Queen of the Road

by Doreen Orion

  The morning of June 18, 2004, dawned sunny and bright. Tim and I were well rested as we left our home in Boulder for our shakedown cruise. First stop: Reno, Nevada.

  At least that’s the way it was supposed to be.

  Here’s how it was: We awoke late, to pouring rain. Since ours was a narrow street on a cul-de-sac, I was charged with directing Tim as he backed down the hill and making sure no traffic was coming as he swung the rear end of the bus into an intersection. No problem, I thought. I’ve flown many a time and studied the guide men out on the tarmac, with their staccato ballet of arm signals, easing pilots onto the runway.

  I quickly discovered why those gentlemen wear sneakers.

  The rain had paused momentarily and things were going smoothly as I walked backwards, behind and slightly to the side of our forty-foot-long behemoth of a bus so Tim could see me in his mirrors. I guided him down the hill, my arms perpendicular to the ground, forearms in unison, alternating perpendicular, vertical, perpendicular, vertical…until my adorable little slip-on sandal slipped off on the slick street. I quickly made the universal signal for “stop,” or what should be the universal signal—wildly flailing arms—as I stepped behind the descending 40,040 pounds of Prevost, reached down, and retrieved my little orphan Annie Klein. The sound of what I would later learn were air brakes hissed in my ear. I completed the rest of the maneuver and climbed into the bus, feeling pretty proud of myself, until Tim, white as the cute little camper van I would soon wish we had gotten instead, gave me a horrified look.

  “NEVER step behind the bus while I’m backing up,” he said with a shrillness I hadn’t heard from him before.

  “But, sweetie,” I replied, “you were going to run over my favorite sandal.”

  “NEVER step behind the bus while I’m backing up,” he repeated, his new mantra. This would not be the last time he would raise his voice fearing for my life that day.

  After Tim hooked our tow vehicle, a Jeep, to the back of the bus, we got safely under way, traveling without incident, until we hit the highway ten minutes later. At 60 mph, the bus door flew open. I, of course, was in the “buddy” seat, just to its left.

  “SHIT!” Tim screamed. “You’re belted in, right?” Indeed, I was. Did he think I was crazy? He’d only practiced driving the thing a total of six hours.

  “I can get it,” I calmly replied, not wanting to distract the driver. After all, there must be a reason for the sign up front that says, “FOR PASSENGER SAFETY FEDERAL LAW PROHIBITS OPERATION OF THIS BUS WHILE ANYONE IS STANDING FORWARD OF THIS WHITE LINE.” I unbuckled my seat belt, climbed down, and stood in front of the door (and the white line). I grabbed the handle with my right hand. One. Two. Three. As I swung the door in toward me, the lift of the wind pulled against me, flinging the door open even wider, this time with me attached.

  “SWEETIE! NO! STOP!” Tim screamed. It wasn’t so much the castrato-like octave of his voice as the slap of the cold, wet rain on my face that shocked me into Sandra Bullock mode. I clutched the handrail along the entry stairs with my left hand, my right still on the door handle. My slide to a certain death (or, at the very least, vast array of new prosthetic devices) ceased.

  “LET GO OF THE DOOR!” Tim barked as he wrestled the bus into the emergency lane.

  “No,” I cried, “I think I can do it!” Reasoning that Ms. Bullock had been able to do all those stunts in Speed wearing a simple sundress, while I was sporting a brand-new designer tracksuit and all I had to do was shut a door, I kept my left hand on the rail, braced myself, and tried again. No dice—not even fuzzy ones. I just could not get it closed until Tim stopped the bus. At that point, he pressed a button on the dash that actuates the door’s air lock, bolting it shut.

  “I am so sorry, sweetie,” he said, as white as the line on the shoulder of the road we were now straddling. “It won’t happen again,” he promised.

  “Better not,” I snapped, “or I’ll have to invoke the ‘two strikes and you’re a dimwit’ rule.” Tim nodded, his face solemn. That would be the second to last thing he’d ever want me to do, right behind flying out the bus door.

  The two strikes and you’re a dimwit rule was decreed one night when Tim left his wallet at home and couldn’t pay for dinner. When we go out, if I bring a purse at all (what are husbands for, anyway, if not to take care of the bill?) it’s to make a fashion statement, not to carry anything practical, like money or credit cards. For weeks afterward, every time we’d leave the house, I’d ask, “Do you have your wallet?” Finally, Tim begged in exasperation, “If I only forget something once, do you really have to remind me every time?” Hence, the two strikes and you’re a dimwit rule. Came in real handy the second time he left the ignition on in my car overnight, draining the battery.

  Things did start to look up when we crossed the border into Wyoming. The rain was now merely a drizzle and I was beginning to enjoy my perch up high, as well as the waves and stares of pedestrians and passing drivers, unaccustomed to seeing such a large tour bus on their streets, especially one painted ocean blue with red, turquoise, and green stripes, all outlined in gold.

  “Look! They think we’re celebrities,” Tim exclaimed.

  “No,” I corrected. “They think I’m a celebrity. They think you’re a bus driver.”

  “At least they think I get to drive a celebrity,” he mumbled under his breath. By the time we reached a truck stop in Laramie to gas up, the rain had started in again, hard. As he stood out in the downpour, Tim realized he didn’t know how to operate the diesel fuel pump. He called over to the driver of a big rig next to us.

  “So, is this pay at the pump?” The trucker gave him a condescending look. “No,” he growled, “push the intercom and tell ’em which pump you’re on.” Two hundred twenty dollars later, our 179-gallon tank filled, Tim climbed back in, his hand dripping blood.

  “What happened?” I asked, alarmed, thinking perhaps he’d come to blows with the trucker over the not too subtle slight to his manhood.

  “Oh, I noticed the tow cable for the Jeep was frayed. It’s been dragging on the ground. I had to shorten it,” he said. I gave him a worried look. “I don’t think I remembered to pack Band-Aids,” I said.

  “I did,” he replied, ripping a paper towel. “They’re in the bay.” He wrapped his hand as best he could and we headed back to the highway. As soon as we hit 60 mph, the door flew open again. Since, after the previous incident, Tim (who likes to lord it over me that I took Physics for Non-Majors) had painstakingly and with excruciating detail explained the concept of camber, by which the angle of the door away from the bus creates lift, thus precluding any hope of my being able to close it, I didn’t try to.

  Tim eased the bus to a stop and I slammed the door shut. As we looked deep into each other’s eyes, we both had flashbacks to my near-death experience of only a couple of hours before.

  “Two strikes and you’re a dimwit rule,” we chimed in unison.

  Night fell. So did the hail. Tons of it, the size of the tassels on my last-season Cole Haan loafers. Tim’s face was as white as the paper towel bandaging his hand had been before becoming soaked in blood. Even the truckers were pulling over on the shoulder. We did, too. The sound of the hail pounding into the steel skin of our bus was deafening. I was certain the windshield would crack. Or worse. The storm let up after five interminable minutes, resuming the pelting rain we had begun to long for. Our dog, Miles, and our male cat, Morty, were both sitting at attention on the sofa. Before Tim started up the bus again, I went into the back to check on Shula, our female cat, who had spent the entire trip thus far cowering under the bedcovers. I bet this scared the pee out of her. It had. Right through to the mattress.

  Neither of us wanted to venture outside to inspect the damage. While Tim struggled to remember if we had coverage for hail under our new RV policy, I wondered how in the world we could ever break the news to Manny, Vanture’s paint and bodywork man who had painstakingly detailed the bus at our house only the day before.
Miraculously, as we later found out, we didn’t have to worry about either, as the hail had not left even one tiny dent.

  Our plan had been to make it to West Wendover, Nevada, just across the Utah border, for our first night. There was a very convenient truck stop we had spotted many times on our car trips to Reno. Tim’s mother, Dorothy, lived there and was turning eighty in two days. We had organized a surprise party brunch at her favorite restaurant, so we really could not be late. West Wendover was a twelve-hour drive from Boulder, very doable had we gotten an early start. But as we headed into Rock Springs, Wyoming, it was already 11:30 p.m. (a normally six-hour drive had taken us eight) and we were both drained. We decided to stop for the night at another landmark we’d taken note of, the Flying J truck stop, just off Interstate 80. There it was. And…there it went. We took the next exit, intending to turn right back around, but somehow ended up in the deserted parking lot of a college campus. Tim stopped the bus so we could catch our breaths, make a plan, and wait for some improved visibility.

  “I think we should just stay here for the night,” I said, my voice shaky.

  “I don’t want to. A deserted parking lot isn’t safe.” Since Peter had also failed to hook up the security cameras, it really didn’t seem like a good idea to stay. We ate a quick snack and headed back to the Flying J.

  One might think a truck stop would be clearly marked, but there was construction, the rain was still going strong, and somehow we missed the exit, again. As we barreled down the wrong street, trying to find a place to turn around, the bus door flew open for the third time.

  “SHIT!” Tim exclaimed, his face now white as the cotton atop the new Tylenol bottle he’d popped open after the second door incident. This time, I couldn’t help but laugh as he stopped the bus to airlock the door.

  “You know, honey,” I said, “the only bad thing left to happen is to get the bus stuck somewhere we have to back out of so we have to unhook the Jeep in this weather.” And that’s exactly what happened a few minutes later, with the Jeep sticking out into a four-lane road.

  We finally made it to the Flying J, Tim driving the bus with me following behind in the Jeep. Since it had been bad enough unhooking it in the storm while watching for traffic, we decided not to bother rehooking it just then. Unfortunately, the only spaces available at the truck stop involved Tim backing up the bus into a narrow space between two trucks. The side view mirrors were completely fogged up from the rain and he just could not see to do it. (As for the backup cameras, they were tied to the nonexistent security cameras, so…) We got out of our respective vehicles and conferred in the downpour. Well, maybe “conferred” isn’t exactly the right word. I begged.

  “Please, honey. Let’s go back to that school.” And we did, finally parking for our first night at 1:30 a.m. God bless you, Western Wyoming Community College.

  As we turned the mattress and hand-rinsed the pee-soaked linens in the sink (we didn’t know how to use the washer-dryer), I had my darkest moment of the day, as I spied a still-traumatized Shula huddled in a corner. She’s not going to adapt to this bus thing. Maybe we should leave her with Dorothy. Maybe she’ll take me in for the year, too.

  Our bus has three temperature zones, one for the main living area, one for the bathroom, and one for the bedroom. We cranked the heat in zone three and climbed into a sheetless bed. We awoke an hour later, shivering.

  “Something’s wrong with the heating system,” Tim said. “I’m freezing.”

  “Me, too,” I answered, teeth chattering. We grabbed an extra blanket (mercifully not left in the storage bay under the bus) and somehow managed to sleep a few more hours. It was only sometime the next day, after I kept turning up the air-conditioning in zone one (not that Tim minded this time; he was sweltering by the windshield), went back to the bedroom to check on Shula (still in full cower mode), and noticed how much cooler it was in there, that we realized zone one, not zone three, was actually the bedroom.

  Surely the karma gods intended that we get all the bad luck out of the way that first day.

  Yeah, right.

  The next morning, Tim started up the bus at 8:30 a.m., with me still asleep—for about a second. I had thought sleeping on our bus would have that familiar, comforting feeling, harkening back to all the snoozing I’d done on Greyhounds traveling back and forth to college. However, lying flat in a queen bed in the very back was anything but reassuring. All of the turns, bumps, and ruts were amplified. I felt as if we were careening off the road while swerving to avoid Godzilla during a meteor shower.

  I bolted out of bed, but stayed in my pajamas (the one bright spot thus far). At first, I was glad I had risen, as the weather was clear and the mountains ahead in Utah were stunning. But once upon those treacherous beasts, destroyers of confidence with their “runaway truck lane” and “steep grade ahead” signs, I longed for the insecurity of the bed in the back. I tried to calm myself. I was being ridiculous. Then Tim seemed to be having trouble with the brakes. His frantic pumping was a good clue. I asked what the matter was.

  “Nothing, sweetie,” he reassured between clenched teeth. When Tim won’t even tell me what’s wrong, I know it’s something really, really bad.

  I might have tried to believe him in this instance, but soon there was the unmistakable smell of smoke. Then there was the minor added detail of our bus taking the turns way too fast.

  I clutched Morty to my frilly flannel chest and realized Shula had the right idea all along. As I pondered our imminent, fiery demise, Tim finally figured out the problem. Rather than turn the Jake Brakes on high, he had turned them off.

  As he later painstakingly explained with excruciating detail, diesel engines don’t normally slow with compression (i.e., when you take your foot off the gas in a car, it slows down; with a diesel engine, it just keeps going). Our diesel engine bus, however, was equipped with Jake Brakes (God bless you, Jacobs Vehicle Systems), which bypass the regular brakes to decelerate the bus, thus avoiding overheating on such steep grades, slowing such massive tonnage. To operate the Jake Brakes, the driver toggles a switch with his left hand. Unfortunately, Tim had assumed that “up” was high, when in fact, “up” was off.

  “Much better, huh?” He laughed, realizing his mistake. You could say that.

  We arrived in Reno that evening and parked in front of Dorothy’s house for the night. We were overdue at Tim’s brother’s for dinner. The bus door, however, was still misbehaving. On the road, it wouldn’t stay shut—now, it wouldn’t lock.

  Project Nerd got his tools from the bay and took the door lock apart. Meanwhile, I tackled figuring out the ice maker in the fridge. I needed a martini. Bad. (Yeah, I know it’s “badly,” but I didn’t need it “badly,” I needed it bad, see?) While he got the lock working as well as he could, I saw that, in fact, there were a few ice cubes already in the tray. Unfortunately, the manual said to discard this first set. Something about chemicals, dirt, growing a third eye…I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I needed my martini and I needed it. Bad.

  Soon, some nieces and nephews returned to drop Dorothy home from the dinner we’d missed. They all came in for a look and were duly impressed. After the tour, one nephew, a strapping twenty-two-year-old I had always been close to and who knew me much better than the others did, took me aside and said, “Aunt Doreen. You’re a really good sport.”

  “Yup,” I burped, feeling no pain, sucking down the last, fruity, tranquilizing drop.

  The next morning, Sunday, brought with it a new day…and a new mattress. Tim spent most of the morning working on that darn door lock, this time with the help of his brother and nephew, while I stayed in bed with Shula. I hadn’t been sleeping well since the night before we left Boulder.

  Doing a project with his brother and nephew was something I knew Tim would greatly enjoy. He was the first in his family to go to college, and frankly, they didn’t know what to make of him. That, coupled with being ten and eleven years younger than his only siblings (who were actually half
brothers), had made Tim feel like an outsider—a welcomed, even adored outsider, but an outsider nevertheless. Fixing our lock was something Project Nerd, Project Nerd-in-law, and Project Nerd Light could do together. One of those male bonding things, like shopping is for women; just as strenuous, requiring just as much problem solving and teamwork (“Where should a blazer hit on a skirt this long?”), and somehow just as fulfilling, even without anything stylish to show off in the end for the effort.

  I hadn’t had many close relationships with non-Jews until after my divorce. I grew up on Long Island, stayed in New York for college, and married a Jewish man. As an only child, especially an only Jewish child, I had felt the burden of expectation. Tim’s family was nothing like that. While I often lamented growing up feeling as if someone were living through me (having a Jewish mother is akin to having a Siamese twin who’s older), Tim lamented the opposite: His family never encouraged him to be a doctor, nor even to go to college. While both his parents had occasionally expressed regret at not having had an education, it was seeing them struggle that spurred Tim into becoming a professional. (He always loved science, and assumed he’d be some kind of researcher, but found that he also enjoyed interacting with people, hence his decision to become a doctor.) Of course, Tim’s family wanted him to succeed, but after generations of rural poverty, it was programmed into their DNA to expect him to fail and they only hoped to spare him that pain. Failure—in fact, anything less than greatness—is just not an option for a Jewish child, even if that necessitates certain fabrications.

  When my cousin in her thirties announced she was finally getting married, her very Orthodox family rejoiced. So did I. I knew how much she wanted children.

  “What’s her fiancé do?” I asked my mother.

  “Oh, he’s in electronics,” she replied with a wave of her hand. I found out later that being “in electronics” meant he was a counter boy at 47th Street Photo.

  Not that it mattered to me. It’s just that I was so used to the pressure to succeed, to strive, to get degrees (another cousin, a rabbi yet, has seven—including an M.D. and two Ph.D.s) that, as maddening as Tim found his family’s attitude, I found it liberating. Through Tim, I felt a kinship with people who had always seemed “other.” And connecting so deeply outside my comfort zone allowed me to separate, just enough, from the parts of my own upbringing I found suffocating. (Little did I know this year would also make me feel a kinship with another group, one I never even knew existed—“RV people.”) It’s a testament to Tim that my parents accept and love him as much as they do. They call him the Goy Wonder.