How do you share chores when traveling?

    That’s what a reader from Whitehouse asked. She had read in this column that Shirley and I spend about six months a year on the road. Because she has been married for more than 15 minutes, she knows there are some things men do naturally and some that women do naturally. But she claims the things that men do naturally (i.e., without being reminded 47 times) tend to have little redeeming social value. Such as updating stats on the Tigers at the All-Star break. Whereas women naturally do all kinds of things that men would never consider. Such as childbirth. And removing the boxers from the bathroom door knob.

   So she wanted to know how Shirley and I divvy up responsibilities on the road compared to at home. We had an extended discussion during which she took exception to several things for reasons I don’t quite understand. 

   For example, she refused to acknowledge that some jobs are just basically “manly” and others are “girly.” Shirley would be the first to insist that she is not a “girly girl.” She likes Columbia fishing shirts because she actually likes to fish, not because she is making a fashion statement. Encounters with snakes, bears, and alligators leave her nonplussed.

A Columbia fishing shirt is not just a fashion statement.

And one of her primary responsibilities is to walk

ahead of me and kick the snakes off the trail.

   At home, I deal with the “wildlife” issues. That is, I schmoosh the spiders in tissue and flush them down the toilet. On which occasions she gazes at me adoringly. When we are traveling, Shirley is inclined to cut the spiders some slack. “This is its home,” she says. “We are the intruders.” So, I am temporarily relieved of responsibility for schmooshing.

   Still, there are always bathroom issues. At home, Shirley has an extensive collection of highly specialized cleansing products. Powders. Liquids. Gels. Sprays. Some she smears on and wipes off for instant results. Others need to sit and fester until the return of the Ice Age. (In Toledo, that would be mid-to-late October.) Only a woman can understand the nuances of what you use for each highly specialized purpose.

   On the road, the bathroom involves more manly skills. The RV has two waste water tanks: “gray” water goes down the sink; “black” water goes down the toilet. Periodically (that is, far less often than Shirley would like) I have to dump the tanks. Without doubt, this is the least pleasant aspect of camping even though our rule is “Only number one, never number two.” Because of the vague possibility of some unpleasantness, I wear heavy-duty rubber gloves. “Heavy duty” is defined as “So clumsy it is impossible to operate the valves and hoses of an RV sewage system.” That’s why we also carry high potency disinfectant hand cleaner to deal with the inevitable.

Dumping the RV waste water tanks is a task for those

who are careful but not necessarily fastidious.

   At home, Shirley drives the Hyundai Sonata. On the road, she never drives the RV. Except for that time I had a kidney stone attack at 3:30 a.m. and collapsed in agony.

   “Suck it up,” she said. “If it were childbirth, you’d only be dilated about three centimeters at this stage.”

   While I practiced breathing out slowly, then panting, then moaning like a bloodhound on the scent of a ‘possum, she consulted our GPS for the location of an Emergency Room. She drove me there with her head hanging out the window making siren noises.

   By the time the sun came up, the ER staff had administered what I still think of as that Wonderful, Wonderful Joy Juice. Shortly thereafter, I gave birth to a lovely microscopic grain of sand of undetermined gender. I felt more than good enough to drive back to the campground even though I was probably still impaired by the WWJJ.

   Other than that, Shirley’s job while I am driving it to enter destinations in the GPS, compare the directions with what the iPhone says, and cross reference with The Next Exit and the atlas. Then reconciling the conflicts among them all the while ignoring my increasingly urgent question, “Do we turn here or not? Do we turn here or not?”

   Her GPS role is critical to our travel success. She locates rest areas, gas stations, Costco (for free samples at meal time), and options for where to spend the night. Most important of all is finding the location of a World Market.

   Think of World Market as Pier One with food, most of it “international cuisine.” Shirley is caught in one of those perpetual motion cycles. She buys stuff to earn “points” that are cashed in when you buy more stuff. We like their coffee, especially the Italian Roast, so when she has accumulated enough points we go in for a bag of free coffee and buy three more while we are at it. Which earns more points. And so it goes.

   Among the international fare stocked by World Market is something called Spotted Dick. I have been fascinated by Spotted Dick for more than 15 years but have never achieved the level of courage required to actually try some. Spotted Dick is British. I fantasize about some bloke exclaiming, “Blimey, this Spotted Dick is simply Jack’s a doughnut!” I have no idea what that means but blokes tend to talk that way in my fantasies.

   Other British stuff includes what they call “biscuits.” Now, I happen to bake wonderful buttermilk biscuits but the Brits apparently think “biscuit” is synonymous with “cookie.” Even though they are not real biscuits, we are compelled to purchase some because they are called “Shirley Biscuits.” The way I see it, if they can’t be trusted regarding something as simple as cookies, how am I supposed to trust them about the Spotted Dick?

These are real biscuits baked in a Coleman camp oven.

The Brits have no idea what a biscuit is.

   All the world knows that camp cooking is a guy thing. If we are having, say, a side of beef for dinner with a cast iron kettle of cowboy beans, I am the one who starts the charcoal. A manly man can do it with one match. If he soaks the briquettes in 91 octane gasoline. Some of us use a charcoal chimney that makes it almost as easy and somewhat less incendiary.

Starting charcoal is a manly man task.

That's OK, Dear, finish your wine. I got this.

I grilled the steak, sauteed the ratatouille, and uncorked 

the wine. Shirley made the delicious bleu cheese sauce.

   At home, of course, Shirley takes care of the…. Hey! Wait a minute. Is it possible that I have been snookered into doing the cooking both on the road and at home? Looking back, it occurs to me that Shirley may have used her nursing school psychology regarding positive reinforcement. “Oh, he loves to cook,” she tells people as she relaxes with an adult beverage and a plate of bourbon balls. She also claims that her mother always insisted that nurses don’t make good cooks. Which, by the way, I can verify by actually having heard it.

Her contribution to food prep is not entirely limited

to grating the Parm. Nearly but not entirely.

One of Shirley's favorites is shrimp and grits so I occasionally allow

myself to be coerced into making it. Real campers, of course,

prefer hot dogs on a stick and s'mores.

   After the meal comes dish washing. At home, I sometimes put an hors d’oeuvres plate in the dishwasher that I never actually turn on. There is some secret female ritual involving what goes on which shelf and when you use the powder or liquid or those little nuggets.

Seriously, now, name a man who could pretend 

to look this happy washing the dishes?

   On the road, because I am an open-minded, liberated man, I do the breakfast dishes. That is, I wash but Shirley rinses and dries. After dinner, Shirley washes and I rinse and dry. Unless I discover that I need to take the garbage down to the dumpster. (Side note: At Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone, I met an Asian couple at the dumpster. She was holding up the lid so he could take pictures of trash. America generates such high quality garbage that it rivals Old Faithful as a tourist attraction.) Anyway, the garbage that excuses me from the dinner dishes is typically a plastic grocery bag containing the wrappers of two trail bars and the red wax rind from a small piece of Gouda cheese.

It can take a while to carry a huge bag of garbage to the dumpster.

Meanwhile, chores back in camp can be postponed or, if I'm lucky,

Shirley will just give up and do them herself.

   Other divisions of labor include cranking out the RV awning (me) and Information Technology Support (her). The latter includes operating the iPhone, the Nook, the Kindle, and the notebook PC so we can stay well informed via what is called “social media.” I think it used to be called gossip and is a direct descendant of the old party line phone system. A subset of Shirley’s tech responsibilities includes finding ways to keep the batteries charged for all of the above.

Cranking out the awning is a highly specialized manly task that 

offsets responsibility for dealing with phones, Kindles and GPS. 

   Sharing a 20-foot RV for five or six months a year requires a lot of give-and-take as well as respect for what the other person contributes. It helps if you are reasonably--no, make that unreasonably--patient and tolerant of the other person’s foibles. (I’m not saying whose here.)

   Our ranger friend Myrta in Everglades National Park asked how long Shirley and I have been married.

   “Twenty seven wonderful years,” I said. “Out of 54, that ain’t so bad.” In fairy tales, they live happily ever after. In the real world, married life is not always just a walk in the park. By the time we reached the Big Five-0, I had even learned not to leave the boxers on the doorknob for the Laundry Fairy.