This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

by Ann Patchett

  The first night is simple: one hotel room, two beds. In the morning we head down to Pierce RV in Billings to pick up our twenty-nine-foot Winnebago rental. Over the phone, twenty-nine feet sounded like a whole lot of vehicle, but standing in the lot we see it’s just a bantamweight. There are thirty-three-footers here, thirty-four, thirty-six. Everywhere I turn I see big tires and endless expanses of glass and steel and aluminum. Our coach is fresh off the factory line, and because it must be returned in perfect condition, the entire interior is covered in plastic—the floors, the booth table with bench seats, the driver’s seat, the bed. It smells not unpleasantly of polyvinyl chloride. Paul, the pale and amiable young man charged with setting us up, asks if either of us has driven a coach before.

  “No,” Karl says.

  I shake my head.

  “Not to worry.” He smiles, not worried at all. “I’ve taken a thousand people through this.”

  Our Winnebago says “Minnie” on the side in sweeping, wavelike letters because motor homes have cute names (Holiday Rambler, Alpenlite, Southwind, Prowler) which fit in nicely with the spare-wheel covers that say things like “Gone Fishin’ ” or “Hardly Working.” Paul demonstrates how to roll down the awning out front, a long and complicated process vaguely akin to setting up a gigantic ironing board. Paul gives detailed instructions for emptying and filling tanks (104 gallons for water, fifty-five gallons for gasoline, averaging just under ten miles to the gallon). He hands over the keys and I climb into the driver’s seat because this is my assignment, my job, and I was fine to go alone. Karl is riding shotgun.

  In Albert Brooks’s 1985 film Lost in America, a couple cashes in everything they own to tour the country in a giant motor home. Brooks, behind the wheel while Julie Hagerty makes toasted cheese sandwiches in the microwave, is funny. The long shots of the lumbering whale creeping uphill in traffic—funny again. Two people driving a Winnebago was such a riot it merited an entire film, and still I am not laughing. While I’m sure I could take this thing forward, I have serious doubts about backing it up. After a moment of interior wrestling I slip the motor home back into park. “I can’t do this.”

  Karl doesn’t make my admission into anything other than what it is. He just steps back from his seat, lets me cross over, and gets behind the wheel. Karl knows a thing or two about backing up, and he is a stone-cold genius at parking. This is not enough to make it work between us. Once he gets the thing turned around he doesn’t ask me if I want him to drive the first leg, because I want him to drive the first leg, and he knows it.

  We ease into the late-morning traffic of downtown Billings, the plastic-wrapped captain’s chairs cradling us like La-Z-Boys. Two blocks out, a black-and-white dog runs into the street and heads straight for our front wheels. Karl slams on the brakes. We then discover the First Great RV Truth: Like ocean liners and oil tankers, RVs do not stop. While Karl grinds the pedal into the carpet, I scream at the dog, “Go! Go!” We might have clipped its tail but the dog itself is spared, and we, very nearly stopped now, are ecstatic. We did not kill a dog in the first five minutes of the trip! We say it out loud to one another. What a good omen! What a positive sign! Five minutes in a Winnebago and we haven’t killed anything.

  Here are the salient details of our personal life: Karl left when I didn’t want him to go and came back right about the time I was no longer interested in having him back. He persisted. We argued. I told him to go and he would not go. Months and months and months went by and still he would not go. Now we are in a motor home heading east.

  After stopping at the grocery store to stock up, we push the cart full of groceries across the parking lot and straight up to the side door of the Minnie. We have not used shopping bags. Karl takes the bananas out of the cart and hands them up the stairs to me. I take the bananas from Karl and set them on the kitchen counter. There is some bending in our upper bodies but our feet do not move. When everything has been unloaded, we roll the cart back to the cart corral and return to sit on the couch, feeling like time itself is not quite right. Some essential step between grocery and kitchen has been lost. We unpack our suitcases and eat peanut butter sandwiches and we are still parked in the parking lot of the grocery store. I find that I am overcome by a powerful listlessness. Why bother driving anywhere? Why not just stay where we are?

  Montana has no highway speed limit, and we are doing sixty. Cars in the fast lane shoot past like pinballs. Perhaps we could go faster, but there doesn’t seem to be any point. Our vague plan is to head south on the interstate into Wyoming, then east to South Dakota, then ultimately wind up in Yellowstone. The Minnie is ours for a week so we have nothing but time. If I must drive a Winnebago, I’m glad I’m doing it in the West. It is big. We are big. We cut a meaningful silhouette against the expansive sky. Everywhere we look it is empty and gently rolling like an ocean and I feel like we are a schooner, a prairie schooner, clipping over the waves. It is a world completely divorced from the one we actually live in, the one in which we are responsible people with jobs and expectations and a shared dog who is now my dog because we are not seeing each other anymore. We don’t talk about what went wrong with us or if we’ll manage to fix it. We listen to the radio and discuss the passing scenery, and while I don’t mention it, I have a powerful understanding of how odd it would be to drive this Winnebago alone.

  After a while, we pull up behind a truck going even slower than we are, and Karl, after a long consultation with his side mirrors and plenty of discussion with me—his navigator and person whose name is on the insurance forms—opts to pass, which is when we very nearly take out two motorcycles sailing up alongside us.

  We lumber back into the right lane.

  The bikers look up at us, not with anger, but with bewilderment, their lives still flashing before their eyes. A group of ten or twelve motorcycles follows behind them. My hands are shaking. Karl is shaking. He had been talking about buying a motorcycle himself. “I didn’t see them at all,” he says, bringing us to the Second Great RV Truth: There’s a lot out there you just can’t see. This lesson is important even if you never plan to drive one yourself. Give all vehicles containing showers a wide berth.

  We have our route planned out, but then decide to take another highway. What’s the difference? We have no hotel reservations. Our hotel is with us. Our restaurant is with us. We are turtles, carrying our world on our backs. Once we leave the interstate we don’t have to worry about driving too slow for the cars behind us. We don’t see a car again for the next two hours.

  Do not mistake eastern Wyoming for western Wyoming. There is no one here. There are cows standing mid-road, still far away. This time, we know to start slowing down long before it would seem necessary, and eventually we stop, waiting for the cows to amble off. We are nowhere, but we are nowhere with fifty gallons of gas and a hundred gallons of water.

  When it is good and dark, we find ourselves not far from a ranch I used to visit years ago, and I tell Karl the owners wouldn’t mind if we park by the barn and spend the night. (In the parlance of RVers this is known as “boondocking.”) When we arrive at the ranch, no one is home. Karl lowers the shades and I flick on the generator, and the lights inside the Minnie are bright, and everywhere there is a humming like an industrial refrigerator. We crawl into bed and try to read and try to sleep but can do neither. We turn off the generator and the silence and the impenetrable darkness pour in through the windows and cover us up.

  “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever done,” Karl whispers. “I feel like I’m sleeping in the trunk of a car.” We each stay on our own side of the bed, and when we shift in our spots the plastic-covered mattress crunches beneath us.

  “Let’s go outside,” I whisper back.

  And so we go outside, climb the ladder to the top of the Winnebago, and stretch out flat on the metal roof to look at the stars. So many stars fall on this night it’s impossible to think we won’t eventually run out of stars. A
fter the deaths of a million stars we are sleepy, and we climb back down to bed.

  During the night a storm wakes me. Every time the lightning flares, the sky stays bright for several seconds. Thunder rocks us and the rain is deafening, and then hail starts clattering against the fiberglass siding. It sounds like peach pits thrown by Sandy Koufax. Inside our tin house we are snug, and I roll over and fall asleep again.

  The next day we drive to Devils Tower to see that astonishingly weird monolith of rock. We hike farther than we mean to on a day that is hotter than it seemed. We make it back to the Minnie, and drive for half an hour before we realize that we’re wrung out, exhausted. We limp into a rest stop, turn on the generator, crank up the AC, and then fall into a coma-like sleep. This illustrates the Third Great RV Truth: Wherever you are, you are no more than fifteen feet from bed. For all of my bone-deep distrust of motor homes, they do combine two of my favorite pastimes: driving and napping.

  When I raise the blinds an hour later, another motor home is parked snugly next to ours, and a boy eating a sandwich at his diner-style table looks through his window into mine. He waves and I wave back, and a few minutes later I get behind the wheel and drive away. Now that I’m used to the RV, driving doesn’t seem so bad. Trips to the gas station, however, are stressful. We’re spending around $50 a day on fuel, and as I stand at the pump watching the numbers roll up I have to remind myself that I have an expense account. When the news talks about America’s dependence on fossil fuel, it’s talking specifically about me driving the Minnie. I am the person for whom the Gulf War was fought and won.

  Late that night we have a hard time finding the Badlands Interior Campground, where we have a reservation, and it’s long past dark when we finally arrive. Overhead, the South Dakota stars—the ones that did not fall last night over Wyoming—glitter in bright abundance. Up and down the aisles, RVs glow with cool blue television light. Children cluster around citronella candles on picnic tables. I think we could be on any suburban street in the world.

  But in the dawn’s early light, it’s clear this motor park is nowhere near a suburb. We are definitively in the Badlands, and the razor-blade bluffs cresting over so many neatly parked RVs are indeed a sight. By six o’clock the sun glares as brightly as noon, and the RV world is up and about. Karl spots Tennessee plates on a big Allegro Bay RV coach. It is all the encouragement he needs to knock on the door. Karl is friendlier than I am, braver, and better at backing up large vehicles. I make a note of everything. The Allegro contains a couple in their seventies, along with their daughter and her husband, who are also from Nashville. The older man is in the process of emptying out his “black water” sewage tank into a discreet metal hole in the ground. I ask if perhaps it got cramped in the Allegro, traveling with four adults. The son-in-law tells me that he and his wife sailed from Nashville to South America and then to Europe and then back. They were gone six years. That was cramped.

  It’s possible to sail from Nashville to South America? You can do that?

  “Take the Tims Ford River,” the son-in-law says. “When you get to the Mississippi, go left.”

  Karl and I have done very well in our Winnebago so far, I will admit it. We discuss the possibilities of our getting along for six years on a boat. He is heartened. He thinks we would do fine. We go to the pancake breakfast at a cluster of tables next to the office. Across the driveway, a child in a bright orange bikini leaps into an aboveground pool over and over again. The pancakes are two for $1.05. We sit down with Rodney and Ronda, who are on their way to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally from Minnesota. Ronda is wearing a bra made out of chamois cloth and leather cord. She is wearing black leather chaps with long fringe down the sides. She is young and tan and lean with an abundance of curly gold hair. Rodney, who is very much in love with her, looks painfully average in his khakis and polo shirt.

  “Are you bikers?” Rodney asks us.

  “Of course they’re not bikers,” Ronda tells him. “Look at their hair. Their hair is too nice.”

  I think she means that I look like a member of the Winnebago set. I am neither windblown and bug-splattered like the bikers, nor rumpled and tanned like the campers. My shirt and nails are clean. Suddenly I feel I represent things I do not mean to represent: wholesomeness, family values, docility.

  They want to know if we’re going to the motorcycle rally in Sturgis, and we, who have no plans and no bikes, say yes.

  “Rock and roll,” Ronda says, showing her pretty teeth, her pretty everything. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  And so Karl gets on the back of Ronda’s Harley. He puts his hands behind him and she reaches back and pulls one of his arms around her narrow, naked waist, right above the chaps. “Hang on!” she cries, and so he does, he must. Out of the Winnebago and onto a Harley, Karl roars away with Ronda and I watch him go. And I feel something, something that is like jealousy and loss and pride at his bravery. They weave away from us down the narrow road towards the mountains in all that gorgeous light. Karl and Ronda. Gone.

  Rodney shakes his head. “She’s really something,” he says wistfully.

  “She’s your girlfriend?” I ask, knowing that she isn’t his girlfriend, not in a million years.

  “She’s my neighbor,” he tells me, his eyes still on that point on the horizon where the person he loves and the person I love were last seen. “She lets me come to Sturgis with her. It’s a long way to come alone.”

  Ronda, he tells me, is a receptionist in a dental office.

  Rodney and I finish our pancakes and pick up the paper plates, and right about the time I think they are never coming back, they come back. Karl’s smile is enormous and when he gets off the bike he pats Ronda’s shoulder and comes straight to me. “She’s going to take you now!” he says. His joy vibrates in the heat of the day. I am sitting on the picnic bench, paralyzed by the offer. Karl is the one who jumps on the bike. I am the one who stays behind and finishes pancakes. “Go!” he says.

  “She just went out,” I say, sounding lame even to myself.

  Ronda revs her engine and makes a great sweeping motion with her tan arm, and I go to her and get on the back of her bike and put my arms around her waist. “Hang on!” she calls to me, and then we’re gone.

  How you ride says everything about how you see the world. In the Winnebago we see the world from inside our house. We watch it as it rolls sedately past our living room window. But on the back of Ronda’s bike, leaning deeply from side to side, I am the jutting purple mountains. I am the asphalt and the birds in the sky. I remember everything about the twenty minutes I spent in the blown-back cloud of Ronda’s hair. People are more than willing to die on motorcycles because for that moment in the Badlands of South Dakota they are truly and deeply alive.

  “That man loves you!” Ronda screams back at me.

  “So he says!” I scream to her.

  By the time we return to the Badlands Interior Campground, the RV herd has cleared out. Picnic tables sit empty on grassy slots between strips of gravel and sand. Connection poles for water and electricity stick out of the ground like speakers at a drive-in. Where there should be a movie screen, there is nothing but mountains and sky.

  We say goodbye to Rodney and Ronda, and say that maybe we’ll see each other at Sturgis, though we never do. We go to the motorcycle rally in our Winnebago, parking as far away as possible and walking in. One motorcycle in a national park at dawn is a beautiful thing. Two hundred thousand motorcycles with their concomitant two hundred thousand motorcycle guys is something else entirely. Within ten minutes my romantic ideas about bikes have disintegrated and once again the motorcoach and the promise of the open road call my name.

  Our Winnebago is the warm nest, the mother ship, and when we return from a hike or a run through some small town, I am glad to see that great whalelike mass parked on the roadside. We become adept at hookups and feel like geniuses. We empty black-water tanks in t
he driving rain. We sleep in a beautiful tree-shaded KOA in Sheridan. We sleep in a crummy campground in Cody (“Closest to the Rodeo!”). But wherever we pull down the shades and stick the popcorn bag in the microwave, it is the exact same place. Getting out of the rodeo at eleven p.m., I am glad not to have to find a motel or pitch a tent. I am glad not to eat a bad dinner or unpack my suitcase or try to start a fire.

  Finally we reach Yellowstone, which is to Winnebagos what upstream is for salmon. All have come and all are welcome—the modest conversion van is parked between the luxe models with tricked-out interiors worthy of a mafia wife. We are all brothers beneath these towering pines. A number of people have mounted a map of the United States and Canada on their vehicle’s side, with a colored insert for every state and province they’ve visited. Under various awnings there is indoor-outdoor carpeting, potted plants and wind chimes, patio furniture, and, on a folding chair, a large stuffed bear holding an American flag. In the morning the air fills with the smell of eggs and sausage. It’s like a neighborhood in an imaginary version of the 1950s, with a virtuous respectability so kitschy, so obvious, one longs to mock it, except I can’t anymore. I am trying to remember how to pull my awning down.

  On a cruise-boat tour of Yellowstone Lake I meet Pat, a retiree in her mid-sixties who has been traveling in her thirty-seven-foot Winnebago for eight years. Her husband died last January, and she’s driven alone ever since. When I ask where her home is, she tells me she doesn’t have one. “My children live in southern California,” she says. On this day Yellowstone Lake is a postcard, with sculpted clouds and diving ospreys. I ask Pat if she comes here a lot, but she says no, it’s been years. When her husband’s health was declining, he couldn’t take much elevation. Now that she’s alone, she’s seeing the mountains. Life is short, she tells me. She plans to go from a motor home to a nursing home.