When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time To Go Home (3 page)

The saleswoman who helped me with a bathing suit and the nice man who sold me a new piece of luggage.

The water softener deliveryman whom I told about the key I keep under the white rock at the end of the drive.

The dry cleaners ... in idle conversation.

Sam, our druggist, who prescribed something for extreme exposure to sun and children.

The Little League coach and the team.

Evelyn, who was giving a birthday party for Stef and needed to know why we weren't coming.

The society editor, Marjabelle Mix, who wanted a little paragraph for her weekly column.

I may not be the most sophisticated traveler who ever hit the road, but I know enough to sneak out of town.

Canada

The first time we saw the twenty-two-foot travel trailer, it was parked next to a carport with license plates that had not been renewed in five years. The For Sale sign was fly-specked.

Our entire family encircled it with excitement and wondered what kind of people could part with such a treasure. It was so compact—so self-contained. As my husband and the owner kicked the tires, his wife gave the kids and me a tour of the inside.

The owner worked swiftly. She whipped off the sofa pillows and jammed them into the broom closet, flipped over the table into a bed, and pulled down the bookshelves into a bunk.

“That's amazing,” I said. “How does one get into the bunk?”

“You either walk on the face of the person sleeping on the table or boost yourself up by putting your foot on the stove. Make sure the burners are off,” she said dryly.

“The kitchen seems rather small.” I smiled. “Is there a refrigerator?”

“Of course there's a refrigerator,” she said. “Your handbag is covering it. To open the door, everyone but you goes outside. When the door opens, you jump in the sink.”

I lingered as she forged ahead to the next section. “Here you have your private quarters.” There was a twin bed on either side of the trailer, divided by a small aisle. “There's even a toilet,” she added.

“And the door is ...”

“There isn't any door,” she said. “You won't use the toilet anyway. It smells. You'll note there's plenty of room under the beds to store your food, clothes, and blankets. Did you notice the cupboards on the walls? Just tell your husband not to make any sudden stops or everything flies open and you're looking at three days of mopping up.”

I fingered a spray nozzle attached to a hose. “How nice. A vegetable brush in the shower.”

“That is the shower,” she said crisply.

I raced to the door, but it was too late. My husband was shaking hands with the former owner, who held our check.

As we hooked the trailer up to our car, the man pocketed the money and observed, “There goes a piece of our history, Mother. We'll miss it.” Her eyes remained dry. “Like the Depression,” she said.

Traveling with three kids and dragging a trailer behind us wasn't the swiftest thing we ever did. In retrospect, I should never have given birth to more children than we had car windows. In fact, after a week on the road with them and knowing what I know now, we should have bought a Porsche and rented kids.

“Mom, where are we going again?” the child riding the “hard middle seat” whined. I clutched the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. “Ask your father.”

My husband put down the road map. “Don't distract your mother. She's driving. We're going to see one of the most breathtaking phenomena in the world, the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, Canada.”

“Tell us again why we're going there,” queried another bored voice.

“Because you are going to see something that few people have ever seen ... a bore that comes surging up the Petitcodiac River with a tidal wave that rises to a staggering height of eleven feet at the rate of eight to eleven feet an hour.”

“Speaking of tidal waves,” said the third voice from the back seat, “I have to go.”

“You should have gone before you left home,” said their father.

“Dad! That was four days ago. Mom, look for a place to stop.”

“I told you before, don't bother your mother. She's got her hands full driving this rig,” said my husband.

He got that part right. “Mom” wasn't driving. She was frozen to the steering wheel like she was dragging a tank of nuclear waste material behind her. Every time I looked at the large mirrors on either door, I could see three miles of travel trailers behind me and cars backed up to the United States border.

For the last five hundred miles, I had been following Ruby and Rusty of Kendallville, Indiana, in their RV, True Love. The thought of passing them would have brought on premature menopause.

So far, it hadn't been much of a vacation. Neither of us had anticipated the stress of hauling all this tonnage along the highway. That sweet little couple, Bonnie and Clyde who sold us the travel trailer, never told us the joys of hitting downtown Detroit at five p.m. or the thrill of meeting another car on a bridge designed tor a compact and a bicycle. And they certainly never prepared us for the nightly ritual called “parking your home on wheels for the night.”

Parking was an exercise for the entire family. My husband needed all the help he could get. He watched the two large mirrors mounted on either door of the car, one child near the rear wheels picked his nose, another at the opposite rear wheel threw rocks at squirrels, and a third child searched for a toilet. It was my job to stand off to one side and coordinate the operation.

“Turn your wheels that way,” I shouted.

“Which way? I can't see you. That means nothing to me.”

“Left. Turn them left.”

“The trailer wheels or the car wheels left?” he shouted.

“Whichever ones make your back wheels straighten out.”

“Is that better?”

“Right.”

“Is that right as in OK, or right as in turn right? I can't see you in all this rain, you know.”

“That's because you didn't listen when I yelled stop. It isn't raining. You just hit the water connection.”

“I'm pulling up again. And for God's sake give me better directions. Who are you waving at? Do you want me to go that way?”

“I'm waving to our neighbors.”

“Forget the neighbors till we get this parked, then you can get friendly.”

“We'd better get friendly now. You just backed into their tent.”

It was always a problem. One day in Quebec, it was two o'clock in the afternoon and we had not had lunch because we couldn't find a place to park the trailer . . . something the size of a stadium. In desperation, my husband pulled alongside an abandoned railroad track. After lunch, it was my son's and my turn to put the Barbie and Ken kitchen back in order. The rest of the family took a walk. That's when we heard the train whistle. Both of us froze. It's funny what you think about when your last seconds on earth are imminent. You don't do any of the things you're supposed to do like grab the picture albums or fall to your knees and confess your sins. All I could think about was those women on the Titanic who had refused dessert the night the ship hit an iceberg because their clothes felt tight. As my son hummed “Nearer My God to Thee,” I stuffed a Twinkie in my mouth as the train roared by. Every dish in the trailer crashed to the floor.

My mind drifted back to the True Love, and I wondered if Rusty and Ruby of Kendallville, Indiana, were having a good time. You get to know a lot about people you have been following for five hundred miles. I knew they had a Baby on Board, had been to Williamsburg and Knotts Berry Farm, and were members of the NRA. They liked the open road and had a bumper sticker that read campers are the most honest people in the world. (They also had a lock on their gas tank.)

Somehow, I knew that Rusty was driving and Ruby was reading a road map to her husband who “knew damn well he was going east and if the sun was setting there, then God had made a mistake!” Rusty was crabby because he couldn't find a holding station to empty the waste and they couldn't use their self-contained toilet. Ruby worried about the brakes burning out when they went downhill. Her life had no meaning without a laundromat. The big saucepan she used to cook spaghetti in now held bait. Their kids ordered $10 dinners in restaurants and ate only the pickle. Their dog got carsick and rode with his head out of the window with his fanny in Ruby's face.

My husband put down the road map again. “We've only made ten miles today. No wonder. Look who you're following. It's Rusty and Ruby again. Pass him. He's only going thirty-five miles per hour.”

“We're going uphill,” I said. “I don't have the power.”

As we descended, Rusty sped up to sixty-five miles per hour. He was incredible when you thought about it. He never stopped for scenic views. Never got gas. He had to have kidneys the size of basketballs. If he didn't pick it up, we'd never get to the Bay of Fundy.

All told, the trip would take a month. It would take us through the breathtaking forests of Ontario, where our evenings would be spent watching bears eat food in the dump. We would inch our way through the narrow cobblestone streets of Quebec and wind along the St. Lawrence River, around the snakelike coast of the Gaspe. On Prince Edward Island, we would scour the beaches for clams, and in Nova Scotia we would sit on the grass and listen to bagpipe concerts.

Well, some of us would. Others of us would carry water, build fires, hustle garbage, and spend most of our waking hours in a laundromat. While the family was pretending they were throwbacks from a wagon train, I spent most of my time scrounging for quarters and watching my enzymes and bleach race their way to the dirt and grime in our underwear.

The camping experience turned out to be as joyous as giving birth. Each day brought new challenges and tests of our tolerance for one another. But no matter how many flat tires we changed, how many repairs we needed for things that leaked and boiled over, no matter how many times I was tempted to make a necklace out of Valium and lick at them all day long, our goal always sustained us. We were going to see the great tidal bore at the Bay of Fundy. No one in our neighborhood had seen anything like that!

We arrived in the small town of Moncton in New Brunswick in the early afternoon and drove our travel trailer to the banks of the Petitcodiac River. My husband turned his attention to his camera, mounting it carefully on a tripod and trying out different locations. I passed out slickers to the children with orders to stand back at a safe distance and hold Mommy's hand tightly lost they be sucked into the jaws of the powerful waters.

At around 3:05, the buzz of anticipation by the spectators became hushed. There was an eerie silence as binoculars were trained on the flow of rolling water in the distance.

We strained our ears to hear the roar of rushing waves we knew would soon come crashing against the shore. Our eyes searched to glimpse the wild wall of force that would leave us wet and breathless.

At 3:10, a small trickle of brown water, barely visible, slowly edged its way down the river toward us with all the excitement of a stopped-up toilet. The five of us stared silently as the dribble lazily lapped the shore like a kitten with warm milk. I retained more water than that. The crowd was underwhelmed and stood staring like statues. It was a long time before anyone in our family spoke. About five thousand miles to be exact.

In the fall, the kids used the travel trailer to entertain sleepovers. But for the most part, after the Canadian trip, it occupied a space between the garbage cans and the garage. The For Sale sign in the rear window was as aggressive as we got.

One day that winter, a young serviceman and his wife knocked at the door and asked to see it. He was stationed nearby and needed low-cost housing they could park near the base. As our husbands kicked the tires, I showed the young bride the inside of the trailer. When I finished, she said quietly, “The sink seems rather small.”

“Not really,” I said. “It seats one real comfortably.”

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“Do you use the refrigerator a lot?”

She hesitated. “Not a whole lot.”

“Then it isn't important.” I smiled.

By the time she rushed to her husband's side, it was too late. The check was in my husband's hand.

During the rest of that winter, I thought a lot about our first attempt at “quality time.” Was it possible there were vacations where you didn't have to carry your own toilet paper and dispose of your own waste? Somewhere was there a wonderland where nightlife was more than a ranger picking his teeth with a matchbook cover and showing slides of “The Birth of a Bog”?

Some of our friends had actually gone on trips where they didn't have to cut up everyone's meat or listen to a car radio that made their teeth swell. They visited a world where crying children belonged to someone else, and when they stretched out their arms on the back seat to relax, someone didn't put wads of chewing gum in their hands.

That's the world I wanted to explore.

"Honey, I Just Ditched

the Kids"

When my children get their own literary agent (and it is only a matter of time), the first chapter in their Dearest book will record this moment in great detail.

They will describe how they sat on the edge of the bed watching Mommy and Daddy pack for a twenty-one-day European Getaway.

As they fight back tears of rejection, they will reflect on how they were left behind with nothing but $5,000 worth of toys, a $2,000 entertainment center, enough soft drinks to launch the QE2, color-coordinated menus, and an overpriced babysitter who would hover over them like security in a Loehmann's dressing room. They will tell of how their mother traveled twelve thousand miles with a blowfish balanced between her knees to buy their affection back. Their book will inspire tabloid headlines: my dad was too busy to bond.

The big question that should be addressed here is not whether parents should take their children on vacation or leave them at home. The question is, What is the best age to leave them behind?