Combing Through My Memories

My First Adventure

Just after my third birthday, my father switched jobs and our family moved to Arizona from Colorado.  Growing up in the desert climate of the Grand Canyon state (see “One Hundred Years” from March 2012) clearly shaped my passion for warmth and my distaste for snow.  Our family traveled separately to arrive at our new home with my father and me driving from Denver to Phoenix by way of Albuquerque, while my mother flew with a four-year-old and six-week-old.  While not my first road trip, I recall select pieces of this drive, but nothing of the scenery.  I wonder if maybe I was too little to see out the window.

South from the Mile High City, across the state line into New Mexico, through Santa Fe, and down to Albuquerque we drove, making a right turn towards the mountainous areas of Flagstaff during the month of December, and then a left turn towards Arizona’s capital.  I passed through three of my now favorite states, and all without a single recollection of the mountains, the sunsets, the rocks, the rivers, or the route that brought me to my childhood home.  I sometimes think it would be worth retracing my steps and driving this route again, but without the initial recollection of the voyage, it might be just another gloriously scenic drive, but not a memory inducer.

The Moments We Remember

I recall only a few memories of my time living in Colorado – watching out the picture window waiting for my Dad to come home from work,  his painting the deck a color the paint can referred to as “peanut butter,” and singing “Sugar, Sugar,” a number one hit from 1969 by the Archies.  It always strikes me as odd, what things we remember.  A paint color (which I also remember getting on my beach ball) and a cartoon pop song (which I remember hearing while riding in a car with someone who was not my family, but I don’t know who) are two distinct memories I have as a two-year-old.  When I went back to visit the house in Denver as an adult, the current resident asked if my parents had picked out the awful rust-colored carpet.  If I had to guess, I thought I remembered the carpet being green.

But on the drive from my toddler home to my childhood home, I recall only two specific moments from the trip.  The first, when I had an upset stomach and got sick all over one of the two beds in the hotel room (sorry, Dad), so he nervously let me sleep next to him, no doubt paranoid that this little person would get sick again.  And then the following morning, Dad tried to get me ready to go by combing my hair with his narrow comb rather than a gentle little girl’s hair brush.  Ouch!  I know that I cried the entire time.  (Again, sorry Dad.)  But I wonder how well I behaved in the car, what I maybe said to my Dad while we rode, what scenery we witnessed, and how I passed my time for two solid days.  I wish I remembered those moments instead.

Traveling with Boys

My Love Affair with the Atlas

As a tween traveler, my favorite part of a road trip involved monopolizing the atlas.  I watched highway signs near, knowing what town or junction we approached.  I searched for the origins of creeks and rivers long after we had traversed their bridges.  I estimated how far and how long each leg of our drive would take and knew without asking that we weren’t there yet.  Better still, for my sisters the bound book of maps mattered little, so unless someone in the car’s cockpit needed it, I occupied myself in combining my sense of direction to my geographic curiosity.  I easily could have earned the title of Backseat Navigator had my family realized how intimately I studied and adored its pages.

Of course, the road trips with my own children possess three features that the family station wagon of the seventies lacked: seat restraints, a solo driver and ADD-diagnosed boys and their bladders.  I possess an atlas of my own, but I doubt my cartographic fascinations genetically transferred to my two passengers.  Still, my boys rarely ask the classic road trip query, “Are we there yet?”  My secret: when we stop for a meal, I fill the tank – mine and the car’s – and the boys unload theirs. They detour for a pit stop on arrival and before departure, but in between they burn off energy on the playground, whether at a rest stop or a restaurant.  We grab their food to go, I’d buckle back in the driver’s seat, and they feed their faces without driving me crazy.

No Services for the Next Fifty Miles

But despite the skills of a master navigator, boys will be idiomatic, and on the fifty-mile stretch between Las Cruces and Alamogordo through the White Sands Missile Range, Son #2 announces his need to leave his mark in the sandy shoulder of the road.  The occasional portable men’s rooms strategically placed to aid motorists with like-minded boys appear just slightly less frequently enough than needed, and distinctly less frequently than the “No Stopping” signs.  During his sixty seconds of unauthorized precipitation, the only passing vehicle, a Wal-Mart diesel rig, honks in salute of his raining on the military proving ground’s parade.

Back in the car and back on the road, we resume the journey and commence the familial razzing that the situation warrants.  Laughter about his “moment of glory” in the New Mexico desert, another feature missing from the old days in the family station wagon, continues long after we catch up to the discount store semi, which again honks at our family’s follies.  We certainly aren’t there yet, but traveling with my boys distracts us from how far we have traveled, and makes how long each leg of our adventure will still take blissfully unimportant.