TOW #7 IRB Post "We Just Up and Left"

This is another chapter from my IRB, My Kind of Place, called "We Just Up and Left". It describes the author, Susan Orlean 's visit to a mobile home park in Oregon called Portland Meadows Mobile Home Park. She starts out with a story of a man who used to own a hundred cats in a trailer and then recounts stories of many other people who lived in the park at one point, but then left. Orlean describes the trailer park itself, which is secluded and unnoticed from the main road. She presents an anecdote to introduce the managers of the park. Then she goes on to reflect on trailer parks in general, how they often have dreamy sounding names and seem to attract disaster, how a trailer is the cheapest form of shelter, and how it is also the most mobile. One woman Orlean talked to who used to live in a mobile home park in Colorado said "'When the wages dropped in the sixties, we just up and left... Up and left.'" Most of what makes up the chapter are anecdotes, stories of different people who Orlean met in the trailer park. She describes how they came to the park, what their life is like there, and how they are part of the community. This helps Orlean to present an unbiased view of life in a mobile home park. There is a lot of existing prejudice about mobile homes and the people who live in them, because trailers are cheaper housing. By introducing the reader to different, real people, Orlean helps to break some of these stereotypes. Anecdotes are the most effective way to achieve her purpose, to give the reader a different view of mobile home parks. This also is incorporated into the overall goal of the book itself, which I believe, again, is to show the reader the often hidden, potentially stereotyped communities of the world in an unbiased light. This widens the reader's horizons and opens their minds. She uses anecdotes in all her chapters throughout the book and by writing a different chapter on each different subculture or phenomenon. Altogether the reader is presented with varying stories of different people and events, both with each chapter and within each chapter.