30 july 2006
Home from the Road
by Nanci Olesen
Listen to an audio version of this MOMbo essay.
It wasn’t so long ago that people crossed the Great Plains and the Salt Flats and the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas in a covered wagon. On a trip west that we just took, whenever I started the stories about the pioneers and their extreme hardships the kids would start their routine about how I was going to get out of the car, don an old calico dress and a big cotton bonnet, and walk, barefoot along the interstate. This was their fifth car trip to the West Coast, and we’ve done at least four to the East Coast, in the relative comfort of a 1996 Honda Odyssey. We logged four thousand miles in the last month. Sometimes we rode in the car for ten hours at a stretch. We picnicked at rest stops. We ate homemade granola with milk in the little motel room before we started out each morning. We listened to music on our iPods, broadcast through our old cassette deck, and we drove.
We rarely sing these days, and I don’t have to entertain the way I used to. The kids are 11, 12 and 15 and they don’t need me to describe what they’re seeing or sing, “The wheels on the van go round and round.” They just need their books and their music and pretzels passed around to all the seats in the middle of the afternoon.
It was a surreal, dizzying effect that was created in us as we neared the west coast. Along the salt flats in Utah we were sure we saw Jesus, standing with his arms outstretched to us. But it was a fully decorated Christmas tree, which someone had stuck into the sand and salt, about a half mile out on the flats.
The coffee is the worst I have ever tasted. As soon as we leave our righteous organic neighborhood coffee shops and head out to the land of Folgers and Coffeemate my tongue gets weak and saggy in my mouth. Coffee becomes a medicine, not a pleasure.
I love these trips.
I love the long distance that we have to go, together. I love looking at the road atlas and stopping at cowboy cafes in Wyoming. I love thinking aimless thoughts about the world instead of alarming thoughts about the daily news. I love when we get silly at our lunch stops and run around in circles around the picnic table. I love when we stumble out of the car onto the black lava pavement, gasping at the hot dry heat. I love how the evenings cool down and we start reading the signs for motels, hoping to find one with a little rectangular outdoor pool. I love the fights that they have and the deals that they make about who gets the rollaway bed.
I don’t have to ask them how their day was, because it was the same day I had. We have jokes that are just our own and would not translate to anyone outside of our vehicle. They tell stories of things that happened during the school year, each from their own perspective. If I pretend like I’m not listening, I can learn a lot about them.
We’re home now. We don’t make every decision together now. We have work and chores and friends and phones and our own rooms.
The coffee is to die for here. But I miss the life we had on the road.
—Nanci Olesen
producer and host, MOMbo: 1990-2007 |
