Along for the Ride

Patrick is taking us someplace today, but he won’t say where.

So frames my experience of the last twenty-nine years by his side.

He did divulge some details about what to wear (I believe he used the phrase “bundle up”) and I’d like to give my fairly new winter hiking boots some new terrain to cover, so I’m on board. It’s just that wry smile across his lips that gives me pause. I also noticed the winter weather advisory on the app during my morning post-stroll scroll, with that sweet little snowflake icon and “90%” next to it. We’ll see how this goes.

I’m no stranger to such traveling circumstances. As the fourth of five children, I had no say in where we went as a family in one of the many station wagons Dad bought in our lifetime. Families back then weren’t democracies and being near the birth order caboose in our clan, it was a given that I’d share the wagon end of the car with my youngest sister, Jane. We were small enough to fit in the space that remained after the way back (as we called it) was packed with both of our long rectangular coolers, sleeping bags, everyone’s pillows and anything else that could lay flat on top of the pile, including Dad’s fishing rods. If he took a corner too sharply, stuff slid off on top of us and there’d be much hollering and shoving things back up there as best we could while Dad still kept it at a smooth 55 mph. It didn’t help that I was heavily prone to car sickness in those days (and really, if I’m honest, up to the present). Jane was a trooper, I’ll say that.

I remember one trip to Toledo where, from the way back, Jane regaled us all with her six-year-old rendition of “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady”, picked up from one of The Muppet Show episodes she’d watched earlier that week. She belted out the lyrics with enough histrionics to win a full scholarship to Juliard and I couldn’t speak for laughter-soaked tears streaming down my face. It was contagious enough to get us all through what would have been a more tense traffic jam near the turnpike, and to this day, when I noodle around with the words in the privacy of my head, I burst out laughing when I get to the line, “When her muscles start relaxin’/Up the hill comes Andrew Jackson”. I try not to do this in the middle of management meetings at work.

(Weather update: snow is falling sideways in a stiff wind, the front deck has a thin layer getting thicker by the minute. Patrick’s still asleep; he never did say when we’d be leaving.)

In those formative years, I saw slices of the world through the back of a station wagon window, the road slipping beneath the tires and familiar landmarks blurring into other people’s back yards, cows that never moved and farms whose hulking red barns held enough secrets to set off any young one’s imagination. On one income, my parents somehow pulled together the resources to give us all a rich archive of summer memories spent at Marble Lake in Quincy, Michigan. One year, we ventured away from the cottage to tour the Kellogg’s factory in Battle Creek, each of us leaving sporting a paper Tony the Tiger hat and clutching our very own souvenir eight-pack of those single-serving boxes with the perforated fronts so you could pop them open, pour on the milk and eat right from the container. I saved the Frosted Flakes for last.

For most of my youth and young adult life, those bouts of carsickness were troubling enough to keep me from yearning for the open road until well after I’d obtained my own driver’s license at age 22. Sitting in that command seat behind the wheel, I felt a lot less queasy and eventually, the years and miles piled up until I graduated to air travel in the late ‘80’s (Dramamine on board), my first flight chaperoning a group of high school students to Spain during spring break. Three and a half months later, I’d head to Nicaragua with a Witness for Peace delegation to document the war, bumping through the jungle in a bus with a windshield cracked by bullets. As we made our way north from Managua to the Honduran border, I fixed my hungry gaze on the lush landscape and lost count of how many shades of green there were, wondering what violent secrets were hidden beneath the thick leaves on the branches. In the distance of my memory, I could hear Jane singing the last chorus of “Lydia”. How did I get here?

It’s a good question to ask now and then, dear readers, to take a moment and look over our shoulders at the miles behind us. Destinations known or unknown, we’ve been places, seen things and carried home treasured bits of the places our feet touched, different and perhaps better for the experience. Whether we got there under our own steam or someone mysteriously crooked their finger at us and we obeyed, we took the risk, left behind the familiar and trusted we’d arrive somewhere, surprised, delighted or at least educated.

Weather update: Patrick’s awake. After taking a look out the living room window at the blur of white coming down fast and blowing in all directions, he’s postponed today’s adventure. “It’ll still be there”, he said, smiling wryly.

Twenty-nine years later, I still trust him. Rightly so.