On The Road

As a child I spent a great deal of time, as did many younger siblings of my generation, riding in the backseat of the family car. My parents, in the sensibilities of the liberal middle class of the time, sent my brothers to a school 10 miles away; a school where conferences were held in lieu of report cards, teachers were never Mr. So-and-so or Mrs. Such-and-such but rather “John” or “Linda,” and in addition to the daily 45 minute recesses spent running through the woods there was a 15 minute “fruit break” when students could go outside and eat the fruit, yogurt, or granola snack their mothers had lovingly packed in a reusable lunch bag.

Being the youngest I would, on every carpool day, be strapped into the booster seat in the back of the station wagon and ride the 20 miles to and from my brothers' school. And when, halfway through kindergarten at the local school I threw a fit over coloring books masquerading as mathematics lessons and refused to go anymore, my parents decided I too should attend the same school as my brothers, I found myself in the backseat of the car for 20 miles every day.

And of course there were semi-regular weekend visits to my mother's sister in Washington, DC. The 5 hour car ride became familiar enough that to this day, stopping off I-81 in Woodstock and not going to the Hardee's with Norman Rockwell drawings on the walls for an ice cream cone feels unnatural.

Summer vacations found us packed in the car, driving from Virginia to Chicago to Minnesota. We would split the journey to Illinois into two days, generally stopping outside Columbus at a motel. For long car trips, my mother would bring along a box of toys and puzzles and games, a specially designated box we weren't allowed in but during car rides for fear the toys would loose their appeal through familiarity and the trips would become even longer.

My mom's plan would work for a while, until we started to behave as brothers do, at which point she would use some trick from the mom manual, distracting us until the next rest stop. Sometimes she would read to us, exposing the three of us to the literary classics we would otherwise never read on our own: The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, The Velveteen Rabbit. And some that we would have: The Jungle Book, A Wrinkle in Time, The Call of the Wild.

To this day when we get together, my brothers and I will sit around and reminisce about the times we spent traveling. When one of us discovered McDonald's only served small, large, or extra large drinks but not medium; Dave Barry columns we would read and find hilarious for the rest of the trip (that IS a big suitcase) and indeed the rest of time; the trip where we couldn't find a hotel because of the Little League World Series, so we drove from Chicago to Virginia in one night.

But one of my favorite past times, those times there was only my mother or my father and I got a window seat, was imagining I was a video game character running alongside the car as it sped down the road. Usually I was Mega Man or Mario jumping over signs, running up hills, doing flips in the air, and blasting trees out of the way. Sometimes I was a ninja, clad in white, slicing through entire forests, fighting off the black ninjas who were trying thwart me from my journey. And sometimes I was an adventurer, a la Indiana Jones or that guy from Pitfall, swinging through the air from whips or vines, evading snakes and lions and pumas.

Later in life I was reading a famous book by a famous beat author when one particular passage struck me. The two main characters, one from a privileged East Coast family and the other from a modest Western family, were talking about the time they spent in the car while growing up. The East Coast character told how he would stare out the window and pretend he was riding his horse beside the car, bounding along without restraint. The Western character admitted he did the same thing, running, running, running beside the car, the wind in his hair and freedom at his back.