ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Family vacations meant taking long car rides in station wagons when my children were growing up. This story describes some of our highway adventures.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

The movie, National Lampoon Vacation, featured Chevy Chase in a role that bore a remarkable resemblance to certain episodes in my life. On a number of occasions, I drove my wife and six children round trip from Phoenix to New York City to visit relatives and show off our brood. How we survived these adventures is a mystery. With only ten vacation days at my disposal, it forced me to drive at least twelve hours a day at high speed, regardless of the weather, in order to minimize travel time and limit our overnight motel stops to three. We never made motel reservations in advance, not knowing the limit of my capacity to drive on any particular day. Our budget required us to shop around late in the day for the cheapest motels we could find. Sometimes we found nice accommodations at a low price, but there were a few memorable exceptions.

Compounding the sin of my driving above the speed limit was my practice of driving poorly maintained cars. One year, on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of nowhere Texas, a tire blew out. Furthermore, my spare needed air. It took forever to get some help. A service truck hauled us to a station where the owner tongue-lashed me for driving my family cross-country on bald tires. It was well deserved.

On another trip, we managed to drive our jalopy to the Big Apple without incident, only to have the engine die near the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge. My heart almost stopped as well. Have you ever experienced the loss of power assisted steering and braking while traveling at 70 mph in very heavy traffic?  It is a breathtaking sensation. It would have been even more so had we all been killed. After some fiddling around, the engine started up again and we made it to our final destination where the problem recurred. A mechanic found that the ignition wiring assembly needed replacement. He managed to contrive a Band-Aid solution, one he assured me would last until we returned to Arizona. It’s hard to pray when your heart is in your mouth, vowing never again to jeopardize the lives of your family by failing to maintain the car. Fortunately, the jury-rigged contraptions held together, on the long journey home.

On another occasion, while staying in Queens, my youngest child, Joey, was forced to accompany me to visit my hometown, Hoboken. This plan backfired. While merging in heavy traffic, my car’s bumper nudged that of a NYC garbage truck with a force equivalent to a mosquito hitting an elephant's back. Nonetheless, the other driver made a big deal out of the incident, which impressed my son greatly. Later on, he reported the gigantic collision to my wife and other relatives with great glee, the little squealer.

My children had accidents and got sick with regularity while on the road. Heading east through Gallop, New Mexico, my oldest daughter, Jamie, sliced open her finger on a razor blade that, for no apparent reason, she happened to be carrying in her purse. Blood spurted out. She began to scream which frightened all the other kids who began to wail in waves of fear. It was almost impossible to get off the highway. We happened to arrive in town just after a Navajo Indian parade had ended. There were drunks everywhere, some staggering around, others already fallen to the ground. Traffic jammed the road. Panic began to grip me. It took a long time to find my way to a motel where we got medical help. This delayed our trip by several hours which caused me to drive even faster than normal to make up the lost time, not wanting to spend another night on the road at a costly motel. The thought of having to drive back through Gallop on our return trip made me nervous.

The highlight of one trip occurred just as we left New York City. Our youngest daughter, Carol, experienced a severe asthma attack that required immediate attention. We drove to a hospital in Queens. Numerous non-Caucasian people staffed the emergency room. Some were Indians, whose clipped British accents made it difficult for me to understand. Others were either Jamaicans or Puerto Ricans, for whom English must have been a third language. We waited patiently for help, along with bunches of other folks. I overheard a young man ask a staff member, "Have you admitted (my friend)?  He was taking dope and I am worried about him."  The helpful person said, "No. Have you tried the morgue?" We waited a long while without receiving any assistance before fleeing to seek the service of a private physician to administer aid.

Afterwards, we drove to White Plains to say some good-byes to my sister, Helen. While there, Carol suffered another attack that forced us to delay our departure for a number of hours. The pressure was on. My vacation was about used up and the kids had to report back to school. We took off and drove all night until the need to sleep forced me to turn over the wheel to my sixteen-year-old daughter, Laura, just outside Columbus, Ohio. She had no freeway driving experience. In later years she said she found it impossible to believe we burdened her with such an awesome responsibility. She drove to St. Louis where we encountered heavy traffic. Still too tired for me to take back the wheel, she had to go it alone. Thank goodness, she proved herself capable.

A few hours later, after I resumed driving, it began raining with great ferocity. Unable to see beyond the hood, I pulled off the highway and decided it was best to spend the night there in Rolla, Missouri. We found a wonderful motel whose rooms consisted of detached bungalow units that resembled Indian tents. My wife and I stayed in one with our sons, Barry and Joey, while Jamie, Laura, Ellen and Carol roomed together in the adjoining place. Around midnight, the older girls knocked to say, “Carol is wheezing badly.”  We left the other kids while we drove Carol to the nearby hospital. The emergency room staff took wonderful care of her, and accepted our insurance coverage even though we lacked verification.

The next day’s drive proved interesting. Carol threw up for hundreds of miles. Trying to cheer the family, we made regular stops at all their favorite burger joints. As the day wore on, our asthma patient began to recover. After one such stop, she informed us that she had left her favorite purse and her retainer at the restaurant. After driving back fifty miles to retrieve them, she felt better, while I felt worse.

Why does it rain with such intensity when you are far from home and need to travel quickly? One year we arrived in Amarillo late in the afternoon. We had stayed at a decent motel in town on the way east. Rather than stay there again, I elected to continue towards Tucumcari. Just as we reached the border of New Mexico, it began to pour. We became trapped in a long line of single lane traffic on a very narrow roadway, barely able to see the taillights of the truck in front, unable to stop or turn off. We rode this way endlessly, all of us petrified. We drove the length of town before finding a motel with a vacancy sign. It is true that we invariably stayed at the El Cheapo Motel, but this place made all the others four star quarters. We had no choice but to room there, despite our fears. It lived up to our lowest expectations. Bugs infested the beds. We slept fitfully for a few hours, and then rushed out of town as quickly as we could.

Later that day, on a bright and cheery note, I thought we might have time to take a quick side jaunt to see The Petrified Forest in northern Arizona. I put it to a vote. My recommendation lost. The family wanted to go home, immediately.

Our children enjoyed some portions of these cross-country treks. They liked the day we spent in Washington, DC, touring all the famous attractions. Our original plan was to spend the next day there as well. We found a motel on the wrong side of the tracks, which seemed to be the way things worked for us. Jamie accompanied me to a fast food place to bring back dinner.

When we pulled into the parking area, a number of black-skinned people seemed to eye us suspiciously. After locking her in the car, I entered the eatery and stood on line, patiently waiting for service. All the patrons and the hired help were Blacks. No one would help me. Finally, after ten minutes or so, a young girl asked me for my order. The quantity took her by surprise.

"How many people are y'all feeding?" she asked.

"Six starving kids plus me and my wife."

She laughed. It’s a good thing. By then, my paranoia was getting the best of me. While walking back to the car, my anxiety at being a racial minority peaked. We stayed the night, but in the morning changed our plans. The children did not want to see more of the nation's capitol. We skedaddled north to visit relatives near Philadelphia.

   There were a few pleasant highlights along the way on some of our trips. We enjoyed sightseeing New Orleans after spending the night at a resort in nearby Mississippi. It was great fun to whiz through other parts of the South, but we rarely had time to stop and look at anything. It usually took about 36 hours of driving to make it to New York. How the kids managed to travel so far so often with so little complaining is difficult to reconcile. They did not have a choice, of course, but they did suffer in silence most of the time. Their memories of these trips differ, not only from mine, but also from each other. They all recall the year we drove home with an extra passenger. We took Angie’s niece, Patricia Sammarco, far from her Brooklyn home. They remember that she would eat anything offered to her, provided ketchup covered it.

On these travels, our cars were always station wagons, Fords or Plymouths. The '71 Plymouth was unique because I had put sunscreens on all the windows. You could not see into the interior. A California patrol officer once stopped me, intending to cite me for driving 'blind'. With some persuasion, he agreed to sit behind the wheel of my car, and found that the screen did not impair his vision. Reluctantly, he allowed us to continue.

In a file drawer are the AAA maps we used to navigate around the country. They are obsolete. Maps are now available on the Internet. One shows me how to drive to visit my daughter Ellen’s new residence in San Jose. It is of no interest to me. Why would I want to drive a brand new car equipped with four new tires, safety belts and air bags, wraparound stereo, cruse control, and exceptional gas mileage to a place that has a bug-free bedroom for my use at no cost? Who calls that a vacation?

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