Ode to a RV

I can’t seem to stop thinking about you, all those long slow miles we logged together, surging along the concrete arteries of New York and Vermont and New Hampshire. Perhaps we shouldn’t have insisted that you go to Maine again at the age of 17, with 100,000 miles under your belts. We pushed you up and down the forested mountains, making you groan as we gassed your engine in our climb to the soaring heights of Acadia National Park.

As I recall, it was there your fan began to falter; suddenly loud and menacing, it limited our pleasant ambling conversations to shortened shouts whenever you chose to sing your song of protest.

Like any tempestuous relationship, you started acting unpredictably, one moment offering us cozy mobile shelter and luscious passing views, then bursting into a chorus of complaint and sending up that stinky smog of fumes that signaled your exhaustion. We poked around your water pump, greasing this and oiling that. For a short time, you’d be content with this extra attention. Things would quiet down again until you heated up enough to raise your temper.

At your insistence, you became a character in our traveling drama, making every effort to remind us of your aging ways, randomly flinging open drawers and cabinets and alarming us with unusual noises. We patched rattles with swatches of duct tape and roped down the fridge door with a bungee cord.

I really wish you wouldn’t have tossed the toilet into your bag of tricks, requiring us to stock flushing water and mop up the floor. Thank you, though, for limiting the leak to the fresh stuff, pre-flush. And thanks for not mounting the curb and flattening that sapling in the parking lot where you angled for your own adventure by rolling backward as we prepared dinner. We pounced on your brake pedal just in time to avoid an unpleasant end to an otherwise fine day.

But getting to the heart of the matter here, our differences are all too clear. You like to lumber along, take the passing glance, the fairly aloof and insulated view. I like to dip in and out of small towns, pause and inspect, intersect and get face to face with what I encounter on the road. I grow impatient with your need for attention—how you can’t just park anywhere, can’t just take any road, boast an arsenal of weaponry aimed at keeping us on our toes.

Some might say you’re just a box of metal burning rubber and fuel, but I know your latent charms—that sense of shelter you provide in foreign places, that quality of “home-away-from-home” that rests in your miniature beds and bathroom, your clever storage spaces and doll-sized fold-away tables, the fragrant steam of coffee rising from your petite stove, the way the sun rushes in when we throw back your curtains, and that sweet sense of community with total strangers in the RV villages where we rested.

On our last night together, I marveled at a neighbor parked nearby. Much older than you and doubtless more digits on its odometer, there sat an old VW camper van, top popped. Behind us, arranged in glistening rows, were the new road warriors, giants with aggressive names like Charger, Avenger and Viking. I used to think you were large at 28 feet, but now I see that you’re somewhere in the middle, between where it all began back in the VW bus days, to where it seems to be headed—glitzy paint jobs on huge trundlers with dishwashers inside. Now I understand the meaning of your moniker, Pace Arrow; you like to journey at your pace and, like an arrow, eventually find your mark.

In our case, that meant “home,” and you delivered your aim. Even though those last two days you refused to go over 40 mph, we limped our way back, listening to the drone of your faltering fan song, getting a good glimpse of the countryside along all those back roads we chose.

Maybe now you’d like to be left alone, parked in the peaceful yard to relax with Lucy the goose, who is in love with her reflection in your mirrored hubcaps, and will linger without complaint about your maddening, even gratifying, traits.