My family is spending an increasing fraction of our summer weekends on California’s campsites. Because on campsites the usual self-imposed segregation by social class and ethnicity is removed, and because people who visit public campsites self-select for those happy to meet other people, the state’s diversity becomes more obvious. Here are the types of campers that we’ve encountered:
- Older couples with vintage camper vans and hippie vibes
- Younger couples and small families with Sprinter vans. Likely to work in tech
- Guys in their twenties driving around on dirtbikes. Almost all of them are white and not that worried about what would happen if one fell off one’s bike and hit one’s unhelmeted head on the Sierra Nevada granite
- College students getting drunk. If you’re unlucky, they’ll have brought a portable karaoke machine that they have plugged into a powerful sound system
- College students decked out with several thousand dollars’ worth of REI gear
- Older guys who are into flyfishing and just want to be left alone and bind flies
- Groups of scary, bold white guys with tattoos, at least until you talk to them, when they seem eager to prove that there’s no reason to be scared by being exceptionally nice and helpful
- Large Southeast Asian families with rooftop tents and multiple dogs
- Large Hispanic families. On the more remote campsites, there is a possibility that they’ll bring small Utility Vehicles that they’ve modded to resemble something out of Mad Max, driving the unpaved roads until late into the night
- People towing boats
- The unclassifiable: Like the Frenchman at the boat launch, unloading a sleek, wooden standup paddleboard that he had handcrafted in his Tiburon workshop
Thank you for reading through this amateur sociology post. Here is another one.
Nehaveigur 