RV TRAVEL ON 5 DOLLARS A DAY

Long, long ago I saw a copy of Arthur Frommer’s Europe on Five Dollars a Day, and was enchanted by the idea of such inexpensive travel. I had studied  French in college, and fervently desired to see Europe, but had little money. (At the time I was a young editor living on a salary of less than $5000 a year.) Could Frommer somehow tell me how to visit Europe anyway?

He could. The book told of many restaurants offering full meals for a dollar or less, hotels where the bathroom was nonexistent or down the hall, cheap forms of transportation, and low-cost museums. The book also contained much advice from seasoned travelers who wanted to share their low-budget finds. My favorite advice was that from a woman who traveled for months with no luggage except a large purse; if I recall rightly, she wore one outfit everywhere, varying it slightly with scarves and a sweater.  If she could manage that well, perhaps I could also.

Though all that detailed information would prove to be extremely helpful, the main thing I gained from reading Frommer was his outlook. He advised scrimping mightily on unimportant items in order to save money for the truly memorable ones, such as the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Alhambra, with perhaps one luxurious splurge.

As it turned out, it took several years and a divorce for me to visit Europe for the first time. In 1971 I saw an ad for a special American Express tour from New York to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco that cost only $250, and realized I could combine it with Frommer’s approach in order to see some of Europe at last. The tour lasted only ten days, but I had a wonderful time, felt very cosmopolitan, and carried one of Frommer’s books everywhere. (By that time travel was a bit more than five dollars a day, but most of his advice was still good.)

It has been more than forty years since that first adventure, during which I have traveled as much as possible. Even when it has been possible to spend more, I have continued to use Frommer’s “biggest bang for the buck” principle. Today, traveling in an RV having a small closet, I think appreciatively of that woman traveler with her one outfit, who helped point the way. A few good tee shirts and pants can go nearly everywhere!

Amazingly, on some days we do spend only five dollars or less on RV travel. If we are boondocking in a Forest Service or BLM campground, we may pay nothing at all for the privilege. Until we move on, gasoline costs us nothing. The fridge is already filled with supermarket foods. Hiking a nearby trail is free.

Of course, my remarks are made with tongue firmly in cheek. The RV cost nearly as much as some small houses, gasoline is very costly when we are driving all day, and if we stay at an RV resort in order to have campground power for a night, the costs can add up quickly. However, the principle is still true: RV travel helps makes it possible to cut costs for unimportant items like hotels and restaurants, and to save up for the worthwhile things like taking a tour of the Biltmore estate or the Hearst Castle, spending a day at Chicago museums, steaming across Lake Michigan on the Badger ferry, and buying Canadian gasoline. Thank you, Arthur Frommer!

WASTED RESOURCES

The Target stores have become known for good design at low prices, and I have happily bought quite a few things there for the RV and our homes. So, when I needed some clothing recently, I headed for the nearest Target.

The bras I chose were on small plastic and metal hangers rather than in packages. As I handed them to the cashier, I said, “I don’t need the hangers—you can keep them for reuse.” She refused to do so, saying that larger plastic hangers can be recycled, but these smaller ones cannot. I indignantly pointed out that this was a waste of plastic and metal. The clerk rolled her eyes—I was obviously being one of those obnoxious customers clerks dread—and told me to just throw them out if I didn’t want them. Muttering “That’s not the point!” I took the hangers with me and left the store. I certainly don’t hang bras in a closet, and doubt that any other woman does. (Well, maybe an elaborate bustier deserves its own hanger.) So, these hangers will end up in my own trash bin.

There must have been several hundred bras in that store, each one on one of those hangers that will be thrown in the trash. How many stores are doing the same thing? What a waste! And how much pollution they will cause! It’s not as if the hangers are necessary—a bra can be packaged in a bag that uses very little paper or plastic. Better yet, hangers can be used for displaying merchandise, but the store can keep them for reuse.

My ire in this case was directed at one Target, but that particular store is only one of many across the country, and Target is only one of the big-box stores with similar wasteful practices. Walmart, K-Mart, and others all do it. Sears, Macy’s, and Penney’s put clothing and other purchased items in huge plastic bags. Supermarkets such as Safeway and Food4Less almost seem to make a point of putting only one or two items in each plastic bag; I have seen some customers leave with what looked like hundreds of plastic bags in their shopping carts.

We customers are at fault almost as much as the stores are. Only a few of us carry reusable bags, though it is easy to do. Like me, some customers allow themselves to be coerced into accepting hangers or other wasteful packaging rather than vociferously objecting to it. Clerks sometimes add to the problem, too. Many of them seem annoyed if they must interrupt their robot-like filling of plastic bags to use our reusable bags instead.

Recently a bill banning plastic bags was introduced in the California legislature, but it failed to pass. As a result, the problem will continue in this beautiful state that thrives on tourism and prides itself on environmental awareness. Except for stores in the few cities that have wisely banned plastic bags, supermarkets and other stores in California will continue this wasteful, polluting practice. A few of the bags will be usefully reused in homes; some may be returned to stores for recycling; most will end up in landfills or waterways. Birds and mammals may choke on them or be asphyxiated by them. Roadsides and picnic areas will be made ugly.

Being an RVer, I see some of this wastefulness in campgrounds, but think having to live in a small space actually encourages conservation. We campers are less likely to load our grocery carts with unneeded items, and to accept extra packaging, than those having lots of storage space at home. In some campgrounds we even have to “pack it in, pack it out,” which truly discourages schlepping a lot of extra items around with us. Most of us care deeply about preserving the natural environment, because we have made an effort to spend time in the national parks or other areas for aesthetic and spiritual reasons. With any luck our concern will have some impact, and our attitudes will prove contagious.

RV GRIPES

Who designs motorhomes, anyway? Though we like the simple interior of our Winnebago View, we cringe at the exterior. The basic white surface, which has the advantage of reflecting sunlight and reducing heat, has a couple of swirling decals on the sides that might have been painted by a chimpanzee on steroids. And our little View is rather tame by comparison with most of the new RVs on the road today, in garish colors and cheesy designs. Readers of RV magazines are starting to write annoyed letters to the editor about the swirls and swoops, but the manufacturers are so far ignoring them.

Part of the problem may be the “if you’ve got it, flaunt it” mentality of some customers. The motorhomes that cost a million dollars or more ought to be beautiful, tasteful homes on wheels; instead, some of them have lighted mirrors everywhere, Christmassy lights in the bathroom sink (!), and far too many TV sets. In a review of a new coach in a current magazine, Bob Livingston writes, “The HDMI Matrix central video selection system is a nice touch and being satellite ready and having the Blu-ray home theater components is great, but getting everything to work in harmony is complicated. There are three TVs in this coach, counting the one in the outside compartment, and connecting them to the system requires on-screen programming and poring through multiple instruction manuals. . . we never did figure out how to connect a satellite receiver without an HDMI input.” This is insanity!

Of course, there may be customers who will buy this garbage. I’m reminded of one RVer who pulled into his campsite, hoisted his TV aerial, and stayed indoors for days. One would hope that he at least looked out the window at the rocky cascades below.

And that reminds me of other despicable RVers: The ones who allow their children and dogs to run through our campsite. Those who run their noisy generators for hours. The overcautious drivers who allow traffic to pile up behind them instead of pulling off the road for a minute.  (Then there are their opposites, the speeders who feel they belong in the fast lane, whatever they are driving.) The owners of 40-foot rigs, towing boats and cars, who try to fit into 24-foot spaces. The drunks. The woman who shouted at me at midnight, “If you want to sleep, go to a motel!” The teenage boys who lurked around the entrance of the women’s showers. The people who leave huge bags of recyclable materials in the Dumpsters rather than recycling them. Those who decorate their campsites with lighted pink flamingos.

One of the most appealing motorhomes I have seen, designed in the 1930s, is a Pierce Arrow on display at the Nethercutt Museum in Sylmar, near Los Angeles. The interior was wood-paneled, and had cleverly planned built-in compartments somewhat like those in an Arts and Crafts home. Appliances were basic and simple. There was nothing ostentatious about the coach, even though it was the high-end line of its day, but everything was functional and attractive. I’d be willing to bet that the wealthy owner would be appalled at some of the rigs—and their owners—of today.

WHO WAS AT THE WINDOW?

 

 

When camping in national parks and forests, of course we’re cautious about predators. We store food in bear boxes or the RV fridge, watch for mountain lions when we hike, look behind rocks for rattlesnakes before sitting down, eye scraggly-looking strangers with initial suspicion.  Just as we don’t display jewelry or electronic gear when walking through city streets, we don’t invite trouble in the boondocks.

At home we feel safe in general. Our home bordering  the El Dorado National Forest is hidden from the road and seems immune even from the occasional El Dorado County crime.  So, when we saw a paw print in the pollen on a bedroom window, we were startled. What could have made a print that large, more than four feet above the ground? It was definitely  nothing human.

Our first thought was the neighbor’s large dog, which tends to wander through our yard and leave his paw prints on everything, but we compared the print with the original dog paws, and realized this animal was much larger.

Could it have been a black bear? Bears do wander into the surrounding area once in a while, and the paw looked like the right size. Bears are notorious for tearing apart anything that might contain food, and that might give us a clue.  In a nearby area not long ago, a bear broke into a cabin where the owner had left a liquor supply. After smashing a bottle of rum, the bear promptly lapped up the rum, got very drunk, and tore apart everything in the cabin. So we looked around for any disturbance, found our compost pile looked untouched, remembered that we have no liquor, and concluded that our visitor was not a bear.

That left us with the frightening main possibility that a mountain lion had been there. The print seems to match those I found online, but I am no expert on identifying animal tracks. (Or scat, aside from deer and dog poop.) We plan to have the county trapper look at a photo of the print soon. In the meantime, we will be a little more cautious walking in the woods—or even walking out the front door.

THE NEANDERTHALS AMONG US

You never know what you may see from an RV window. The South seems especially rich in remarkable sights: One day as we drove along, minding our own business, we saw a huge billboard advertising a dinosaur museum, and we slowed down to check it out.

As it turned out, the museum was too expensive for us—$24 per person, even for us senior citizens. Good grief! For that price, we could have visited a world-class paleontology museum such as the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, or the American Museum of Natural History in New York. More important than the egregious admission price, the museum was anti-science; it was a thinly disguised exhibit about special creation, or the creation of living things as presented in Genesis. We saw no benefit in supporting it, and kept driving.

Some scientists believe God created life; others do not. What nearly all of them agree on is that living things have evolved (changed gradually) since they first appeared on Earth, branching in various directions to form the millions of species that have lived and died over the eons. Evidence from paleontology, anatomy, genetics, embryology, physiology, and  other areas of biology all show similarities among organisms that make sense only if they evolved gradually .

The comic strip Alley Oop is delightfully entertaining. (Oop is a time-traveling Neanderthal who rides through a Carboniferous forest on a dinosaur, battles other cavemen, and so on.) The strip is a pleasant fancy, but of course it is nonsensical. The dinosaurs were wiped out 65,000,000 years ago, millions of years before the Neanderthals appeared. Creationists, though, have tried to insist that all living things were created within 6,000 years, and so humans and dinosaurs actually co-existed. In a hilarious exhibit at one creationist museum, fossils appear to show a dinosaur eating a person.

The creationists have been ridiculed for years, and are thin-skinned enough to have gone through a sort of evolution themselves. Now they call their ideas “intelligent design,” a supposedly scientific theory that is less obviously religious. However, they dodge the question of how there can be a design unless there is a designer. For that matter, what would unintelligent design be?

Back in 1958, just before the centenary of The Origin of Species by Natural Selection, a famous scientist wrote that “a hundred years without Darwinism are enough.” He was appalled that there was still any opposition to a theory that was accepted by the scientific community. And that was more than 50 years ago! There have been amendments to Darwin’s theory of evolution—punctuated equilibrium and the molecular structure of DNA, for instance—but the basic idea of evolution by natural selection has stood the tests of time and of challenges from naysayers.

In recent years researchers have shown that Neanderthals interbred with some groups of modern humans, which means that most of us have some Neanderthal genes. In another sense, though, Neanderthals are all around us—denying evolution, denying climate change, denying science. Will this denial continue for another hundred years? Or will we say this is already more than enough?

WHICH WAY? HOW FAR? WHERE ARE WE?

Having a ghostly voice provide directions as we are driving might simplify our RV life, but what sort of challenge is that? We pride ourselves on making serendipitous discoveries of places that don’t appear on maps. Much better to blunder along with the questionable help of my old Rand McNally road atlas, and with the even less reliable aid of locals.

Conversation with the locals can be amazing, revealing much about current education. When we can get the attention of a young woman who is absorbed in texting about last night’s date, we may ask, “Can you tell us how to get to Wal-Mart?”

“Yeah, sure. Actually, it’s down that street.”

“Which way, east or west?”

[Blank stare.] “That way. Like, past the big mall a ways.”

“How many miles?”

“Uh, I’m not sure. Not too far, actually. You can’t miss it.”

Much later, we pull into a gas station where we can again ask for directions. A slack-jawed young man reluctantly approaches.

“Can you tell us where Wal-Mart is?”

“Well, it’s, y’know, over on the other side of the highway.”

“How far over?”

“Not too far. Like, y’know, half an hour, maybe.”

“Do we go north or south on this street?”

[Glazed expression.] “Just go that way. Y’ go over a coupla bridges.”

Despairing of ever finding Wal-Mart, we stop at a fancy coffee shop filled with people glued to their laptops. The barista—no doubt an MBA looking for permanent employment—listens sympathetically and whips out her expensive tablet. She searches desperately, then brightens. “Here we are. It says the closest one is over in Illinois. About 200 miles.” 

We are in Wisconsin. Three cheers for technology! This is so much better than relying on the locals.

LIVING IN OLD HANGTOWN

A stuffed dummy of a hanged man, noose around his neck, dangles from an upstairs window. A nearby historical plaque notes that this is the site of the Hanging Tree, where nineteenth century mining-claim jumpers and desperadoes were publicly hanged, gratifying the righteous church-going citizens who watched. This grisly spectacle is near the center of downtown.

Originally Placerville, California, (my recently adopted home) was known as Blood and Guts. When gold was discovered by James Marshall a few miles away in 1848, the Gold Rush ensued, and hordes of both honest miners and ne’er-do-wells soon gathered in the hope of getting rich. As water had to be brought in to wash any gold out of the gravel, the town was renamed (a bit more genteelly) Dry Diggins. It was a wild and woolly place. Frontier justice that included the Hanging Tree followed, with Dry Diggins becoming known as Hangtown. The Gold Rush was short-lived, and in a few years Hangtown became much calmer. Those who wanted a better image changed the name to Placerville in 1854. Fewer saloons and brothels, and more churches, were built.

Today, of course, we are more civilized. The stone house that was once a Chinese brothel has been converted to a lawyer’s office. The saloons are generally peaceful places used for socially drinking into a stupor; only occasionally does a bar fight end in mayhem or murder. The “Old Hangtown”  label on police cars and various signs is supposedly a playful nod to our past.

Totin’ a gun is still widespread here, though.  The El Dorado County sheriff, proud to be a good ol’ boy, has proudly proclaimed that he will refuse to enforce any national legislation leading to gun control. He knows which side his bread is buttered on; in a very Democratic state, this county is extremely Republican. Tom McClintock, our representative in Congress, is one of the most conservative members in the House, and always wins elections handily. The local NRA is obviously popular, too—a recent fund-raiser was sold out immediately. When the scarce liberals in the area write letters urging assault-weapons control to the local newspaper, they are promptly derided for being opposed to the sacred Second Amendment. Indeed, one hapless gun-control advocate soon found that someone had gained access to her credit card and charged a purchase at a local gun dealer. What a fun-lovin’ bunch!

The level of civilization here extends to the intellectual. Because it is the county seat, Placerville has a large library that is used by thousands of patrons (many of whom read no books, but happily use the free computers to play endless games and admire themselves on Facebook). Some legerdemain in the past excused the city’s homeowners from paying any taxes to support the library, however. When a library bond issue came up last year—which would have led to an annual assessment of only $18 per parcel, or the price of a few hamburgers—it was promptly voted down. “No new taxes,” the cry rang out, and the faithful responded.

I’m an unreconstructed Bay Area liberal, and find much of this reprehensible. Why do I stay? Hangtown has many attractions for me. One is the long-suffering library; they have a reasonably good collection of books and videos, the librarians are helpful and pleasant, and I enjoy the book club. If I can avert my eyes from the hanged man, I enjoy strolling along Main Street. I can shop in the Placerville Hardware, the oldest continually operating hardware west of the Mississippi, or at the Placerville News Company.  (Everyone calls it George’s, referring to a long-time owner who died years ago. The fifth generation of his family is now working at the store.) Across the street, the Bookery has a large collection of new and used books. In hot weather the best place to eat in town is the Cozmik Café, where some tables are in an old gold mine once used for storing soda water, butter, and so on. Several thrift shops provide support for the local hospice, and offer inexpensive items for sale. The clothing shops and  pharmacy are locally owned. A flourishing group of artists sell their wares in a cooperative gallery, and there are three historical museums featuring Gold Rush times.

The natural environment is beautiful, in the rock-strewn Sierra Nevada foothills. Apple Hill, a few miles to the east, has acres of apple and pear orchards that are a delight to visit. A drive of less than two hours leads to Lake Tahoe, one of the most spectacular lakes in the country. Though urban sprawl is creeping up from Sacramento, at this point Placerville still has much of the small-town ambiance of Gold Rush times, with only scattered monster homes. My own small home is in a wooded cul-de-sac that belies its proximity to downtown. I like my neighbors! So, I will probably be here for a long time, when I am not on the road in the RV or living off the grid with my partner.

RV REPAIRS

It is an unfortunate part of RV life—nearly every long trip is interrupted by some mechanical problem that must be repaired. RVs are not like Model T’s, easily fixed by their owners. We live in California, and seem to have a problem having repairs made near home, which adds to the difficulty.

With a little bit of luck, the repair can be accomplished before the warranty expires. Soon after buying our Winnebago View, we started having trouble with the entertainment system. In the middle of an interesting TV program or DVD, we would see “no signal” on the screen. If the picture returned, it was usually too late. We took it many places for repair under the warranty, but no one else had the same problem, and they obviously thought we were hallucinating. Finally we had had enough, and stopped at the Winnebago factory on our way through Iowa. Forest City turned out to be a nice midwestern town where we hung out for a few days, took the factory tour, and looked through the museum. Though the problem was never diagnosed, our entire entertainment system was replaced.

On another trip, we were in Canada when the drive shaft needed repair. This was bad. The chassis is a Dodge Sprinter, which can be repaired in only a few places. We would have to return to the U.S. and take the View to a Dodge dealer in Minot, North Dakota. We had never heard of Minot at that time, but that would soon change. (Someone in the Air Force later told us that when Air Force pilots misbehave, they are reassigned to the Minot base.) We went to Minot, where it turned out that the drive shaft has three sections, only two of which could be ordered. That took several days, and though the rig could be safely driven, we still needed to replace the third section. As we needed to go on, we left without getting it. To have it replaced under the warranty, we had to return to Minot the following year. Both times we stayed at a Corps of Engineers campground near Garrison Dam, a delightful and inexpensive place. When we had to be at the Dodge dealer’s, we spent time at the nearby excellent public library. The Dodge employees were all professional and helpful, and after two years they began to feel like old friends.

One of our best repair adventures was in Avon, New York. The frightening “check engine” light had come on, and we didn’t dare proceed without having it checked. The Dodge dealer found a very minor problem and corrected it quickly, but the day was getting late, and we had no idea where to spend the night. Another customer who heard us asking about campgrounds suggested that we try the Letchworth State Park a few miles away. He said it was a pleasant campground. What an understatement! Letchworth turned out to be magnificent. Often called the “Grand Canyon of the East,” it has lovely waterfalls, a historic wooden railroad bridge that is still used, and other attractions. If we had not stopped in Avon for repairs, we would never have known about Letchworth.

So, the bottom line is serendipitous. Repair work can be expensive, annoying, and time-consuming, casting a dark cloud over a trip, but we have always found a silver lining.

 

THIS RV BRAKES FOR LIBRARIES

A library stop in Elko, Nevada

Most people think of RVing as taking to the open road, sightseeing, perhaps hiking and fishing. The outdoor life is vital for us, too, but we enrich our travels by spending some time in libraries along the way.

Our local branch of the county library is always a good place to begin. The Pollock Pines library is a cozy one-room operation, nestled beneath pine trees and dogwoods. It has a basic set of travel books that help with general planning; for more specific needs, we can Google on the library’s computers or on our own laptop. Just before leaving home, we may check out a few books to take along. Being a mystery addict, I am likely to take some paperback whodunits or DVDs, which are perfect for entertainment during enforced layovers in rain-drenched campgrounds.

Libraries themselves can be mysterious. In Tonopah, Nevada, we saw a tiny library on a side street. The intriguing sign on the front lawn read A.D. 2500. What was that about? Because Tonopah is on the Extraterrestrial Highway, we speculated that it might mean After Descent or (more scarily) After Dominion.

Lockport, New York,  has a beautiful library where I did some online research for a book while Thane admired the architecture. We hadn’t realized Lockport was on the historic Erie Canal, but the librarians soon set us straight. Following their directions, he saw the canal and locks, and took many photos.

In general, the libraries in large cities or in wealthy suburbs offer the most in books, architecture, and other attractions. Some newer libraries even have coffee shops where patrons can have coffee and a snack while reading books and magazines. The new Alameda, California,  library (built for $25 million with state funds and a local bond issue before the current recession) is spacious and beautiful.

The old library that it replaced was beautiful in another way, having stained glass windows, marble floors, wooden paneling, and lovely ironwork. It was a Carnegie library, one of the hundreds of United States libraries provided around the turn of the twentieth century with financial help from philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Many of these libraries have a characteristic Greek Revival architectural style, with a stairway leading up to the entrance and pillars on each side of it, that is easily recognizable. We have seen Carnegie libraries all over the country. It is always a pleasure to visit one of them and perhaps curl up in front of a fireplace with a good book for a while. Unfortunately, they are gradually disappearing.

Librarians are usually experts on their local areas. When we drove into Las Vegas and had trouble in finding our way to the main strip of casinos, we stopped at a library for help. The idea that anyone could have trouble finding the flashiest square miles in America must have considerably amused the librarians, but they printed out a map of the city and marked it clearly so we could find our way.

Wi-fi is available in libraries nearly everywhere now. If I am writing or editing something, access to the Web is essential; even for e-mail, we need wi-fi every few days.  Occasionally we must pay a small charge for access, but it costs less (and is less fattening) than buying coffee and pastry in an Internet café.

While in a library, we can catch up on magazines and newspapers without spending any money or accumulating paper that must be recycled or thrown away. (We are frugal environmentalists.) Because local newspapers can be read in libraries, we can get an understanding of local issues that would be unlikely otherwise.

Thane devours magazines about anything having wheels—planes, RVs, or motorcycles—or about astronomy or photography. At the library in Pocatello, Idaho, he was delighted to find the latest issues of his favorite magazines on those topics. The library in Bismarck, North Dakota, was another treasure trove of magazines. When I had to fly home because of a family emergency, Thane spent a blissful day in the Bismarck library. I’m not sure he even noticed I was away. North Dakota seems to have excellent libraries, possibly because people need help in getting through the long winters. When we found ourselves in Minot waiting several days for RV repairs, we spent many happy hours in the city library.

In Oregon we bought a large box of cherries at a roadside stand, then realized they would spoil before we could eat all of them. A librarian at the Bend library saved the day by helping me find a recipe for cherry pie.

In general we have been lucky in finding libraries open whenever we happen to stop, but were disappointed in Winnipeg when we found a “closed” sign on the library door, with no explanation. A passerby shrugged and commented “It’s summer,” as if that accounted for it. 

Sometimes libraries in rural areas can be surprising. When we drove into Frazier Park, California, the day was late, and we needed to find a campground for the night.  As we searched, we noticed a library sign and decided to ask there for directions. This library is a gem—a recently built Arts & Crafts creation, complete with stained glass windows, sculptures, music, computers, community meeting rooms, and so on. The helpful librarian pointed us up the mountain to the lovely Chuchupate Forest Service campground, which we would never have found on our own.

So, some day you may see our Winnebago View in a library parking lot. We will be indoors happily catching up on e-mail, work, and reading. Or asking for directions.

"SUPERBUG" BACTERIA

The epidemic raged through the hospital nursery, endangering or infecting newborn babies. It was 1960, when penicillin was still effective against most pathogenic bacteria, but a new strain of Staphylococcus aureus had emerged—a strain that was resistant to penicillin.

I was a research assistant at a large teaching hospital in the Chicago area, and found myself assigned to finding the source of the infection. Was there a Typhoid Mary on the staff? Some cleaning woman or nurse's aide, perhaps? There was only one way to find out. For several weeks I moved from one room on the nursery floor to another, taking nasal swabs from every person who entered the room, then culturing the bacteria from them in the laboratory. It made me less than popular with the nursing staff, but the hospital administrators had given strict orders about the need for cooperating with my study. My results did indeed show the source of the infection—the pediatricians who moved from one baby to another without thoroughly washing their hands.

At that time hospital-acquired infections were much rarer than they are today. The “magic bullet” penicillin was given routinely to control infections as soon as they appeared. But the appearance of penicillin-resistant bacteria was a red flag for biologists, if not for much of the medical profession. Pharmaceutical companies responded by modifying the structure of penicillin to create methicillin, and for a time methicillin controlled all the bacteria that were resistant to penicillin. Eventually, some strains of bacteria emerged that were resistant to methicillin; now we call them methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. Some bacteria failed to be controlled by other antibiotics, also. Today many infections still respond to various antibiotics, but occasionally they do not.

How did this come about? As Charles Darwin realized in the nineteenth century, evolution occurs when something in the environment kills part of a species before it can reproduce. (This is what is meant by natural selection.) In a population of Staphylococcus (staph), some of the bacteria contain mutations that make them vulnerable to a given antibiotic, but other bacteria may be resistant to it. If an infection is treated with the antibiotic, only the resistant bacteria survive and reproduce. Bacteria multiply rapidly; soon, many resistant bacteria are in the environment.

Though antibiotics can be lifesaving when necessary, their misuse has led to selection for resistant bacterial strains. Most physicians are aware of the problem. However, even now many people continue to insist on being given antibiotics at the first sign of an infection, or even as a preventive measure.

In 2011 an infection spread through a National Institutes of Health (NIH) hospital near Washington, D.C. Caused by a drug-resistant strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae, it infected 18 patients and killed six of them. Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) is another danger: it is a particularly nasty class of bacteria that causes serious intestinal illness and is fatal in about 50% of cases. It is resistant to the powerful class of antibiotics called carbapenems. So far CRE has been found mainly in hospitals, but it has spread to most states now, and it seems inevitable that it will spread to the general community.

How can we aging people avoid getting these infections, which are especially dangerous to the elderly? One strategy is a no-brainer—stay out of hospitals! Many procedures can be done in outpatient settings today, which costs less and is less likely to lead to infections. If we do have to be in a hospital, we should forget politeness and insist that anyone who touches or even breathes on us wash their hands or use alcohol-based sanitizers. Beyond that, there is little we can do now except to stay as healthy as possible. Our bodies contain many “good” bacteria that help protect us against dangerous pathogens; if we are generally in good health and have not destroyed those helpful bacteria, we have a good chance of staying free of “superbug” infections.