My sister and I first learned the joys of the open road from our Uncle Quentin. He was one of my mom’s brothers, she had 13 siblings, and a bit of a legend in the family. He had been a pilot during the war, WWII, and had gone to college. He was the only child to do so. A botanist, he was on a working vacation to the peninsula of Washington. He was working on crops that might be used to replace the poppy as the crop of choice in the golden triangle poppy fields of the Far East.
My mother had first learned of his trip from the round robin letter we received every few months. The letter was usually a large envelope, though it grew to be sent in a small box, which was circulated among all of the siblings, many of their children, and my mother’s parents. Upon receipt of the round robin, my mother removed her last letter, read all of the other letters, and then composed a new epistle to enclose before sending the bundle on its way. Uncle Quentin was coming through Casper and he was bringing his new wife, June. Not only was she younger than him, she was his second wife, and they had a new baby! All of which was fascinating to Lora and I. Somehow it was decided between my mother and her brother that they would take the two of us with them to Washington and leave us with our grandparents. My father would come out at some later date to retrieve us. (As I write all of this I am aware that I really have no idea why this all transpired. Was it to give us an interesting summer vacation? Were my parents tired of us and needed some time away; an unlikely idea because by then we had a younger sister Lisa? Were they trying to get even with Quentin for some unknown transgression and transporting a 7 and an 8 year old seemed like a suitable punishment? I don’t know).
I don’t remember Quentin’s arrival, though I remember being shy of June. The baby does not appear in my memory at all. What I do remember was that on that trip my uncle kept us completely enthralled by teaching us to gamble, spit and sing dirty, to us, songs at the top of our voices.
My uncle, perhaps cautioned by my parents and learning from their mistakes, did not hit the road much before 9:00. He was not the goal oriented, white knuckle driver that my father was, rather he draped one hand over the wheel and used the other to gesture as he carried on a lively conversation with us. We were unencumbered by seatbelts and our view was not obscured by high seat backs. He would point out the start of Burma Shave messages and we would read them aloud together as we passed each laughing together at the punchline. (Li’l Stinker signs replaced Burma Shave in Idaho and became our favorite, the concept of a gas station named after a skunk had a certain childish appeal.) When our end of the conversation lagged, he suggested a game. We each had to put 5 nickels into a pot, he and Aunt June would do the same. We then made up a list of five things to look for. The first person to spot an item would win four nickels. One of the items was for white horses together and another was four cars of the same color in a row (an easy one given the limited variety of car colors in 1958). I don’t remember the others. A nickel was a lot of money then to us and I remember the hurt and disappointment the first time I had to give one up. To this day I think that first loss was the reason I don’t gamble. In any case, In the long run both Lora and I broke even, though I’m sure there was some finagling on the adults’ part to make it so.

On the second or third day, Uncle Quentin taught us the little brown mouse song as we rolled along toward Oregon. Lora and I took to the song immediately, singing as loud as we could because after all, the song was about drinking and we had to swear at the end. What more could an adolescent want in the way of pushing the envelope in 1958. It was being naughty WITH permission:

Oh, the liquor was spilt on the barroom floor,
the bar was closed for the night.
And out from his hole came the little brown mouse, into the pale moonlight.
Well, he lapped up the liquor on the barroom floor
and back on his haunches he sat,
and all through the night you could hear him roar
“BRING ON THE GODDAMN CAT!’.

The song carried us for many miles and we only stopped singing it when Uncle Quentin replaced it with the Lizzie Borden rhyme, again unmarked territory in our education, though it was growing rapidly:

Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks; when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.

He followed this with a lengthy description of the basis of the song, which as I remember, was terminated by Aunt June with a withering look and a reminder that we were just children.

My only other memory is of the giant cherry tree in one of our Aunt’s yards after we reached Oregon. It was a giant of a tree and it had CHERRIES growing on it. To this point in our young Wyoming bred lives, Lora and I had little experience of things growing on trees other than fir cones and the occasional ornamental crab apple. We were allowed to climb it and pick cherries. Adult approved tree climbing…could this trip get any better? Soon after we must have continued on our way as I remember Uncle Quentin teaching us how to chew around the cherry pit and then spit it out the window. This quickly evolved into a game of trying to hit pedestrians with the pits. Aunt June intervened vocally and the three of us rolled up our windows, though I recall a smirk on Uncle Q’s face.

Ultimately we were deposited at our grandparents place (where I was first allowed to shoot a rifle) where we waited for our father and sister Lisa to retrieve us. I cannot speak to Lisa’s solo journey with dad to collect us. We each learn to travel in our own way. I can only say that that trip, for us, was formative. It was perfect in the way that no other trip has been. I was too young to know if there were problems or to care about the end goal. All I knew was the happiness of the road.