By BEN KLEINE

Staff writer

Lowell Hale has a different idea of roughing it in the outdoors.

“We’re roughing it with showers and air conditioning,” Hale said, not to mention high-speed Internet and satellite TV.

Hale and his wife, Carole, are gate attendants at Marion Reservoir. They place campers on sites and keep track of who is where.

Although the Hales live in their recreational vehicle at the reservoir six months out of the year, they won’t be complaining any time soon. To go along with the air conditioning and a full bathroom, the Hales also have an equipped living room with two recliners, a big-screen television, and a kitchen with a stocked refrigerator.

The Hales have two satellite dishes outside of their RV. The bigger provides Internet; the second beams DirectTV into their living room.

“It’s too bad they don’t have Internet,” Hale said of the reservoir. “It seems like the rest of the world is modernizing.”

After Hale retired as an airline pilot, the couple would work as gate attendants but go back and forth periodically to their house in Kansas City. Eventually, they sold their house and now live out of their RV while working at the reservoir.

They left for six years and lived in other states, but returned recently to their old job at the reservoir.

“You get to know a lot of the people around here,” Hale said.

Recently, their job has been a bit more difficult because a rising reservoir has flooded. It is the Hales’ task to move people to spots that aren’t flooded.

“It’s quite a tap dance,” Hale said. “I just try to keep people satisfied. Most people are pretty pleasant, but there is that 3 to 5 percent you’d like to never run across. They just like to complain.”