Taking Their Lives on the Road

Afew years ago when Dorothy and David Counts, a husband-and-wife team of Canadian anthropologists, began applying for research grants to rent a recreational vehicle for a leisurely journey through California and the rest of the Sunbelt, their colleagues scoffed. Some thought it a clever subterfuge to escape the Toronto winter; others ridiculed their plan to devote years to studying the culture of "RVers," suggesting that an examination of Club Med might be next in order.

But the pair had faced daunting challenges in doing fieldwork before. For a quarter of a century they'd trekked into the wilds of Papua New Guinea, braving malarial hordes of mosquitoes and teeth-rattling monsoons in villages with no electricity to learn about how elders were treated in that South Pacific society.

Venturing into the world of RVs also presented hardships: They had to learn to park a truck pulling a 25-foot trailer without taking out a block of cars, ignore taunts of drivers in zippier vehicles and master a strange language with terms like "hitch itch" (the overpowering feeling of being in one place too long).

More than 40,000 miles and innumerable oil changes later, they've produced a trail-blazing piece of work, "Over the Next Hill: An Ethnography of RVing Seniors in North America," out recently from Broadview Press. Last month, the two presented their findings to an appreciative audience of the American Anthropological Assn. in San Francisco.

Other scholars applauded their methodology: participant observation (driving a trailer), interviews (often over laundry at trailer parks) and questionnaires ("Do you carry weapons?").

The results were surprising, not least to the Countses. "We thought that working with RVers was going to be fairly straightforward," Dorothy Counts said. "We were really astonished. After the first two weeks we got up every day and said, 'What's going to astonish us today?' "

Before the Countses' research, many anthropologists could readily find out more about the sex lives of teenagers in Samoa than they could about millions of senior citizens cruising the byways of America. When the Countses started their project in 1990, the only academic literature they could find was a 50-year-old dissertation. Luckily there were some publications, such as Trailer Life and Motor Home, to give them a glimpse into the RV world before they set off into the wilderness of fifth wheels, folding trailers and van campers.