Basking in the glow of the hip Airstream

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — Maybe it's because I'm punchy. It's been a trying day, 10 hours on the road. The babies got carsick in the mountains, and one threw up rather spectacularly. After arriving at Upper Pines campsite, I had to back the 26-foot Airstream trailer into a tight space between trees, in the dark, a nerve-wracking man audition with a gathering audience of seasoned and skeptical RVers shouting advice: "Cut the wheels to the left. ... The other left!"

But now the day is done. Roz and Viv (my 10-month-old twins) are finally asleep in the trailer and my wife, Tina, with them. I'm sitting at a picnic table in the sumptuous, high-corniced night of Yosemite Valley, drinking coffee, looking at the Airstream. Just looking.

The orange lick and leap of the campfire light pours off the polished aluminum skin like lava. The Airstream hovers; it glows. As I said, I'm punchy.

I've never been much interested in the recreational-vehicle lifestyle. You call this camping? Please. But I've always wanted an Airstream. Billed as the world's oldest recreational-vehicle company — born in Los Angeles in 1932 but now in Jackson Center, Ohio — Airstream has had the good sense to keep its classic design classic. The riveted aluminum capsules of today are, aesthetically at least, not much different from the silvery streamliners of more than half a century ago.

An Airstream is a shiny telegraph from midcentury America, an object that reflects our grandparents' restless, road-hungry energy. One Airstream — a 1960 Bambi model — made it all the way to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. So when the company asked whether I'd like to borrow one of its trailers for a week, it felt like being asked whether I wanted to borrow the 20th Century Limited or the Chrysler Building. Oh, yeah.

Rough road for RVs

The road ahead is rocky for America's RV industry. Shipments are off by 17 percent for the first half of 2008 compared with the same period last year, and sales of the big class-A motor coaches are off more than 50 percent. It doesn't help that gas and diesel are so expensive and that a big motor coach gets around 6 miles per gallon.

Airstream has been partly insulated from these forces. For one thing, the products are designer-label expensive — two to three times more costly per-foot than comparable trailers — so they play to a more affluent demographic. For another, the Airstream's retro-Modernist style attracts buyers who would not otherwise consider an RV.

"People will buy an Airstream because it's different, and they think they are different," says Rich Luhr, editor of the enthusiast magazine Airstream Life. "They tend to be more artistic, a lot of teachers, a lot of small-business owners and entrepreneurs. They're more design oriented. They look at a white-box RV and say, 'Ugh, I can't be seen in that.' "

In what would have likely struck the company's founder — the highly eccentric caravaner Wally Byam — as a very odd turn of events, Airstream has become a hip luxury brand. Matthew McConaughey hip, Sean Penn hip, Dr. McDreamy hip.

Haves and have nots

If you ever go shopping for a recreational vehicle, you will hear the argument that — compared with the cost of airline tickets and hotels — RVs are a much cheaper way to vacation. I've done a quick run of the numbers, and I think that's crazy.

The economics of RVing depend on lots of things: number of days of use, the monthly payments (the interest may be deductible as a second home), residual value, per-mile costs of operation and number of people in your family.

Some observations from the road:

• There is something undeniably fun about hauling a house — a very nice, 26-foot, $70,000 Airstream house — behind you. We stop several times (diaper changes, feedings and the like). We simply step into the Airstream and, just like that, we're there. With an RV, the destination really is the journey.

• The engineering advantages of streamlining are as real and relevant as they were 76 years ago. An Airstream's ballistic contours mean it is more stable and takes less power to move it through the air, and that means better fuel economy A check of the Ford Expedition's instant mileage gauge informs me that we're averaging 11.7 miles per gallon hauling the Airstream.

• In the RV world, an Airstream is the equivalent of a Lamborghini. Which is to say, not everyone celebrates your good fortune in having one. We pass several white-box RVs on the road and, though I expect a friendly, fellow-RVer wave, the drivers all seem to be scowling straight ahead.

Airstream life

Our first morning in the trailer requires some consideration of resources. Like all RVs, the Airstream can be externally supplied with water and electricity. But Yosemite doesn't have utility-equipped campsites, so we're having to steward the 39 gallons of freshwater on board carefully. (A status panel tells you how much water you have left.)

The RV lifestyle is also, except for the 100-grand rig involved, very Zen. "You have to learn to edit your life down to the bare essentials," said Airstream Life editor Luhr, who has been "full-timing" in his Airstream for three years now. "You just have to get rid of anything that is nonessential."

This is acutely true in an Airstream. Because of the interior curvature imposed on them by the aerodynamic shape, the trailers are not particularly space efficient. Clearly, we have a lot to learn. After only 12 hours, the inside of our Airstream looks as though somebody threw a stick of dynamite into a Goodwill box.

Winnebago has its partisans and Monaco has its fans, but Airstream has a uniquely rapt culture and society numbering in the tens of thousands. One reason is that, because of their aluminum monocoque construction, Airstreams can survive for decades.

We meet some citizens of Airstream Nation in Yosemite. Michael and Tina Lambert of St. Thomas, Ontario, hauled their vintage '71 International the length of old Route 66 before arriving at the park. He's a high-school art teacher; she runs her own child-care center. And they are both mad for midcentury modern. The Lamberts gutted the trailer and rebuilt it in Atomic chic/kitsch: the swimming-pool-aqua upholstery, the martini-glass motifs, the Trader Vic's-style Polynesiana.

Like many hard-core Airstreamers, Lambert has taken an electric polisher to his trailer and arduously, over hundreds of hours, brought it to a mirror-bright luster. "The polish is the difference between an old trailer and an icon," he says with a laugh.

Maybe it's too bright? On this trip, the sunlight bouncing off the trailer burned a hole in a carpet he had put outside.

After three days of camping, and some delicate proceedings at the park's "dump station" involving "black water," we head home. But before we do, we stop off for another $100 of gas.

End of the road

How long can the Great American Road Trip survive? The average household income for RV buyers is only $68,000, according to the industry's own surveys. It seems certain that soaring fuel prices will eventually put this time-honored, middle-class pleasure out of reach of many.

And the cost of fuel threatens even the storied Airstream. When gas was cheap, big SUVs were hugely popular as first and second vehicles. A large segment of Americans had what Airstream Chief Executive Bob Wheeler calls "accidental towing capacity." Which is to say people didn't have to buy a dedicated tow vehicle to go with their trailer.

But truck and SUV sales are plunging. And with dramatically tougher government requirements for fuel economy coming, automakers are getting out of the large truck and SUV business. It's an open question of what people will use to tow travel-trailers in 20 years.

"It's a huge issue for us," says Wheeler.

Airstreams, icons of the 20th century's open road, may find themselves marooned in driveways and parking lots in the 21st. By the time our daughters are grown, an Airstream may be as rare a sight on the road as a '57 Chevy or an Indian motorcycle is today.

But whenever they do see one, they're sure to stop and look. Just look.

Dan Neil is a Los Angeles Times automotive critic.