Bryan, My Hero by Jessica Renee Collins

 

I've been in a relationship with Bryan since I was 19 and he was 20. We're now both 37 so you do the math on that one because I was an English major. In that time, we've had a good share of crisis moments that required immediate action. Traditionally, Bryan's reaction is level-headed while mine is less so:

When we got the news that we would have to undergo Intra-Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection in order to have children, my first reaction (after googling that $hit) was to lament that I was never, ever, absolutely never going to be a mother. Bryan said that it would work out. We have two daughters. Point Bryan.

When our oldest daughter, Riley, two years old at the time, choked on a miniature white plastic "Barbie and the Rockers" microphone, I bolted for the telephone to call 911; Bryan gave her the Heimlich. Point Bryan.

When our youngest daughter, Jordyn, five years old then, leaped off a chair whilst holding a bowling ball, Bryan said that she'd be fine and put a band-aid on her bloody chin. I took a hesitant peek, saw that Jordyn's chin was now enhanced by a teensy tiny gaping mouth and knew that she actually needed stitches. Point Jessica.

When Riley, at six years old, fell off the monkey bars, I rubbed the woodchips off her, told her she'd be fine and commanded her to stop crying and then I continued talking to my friend. Bryan put Riley's arm through a series of calisthenics and correctly proclaimed it broken. Point Bryan.

With Bryan winning the past crises of our lives 3-1, our first family RV trip was an opportunity for me to even the score.

Bryan, in his brilliance, decided that we should "try out" the RV at a nearby location before embarking on our month long RV trip this summer, to determine if we actually were crazy in thinking that we could circumnavigate the United States of America in one month's time with our two children, two dogs, and four cats, our biggest concern being how to handle six animals, chiefly Scout, a geriatric cat, aged 16 years, afflicted with diabetes and requiring 2.5 ml of insulin injected between her shoulder blades twice a day. She also occasionally either actually forgets or chooses to forget where her litter box is.

I selected Melbourne, FL as our "fairly close to home" location because it is the first point, as one travels south in Florida, where the ocean is actually that gorgeous South Florida blue. I booked us a campsite at Wickham Park and wrote up a loose list of things for us to check out including a cute bakery called Love Bugs, the Eau Gallie arts district, the go-carts at the Andretti Thrill Park, the Kennedy Space Center, and the Palm Bay Aquatics Center. Besides the fact that Wickham Park was quite lovely and peaceful, the only thing I can tell you about Melbourne, FL after being there for three days is where the Wal-Mart and Home Depot are located.

The trip began on Saturday with what we thought would be the "crisis we'd remember." We placed all four cats into a fabric dog crate with no litter box wrongly assuming that being thrown together in a tight space that smelled like dog and then placed into a moving vehicle wouldn't be traumatizing for them at all. Not so, my friends. They literally lost their $hit two minutes into the trip. When the stench wafted into the front seat region of our vehicle, Bryan asked, "Should we just go to Target?" I replied, "We need to go back home, NOW." Point Jessica.

In ten minutes, I cleaned the befouled cats, each of them giving me a nice long thank you scratch from their back claws, and returned them to a hose-able crate now equipped with a litter box. We had learned that there were worse things than having cat litter spilled all over the car and didn't we just feel blessed as hell to have learned that lesson only two minutes into the trip? You're damn straight we did and off we went with a ha ha tee hee about the poo incident.

We arrived at Wickham Park around 5pm, much later than anticipated because we had never stocked an RV before (it's like outfitting a college apartment for you, your roommate, and your roommate's eight drunk friends) or traversed 2.5 hours in a vehicle containing ten bladders. We got the RV hooked up before dark and went to bed at 9pm just exhausted from our "tough" day.

When we woke up early Sunday morning, Bryan's foot literally squelched in the carpet and Scout, the geriatric diabetic with a litter box problem, was cowering near there in a hidey hole, her legs and backside wet. What we most feared would happen, had happened.

I soaked up what I could with half a roll of paper towels thinking that it was a strangely large and rather saturated area that she managed to destroy, even seeping into an under-bed storage area, and I told Bryan that we needed to get a steam cleaner stat, all the while just dreading the fact that my cat had destroyed his new RV because no matter what my lips said, my brain coils knew that there is no getting the smell of cat urine out of a vehicle that spends the majority of its life baking in the sun with sealed doors and windows. I also knew that I would have to have Scout euthanized before our summer RV trip because she just wasn't going to make the cut, not after this.

At 7:30am, we toured the Melbourne Wal-Mart, a nicely organized affair, with handheld steam cleaners available for the low everyday price of $99.99.  There went our entry tickets to the Kennedy Space Center but, no matter, my mind was on the absolute ruination of Bryan's spanking new toy which he had only been dreaming about for, um, perhaps just his whole life or so, not to mention the impending death of a cat who has been purring right alongside me through college, my wedding, several apartments, three houses, and two children.

Back at the RV, I steam cleaned for my life a nook and cranny area of our bedroom not intended for a stocky she-hulk type contorting into the most unattractive positions possible while Bryan investigated a problem that he had just noticed with our water hook-ups. For some reason, the city water hook up, which normally supplies the RV with running water in the kitchen and bathrooms, was filling up the "fill tank," which is just a small accessory tank that one would use for a quickie situation on the side of the road for hand washing or bathroom using while traveling. The fill tank was overflowing to the point that water was streaming out of its hose input hole on the side of the RV, the very side where the soaked carpet was located in our bedroom. Eureka! It was not cat urine I was steam cleaning, it was merely water! Scout could live! I was knee deep in water not, um, wait a minute, we have water leaking into our new RV, egads!

Because we are RV rookies, Bryan spent hours checking all of the valves and connectors, trying to determine if we had gone wrong somewhere, finally landing exasperated on the couch not knowing what to do next and needing a nap so that he could think straight. I'd never seen Bryan not know how to fix a problem before, so I knew that we were in deep...water, so I did the only thing a level-headed person could do, I asked Google. Point Jessica.

Doing the best it could with the spotty campground internet, Google found me a forum of experienced RV campers who had also encountered this same problem with our model camper and, according to them, it was the result of a tank or line leak, and not something that we had done wrong. This normally would have lifted the weight off Bryan's shoulders except that his shoulders were still weighed down by the nearly three gallons of un-dry-out-able water in our bedroom, not to mention the fact that we had an ongoing water leakage issue with another day and night of camping remaining, and also the fact that we were not exactly all that close to home or our RV service department who had the audacity to be off enjoying Memorial Day weekend in their own perfectly functioning RVs. At this low, low moment Bryan needed to tag out, so I offered to go to Home Depot to purchase a wet/dry vac. The fact that he trusted me, alone in Home Depot, to pick out a tool shows how very dark his day had gotten. Points nullified.

After touring the Melbourne Home Depot, notable for its friendly greeter man, I returned to the RV in the role of rescuer and spent the next two hours sucking water, not urine!, from the carpet. I also suggested to Bryan that we just shut off the city water and use the water in the fill tank until it was empty and then refill it again when needed and he agreed that that was a good plan. In the interim, he had made an appointment to drop the RV off before 5pm the next day, Monday, to have the service department look at it upon their return on Tuesday. This meant that we would have to wake up, pack up, and leave the next morning giving us no time for our planned activities. The girls spent the entire, entire!, day curled up with the cats and dogs in their RV bunkhouse room watching a kids channel called kudo or judo or moodo or whodo knows because Bryan and I were busy drowning!

We managed to squeeze in a home cooked spaghetti dinner plus a bike ride around Wickham Park  and a visit to both the playground and the dog park there which were great. Right before he went to bed, I told Bryan that tomorrow would be a better day. Points nullified.

Monday morning we awoke to dry floors, hooray!, and a mission: get out of here as soon as possible so that we can drop off the RV to the service department, 2.5 hours away, before 5pm. We used every ounce of partnership to get those kids, those animals, and that RV rolling by 10:30am. Points nullified.

We had hungry kids by 11:30am, so we found a rest area and opened up the RV to have lunch right there in the parking lot which was quite lovely. We drove along uneventfully for awhile after that, so I decided that since home was close and the weekend of crisis was nearly over, I could safely take a little nap. I went to sleep with the sun shining and everything humming along fine and I awoke to dark skies and Bryan saying that it was starting to rain. Just as we passed a rest area, something black twisted up on Bryan's side of the windshield--it was the windshield wiper. The damn thing broke, right then, while we were towing a 35 foot long house for only the third time, in a downpour, with our children and all the life of our household snoozing cozily oblivious and with a looming 5pm deadline. 

For as long as I have known him, Bryan reacts to occurrences on the highway by pulling over to the side of the highway. Once, he stopped on the side of a highway in Missouri to get what he thought was a rare piece of Ozark glass, which turned out to be a blue Wal-Mart bag. He has, thankfully, not lived that story down in nearly fifteen years. Point Jessica. Speaking of Jessica, I am a person who would drive her hubcaps to stubs before pulling over to the side of a highway because I am a worst case scenario envision-er. Every time Bryan has ever pulled our vehicle over to the side of a major highway, I have berated him with my fear that we are about to be crashed into and killed just because we pulled over on a highway. I don't mind dying, but I don't want to die for a stupid reason, so if I ever do die because of stupidity, please don't tell me and please just tell everybody else that I died in a more heroic manner.

So, while my usual response to finding myself in a vehicle on the side of a highway is utter terror, for some reason on this occasion, when I had a 35 foot long brand new house behind me as well as a vehicle containing everything I most treasure, in a downpour, with a broken windshield wiper and a 5pm deadline, I responded with laughter, sheer unadulterated hysterics that I just could not stop. Oh, there's my husband climbing out my side of the car and then getting onto the hood of our SUV to fix our broken windshield wiper. Ha! Ha! We're all about to be killed, any moment now, by some idiot ramming into the back of our house on wheels in this weather. Oh, ha, ha, hidy, ho! I was a nut! A complete crack-up! I could not hold it together for the life of me. Point Bryan.

Bryan got back into the car, climbing over the center console again with a speed I have never seen before and there we went bumbling down the breakdown lane with our hazards on, crossing over ripped up tire pieces from semis and bumbling along the rumble strip they embed into the road to wake up sleeping drivers, the SUV bumpity bumping and then the RV just droning grumble, grumble and Bryan is trying to get our almost 45 feet of combined snail vehicles back into traffic that is roaring past constantly, in the rain, and then broomp, there goes the windshield wiper, broken again, and I am just laughing my a$$ off with tears running out of my eye corners, so loudly that I wake Riley up and she is, whether from sleep or my noises, confused as to whether I am crying or laughing, whether we are about to die or having the greatest time of our lives and I cannot respond with anything at all because I have no idea myself.

Bryan, at this point, has given up trying to get back into traffic and we are just sitting there on the side of the road, in the rain, apparently waiting to be crashed into and killed. He says that he doesn't know what to do and that he can't do anything and the broken windshield wiper is just staring at him from the other side of the windshield with a ha, ha take that, and the freakin' clock is ticking away and his wife is making the weirdest noises he's ever heard while his firstborn is asking unanswered questions and his animals are beginning to stir thinking that we have maybe arrived somewhere exciting finally.

Through my hysteria, I manage to tell Bryan that if we keep driving in the breakdown lane, we will soon reach the exit for Old St. Augustine Road and that there is a hospital there with a big parking lot where he can park this rig of crazy and figure out what to do with the windshield wiper, so he starts inching along again because it's a plan of some sort and even though he can see nothing but sheets of rain on the windshield, he trusts this insane person who used to be his wife telling him that he's doing great and that he's almost there. Point Jessica. 

Bryan somehow manages to blindly get us to the exit and into the hospital parking lot. Point Bryan. He instructs me to find something that he can use to fix the wiper and I miraculously find a random paperclip in a cup holder which he deems perfect. Point Bryan. He then gets out of the car again to MacGyver the blasted windshield wiper and, since he's out of earshot now, I laugh unchecked, the tears still streaming and all of a sudden I notice that Bryan is slapping continuously at his head which makes me laugh even harder until I realize that he is being attacked by at least three of the nastiest flies imaginable: horseflies. These suckers bite likes bees and the itch is insane and lasts for weeks.

I get out of the SUV to help him and he is just slapping all over the place, screaming at someone, God? Mother Nature? The Devil?, "Is it enough yet? Is this enough yet?" and I start smacking those horseflies as hard as I can and it is unfortunate because they are on the back of his head and his shoulders and I feel like I am just beating the crap out of him on the worst day of his life, so I finally tell him to get into the car and move us because we are obviously near their nest or something and they are having none of it, so he gets us moving along to a safer spot, fixes the windshield wiper, with a paper clip!!, and gets us back on the highway to the RV service center, all in one piece, all alive, all before 5pm, and my God it is just the greatest thing when he finally smiles and starts laughing with me at what we just went through. The crises of all crises and he came out on top and un-toppable!

Bryan, I could never do what you did and I admire you so much for handling one of the worst scenarios we've ever gotten ourselves into like a boss. Cannot wait for the next adventure with you!