the american side of things

tourist camp

Dinner time is close and when hunger strikes, it's hard for anyone to concentrate. I suppose it's never a good idea to work hungry. However, the description of the Roadside food was good enough to keep my attention. The gumbo, thick with crab meat, the Bar-B-Q sandwich (who knew it was the roadside slang for roast meat, not "real" barbeque), doughnuts, jambalaya (deeply spiced meat, rice and tomatoes), creole pralines all sound so wonderfully delicious. However, like all things we call American, they are all rooted in another land. It seems a lot of food we consider American are all but mutations and/or migrants from elsewhere. But the tourist camp, is a truly American invention that came about in during the depression. An economical way for tourists to be on the road and stop somewhere without having to spend much.  Agee writes, " the tourist camp is one sound invention that the American roadside has contributed to the American scene. And as an invention it is more satisfying than the hot dog" (The American Roadside, p. 52). The tourist camp allowed restless people to bombard the roads with their automobiles. These camps were important because people were restless, restive, the automobile was a "hypnosis," the automobile that had become "the opium of the American people." (p.44) It was the means which made the possibilities of travel limitless. And with the cabin camps and automobile camps all around, judging from Agee's article, if you owned a car, there was no reason not to be on the road. However American automobile travel seems to have been according to Agee, in Being Elsewhere, Berkowitz writes that travelers from abroad were just as taken to the American Road, "the crisis of the depression...completed the transformation of tourism into a mass phenomenon." (p.187) The attraction to the automobile was because of the comfort it provided the traveler, the level of familiarity that was now accessible on the go. Tourists could now travel without a location in mind and escape came from the drive itself. John Jackle writes, "travel by automobile was a way of escaping the everyday" (The Tourist). The escapism feeling comes from the many different aspects of driving a car: the speed (the faster you drive, the smaller your field of focus), the mechanical act to distract from all else, and of course, the scenery. The moving image caught in the frame of the window, watching the scenery pass by is just as hypnotic as the driving itself.