Sharing the Load

All Rights Reserved © 2014 Thomas W. Day

When I'm home, which is most of the time these days, a character I've known for years used to regularly stop by the house with his motorcycle in some state of disrepair hoping that I'll drop whatever I'm doing and fix it for him. In my withering years, I'm disinclined to multi-task for anyone at any time and I ignored him until he went away. Along with the "fix this for me" chant, he regularly includes "Why don't we ever ride somewhere together?" 
 

We bought an RV a couple of years ago and I spent the summer fixing up the damn thing, getting it ready for what I'd hoped would be a 12,000 mile winter trip. By "we," I mean "me." My wife encouraged this purchase, provided the money from a normal inheritance she'd received from her father's estate, and nagged at me to find an RV until I put aside the stuff I wanted to be doing that year and researched RVs until I found something we could live in and that she might be willing to drive. The limitations were serious: has to be normal enough to feel like driving a car, costs under X-dollars, gets good mileage, can be parked in town, and has a collection of "must have" accommodations. Not many US-sold RVs met her requirements, so we ended up with a very low-mileage 2000 Winnebago Rialta. I flew to Portland and drove the damn thing back by myself because she decided, at the last minute, she didn't want to take that trip. Huge warning flags waving right then, but I am as perceptive as a sightless fish and as smart as a sightless worm. 
 
8,500 miles later and a good portion of the winter spent re-engineering Winnebago and Volkswagen's poor quality assembly attempts, and I know way more about "adaptive transmissions," VW's many quality problems, automotive computer systems, and being an RV owner. My wife, on the other hand, knows almost nothing about any aspect of our vehicle and its functions as a moblie home. I signed up for a couple of users' groups for this vehicle and a woman recently posted, "I had no idea what my husband did with our Rialta until he died last summer and I discovered I didn't know how any aspect of this motorhome worked. I had to spend nearly $2,000 doing the basic maintenance he did every spring for a few hundred dollars and a weekend of puttering around. I didn't even know how the stove worked until one of you showed me at the Nevada rally." I'm not saying my wife is incompetent. She gets around the kitchen pretty well and has sort of adapted to my "everything has a place and belongs in it" Captain Bligh routines, she took over most of the cabin-cleaning duties. I cook, she cleans up afterwards. She's a good driver and put on a few hundred miles behind the wheel on the first half of the trip and a few thousand on the way back. While she knows there is a setup and teardown checklist and can read it off to me, she would be helpless if the roles were reversed. Among our RV-aquaintances, my wife and other wives pretty much agree, "If he weren't with me, I'd sell this thing in a minute." Like motorcycling, RV-ownership appears to be a guy thing.
 
If I were to "go riding" with the wannabe co-rider about whom I started this rant, I'd be stuck in the same situation, but on a motorcycle. I have always tried to surround myself with people who are smarter than me; and that's not often a difficult task. When I go for distance on my motorcycle, I am exercising my Inner Hermit and I have no desire to babysit anyone. Since I turned thirty, my motto has been "Hermits don't have peer pressure." In fact, I'm going to have a t-shirt made with that on it; in big letters. There are some people with whom I have obligations and I'll set aside my better hermit judgment for them. There are a very few people with whom I would happily travel anywhere, anytime, for as long as they want to go. For everyone else, I'm not going there with you. I have enough problems taking care of myself. Adding you to my load is not on the menu. I've had my kids and you're not them.