Day 175 / 190 Passing The Baton

Saylorville Lake

We went to the wedding of my good friend’s oldest son this past weekend. This was the second wedding of a friend’s child this summer and a beautiful event.  These things make you realize you are moving up the ladder of elderhood. As if being a grandparent isn’t enough to make one feel old, watching all your friend’s kids grow up along with yours makes you realize you are quickly being swept up the generational ladder. All of a sudden, you realize there are more people behind you than ahead of you in the aging game.  The father of the bride used the analogy “passing the baton’ in reference to conceding his place as number one man in his daughter’s life to his new son-in-law. It made me start thinking about the hierarchy of seasoned and new RV volunteers.

As we spend time with our friends here at volunteer village who have been work camping for over 15 years we wonder what it will be like when they have traded their gypsy life for a stationary one once again. Volunteer Village at Saylorville will be strange without Will and Judy or Don but it is inevitable that one of these years we will return, and they will not. The culture of work camping is much like a family. Older more experienced workcampers mentor the newer workcampers and we learn from them. Tenured couples have a huge catalog of stories and the newbies dream of the time when they are the ones who are sitting around the campfire telling tales to the up and coming generation of workcampers.

In our first two years we have become friends with several couples who have been doing this for many years. In the modern world of full time park volunteers these people are perhaps the first or second generation. I imagine the original work campers were the circus people, or carnies. Before that, we knew them as the traveling show or medicine men selling magic elixir (aka, opium) back then they called them gypsies.  As camping has become more popular, campgrounds have grown and budgets to fund county, state and federal parks has shrunk. Enter the RV Volunteer. People like Champ and I who love the camping lifestyle as much as we love being in a nice campground fill in the gap of paid employees and the work it takes to make the campgrounds nice for the people who visit them. The subculture of park volunteers is a distinct sect of the work camping world. We don’t get paid except for our site and utilities. That’s fine with us.  We love what we do, and we love who we do it with. Our fellow volunteers become our family on the road and a certain respect is bestowed upon those who have been committed for years. It’s a little like a tribal hierarchy of respect. We aspire to be them and hope for the good luck and good health that it takes to look back on 20 years in the game.

Like parents or older siblings, we look up to the Will and Judy’s of the work camping world. We love them and dread the year when we are here, and they are not. Every job we go to we get to know the other volunteers, some newer at it than us and some like our friends here who are veterans. We share and learn from each other and make connections. Like parents watching their kids grow up, volunteers watch the years tick by just as fast and realize we will quickly become the old timers of the volunteer village.

It is truly the beginning of a new life cycle, when you embark on this wonderful journey. Who knows what park volunteers will look like in 15 years, when Champ and I are the old timers sitting around the campfire, telling tales of being flooded out of our site in 2018, going an entire summer with an ailing AC unit or having emergency surgery 1500 miles from everyone we know. In a decade we’ll have so many stories we won’t be able to remember them all and probably bicker about what year it was or where we were when this or that happened. I can’t wait. Just like being a grandparent, being the 15+ year RV veterans will be a lot like that I think.

As we look down the barrel of our third winter away, I shudder at how quickly time is moving. One of these years Will and Judy will ‘pass the baton’ to us, Someday, we will be ready to hand it off to people just like us and the wheels on the bus will go round and round.

I can’t leave without putting in some pictures from the wedding. It was such a special day for a family who lives deep in my heart.

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Until Next time…