns. These were, for the most part, people who couldn't afford to live anywhere else and who would have decorated their lawns like that even if they lived in regular houses, replete with year-round Christmas lights. From the open screen doors of their dwellings came the jagged coughs of elderly smokers and the rough baritones of whiskey-voiced women. Life had ridden most of those folks hard and put them away wet, and what they had to show for it was a trailer and a few square yards of crappy living space. To be sure, there were a number of spaces there for transient vacationers such as ourselves, but the atmosphere was, shall we say, mixed.
This year's dwelling place is a cut or two above that. As I said, there are a few year-rounders, but all of them, and the majority of the rest of the occupants, have large nearly-new class A motor homes or spacious fifth wheels of the sleek variety, often exceeding 40 feet in length, with three or four sliders. Having attended several annual RV shows at the Pomona Fairplex in LA County, I know that the class A's of that size often cost over $250,000 new, and the fifth wheels about half that. Our modest 2006 32-foot class A looks perfectly respectable, but somewhat small and doughty, by comparison. And we bought it when it was 11 years old, so it cost less than one of the overpowered four-door pickup trucks that seem to be the vehicle of choice for pulling a fifth wheel.
Perhaps half the denizens of this park hail from Canada, and mostly from British Columbia. A fair number of the park dwellers, and the Canadians, are male gay couples. However, in light of the acceleration of the coronavirus epidemic, most of the Canadians cleared out at least a week ago, heading for an uncertain border crossing and what they assume will be a 14-day quarantine once they get home. The mass migration of the Canadians, like that of the painted lady butterflies hereabouts or the monarchs over in the California central coast, was to be expected anyway, but not for another month or so. Entomologists might say, "Well, the Canadians are a little early this year." These Canadians are restricted to no more than 182 days (I think) per year in the U.S., and if they overstay their welcome here in the land of the free, they risk being prohibited from re-entering for up to five years. And worse yet, from their point of view, if they stay for a half year or more they will be subject to U.S. and, I presume, California income taxes. Despite their unfettered leisure time and apparent affluence, which permits them, despite the comparative weakness of the Canadian dollar, to spend their time in quarter-million-dollar RVs, and travel back and forth to California (not to mention for some of them the Mexican Pacific resort areas), they seem to regard the whole subject of the virus and forced social distancing (which they don't observe very well, considering that most of them are in a vulnerable demographic group), as something of a joke, and really, more of an annoyance than anything else. Perhaps it's in their national character to act mildly annoyed and bemused by just about everything, as a sort of antidote to what they may justly regard as the U.S. tendency toward shrill hysteria. I don't know.
Fortunately for most of them, the weather in the Vancouver area, where they are principally from, is comparatively mild in April. There is a couple from Ontario still here, and they're not going anywhere just yet, for obvious reasons. That leaves a smattering of U.S. folks, mostly from places like Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and South Dakota, from whence, like us, they've come to miss out on winter. And the year-rounders I mentioned. It's rare to see a motor home from east of the Mississippi, or from south of the Mason-Dixon line. Folks out there go to Florida or just stay where they are.
And speaking of staying where you are, we are doing just that. The virus situation is unfolding and unforgiving and changing so rapidly that it's not even worth going into detail about it here. You can read the newspapers or the online stuff, and anything I say now will be at least partly obsolete tomorrow. We're staying in and taking walks around the sparsely populated park and doing lots of reading and some TV streaming, which in truth is what we were doing anyway, except that now there's no going out for sushi and Thai and Mexican and to the movies. I go out every ten days or so to the grocery store and take all the precautions I can short of wearing a hazmat suit. This is life for most of us around the world, so I'm not telling you anything. And if it's not life for you, then you're a fucking fool, and a dangerous one at that, unless you have the misfortune of being a healthcare worker, grocery store employee, or cop or firefighter, in which case I wish you the best and urge you, in the case of the cops, not to shoot anybody.
Perhaps half the denizens of this park hail from Canada, and mostly from British Columbia. A fair number of the park dwellers, and the Canadians, are male gay couples. However, in light of the acceleration of the coronavirus epidemic, most of the Canadians cleared out at least a week ago, heading for an uncertain border crossing and what they assume will be a 14-day quarantine once they get home. The mass migration of the Canadians, like that of the painted lady butterflies hereabouts or the monarchs over in the California central coast, was to be expected anyway, but not for another month or so. Entomologists might say, "Well, the Canadians are a little early this year." These Canadians are restricted to no more than 182 days (I think) per year in the U.S., and if they overstay their welcome here in the land of the free, they risk being prohibited from re-entering for up to five years. And worse yet, from their point of view, if they stay for a half year or more they will be subject to U.S. and, I presume, California income taxes. Despite their unfettered leisure time and apparent affluence, which permits them, despite the comparative weakness of the Canadian dollar, to spend their time in quarter-million-dollar RVs, and travel back and forth to California (not to mention for some of them the Mexican Pacific resort areas), they seem to regard the whole subject of the virus and forced social distancing (which they don't observe very well, considering that most of them are in a vulnerable demographic group), as something of a joke, and really, more of an annoyance than anything else. Perhaps it's in their national character to act mildly annoyed and bemused by just about everything, as a sort of antidote to what they may justly regard as the U.S. tendency toward shrill hysteria. I don't know.
Fortunately for most of them, the weather in the Vancouver area, where they are principally from, is comparatively mild in April. There is a couple from Ontario still here, and they're not going anywhere just yet, for obvious reasons. That leaves a smattering of U.S. folks, mostly from places like Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and South Dakota, from whence, like us, they've come to miss out on winter. And the year-rounders I mentioned. It's rare to see a motor home from east of the Mississippi, or from south of the Mason-Dixon line. Folks out there go to Florida or just stay where they are.
And speaking of staying where you are, we are doing just that. The virus situation is unfolding and unforgiving and changing so rapidly that it's not even worth going into detail about it here. You can read the newspapers or the online stuff, and anything I say now will be at least partly obsolete tomorrow. We're staying in and taking walks around the sparsely populated park and doing lots of reading and some TV streaming, which in truth is what we were doing anyway, except that now there's no going out for sushi and Thai and Mexican and to the movies. I go out every ten days or so to the grocery store and take all the precautions I can short of wearing a hazmat suit. This is life for most of us around the world, so I'm not telling you anything. And if it's not life for you, then you're a fucking fool, and a dangerous one at that, unless you have the misfortune of being a healthcare worker, grocery store employee, or cop or firefighter, in which case I wish you the best and urge you, in the case of the cops, not to shoot anybody.
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