RVs look best in your rearview mirror

WHENEVER I’m caught driving behind a so-called recreational vehicle, I honk. It is an instinctive response caused by the very sight of an RV as big as a PT boat blocking my path, my view and my life. Like Pavlov’s drooling dog, the stimulus leaps from a memory conditioned by repetition, in my case not a dinging bell but the endless presence of those behemoths in front of me on an otherwise open road.

My wife, who dislikes honking almost as much as she dislikes sloth, compares me to the late dog Hoover who used to bark at us every evening at exactly 5, which was his feeding hour. Even when daylight saving time began or ended, he’d still bark at 5 p.m. by the clock, as though he could tell time and adjust to the change. I can’t even do that.

“At least the dog was after his food,” she says. “You honk for no reason, like you’re part goose. Honk, honk, honk.”

Even though she does a pretty good imitation of a goose, she doesn’t understand the male dynamics at work here. Men do not like to be hemmed in by vehicles larger than the one they are driving. It has to do with our testosterone and the size of our egos, among other things. Honking is a way of saying, “Leave my woman alone!” or “Hands off my cows!” Big things constitute threats to our possessions.

During a brief time off, driving back from Crater Lake on I-5, a pickup pulling a 40-foot-long trailer known as a fifth-wheeler swung in front of me and lumbered along at maybe 45 miles an hour in the fast lane. I honked until my hand hurt, which caused a good deal of honking by others, a cacophony that did in some ways resemble the sound of geese bound for someplace south. Long Beach, perhaps.

We were at Crater Lake for a second time in a few months because the last time we were there was in the middle of a snowstorm and you couldn’t see the lake. We returned a few weeks ago and learned, to our surprise, that one of the reasons we hadn’t seen the lake was because we were looking in the wrong direction.

“It was your idea to look that way,” Cinelli said, pointing, then spinning in the opposite direction, “when the lake was actually over that way!”

“They must have moved it,” I said.

The idea that a 2,000-foot deep lake had been moved was so outrageous that for a moment she couldn’t find words to contradict my theory. I deal in grand themes when I’m wrong, but the fact is that no matter which direction we might have looked in, we still couldn’t have seen the lake for the snow and the mist.

There are roughly 10 million RVs on the road in the U.S., ranging from little pop-up trailers to vehicles the size of houses, some traveling under their own power, others being towed.

One would think that at this time of year they’d be parked somewhere, their occupants hibernating like kodiak bears, instead of clogging America’s highways.

Robin Williams will be in a movie called “R.V.,” which Columbia Pictures will release next year. They should have come to me for technical support.

Twice I have rented slide-in campers, which is to say units affixed to the bed of pickup trucks. One was called Fun Time, a name intended to indicate what a grand time its occupants would have. To give you some idea of what a grand time we had, I laid it on its side in a sleet storm outside Oklahoma City when the cursed thing hydroplaned.

We were all OK, but I sensed Cinelli and the kids still resented me when she said, quite sweetly, “You did a nice job not killing us, dear.”

When we weren’t out of control in the sleet, we were lodged in RV camps occupied by men wanted for armed robbery in Wyoming and sweet old people who said, “Howdy, folks” every time we saw them, whether it was in the community store or the community toilet. I got along better with the fugitives from Wyoming.

I am personally done with RVs forever, and have come to resent their very presence around me on the road and also the way they all seem to cluster together in aimless convoys, like herds of wildebeest sensing the presence of a lion.

However, I respect the right of the misguided to operate these oversized monsters, although they should be dragged from their vehicles and severely beaten if they ever wave and shout, “Howdy, folks.”

Cinelli predicts that one of these days, a warning is going to go out from Cruise America, a national RV organization, to watch for me, surround me with tank-sized recreational buses pulling cars, boats and off-road vehicles, and move in slowly until I am pressed to the size of toilet paper.

But I’ll just keep on honkin’ until they do.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.