Queen of the Road

by Doreen Orion

  Although I promptly vowed to use less profanity, I could not be blamed for falling off the well-bred wagon as we left our Skidaway Island campground. Tim was lamenting the tightness of his belt (what they say about Southern cooking is all too true) and tried to loosen it while driving on the wide, deserted street. I went wild-eyed, grabbing at his waist to do it for him. He would have none of it.

  “There’s no one on the road. Take the wheel,” he commanded. Before I could scream, “Are you insane?” his hands were on his belt. Mine did, indeed, fly to the wheel. Unencumbered by stricture—or, apparently, morals—Tim purred like Shula after a good neck scratch.

  “Told you I’d get you to drive the bus,” he said. I started to protest that it wasn’t really driving, but thought better of it: After all, if I convinced him I was right, I’d undoubtedly really be driving the thing before long. To this day, Tim still can’t understand why I didn’t enjoy my brief time at the wheel.

  I suppose that interlude only proves there are limits to living in and trying to understand each other’s worlds. For Tim, nirvana is being at the helm of some powerful engine. For me, it’s riding on that engine in first class. Unlike me, Tim has a hard time being pampered. It took him years to agree to ride in a taxi. Being driven, especially paying someone for the privilege, just wasn’t right. While he was growing up, his family did everything themselves—they had to. And they took a certain pride in that. Once Tim had the means to hire stuff out, he still viewed doing so as a weakness. Gradually, through living with me, he’s come around—on some things (as if he has a choice).

  I was actually glad cooking was not one of them and that Tim became discontented with allowing others to prepare our food (like the Colonel or Ronald or that guy dressed as a giant pickle). Although we’d gone to plenty of restaurants on our travels, now that he had the time, Tim swore we were done with TV dinners. Of course, when my husband decided he was going to learn to cook, he not only bought cookbooks, but books on the science of food. And, of course, I teased him—until I started tasting his creations. Then I shut up. Fast. As usual, if Tim set out to do something, he did it well.

  Even though he loved cooking in our upscale, if tiny, bus kitchen, being a guy, he still liked to grill outside. His usual preamble: “Me go light fire. Me go burn shit.” Whether indoors or out, we’d pick some music for Tim to cook to, mix up some martinis for me to watch him with, and take some breaks here and there to dance. The whole process of food preparation—buying fresh ingredients, chopping, sautéing, baking, broiling, and boiling—rather than just removing from freezer and microwaving, greatly enhanced the entire experience (even for me just watching him). And not only for our taste buds, but for the whole social aspect of what is commonly known as a “meal.” I guess we hadn’t really understood what the word meant. Perhaps most astounding of all was that we didn’t have to rely on Stouffer’s to pick a side dish. We could do it ourselves—maybe even two! What a concept.

  The bus had other restorative effects on our domestic equilibrium, for finally, after years of capitulation to my slovenly ways, Tim was able to enjoy a certain measure of tidiness as we were forced to regularly straighten up. It’s not just that our house had never been neat; we had stopped aspiring to neat long ago. Livable would have been an improvement.

  During my internship on a psychiatry ward at a VA hospital, the attending once took her students on a tour of patients’ rooms. That woman could diagnose with uncanny accuracy, just by observing the state of the allotted living spaces on her ward. When she commented, “That’s a schizophrenic bed,” we could instantly see what she meant: The sheets were askew with clothes, toiletries, even food in the mix, seemingly ground into the white cotton linens, a blur of no longer discrete things with their own shapes and boundaries. I often imagined that attending, standing in the entryway of our home, shaking her head and sighing, “That’s a schizophrenic house.”

  It wasn’t that I actually enjoyed living in a rank Dairy Queen Blizzard, it was just that tidying up seemed like such a tremendous waste of time, given that the law of entropy dictated that things tend to disorder themselves naturally. (Poor Tim. Figures that would be the only lesson that stuck from Physics for Non-Majors.) And it wasn’t only large items that were subject to my twisted thermodynamic logic, but smaller, seemingly insignificant particles, as well. For example, what is the point of putting toilet paper on the holder? It’s not like it lasts for a year or anything. Pretty soon, you’ve got to put on another one. Why not, then, just leave the new rolls somewhere handy, like the top of the tank? For years, Tim had been trying in vain to wait me out, but with each new roll, he eventually succumbed and put it on the holder himself. By then, though, the paper was almost half gone, so to my way of thinking, his feeble attempt to keep the dispenser gainfully employed became even more pointless.

  By definition, living on a bus meant having to keep the place neat: Whenever we pulled up stakes, we had to stow everything that had been left out so nothing would lie in wait as potential projectiles. Dishes, silverware, newspapers, books all had to be put away. For the first time in our lives together, we were creating the sort of environment Tim had craved since we started cohabitating.

  Sometime after our initial date that wasn’t supposed to be a date, I went over to Tim’s bachelor pad. I thought I was in a model home. I simply could not believe anyone actually lived there. Was he fooling me again? The carpet looked like it had been raked. There were coffee-table books neatly stacked—on the coffee table! The kitchen counters were bare. If he’d had a dog, I swear the dog bed would have had pillows with a mint bone on top. I was afraid to touch anything. Surely it was all a cardboard façade. Now I was living in a model of sorts myself, and even more unbelievably, a mobile one.

  While Miles’s bed still had no pillows or mint, Morty certainly didn’t care. Both cats slept on the bed with us every night (and Shula stayed there most of the days we were not on the road), with Morty shifting to the “dog” bed once we got up in the morning. This led Tim to often remark, “Isn’t that nice of Miles to let Morty sleep on his bed?” Right. Like his brother, I don’t think Miles ever quite grasped the concept of “dog” bed, either. Or, perhaps just like his father, Miles was all about simple pleasures: It was enough in life to have a bowl of food and a small, quiet place to himself, surrounded by people who loved him. Why ask for anything more?

  They could teach me a lot.

  Chapter Eight

  MY FAVORITE WINE HAS ALWAYS BEEN “I WANNA GO TO FLOOOORIDA!”

  * * *

  Secession Swizzle

  4 parts vodka

  3 parts guava juice

  11/2 parts raspberry liqueur

  squeeze fresh lemon

  Mix ingredients in shaker. While sipping, draw your own flag and come up with catchy country name. Drink. Repeat until total surrender to unseen invaders or cold hard floor.

  * * *

  It was time for an oil change.

  For normal folk, this would not be anything of note. But I’d had plenty of experience with oil changes or, more accurately, with Tim doing them. Yes, Tim. Oil changes are too mundane (theoretically) and therefore well beneath Project Nerd.

  My husband seems to have an oil change curse. Although the explanations of what go wrong vary, the one constant is that they are always completely unintelligible to me: The oil pan plug stripped after being tightened improperly by the last person who changed the oil, necessitating a trip to the hardware store—oh, horrors!—to buy a special socket (whatever that is) for his socket wrench (ditto) to grip the stripped nut (hey, I’m not making this stuff up). Of course, my husband was never that mythical “last person,” who, it turns out, was second only to me in nincompoopery, since I had insisted on buying a service plan in the first place and then had the gall to actually take advantage of it. No wonder we always had to have multiple cars; Tim needed one he wasn’t working on for the inevitable hardware store trip to get a part for the one he was.

 
Other famed Halliburtonian fiascos included the time the oil filter was on too tight (same “last person”), requiring Tim to shove a screwdriver through it, providing leverage to pry the filter off. Then there was the time he actually got to the point of pouring the new oil in, but forgot to fasten the oil pan plug first (no other “last person” here, I’m afraid), running a few quarts out onto the garage floor. This led to hours upon hours of sopping up the black muck with sawdust. (He keeps a trash barrel full of the stuff for just such absorbent-requiring emergencies. By way of explanation, I’ll just quote him: “Everyone with a garage has some absorbent around.” I see.)

  So, when Tim announced that after nearly ten thousand miles we were due, I could hardly be blamed for shuddering. Changing the oil on a bus? We could all drown! But then he informed me he wasn’t going to be doing it himself.

  “Not Project Nerd?” I asked with dread. Tim shook his head.

  “We’re passing close to the Prevost place in Jacksonville. They should do it.” Mr. Safety was rearing his lovely head. Since the repair shop could also do a full safety check and was familiar with all the lube points (whatever those are), that’s where we headed.

  You might think for a Princess, staying at a mechanic’s shop would be worse than being locked in the deepest, darkest castle dungeon, but I was most pleasantly surprised. Not that it was beach blanket busing or anything, but with free electric hookups, level spaces, busnut neighbors, and even a grassy spot for the dog, we spent a most pleasant few days just hanging out, waiting our turn. When it came, I opted to remain on the bus while two hydraulic lifts levitated it in the shop, enjoying the sensation of being airborne until I noticed the Prevost next to ours. It had a huge gash all along the side and the front was bashed in. I called out the window to one of the mechanics and asked what had happened. Apparently, some “last person” (I was about to see Tim’s point with regard to those service plans) had put a wrong tire on. It had blown out on the highway, smashing the bus into a median.

  “You can get a great deal on it!” he assured me. “The guy’s wife is refusing to ride in it anymore.” Indeed. Suddenly, feeling airborne in the bus had lost its appeal.

  We headed over to the Gulf Coast, and while we enjoyed the view of the water from our RV park near Fort Myers, I was less than thrilled with the owners’ haphazard attitude toward government services, as evidenced by their incredulity that I actually received the package I was expecting in the mail.

  Most full-timers (which we were for the year, God help us) used a mail service. We had given the USPS a change of address form to forward our mail from Boulder to a place in Pensacola. It seemed a lot of these mail-forwarding places were on the water, as not only full-time busers but boaters used them, as well. A few months back, I mistakenly made this observation to Tim, who responded with a gleam in his eye, “Living on a sailboat! That’s our next adventure!” Yeah, sounds romantic, but Tim and I know nothing about boats. (God help us. Again.) Whenever we knew in advance we’d be at a certain RV park at a certain date, I called the service, gave them the address, and they forwarded whatever had accumulated. I’ve always been a fanatic about getting the mail. Tim says that’s because as a near shut-in, it’s one of my few links to the outside world. Maybe so, but then I always have to remind him that we shut-ins prefer the more politically correct term “hermit.” Geez.

  In any event, at this RV park, as in most others, mail is delivered to the office and, from there, distributed to guests via cubbyholes with site numbers on them. My incredulity came into play as this park’s process of getting the mail into the cubbyholes was more miss than hit. In fact, I discovered my package, along with everyone else’s mail, in a pile scattered on the floor beneath the cubbyholes. There was a time this would have made me apoplectic. But getting the mail had become less of an event for me during our bus year, maybe because it came with less regularity. Or maybe, just maybe, because I was getting out more.

  From Fort Myers as a base, we drove around Sanibel and Captiva islands in the Jeep. While the beaches were lovely, we enjoyed the five-mile Wildlife Drive at J. N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge even more. It’s part of the largest undeveloped mangrove ecosystem in the U.S. and was named after the political cartoonist instrumental in blocking the sale of the land on Sanibel Island to developers. At Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling’s urging, President Truman signed an executive order creating the refuge in 1945. We saw tons of birds (there are over 220 species there), including some that were apparently quite rare (judging by one woman’s reaction, a red-tailed hawk is the Armani Couture of the avian world), and even an alligator or two.

  I never have developed an affinity for bird-watching (except pelicans and most definitely not sparrows). I’m sure bird-watchers are very nice people—even the one I insulted in the refuge. She had the misfortune of glancing up at Tim and me as we slowly drove by the thicket she was staring into. Noting the bewilderment on my face, she mistook it for interest and shot me a triumphant glare.

  “Yellow…crested…night…heron” was all she said, like a town crier announcing the queen’s arrival to the wretched masses. Why hadn’t anyone ever told me bird-watching was a competitive thing? I could actually get into this. But until then, lacking familiarity with all things avian, I felt it only fair to rely on a certain expertise of mine that my new nemesis could not possibly trump: I lifted a foot so she could see my shoe out the Jeep’s window, pointing to it for effect.

  “Black…Chanel…quilted…loafer.” She narrowed her eyes at me as we passed, undoubtedly pondering the potential resplendence of her precious night heron as an evening shoe in order to rival what I apparently had done with my Chanellium quiltus.

  In Estero, just south of Fort Myers, we wandered around the lush acres and abandoned buildings of the Koreshan State Historic Site, where, in 1894, the settlement of the Koreshan Unity Movement was founded. This religious sect seemed doomed from the beginning, due equally to its expectation of celibacy as much as its rather loopy central tenet: that the entire universe exists inside the earth rather than on the outside, as has generally been accepted by most multicelled organisms. They even set up experiments to prove their thesis and show that the horizon on the nearby beach curved upward. The last four members deeded the land to the state in 1961. These are the sort of folks who put the “od” in God.

  After about a week, we headed for the other Florida coast and landed in Markham Park Campground in Sunrise. All in all, this was probably our favorite parking spot of the year, as the vast, Broward County–maintained grounds were so much more than an RV park. Even the sites themselves are palatial and could easily fit two other rigs with room to spare.

  One day, Tim and I biked about a half mile from the bus to see skeet shooters at the target range. We didn’t stay long, as it’s not terribly exciting to watch people fire guns (unless they’re firing at you, in which case excitement is the least of your worries). So we headed for the opposite side of the park to take a gander at the model airplane field. Tim was entranced. First, a little plastic plane took off from the runway. Cute. Then oohs and aahs from the crowd—a biplane. Fine. Tim turned to me and snickered.

  “If these guys were real men, they’d send up a…” and there it was—the unmistakable roar of a jet engine. Our mouths (and every other spectator’s) gaped open, watching it go through its paces. The owner even had a friend standing by with a fire extinguisher. Continuing with the theme of overkill, Tim observed how neat it would be if the skeet and airplane guys set up some joint war-game activities.

  From Sunrise, it was only five miles to the world’s largest outlet mall at Sawgrass Mills. Of course, Tim and I had to go. Yet, while I still enjoyed looking at all the fashion, after my experience in Myrtle Beach, I just didn’t seem all that interested in possessing any.

  Tim loves all things Art Deco, so he’d been looking forward to Miami, especially South Beach (or SoBe, as the southern end of the ten-mile-long barrier island of Miami Beach is called).
We spent a very pleasant couple of hours listening to the Welcome Center’s audio tour, strolling around the few dozen hotels and apartment buildings, built primarily in the 1930s and designated the only Art Deco National Historic District in the country. In its Prohibition heyday, celebrities and mob bosses like Al Capone flocked to the area for free-flowing gambling and liquor. Within less than a half century, it would become a drug-infested slum. Then in 1976, the Miami Design Preservation League was founded and started restoring the original buildings to their characteristic sweeping curves and geometric shapes. I particularly liked the whimsy of Tropical Deco, buildings with ornamentation evocative of flora, fauna, and ocean liners. Tim, of course, preferred the examples of Streamline Moderne, taking a cue from more industrial and machine-inspired forms.

  Afterward, we drove farther down the strip to get a better look at all the hotels. We particularly enjoyed nosing around the famous Delano, done all in white, with its interior full of fanciful Deco chairs (the one with the high-heel boot legs and arm back especially thrilled me, natch) and fur-draped settees. To truly soak it all in, we splurged at the ridiculously expensive bar (eleven dollars for a cocktail and four dollars for a not-even-eight-ounce Coke), remembering that after all, we were in Miami.

  That night, we went to Little Havana and swooned over the ropa vieja at a local café. We asked the waiter how in the world the name “old clothes” could be applied to a dish that was so darn good. He had no idea where the moniker came from. Tim, with his cleanliness fetish, obsessed for quite a while after our meal about how he could have ingested something normally associated with donations to the Salvation Army. Then we happened upon a nightclub with a flamenco show, hosted by an MC in drag. After all, we were in Miami. It was in Spanish, and despite having taken five years of the language in junior high and high school, I was lost. Tim, who hadn’t studied it any more than I had, seemed to understand quite a bit. He explained it was all our time in Tucson. Hmm. Perhaps another advantage of getting out more.