I am addicted to the idea of traveling. To see famous wonders of the world, capture them in pictures, and then be able to say “I’ve been there” when the places show up on a screen or in print, is a tantalizing concept. The practical application is a different story.
When I was very young my sister, who is only 10 months, five days younger than me and so treated like a twin (she was I now believe the result of the then common myth that you could not get pregnant while nursing) and I were carted on many road trips to Oregon and Washington where my mother grew up. The Northwest and particularly Washington were always spoken of in reverence by my mother, who seemed to hate the heat, snow and wind of Wyoming, until my father moved the family to Portland when I was seventeen. From that point on she spoke lovingly of the Cowboy State and seemed to miss it terribly. At any rate, my father insisted on early starts on our travels, avoiding the heat of the day he said, no matter what season of the year it was. We were always on the road by 4:30 or 5:00 AM. I was not then an early riser and was prone to have a queasy stomach, particularly after having been hurriedly fed and then jostled into the back seat of a stuffy, over packed coupe with poor suspension. I remember distinctly the first time my stomach got the best of me. We had gone no farther than Midwest, about 25 miles from home on 87 north when I complained that it was too hot and I didn’t feel good. Mom rolled down her window to let some fresh air in, a mistake of the first order. My stomach soon decided that it no longer wished to retain my recent breakfast. I lunged for the only open window, my mother’s. I was only 5 and short and the gap was just too far away.
It took a while for my ears to clear from the screaming of my mother as she wiped the seat, the inside of the door, my shirt and her blouse and pants. My father only looked grim and washed off the outside of the car door with water from the canvas bag he had tied to the front grill as extra water for the radiator. He pulled suitcases from the trunk and draped shirts across the windows so my mother could change in the car while my father re-clothed me by the side of the road. Once the soiled clothes were stuffed into a brown paper bag and stashed in the trunk, and the suitcases were reloaded and stored, windows were rolled down and we once again headed to Oregon, a stiff breeze blowing our hair and freshening the interior smell. We road in silence for miles, while to our right the sun came up over the prairie.
I do not know where my sister, Lora was during all of this. Though we were usually inseparable I have to assume that she had distanced herself from me as far as possible and concentrated on remaining totally invisible during the subsequent resolution of the affair. She seems to have re-appeared, as far as I can remember, at the Chinese-American restaurant where we stopped for dinner. For all I know she had taken refuge in the trunk.
Not all of our trips had such an interesting beginning, partly because as I grew older I grew to tolerate early mornings better and partly because my parents quit feeding me before road trips yet insisted I hold a paper sack in my lap until noon. We took to stopping for breakfast around nine or ten and I learned to love restaurant breakfast.