New West Book Review

On the Road with Boulder’s Queen of Shoes and Sloth

By Jenny Shank, 6-23-08

Queen of the Road
By Doreen Orion
Broadway Books, 293 pages, $13.95

Don’t be fooled by the author photo in the back of Boulder author Doreen Orion’s new travel narrative, Queen of the Road.  It depicts her wearing sneakers and exercise clothes, smiling next to her dog at a scenic overlook to which they’ve presumably hiked.  Although she looks like a standard REI-shopping, backpacking, Yoga Journal-reading, outdoor-worshiping Boulderite, she reveals her true nature early on in Queen of the Road, which details the year she and her husband Tim spent cruising America in a tricked-out luxury bus. 

Orion, whose husband describes her as a “princess from the Island of Long,” abhors hiking.  She doesn’t even like to leave the house, much less change out of her pajamas (although, ironically she does enjoy acquiring a fancy wardrobe, including 200 pairs of shoes).  I found Orion fascinating: she was like a character from one of those chick lit novels set in Manhattan that I’ve heard so much about, brought to life and imported to Colorado, complete with an aversion to cooking and cleaning, a phobia of bugs that causes her to scream at the sight of any insect, an enthusiasm for fruity martinis, and an abhorrence of peeing in the woods.  How can someone live in Boulder and be unable to pee in the woods?  I don’t know, but Orion might have broken some kind of record for abstaining from it, as she holds her water for seven hours during a visit to the Alaskan wilderness that comes late in the book.

The adventure kicks off when Tim, burnt out from a job as a psychiatrist and medical director that he pours all his energy and waking hours into, decides he needs to take a midlife break.  Orion, meanwhile, is content.  Also a psychiatrist, she gave up treating patients in favor of conducting medical reviews for insurance companies from home.  Orion is a creature of profound laziness: She has no kids (because of the work they entail, she admits), does no cooking, ironing, laundry or dishes, rarely leaves the house (once remaining indoors for a stretch of “118 hours"), and her favorite pastime is watching TV.  (She even starts to work in bed, which causes Tim to remark, “Even whores have to leave their beds to get johns.") Tim, meanwhile, is a highly-motivated go-getter, inspirational to his patients and staff and handy around the house, a hiker, tinkerer, and science enthusiast known to Orion as Project Nerd.  Somehow they make the perfect pair, and Tim finally convinces Orion to sign on to his dream of a year-long road trip.

Of course, he doesn’t make the pampered princess travel in any old bus.  They buy a Prevost, “the Holy Grail of buses” that “rock stars travel in.” And they install kitchen counters made of “the most expensive granite known to mankind,” and a retractable flat screen plasma TV along with many other amenities.  All of these trimmings do nothing to diminish Orion’s phobia of buses, which increases on their maiden three-week voyage to visit Tim’s family in Nevada and Arkansas, during which the bus door flies open repeatedly when they are traveling at 60-miles-an-hour, they must brave a hailstorm, and Tim has trouble maneuvering the bus over narrow roads and small bridges.

Nevertheless, after a brief stop back in Boulder, they decide to press on with their one-year plan.  The itinerary is calculated to avoid snow, as they swoop south during the winter months and end up in Alaska in summer at the end of their year.  Most of the book consists of Orion’s commentary on the local color they encounter, the tourist attractions they visit, and the adventures they have, such as a stop at a nudist RV park and a brush with a robbery in Tucson.  She also provides recipes for the elaborate martinis with which she sedated herself during harrowing bus moments.  Orion’s humor and self-revelation makes Queen of the Road an enjoyable read, packed with tidbits like this one:

“During my internship on a psychiatry ward at a VA hospital, the attending once took her students on a tour of patients’ rooms.  That woman could diagnose with uncanny accuracy, just by observing the state of the allotted living spaces on her ward.  When she commented, ‘That’s a schizophrenic bed,’ we could instantly see what she meant: The sheets were askew with clothes, toiletries, even food in the mix, seemingly ground into the white cotton linens, a blur of no longer discrete things with their own shapes and boundaries.  I often imagined that attending, standing in the entryway of our home, shaking her head and sighing, ‘That’s a schizophrenic house.’”

Indeed, Queen of the Road has disabused me of any illusions I harbored that mental health professionals are somehow better adjusted than regular folks.  Tim and Doreen don’t rely on their rational doctor powers very often during the book, except when a gunman bursts in to rob a restaurant they’re eating in and Tim keeps his cool and stares down the assailant. 

And, blessedly, although Orion says that her year in the bus has cured her somewhat of her lust for shoes and other material objects and made her more willing to “take better advantage of all that [Boulder] has to offer,” she doesn’t have a grand Oprah-style epiphany that leads her to change her life and heart.  She doesn’t radically change her lifestyle or try to become a better person, and who’d want her to?  It’s so fun to picture this woman, in the midst of all the strenuous athletic and outdoorsy activity going on in Boulder, sitting home in her pajamas, refusing to cook, clean, exert herself, and above all, pee in the woods.

Doreen Orion will discuss her book at the Tattered Cover (Colfax) on Thursday, June 26 at 7:30 p.m., and at the Boulder Bookstore on Monday, June 30 at 7:30 p.m.

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