Road Work

Dear J-

Although I typically spend much of the year in shorts and therefore am never at a loss for what to wear* theVet sometimes despairs of my choices with a kind of resigned sigh because compared with me she actually cares about such things as coordinating colors and matching, say, belt to shoes. Although I’m now a hopeless case and my appearance should not be considered an indictment of her efforts, she does freely edit what I’ve chosen for figgy (I suspect she actually buys clothes that are unable to be mis-coordinated — they can all match) because I don’t seem to have been born with a keen sense of color.

My favorite part of the trip north is passing through the San Luis Reservoir on California Highway 152. After coming out of the Grapevine you go through a hundred plus miles of flat flat flat land; once you hop off Interstate 5 onto CA-152 you go through hills and water that puts me in mind of the Europe I know from movies and pictures: lush peaks kissing a cloud-filled sky, winding road to delight and thrill in equal measures. I sometimes wonder if I should take this section to drive myself, as reward for slogging through the long dry straight, or turn it over as I get a chance to take pictures instead. One glance over at theVet is enough to tell me I made the right choice (no matter the choice — we have made both choices at different times).

We make for decent traveling companions when not stressed out by schedule or angry kids (they are at the moment asleep and therefore perfect), pointing out sights and spouting off obscure trivia in playful banter. The longer we spend tracing the routes laid out by the wise traffic planners I’m convinced I’m the luckiest guy in the world, surrounded by people I love and who love me enough to point out what I could be doing better and incredibly happy to do those thousand small courtesies that seem to come more naturally now than ever. The settings change and the pictures too: I could have sworn that college was five years away, not fifteen, but the feelings are constant.

Mike

* The sartorial program is absurdly simple:
If (going to work today)
  Then (khakis and polo shirt) and (stuff I didn’t wear yesterday)
Elseif (penguins show up outside)
  Then (jeans and t-shirt)
Else (shorts and t-shirt) and (sniff shirt to ensure acceptable)

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Four Hundred Miles

Dear J-

It’s funny (not in a ha-ha way) what I decide I’d need for a given trip; when I was little those decisions were pretty necessarily limited to a particular flavor of chips to bring along and maybe to pick out a restaurant along the way. Of course, back then you could take a roadtrip in a sedan (the canonical example I like to point out is the one we took with four adults and four kids piled into a red Ford Fairmont rental to the Canadian Rockies (Banff/Jasper); hopefully my uncle has forgiven us by now) and not worry about the child-rearing paraphenalia that accompanies even the shortest trip now.

Back to gadgets, though; before if you were lucky you had a tape deck and you’d maybe make up a mix tape or two whereas nowadays the iPod is almost an unremarkable extra. You would have to listen to obscure radio stations and local deejays if you wanted a relief from the same sequence of songs (even more so if you had an eight-track or an autoreversing unit, endlessly looping back and forth). And that was okay. You’d take a break every so often to stretch your legs (running around rest areas set in the middle of nowhere, voice raised in howling chorus with the wind) and check your course against a paper map, cross-referencing road signs and towns passed. Now if it wasn’t for biological breaks (and I had friends whose dad made a solution for that involving a rubber tube and various cappable containers) we’d never get out of our cars, drive-thru dining and GPS keeping us steady and level.

I’ve long suspected that cars are sized for roughly four hundred miles on the freeway — by which I mean that even if you get fifty miles to the gallon, your tank is small and you’ll have to stop for more gas; likewise the ten MPG tanks out there have correspondingly huge tanks. It’s a reminder that for all we do, comfort-wise (when was the last time you had to actually crank a window or live without air conditioning?) we are the weak link in the movement of people on the highway. Four hundred miles is a reminder that there’s a world outside our glass and metal beetles, and we’ve got something to explore beyond those confines we limit ourselves to.

Mike

Road Warriors

Dear J-

The first long road trip I can remember taking was in 1979, when my parents went to Yellowstone with a like-minded uncle and their set of kids, nicely bracketing our ages (we were four and seven; they were three and ten).  I can see the lessons learned on that trip applied the very next year; instead of the board and blanket converting the back seat into a makeshift bed — we rattled around a lot, without seatbelts — the ten-year-old 1969 Cougar got traded in on a Cutlass wagon, just like the uncle’s family had (okay, they had a Custom Cruiser), save the nausea/rumble-seat.  Of course a CB radio was de rigeur — between listening to trucker chatter and keeping in touch with the family convoy, that was the peak of the CB radio craze.

I also remember that was the first time I had corned beef — part of the Yellowstone experience being “roughing it” in a park cabin and excitedly eating meals out of cans and outdoors on picnics (I can still remember my cousins’ delight at seeing Wonder Bread on the table).  No one ever expects to be livng in anything but the most modern times, but it felt like endless pioneer days to a four-year-old, regardless of the number of Motel 6 stays we made.

What I barely recall were the tricks used to keep us in line; I remember begging for various souvenirs (one, a kind of fuzzy bookmark/animal that would arch its back when petted, just because all the other kids were getting one; another, a thunderbird keychain that caught my eye) and books (another trend was starting to peak — the Scratch-N-Sniff — and there was a magnificent book they kept trying to say I was too old for, complete with smells of honey, campfire smoke, and skunk).  It now dawns on me that if it’s this hard to keep figgy entertained in a house filled with stuff and junk, how we’re going to pull the same trick while on the road is beyond me.

Mike