Before my mother inherited all her millions, her trips were less frequent and less expensive. Every year, she and my father would ditch the kids and go to the Caribbean for a week. Sometimes they would put us all in the station wagon for a Family Vacation - a chance to put the Fun in Dysfunctional.
My father, the engineer, was in charge of tying all our suitcases to the top of the car. In all honesty, this is not very difficult. However, he managed to do it in such a way that my child's suitcase fell off the top of the car THREE TIMES. Always mine - not anyone else's. Was this a personal vendetta? I don't know, but it certainly felt like one.
After the first two lost suitcases, I knew to listen for the "kabump" as my little luggage broke free and ricocheted off the roof of the car. The third time, I heard the "kabump," looked out the rear window, and saw my suitcase split open like a clamshell at the side of the road, my clothes scattered brightly all along the edge of the highway.
I hollered and my father reluctantly brought the car to a stop. He did not like interruptions. We hiked back to my suitcase just as a kindly truck driver pulled over his enormous rig and stopped to help. What a nice man. Unfortunately, I was about nine years old and MORTIFIED that his large, unfamiliar trucker hands were picking up my underwear.
In better news, my Cray Pas coloring crayons were still in their box. And I never, ever let my father put my suitcase on top of the car again. I kept all my precious possessions with me in the "way back," which was my own little jail.
I was ALWAYS violently carsick. (It turns out this is associated with migraine headaches.) It would have helped to let me sit up front, but that was my mother's position. No hope there. My two brothers took the middle seat, and cruelly and repeatedly said I was too gigantic to join them. So I would climb into the back like a dog, my father would open the window just enough to suck in all the car exhaust, and I would be horribly, miserably, desperately carsick within minutes. My father would stop the car long enough for me to puke and then press on, instead of giving me a few moments to walk around, breathe, and feel better.
In about 1964, we visited a ranch in Aspen, Colorado. My parents had the bright idea of taking the family on a cross-country trip, and avoiding hotels by pulling a fold-out trailer behind the car. The top opened out into two wings that were supposed to be beds, and there was a canopy over the whole thing. There is a reason you NEVER see those things on the road any more.
My parents chose a fairly straight shot west to Colorado, then drove home via a southern route. I remember parts of this vacation very clearly. They just aren't the right parts. Mostly I remember the staggering incompetence of my parents.
My brothers were probably 16 and 17. Before the car even pulled out of the driveway, they were both reading in silence, looking down. I was disappointed. No one to play with. Obviously they were present only under duress. I can't remember speaking to either one of them for the entire three weeks.
Of course the car had no air conditioning - and this was before the days of bottled water. My mother's idea of refreshments was to fill a large, round, dirty Thermos with a gallon of water and then add one small tin of formerly frozen lemonade - just enough to make the water taste "off." This was her signature half-assed approach to pretty much everything she did. Except drinking, which she did wholeheartedly.
We drove hours and hours through the flat heartland of America. I have no idea where we were, but the road was straight as an arrow with puddles of mirage water in the distance. Billboards for the Corn Palace and the Five Foot Six Ton Prairie Dog were placed every hundred miles or so to build up our curiosity.
The camper had a small "refrigerator" where you could stow a bag of ice and some food - and beer, of course. My parents placed the kids' flannel sleeping bags from L. L. Bean on the floor of the camper next to the fridge. Somewhere in the heat of Middle America, a gallon of milk fell out the UNLOCKED door of the refrigerator and soaked into the sleeping bags. My mother refused to accept that the smell of damp, spoiled milk saturating my sleeping bag was a problem.
When we were dying of boredom and heat exhaustion, my mother would produce what she uncharitably called "whining pills." Unfortunately, the whining pills consisted of one pack of DoubleMint gum to be shared by everyone. When you already feel carsick, a stick of gum is NOT what you need. If we were very, very lucky, we might get some Stuckey's Peanut Brittle because my mother loved it.
Treats were rare, so I remember stopping for ice cream in the Badlands. It must have been over 100 degrees. After the warm lemon water and my stick of gum, I scarfed the ice cream in amazement - then threw it all up, becoming more dehydrated than before.
My parents were intent on MAKING good time, not HAVING a good time. Except for my puking, or the occasional gas station bathroom, we rarely stopped. We never moseyed along side routes, or looked for interesting places or tasty food off the beaten track. The only time we deviated from the course was in the evening, when my mother tried to find free places to set up the camper in order to avoid campground fees. This also meant no running water, showers, or bathrooms for the night.
Somewhere in the mountains she had my father drive up a steep logging road and pull off into the woods. In the middle of the night I had to crawl out of the camper in my pajamas to throw up again, and I couldn't wake up anyone else enough to care.
In the morning I noticed huge red signs forbidding access to the logging road. Just then a truck loaded with 20 tons of logs came barreling around a blind curve at 80 miles per hour, and I realized it was a miracle we had not been pounded into sawdust.
The other most noticeable aspect of this non-camping-spot was a prison with thick bars in the windows about 100 feet away through the trees. During my midnight puking session I could easily have been grabbed by anyone from this hidden jail, and no one would have noticed. Being that close to prisoners scared me. I was learning not to trust my mother's judgment.
After 2000 miles, my father started driving faster and faster, until the station wagon started rattling and shaking to pieces. He had lost his mind and would NOT slow down. I think he wanted to kill us all. We pleaded with him to stop. Even my brothers stopped reading and started objecting. My mother tried to reason with him. The car rattled so much our teeth were chattering and the trailer was hopping all over the road behind us. Eventually, he stopped and turned over the wheel to my mother.
An hour later there was more yelling and the shaking of maps. We had been close to Aspen, but my mother had driven 50 miles in the wrong direction without noticing she was still going west. My father had to take the wheel again, backtracking all 50 miles and then completing the final leg of the journey. When the game is almost over and you're ahead by 50 points, my mother can still find a way to seize defeat from the jaws of victory.
The ranch in Aspen was great, although I was was humiliated to be assigned a pony with a surly personality named Butterball. We were riding the ski lift up the mountain, watching the leaves of the aspens quivering in the breeze, when the bar across the front of my chairlift suddenly swung wide open. My heart stopped. The chair continued to move along, 50 feet in the air with nothing between me and the rocks below. Somehow I closed the bar without slipping out of my seat. No one noticed.
The trip home included more heat, discomfort, and KOA campgrounds. We spent one night in an actual hotel.
In New Mexico we went out for cheap Mexican food. My mother got drunk and - against better advice - insisted on eating hot sauce straight out of the serving dish with a spoon. This was due to her "nothing is anything" philosophy; the ultimate nihilism that extended from the afterlife, to birthdays and holidays, down to hot sauces in Mexican restaurants. Nothing matters, nothing makes any difference, everything is the same and equally meaningless. This is the same philosophy that led her to her rub all the wooden furniture with mayonnaise instead of furniture polish, or to wear a nightgown instead of a ballgown, or to combine grape jelly with hickory smoked salt and call it "sweet and sour sauce," or to give newlyweds old tea towels with HER initials monogrammed on them instead of buying a proper wedding gift.
She ended up coughing and choking with tears streaming down her face. The rest of us were delighted.
Proving that details do indeed matter, my father parked the car under a streetlight, and the next morning it was FILLED with shiny hard-backed bugs that crawled out of every crack and from beneath every seat. It was like Bugs on a Plane.
Next my brother became extremely uncomfortable, and it gradually became known that he had a rash on his botto. I can't think of anything worse to happen to anyone on a long, hot road trip. My mother was convinced he had picked up syphilis or gonorrhea from a public toilet. I could hear her stage whisper all the way from my jail.
"DIDN'T YOU TEACH THEM TO PUT TOILET PAPER ON THE SEAT?"
My father did not answer.
"YOU DIDN'T?" Horror and disbelief. "YOU NEVER TAUGHT THEM? YOU HAVE TO PUT TOILET PAPER ON THE SEAT!!!"
My father said nothing.
This lecture continued for hours until they somehow found a doctor en route. My brother was diagnosed with poison ivy from going to the bathroom in the bushes.
By then it was clear we had to get home fast. We zoomed up the Eastern seaboard, back to Philadelphia. I remember nothing between Texas and Pennsylvania.
There would be no more family vacations. But over two decades later, I put my lessons from this journey to good use. After I had children of my own, we did NOT attempt any three-week road trips. When we leased our first car, we got air conditioning. for trips we tucked in the kids with pillows and quilts. I always brought Travel Toys for long rides, and the only rule was that we had to actually be on a highway before opening the first one. And we didn't have "whining pills," we had food, drinks, cookies, muffins, and anything else my son's allergies would allow. We played kid movies on a tiny portable TV, we listened to kid songs on cassettes, we used books on tape, we sang out loud to the radio - and we stopped, often. I did not want my kids to measure their miles of memories by throw-ups and fights, but by discoveries and treats.
Kids in the back seat are not guaranteed to get along. My daughter once softly sang a long recitative from her car seat about killing her brother, and he once went into a rant about throwing her out the car door into traffic. But today, both kids are extremely good travelers. For our last family trip, I tried buying Car Toys one more time... but it ended up being for me more than for them.
The only trips I remember about my childhood were either driving on the Cross Bronx Expressway to my grandma's apt, or to Atlantic City. Either one of these meant getting lost or stuck in traffic. My mother would yell at my father if he got lost and how he could not follow directions and we always stopped at a gas station for help. Never pleasant, those road trips. When I was an early teenager, I was allowed out to hang out on the boardwalk with a newly made friend from the hotel but was always warned about bad people stealing kids or if we should meet some boys, not to go back to their room because bad things would happen. Your experiences make mine seem so mild, but how we deal with it and how it affects us is up for grabs. I always swore that I would not do to my kids what my parents did to us. I believe I was successful, but I am sure they would claim I did other things that they found upsetting. We go through life, hopefully strong enough to unlearn bad behavior and aim for the good and right ways of doing things. I do not know how I would have managed being on a car/road trip for as long as you had to endure and for too many times. You are one strong mama!
ReplyDeleteParents yelling is stressful no matter where you are! My parents fought constantly, so when they pulled the "your father and I think that blah blah blah" I wanted to say. "NOW you're agreeing on something? Since when?" Shelley YOU are a strong mama too and your kids adore you! Thanks so much for reading!
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