Last week I was on a summer vacation which reminded me of another vacation I took with my family back in the 1967.
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The same year I graduate from eighth grade, my dad accrues thirty days of vacation from the General Electric Company. He proposes a cross-country road trip pulling an Apache pop-up trailer. My parents plan all year for this month of visiting every relative, long lost friend, and national park from Niagara Falls to Disneyland.
In the dark of winter, I fall asleep to the nick, nick, nick of my mom’s sewing machine in the guest room on the other side of my bedroom wall. She stiches drawstring cases for each of our sleeping bags. Mine is pink calico with turquoise flowers. My brother’s, a Navajo print on a maroon background. My mom and dad’s, nautical strips. She makes herself a mumu in a psychedelic pattern for the baking Southwest. For me she fashions summer blouses, shorts, and my first two-piece bathing suit with padding in the cups.
My Dad buys a series of Rand McNally maps and guides, and with snow on our roof, marks our hot, dusty route.
The day after school is out, Dad double checks all the belts, hoses, and fluids of our maroon Ford station wagon. Mom packs the bottom of our red, metal Coke cooler with ice, ginger ale, Orange Crush, and grape soda. Bologna, cheese, and tuna salad made with pickle relish go in the top tray. In a picnic basket she arranges: a loaf of Wonder Bread, potato chips, and homemade oatmeal cookies. My brother calls the way back with the snacks and the cozy sleeping bags, and I start out in the red vinyl backseat.
Our first night we stop in Erie, PA with an aunt and uncle. After hamburgers, corn on the cob, and watermelon, my cousins and I do handsprings and cartwheels across a lawn blinking with lightning bugs.
In Council Bluffs, Iowa we visit my mom’s college roommate, Lucy, and her husband, Dick, an elevator tycoon. We park in the driveway of their towering Victorian, and Dad and Bruce, pop up the canvas roof. There are two bunk beds on one side. I sleep on top by a zippered screen. Bruce sleeps below. My parent’s bed fits over a dinky kitchen table.
After a hot day on the road, without air conditioning, I’m happy to hear we’re going to dinner at Dick and Lucy’s country club—with a pool. I pull on my new two-piece bathing suit and exit the club’s locker room. Lucy’s daughter has thin blonde braids and is younger than Bruce who is two years younger than me. Lucy’s son is a year older than I am with braces, a blonde crewcut, and acne on both his face and back. They are waiting in the pool when I dive in. Without asking, the son swims between my legs and surfaces with me on his pimply shoulders.
He grins. “Hey, wanna have a chicken fight.”
My brother dips below the water and rises with the little sister above him. It’s no contest. King Kong and Fay Wray against a fairy on a lily pad. I wriggle off the gorilla and swim to the deep end. He cannon-balls me from the side. On a steaming, mid-western day, I can’t wait to get out of the pool and go to dinner with adults I don’t even know.
The sleeping arrangements at the Victorian Hilton are: my parents upstairs in a guest room with red flocked wallpaper, my brother and I in the trailer in the driveway.
At the dinner table, King Kong looks at his little sister. “Hey, wanna sleep in the trailer too?”
My dad eyeballs him. “No son, I don’t think there’s room.” I want to kiss my dad.
Next morning, our trip continues . We travel through The Badlands and Mt. Rushmore. We head for the Tetons, and the water is so cold in Jenny Lake, I jump in and out so fast, I almost lose the top of my new two-piece. In Yellowstone we mustn’t stray from narrow wooden walkways beside bubbling mud, and boiling geysers.
Climbing into the ancient Anasazi cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, a gust of wind whips my mom’s carefully planned mumu, over her head, revealing white undies to all the tourists at the bottom of the ladder. Thank God she made me shorts and blouses instead.
We travel through Monument Valley and the spiky Joshua trees of the Mojave. Under cover of night we enter the neon jungle of Las Vegas. We enjoy sizzling steaks at the Golden Nugget, and afterwards, my dad gives Bruce and I four quarters each for the glitzy line of slot machines. He wakes us at 3:00 a.m. to drive out of the desert before sunrise. I fall back asleep in the car and awake to surfers riding the waves of Huntington Beach, California. We made it. Next day—destination Disneyland.
An oversized Goofy takes our tickets at the gate. I spot a too-big Minnie and Micky on our way to the Matterhorn. As our little train climbs the artificial Alp, I view the land I’ve dreamed of. In the distance is the castle where Tinker Bell has waved her magic wand for as long as I can remember. I plunge down the mountain, my heart in my throat, and the ride is over.
All I remember on our return trek is miraculously floating in the Great Salt Lake, and miles and miles of Kansas dotted with an occasional buffalo burger stand.
That is until our next to last stop at The Lincoln Boyhood Memorial. Once the camper is popped up, and the cooler unloaded, Bruce and I run across a bridge towards a shady playground. Below, a boy about my age stands in the stream skipping stones. I notice his brown hair, his bare, bronzed torso. When he flashes a smile, my body melts in a way I don’t recognize.
I run to the swings and pump higher with eyes fixed on his shirtless back, I watch his biceps bunch and lengthen as he releases each flat stone across the brook. He leans over to find the next rock and pushes his sweaty hair off his forehead. From above, his perfection makes me ache for something I can’t name. I lean so far back my ponytail brushes the ground. The toes of my navy blue sneakers kiss the sky.
My mother calls Bruce and I from the other side of the bridge for supper. I jump off the swing and float for a moment in mid-air like a cabbage moth, aware that I am somehow suspended between where I was and where I am going, my destination nowhere on the Rand McNally guide which lists which campsites offer pools, hot showers, flush toilets, and electrical hook-ups. The soles of my feet sting with the impact of hard-packed earth. I run across the bridge and laugh to make the boy notice me.
He looks up. His white-toothed grin, however brief, takes away my appetite for hot dogs, baked beans, coleslaw, and even butterscotch brownies. This boy has flipped a switch I say nothing about as I place my napkin on my lap and drain my Dixie Cup of Kool-Aid.
Under the stars, I unzip the canvas screen beside my sleeping bag and let the humid air blow across my baby doll pajamas.
After our road trip, the summer is half over. There are boys in my best friend, Linda’s backyard. High school boys who want to put us on their shoulders for chicken fights, even without a pool. Boys who ask me to dance at summer dances at the high school I’ll be attending in the fall. Boys whose smiles light me up like a lightning bug.
Back in my own bed, a summer breeze ruffles my sheets, and I realize I’ve outgrown Disney’s Small, Small World. The floor beneath my bed is as unstable as the bubbling ground of Yellowstone. I am as vulnerable as my mom with her mumu over her head.
History books record 1967 as the year Elvis got married and the year of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour.
But what I remember from the summer of 1967 was the magic boy who lit puberty’s match.
In the time it took for the moon to circle the earth, I left my driveway on one side of the continent and returned to another.
Have you ever gone on a road trip, and where did it take you?
Cover photo by Diego Jimenez on Unsplash
