Sunday, December 1, 2013
The big trip “out west.”
I mentioned one incident on this trip in an earlier post; now I'd like to share a few other memories I have of that trip. Sadly, my memories of that adventure are disjoint and faded – my only excuse is that these events occurred over 50 years ago and time has torn up and scratched over the pages of my memory. In addition, my family (all of us!) made later trips, and it's possible I've confused some of the memories. But for what it's worth, here's what I remember...
My father, my brother Scott, and I piled into my dad's old black 1948 Dodge and headed for an epic adventure “out west”. Scott and I were far too young to have any sense at all of the geography of our travels; we just knew that we would be gone for several weeks, going a long, long way, and seeing places we'd never before seen. What more could a little kid want?
We took an old Army surplus tent, sleeping bags, some blankets, a few pots and pans, an ancient two-burner Coleman “white gas” stove, a few changes of clothes, and not much else. I was too young to know anything about money, but for some reason it's stuck in my head that my dad carried very little cash with him – not because he planned to pay with credit cards (we didn't have any of those), but because he simply didn't have much money. One thing I do remember that supports that idea: we traveled extremely frugally. I recall my dad being very conscious of his fuel use (even though gasoline was under 20 cents a gallon), and I remember that when shopping in grocery stores for our food my dad was always looking for the most “bang for the buck.” Beans figured prominently in our diet. We camped almost every night, and mostly in undeveloped (free) National Forest campgrounds or just out in the woods somewhere with no facilities at all. The only exceptions were a couple of nights when we stayed at the home of someone he knew.
The rest of my memories are all centered around particular places or events. I do not recall at all the route we took on our trip. My younger readers will have trouble imagining this, but back in those days there were no Interstate highways, and there were lots of unpaved roads. Some of those unpaved roads were oiled dirt, something you rarely see these days because of environmental concerns, but back then they were common. Most of the unpaved roads, though, were plain old dusty dirt roads. In certain parts of the country, if it rained often, they might be complete with deep ruts. I remember many hours on roads that varied from nicely paved U.S. highways to rutted, dusty dirt roads. Those roads, for a cross-country trip, were a very different experience than the Interstate highways – of course they were much slower, but that's not what I mean. Traveling on those roads, you actually felt like you were part of the countryside or town you were traveling through. You could stop and get out to take a look at something anytime you wanted to (and we did that often!). Taking an Interstate is more like being at 35,000 feet in an airliner: you're observing from a distance, not so much traveling through. Debbie and I to this day travel as much as we can on such roads, for exactly the those reasons.
One of the places we traveled to on that trip was to a nursery in eastern Missouri, near the town of Festus. My dad had corresponded with the nurseryman, and had arranged to meet him and see his stock. I remember my dad collecting some cuttings, but not much else about the nursery visit. The nurseryman's wife made us a fine meal, an early dinner, which we greatly appreciated, as at that point we'd been on the road for several days of very frugal eating. Also, I should note that while my dad had some truly admirable abilities, his cooking was not amongst them. We attacked that meal with great gusto, to the delight of that nurseryman's wife. She gave us a big pile of leftovers to take with us, too. The nurseryman told my dad about some high bluffs, just south of town, that we could camp on. There were no facilities there, but he said we could easily find a place to pitch our tent with a fine view over the Mississippi River, whose western banks lapped up against the bottoms of the bluffs. We did exactly that, far from any highway noise (though I do recall quite a bit of mosquito noise – those little buggers were feasting on us). We watched the running lights of barges and tugs going by below us; we heard the sailors hollering at each other (with my dad wincing at some of their language).
Many, many years later – around 2007 – I made another personal connection with the town of Festus – one of those bizarre coincidences that life is full of. I had started collecting slide rules, and focused on a brand called “Acu-Rule” that I liked for its uniquely American characteristics. As I researched the brand, I discovered that the original company making them was called “Festus” – and that the factory for them was at one time the largest business in town. I later made contact with an elderly gentlemen there named George Keane who was sort of an unofficial historian for the company. He connected me with some people who actually worked in the factory before it went out of business, and through that connection I acquired a fine collection of brand-new Acu-Rule models from a former worker's private stash...
In the morning, we ate all those leftovers and headed for our next destination: the Ozark Mountains in southwestern Missouri. I was fascinated by the countryside we were traveling through – so much water, and beautiful, exotic-looking forests. Scott and I were eagerly anticipating an adventure that lay ahead of us, thanks to my dad's nurseryman friend. When he'd heard we were going to the Ozarks, he told my dad that we just had to take a “jon boat” down the river, and he had a friend there who could help. The nurseryman made a phone call to his friend and the unexpected adventure was arranged. These days, I read that such float trips are a large, organized business. Back then it was just locals finding a way to make a little money with their boats and pickups. They would pile their jon boat in the back of their pickup with whatever gear you had, then stuff you all in the front seat of their pickup and give you a ride to somewhere a few miles upstream along one of the many rivers there. You'd all pile out of the truck, slip the boat into the river, and float slowly downstream with the current until you got back to where you'd started.
That's exactly what we did. We met the friendly fellow the nurseryman had called on our behalf in front of his slightly decrepit-looking cottage on the banks of a river (I'm not certain which river this was). He looked like one of the corn-pone characters from Li'l Abner, and had a thick accent. We loved him at first sight. He had an old, beat-up wooden jon boat and an even more beat-up, rusty pickup. He and my dad loaded the jon boat up, we threw a rucksack with food in the back, and Scott and I both got on my dad's lap in the passenger side of the pickup. We drove for quite a while – perhaps an hour – mostly over narrow, rough dirt roads through the woods on one side of the river. Finally we arrived at a place where the road went over a concrete ford that crossed the river, and we unloaded the jon boat and took off.
Within just a few minutes, we were alone on a magical river. I remember the quiet – the only sounds were insects, birds, and the occasional light breeze stirring the tree leaves. The river varied in width, but probably averaged 25 or 30 feet wide, quite small. The current flowed slowly, at the pace of someone walking slowly, perhaps one mile an hour. In many places, trees grew completely over the river and we were floating through a green tunnel, brightly lit from above but full of diffuse greenish light below. An occasional sunbeam found a hole in the canopy, making a beam like a flashlight, full of motes and bugs. Once in a while a fish would surface to catch a bug. We used the paddles just to keep the boat away from the shoreline (mostly tree roots) and to aim it – the current did all the real work. Occasionally we'd pass a ramshackle cabin, and wave at the people we saw. They always waved back, with a friendly smile or shout out. My dad was entranced – this was exactly the kind of natural beauty that he most enjoyed, and he was drinking it all in. We spent most of the day on the river, yet when the Li'l Abner character's cabin came back into sight (along with our car!), we were all a little sad.
That's a day I'd love to relive.
Later on that trip, we ended up in Big Bend National Park, in southwestern Texas. Two memories from that visit stand out. The first one was during the day, at the peak of the afternoon heat. We were walking around a fossil bed. I don't actually remember the fossils at all, but I do remember my dad thinking it was amazing. What I remember is my dad saying that “it was hot enough to fry an egg on the fender” – and Scott and I wanted him to do it. So he did! He washed off a piece of the fender that was level, put butter on it, and fried an egg. That was one ugly fried egg – more scrambled – but it did get fried, much to our delight as we ate it. The other memory is from a morning, camped on a steep hill overlooking the Rio Bravo. We got up before sunrise, and my dad made us breakfast as dawn broke. Before we ate, he wanted us to wash our hands – and that posed a challenge. We were just camped in the meadow, not in a campground, and there were no facilities there, not even water. We didn't have much water in containers. So my dad told us to wash our hands “like the Indians did.” According to him, that meant finding some clean sand, scrubbing our hands with it, then “rinsing” them off with the dew collected on the tall grass all around us. For some reason this really tickled my little kid self's fancy, and I did it several times, just for fun. Now I have a memory of myself, standing on a knoll above our little campsite, nose full of the intense scents of the desert, looking down at my dad working on the stove and behind him the broad expanse of rolling hills, desert, and Rio Bravo below, with the sun rising off to my left. A wonderful memory scene...
I only have a few other memories of that trip. One is of driving through miles and miles of southern yellow pine forest, with Spanish moss hanging down, in high humidity. That was most likely northern Mississippi or Alabama, judging from more recent experiences, though I'm not sure. When I asked my dad about it, many years later, he didn't remember being in the Deep South, so I'm not really sure where we were. Another memory is of an oilfield in Texas, with swinging-arm pumps operating all around us. We walked through the field, fascinated by the mechanical connections (through steel cables) that operated several pumps from a single central pump that had a motor. I also remember a nursery in Illinois that had quite a bit of American holly growing in sandy soil, which my dad was quite surprised about – I don't think he believed there was any nursery that had as many holly plants as his, but this one was clearly much larger. The proprietor was a businessman, not a plant lover, and my dad was full of scorn for him after we left. I remember the scorn more than the nursery :)
There's also one meal that has somehow gotten stuck in my memory. I've no idea where we where (though Oklahoma comes vaguely to mind), but we had just visited a store that had some bargain food that my dad was quite excited about. We had scored several large tins of sardines in mustard sauce, a gallon of “real” apple juice, a loaf of fresh-baked bread (still warm), a nice chunk of strong-smelling cheese, and some beautiful ground chuck that had been ground right in front of us. My dad couldn't wait to do our usual thing of finding a pretty outdoors place to eat, as he wanted to get to that bread quickly. So we stopped at the sort of place that normally we'd avoid: the town park. This was quite a small town, and they had a correspondingly small and simple town park: a few trees, some grass, and a couple picnic tables. We took over one of those tables and proceeded to have a feast that most people would likely consider odd, though we didn't. We ate the hamburger raw, with just a little salt on it, with chunks of bread as accompaniment. The apple juice was our tipple, and the cheese and sardines our desert. A few passers-by gave us some odd looks, but we didn't care – we were too busy stuffing our faces with this delicious food. It was far better fare than our usual meal on that trip. Knowing my dad, I'm sure that was far from the oddest meal on our trip, but for some reason (perhaps the setting in the town park) it stuck in my memory.
Looking back on that trip, I'm in awe of my dad's courage (or insanity!) in just taking off on such a trip with two small boys, hardly any money, a car that could break down at any moment, and absolutely no idea where we would spend our nights. He loved to travel, so the trip was guaranteed to be rewarding for him – but he chose to share it with us, and he used the experience to try to instill in us a love of the outdoors, of nature in general, of plants in particular, and most especially an appreciation for natural beauty. I'm certain those were actually things he intended, and in those he succeeded. But he also taught some other lessons with that trip, lessons that I've carried with my all my life, that I don't think he actually intended. Probably the one most important to my own life was this: that there are profound pleasures that life makes available to anyone, no matter how rich or poor, educated or ignorant. Anyone can be awed by a sunset, or float down a river, lay on your back in the grass under an apple tree in bloom, listen to the crickets on a summer night, slurp ice cold water from a spring, wash your hands in dew-soaked grass, marvel at the Milky Way on a night in the desert, or breathe deeply the aroma of lupine blooming on a Texas roadside. It's all there for anyone at all to enjoy, if you'll just take the time to do so...
