The Cabin Camp: Here to stay, or already gone?

La Quinta Inn: My home away from home.

When reading James Agee’s “American Roadside,” I was struck by his description of the cabin camp, an institution that has seemingly gone by the wayside for today’s tourists – or at least, neither my family nor I have ever used or even seen one on our road trips, of which there have been a considerable amount. I have, of course, stayed in a number of those roadside hotels. You know the kind: the Comfort Inns, the La Quintas, those cheap but clean hotels that are a few steps above a Motel 6. We never stayed in motels, because my mother was convinced that they were all infested with lice and cockroaches (which is pretty funny, considering the fact that my grandparents owned a motel in Albuquerque for many years, and my family actually lived there with them for a handful of those years).

When Agee describes “the vista of a city” that the auto-tourist catches sight of at the crest of a hill, I, too, can see the “second-class commercial hotel” with its “drab lobby” and “cheerless rooms” with my eyes closed (45). Sounds just exactly like the hotels I’ve always stayed in on the road with my family: every room in every cheap hotel I’ve stayed in looks the same (save for a change in carpeting and quilt design), with the same clean-but-faintly-musty smell and the fluorescent lighting in the bathroom. In contrast, the cabin camps sound so simplistic and peaceful, with an air of quaintness that I think I would’ve enjoyed: a bed, a couple of chairs, a row of hooks, a washbasin (47). I would much rather have tried out a cabin camp, and been surrounded by “a grove of cool trees” instead of the usual parking lots, Denny’s restaurants, and highway on-ramps (45).

But, contrary to Agee’s confident proclamation that the cabin camp, “like the automobile…is here to stay,” (44) it seems that the era of seeing a “little semi-circle of cabins” (45) off the side of the road has passed. Sure, there are little automobile camps and cabins for rent near where I live, but they aren't intended for tourists, or as roadside resting places for travelers. They're more like a cute camping getaway for the suburban outdoorsy novice (like me, for instance: I stayed at an automobile camp this summer, and it took me and a friend over an hour to pitch the tent - and it fell down twice during the night). Or maybe they are still around, but just not in the southwestern U.S. Hopefully Agee wasn't totally wrong, and I’ll encounter one some day. But until then, hello La Quinta.