Travel Essay: Road Trips With Father

When I was in fifth grade my mother remarried.  Her new husband, Al, was a blue-collar gentleman, kind, and dependable.  He was the antithesis of my “Real Father” whose place he would take.  And he loved automobiles.

During his lifetime, my stepfather must have owned twenty or thirty cars. While in high school, he and his twin brother would scrape together $10-$20, buy some old wreck, drive it until it died, save up some more cash, and then purchase yet another heap.

My first big road trip with Al was from Seattle to Southern California, a summer journey following close on the heels of the opening of Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Anaheim.  We were off to The One And Only Disneyland of its time.

The only thing I would eat during the trip, morning, noon, and night, were hamburgers slathered with mustard and catsup and served on sesame-seed buns, washed down with iced tea or water served in ribbed plastic glasses commonly found in diners and coffee shops in the 1950’s.  My strict diet didn’t faze Al; a year or so earlier he had been forced to picnic on canned-pea sandwiches when he helped a parsimonious family take a driving trip to and from the Midwest.

When we reached Disneyland, I suffered three disheartening experiences: Nearly throwing up in the whirling cups of the Mad Tea Party ride, being an inch too short to reach the gas and brake pedals and unable to drive the cars at Autopia in Tomorrowland, and not meeting Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, who apparently never received the sappy love letter I mailed to her shortly before the trip and who was not anxiously awaiting my arrival with lips pursed for a romantic greeting.

On the way home we drove through Death Valley where we nearly expired from heat stroke. While drinking water from a burlap water bag that hung off the car’s hood, I saw that the thermometer hanging on the outside wall of the gas station where we had stopped had hit 120 degrees in the shade, nearly twice the average high on a summer day in Seattle.
 
While my parents gambled away part of an afternoon in Reno, I sat with a bunch of other bored kids watching the movie Bengal Rifles (aka Bengal Brigade) in which Rock Hudson plays a British army officer fighting bad guys in India. For my patience I was rewarded with a toy slot machine bank that stored coins rather than dispensing them in a jackpot-like cascade.  This gift, apparently intended to teach me that it was better to save your money rather than leave it behind in the casinos of Nevada, worked like a charm.  Fifty years later, loose change from my pockets is all that ever finds its way into the one-armed bandits that lurk along the highways and in the cities and towns of The Silver State.

But most of the journeys I took with my stepfather were from Seattle to my maternal grandmother’s farm near Moscow, Idaho. Over the years we rode in a variety of vehicles:  A Studebaker with a pointy front end like the rocket ships in which Buster Crabbe buzzed through outer space in Flash Gordon serial movies that played in movie theaters in the 1930’s and later on TV in the ‘50’s; a big Buick with fake exhaust portholes along the sides of the hood; or a 1947 Cadillac Fleeetwood pseudo-limo that had fold-down foot rests that let me ride regally in the backseat hour after hour, pretending to be Yul Brynner playing the role of the King of Siam, albeit in the 20th century, rather than the car-less world of the 1800’s.

Al helped me find my first car: A 1951 black, turtle-backed Chevy coupe with a 1952 Chevy engine.  He taught me how to drive it, guaranteeing my successful passage of the Washington State driver’s license test shortly after I turned 16.
 
When I developed an insane lust for sportscars, he co-signed a loan for me to buy a ratty, red 1956 Austin-Healy which steadily fell apart, piece by piece, over the course of a year.  Then he supported me again when I replaced it with a black 1960 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spyder Veloce.

The last road trip Al and I took together before I left home, more or less for good, was in 1967.  He had driven my mother over to Idaho where she would spend the summer on the farm with my grandmother and her fourth husband, Bud.  The plan was for Al to stay a week or so, then take the Greyhound Bus back to Seattle, leaving the family car for my mother’s use.

But one Friday evening after their departure, I put down the ragtop on my Alfa, climbed behind the wheel, and set off for Idaho as the sun dipped low in the sky above Seattle.  Halfway across the state of Washington I ate a late supper in our favorite diner in Ellensburg, then in the dark of night plunged downhill through Vantage, across the Columbia River, up onto the broad lava lands on the other side, and raced by moonlight along the lonely two-lane highway that flowed eastward over the flatlands.

My arrival at the farm surprised Al, my mother, grandmother and Bud, who had stayed up late playing cards.  The next morning, Al and I retraced the route westward from the rolling hills of the Palouse, over the Cascades, and back to Seattle.  A few hours after returning home I drove the Alfa to Renton to begin a new workweek on the graveyard shift at the Boeing airplane factory.  On Monday, Al went back to his day job at the post office.

Seventeen years later, I flew to Seattle to attend the 20th reunion of my high school graduating class.  Then Al, my wife, her father, and I traveled in two cars, caravan-style, on the three-hundred mile trek to Idaho.  The year before I had flown up from the San Francisco Bay Area to help my grandmother grieve over Bud’s recent death and watch him being lowered to his final resting place in the cemetery on the outskirts of Genesee, a small town a few miles to the south of Moscow.
 
My father-in-law drove alone back to California while the rest of us proceeded north for a mini-vacation on the shores of glacier-carved Lake Pend Oreille.  Before driving my grandmother back to Moscow, Al dropped my wife and I at the airport in Spokane for our return flight to San Francisco.  He and I would never cruise down the highways on long road trips together again.

During the years that followed, Al would sell his existing cars and buy“new” used ones, usually owning at least two, and sometimes three, at a time. Occasionally he would call me from Reno or Lake Tahoe where he and one of his long-time pals were playing Blackjack, slots, or craps, and on short notice ask if they could drive down to my home for a brief visit.
 
When my wife and I flew up to Washington State on vacation, we’d borrow one of Al’s fleet of vehicles, rather than renting from Mr. Hertz.  The most memorable of these was a 1970’s era Chrysler product that we nicknamed “The Green Slime.”  It was as long as a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.  As we maneuvered it down the road it swayed from side to side like a big ship rolling in heavy seas.  Carrier-based fighter aircraft probably could have safely landed on its huge trunk lid.

In early December of 2001, Al’s brother phoned to inform me that Al had suffered a severe stroke.  I quickly booked a flight and packed my bags.  I secured a guest room reserved for family members in the downtown hospital where he struggled to survive.  But by week’s end his heart had run out of gas and his life had reached a dead-end.  I made funeral arrangements, he was buried next to my mother, and I flew home mere days before Christmas.

During a brilliantly sunny, but cold week the following February, my wife and I drove up to Seattle, cleaned out Al’s home, and sold it along with the last of his two cars. We left town in the face of a gathering winter storm, stopped for a quick lunch with my aunt  in Tacoma, and then went on south to Corvallis, Oregon. The next day we sped over the mountains at the Oregon-California border before snow could close I-5.

Today, on Father’s Day in 2010, I’ve just finished planning a road trip to Oregon in August.  Al, on the other hand, is probably selling used cars to angels in Heaven, while holding back his favorite ones to drive on his own divine summer road trips far above earthbound families making their way down terrestrial highways.

(Do you recall a favorite Road Trip with Father?  Share your story with other Tales Told From The Road readers in the Comment section below).