Since Father’s Day is this weekend, I was inspired to write down a memory of my Dad and an ode to road trips.
I was going into sixth grade—you know, that awkward time in a girl’s life where she is somewhere between teenager and child and on any given day cannot decide which way she would prefer to behave. My dad was taking the family on our almost annual road trip, in this case to Missouri to see my grandparents.
Before I can tell you about this road trip, there are three things you need to know about my dad:
One: He always takes the scenic route. By this, I mean, we once drove “The Loneliest Road in America” just so we could say we’d driven “The Loneliest Road in America.” By this I also mean he will take the more beautiful stretch of highway (read: winding roads) instead of the faster, straighter stretch of highway. My mom’s stomach has never appreciated this.
Two: My dad thinks brown is the best color—for cars, for furniture, for clothes. If he’s reading this right now he’s probably saying something along the lines of: “Well, it is! Brown never looks dirty. It holds up great. It matches everything.”
Three: My dad has very little tolerance for kids arguing in the backseat. We always knew he had reached his limit (or that the Forty-Niners were losing) when he made one loud clap with his hands, as though a carpenter had just dropped a wood block onto a concrete floor. He then rubbed his hands together as though that same carpenter took coarse sandpaper to his wood block and began vigorously sanding away. Most of the time, my dad also muttered under his breath during his hand-clap-and-rub signal.
On this one particular day, we were just leaving the Grand Tetons. We had hiked, we had been horse-back riding, we had stayed 3 kids in one bed with so much static electricity in it, it looked like a small lightning storm when you peeled back the comforter from the blanket. And now we siblings were tired of each other.
One half hour into our drive and we sounded like this:
“Mom, tell Andy to stop looking at me.”
“Mom, I’m not doing anything.”
“Andy! Mom, Andy keeps looking at me! He’s doing it to bug me.”
“I am not. Mom, tell Amanda to stop being so sensitive.”
“Mom!”
And then came the tell-tale sign: the carpenter entered our van, dropped his wood block and began to sand. Dad was done with our banter.
Mom intervened immediately. “Andy, you look out that window. Amanda, you look out that window. I don’t want to hear another word from anyone for ten minutes.”
For a few moments there was peace in that brown caravan as we passed from Grand Teton National Park into Yellowstone National Park. The road was winding and the trees were magnificent.
We rounded another bend. With my face against my designated window, I noticed a bear in the clearing.
I also noticed this bear was bounding.
Front feet. Back feet. Full on running at our Dodge. Teeth bared.
My eyes got wide.
Am I really seeing this?
And then words formed: “Bear! Bear! There’s a bear charging our car!”
My dad braked. My sister screamed. My brother asked, “Where?” I am pretty sure my mom stretched her arms across the front seat like a human seat belt.
The bear ran towards us until it got about a foot from our car. That brown creature was full of such fiery, testosterone-charged rage. It’s like it didn’t see us, it just saw red—some carnal instinct to take out a threat and not stop till it was gone. And then it did see us. It suddenly stopped, turned around, and trotted back through the trees, indifferent to the van full of panic-stricken homo sapiens.
My dad, who I am pretty sure would make an excellent Jeopardy contestant, explained to a wide-eyed car, “It’s mating season. We must have entered that bear’s territory. And, I guess, our brown van looked a bit like a bear.”
On that vacation we managed to see Old Faithful, dig for quartz crystals in Montana, take pictures of Mount Rushmore, experience small-town Missouri on the Fourth of July complete with 90% humidity, Grandma’s homemade ice-cream, and my uncle’s lesson on how to properly extract the bottom off of lightning bugs to make glow-in-the-dark rings. On the return trip we ate lunch in the world’s largest McDonald’s, swam in hotel swimming pools, and saw lightning touch the ground in Colorado. We fought over Gameboys and walkmans. We played travel bingo.
We had the forced undivided attention of one another for near 3 weeks solid.
Much of that time was in the six by twelve foot space of one brown-like-a-bear Dodge caravan.
As a parent now, I look at my parents with a sense of awe. My dad planned family road trips. He knew the bickering he would have to endure. He knew he was going to hear “Are we there yet?” at least ninety-seven times. He knew there would be no less than thirty inconvenient bathroom stops. He knew his patience would be pushed past the limit, and, that at some point on that trip, he would be thoroughly annoyed with each one of us, possibly all of us at the same time.
He planned road trips anyways.
My dad gave us the world. He let us see it, know it, experience it, adventure through it. He gave us memories and stories to tell.
He gave us relationships with each other forged in the fire of small spaces and big personalities on the back roads of America.
My dad is one of the brave ones.
Thank you Daddy. And Happy Father’s Day.
