“Drip, drip, drop
When the sky is cloudy
You come along, come along with your
Pretty little song”

from Disney’s Bambi – “Little April Showers”

 

After the bison stuck their long, muddy snouts fully through the rolled-down windows of our Ford Expedition and the kids shrieked with glee, we rolled up the windows and watched a sheet of rain advance toward our car. Brandon and I looked uneasily at each other.

“It wasn’t supposed to storm today,” I said, trying to pull up the radar on my phone, “Maybe it’ll blow through quickly.” But the sky to the west looked black with rain. It dripped and dribbled and then dumped onto the truck, our wipers whipping the water off of the windshield. “At least we did all of the outside activities first,” I said over my shoulder to the kids.

The morning was filled with camel rides, monkeys, and Henry terrified by the spitting alpacas. After a quick sack lunch at the African Wildlife Safari Park, we drove through the “safari” part of the park, Brandon and I taking turns holding the feed cup out the window as the passengers of our car giggled. Most of the animals in the park are endangered species, and none of them are native to this region of Ohio. Reindeer, alpaca, bongo, Sika deer, llamas, Scottish Highlanders, and bison wandered freely through the overgrown grasses and dust, in front of and around the line of cars, hoping to grab a nibble before the rain came down. Their offspring trotted close by, and we imagined the alpaca parents explaining the daily operations, “You see, kids, when the doors open and the metal people-carriers approach, trot up and smear your noses against the glass until they stick out the nuggets of food. Some of them have carrots; go for those any chance you get.” We rounded the bend toward the final drive-thru exhibit of giraffes and zebras when the rain started.

Now the rain poured down and the sky blackened. We emptied the remaining nuggets of feed onto the ground and tossed the cup in the garbage bin at the exit. The outdoor temperature reading on our truck dropped from the low-90s to mid-60s over the remainder of our fifteen-minute drive. We took Route 2 at a minimum speed while the rain formed temporary rivulets across two lanes. The rear-view mirror reflected the clouds in the west, flashing with lightning.

“What if there’s a tornado?” Lydia asked, and Elvis worried with her.

“There won’t be a tornado, guys,” I said, glancing sideways at Brandon in the driver’s seat and then back at the rear-view mirror, “You’re safe.  You have nothing to worry about.”

The camp site was about five miles down the interstate, just passed the exit for Cedar Point. The kids were all still too young for the amusement park… at least the part of the park we were willing to pay for. I found our campground through Groupon.com, a daily discount email. The African Wildlife Safari Park had been listed in the same email, and it seemed like a brilliant way to spend a few days—visiting animals and then camping with the kids.

It was still pouring as we exited the highway. The GPS lady announced, “Turn right at the exit. In 500 feet, your destination is on the right.” Five hundred feet? I thought to myself. That can’t be right.

It was right. We pulled into Camp Sandusky. A crumbling asphalt basketball half-court with a rusting hoop of chain-metal net leaned toward the earth as if gravity itself were bringing it down, the court sagging into the dirt. A large corporate for-sale sign was staked into the front lawn.

“This doesn’t look anything like the website,” I told Brandon. He laughed under his breath.

It was still pouring. Brandon put the truck into park and slowed the windshield wipers to a more moderate pace. We could see the pool tucked behind the campground’s general store. It looked clean but smaller than I expected, and no kiddie pool. To the right stood rows upon rows of cabins, ten-by-ten garden sheds with two windows and a door.

“Those sure look rustic,” I offered. The highway roared to the right. I had no idea the campground was so close to the road. I should’ve looked at a map before making the reservation. But who imagines a campground right next to the highway? “Maybe our cabin is a bigger one.”

We still had about a half-hour until check-in at 3 p.m. I wasn’t sure if we could back out of our reservation, but given that the coupon was for $25, it didn’t seem like the end of the world to abandon our plans and drive home with some disappointed kids, maybe catch an afternoon movie at the dollar theatre until the rain stopped.

“I think it’s slowing down,” Lydia said, “It won’t be that bad. Can we go to our cabin now?”  I smiled as the wind drove the rain into the side of our car. Lightning flashed again. Lydia is her mother’s daughter. It’s just a little rain, pitter-patter pitter-patter, this is fun, look at it come down! drip drip drop when the sky is cloudy, your pretty little song will brighten the day… Always able to find the rainbow even when there wasn’t one, the blackest sky alight only by jabs of electricity. Brandon and I continued to try to refresh the radar on our phones but couldn’t get a signal.

“Well, what do you want to do, Sarah?” Brandon asked. I had imagined twenty-four hours of hiking, picnicking, swimming, grilling, and roasting marshmallows around the campfire. I had imagined a bright sun, a kiddie pool, reclining in a patio chair with a book and a bottle of water, my kids splashing and laughing. I had imagined casually tossing a football back and forth with my family, nothing but the sounds of nature as a backdrop. I had not imagined the highway roaring behind the campground. I had not imagined sheds. I had not imagined mud. I had not imagined a fallow cornfield and no trails. I sighed and avoided Brandon’s question, pressed update on my phone again, hoping this time the radar would appear with a forecast bright and clear of rain.

*

Vacations generally do not turn out the way I envision them. I don’t know how these fantasies about what a family vacation ought to look like got planted in my brain; just because it is a vacation does not mean that the family members all turn into optimistic, adventure-loving, starry-eyed explorers. No, a family vacation simply removes the natural habitat of the cranky, the lazy, the whiny, the optimistic, and the determined-to-have-an-amazing-time, and dumps them together into another habitat to continue operating within their default setting. Together, the varying species trot around the feed truck and wait for meals, pressing their snotty noses against the glass and whining, “When is dinner? What are we having? I’m bored!” I should know this by now. With as much evidence as I’ve accrued over the last thirty years, I do not know why I expect otherwise.

After childhood birthdays spent in a tent or camper with my family or carsick in the back seat driving from one tourist trap to the Hoover Dam, after driving through Yosemite National Park and only stopping briefly to peer over the edge of all sorts of scenic overlooks but never actually hiking into the wilderness we viewed from the window of our rented minivan, after passing the putt-putt golf course and maze castle back and forth from the Daytona race track to the cabin with the cockroaches and yard of rotting oranges, after driving for three days to vacation for two and then turning around again to go home, after leaving the Outer Banks a couple days early because there’s nothing more to do at the beach, after watching for Dad to arrive late Friday night to camp with us for the weekend, after stopping every exit along the interstate until we found the one hotel with vacancy… oh, after all of these things, and more, why should I expect anything more than craziness, disappointment, utter disasters of vacations we can all laugh at with abandon, at the safe distance of at least five years or so down the road?

“You remember the time we drove to the Hoover Dam on your birthday making ‘dam’ jokes the entire way?” Dad laughs. “‘You kids ready for the dam tour?’ ‘Where can we get some dam bait?’”  I had fumed in the back seat of the minivan, angry to be away from my boyfriend on my sixteenth birthday, stuck in the car with my family.

I never miss my cue, “Can you please stop with the damn jokes already?” Good times. Fun times.

*

Last June, we set up two campsites with my side of the family as a cold wind whipped across West Branch State Park’s lake, blowing heavy bursts of rain through the trees that lined the shore. My brother and his wife and my mom and dad shared one camper and Brandon and I and the kids shared another, parked side-by-side along the lake. Lydia was six, Elvis almost five and Henry just over a year old.

It had been four years since our last attempt at a family vacation with my side of the family. The Great North Myrtle Beach Vacation Disaster, when my stay-at-home husband and mild mannered mom set out around 8 p.m. Friday night to drive through the night to North Myrtle Beach in our van with over 180,000 miles on it, and our kids took turns screaming all through the night, and Mom had to hold a blanket up over the window so the streetlights wouldn’t keep our infant son and toddler daughter awake, and Brandon peed beside the sliding passenger door while he filled up the van with gas so as not to delay the time the kids had to sit and scream in all of that light (light like daylight, light like awake-time) from the BP gas station. After they got to Myrtle and settled in, Bambi jumped in front of Brandon’s van on his way to pick me up from the airport Tuesday night. Bambi survived, staggered off the road and ran into the brush. The van staggered down the road and stopped, the hood caved in. He called AAA, I rented a van at the airport, and when we finally rolled in to the two-bedroom condo, our kids woke up and wouldn’t go back to sleep the entire night, all four of us in one bedroom, Elvis in a pack-n-play in the bathroom and Lydia’s pack-n-play wedged in the closet. The next day, Mom and I walked the beach with Lydia toddling in and out of the surf, and Mom said, “I’m worried about Brandon. He gets so angry. I can’t imagine he’d ever do anything, but… do you think the kids are safe?” and I nodded, aware how hard this transition had been for him, stay-at-home dad with two children under two and me at work all week. My dad and brothers arrived in time for Thanksgiving and then prepared to leave again on Friday, and I exploded about how this always happens! you always leave early! can’t you just relax, can’t you just enjoy our company, my kids, my husband, our family, me? We drove home in a rented minivan because our own van was not yet repaired from the Bambi incident, and a week later Brandon flew back to Myrtle to pick up our van with the repaired but not painted hood. It was the most expensive “free” trip we’d ever taken. And then my mom’s dad died ten days later.

Not enough time had passed for us to joke about that trip. It hadn’t quite lost its sting.

My youngest brother, Phil, had a blowout fight with my dad earlier in the week and had no intentions of joining us at West Branch that weekend. I was holding out hope for a grand time, remembering my own childhood camping trips with my parents and brothers, riding our bicycles on pathways carved by raccoons, swimming in Punderson Lake, playing rummy, catching fish with my grandpa, making hobo pies with Mom, and telling stories around the campfire. “There once was a guy with a wooden eye. He was always embarrassed by his eye, but, building up courage, he asked a lady to dance. She had an enormous nose, and he figured, well, maybe she’d understand him. ‘Oh, would I!’ she said. He got all excited, shouting and pointing, ‘Big nose! Big nose!’” (Get it? Wood eye? Funny, right?) Dad’s suntanned face creased around his eyes as he guffawed, the fire bright and hot on the bottoms of our soles.

Those hopes gradually dissolved in the rain as my dad doused our firewood with lighter fluid. We huddled under umbrellas and hooded rain jackets around the ring, our teeth chattering, the kids chittering excitedly inside the camper, not sleeping.

In the morning, my mom and I cooked eggs and bacon over the lighter-fluid fire, still battling the chilly air, intensified by the lake. This figures!  I muttered. We can’t plan anything. It’s freaking June, sixty degrees out, and gusting like a hurricane. The leaves of trees danced silver and green in the wind. Brandon kept his “I told you so” to himself while our kids watched a movie on the portable DVD player in the camper. My dad and Bill got in the truck, “We’re going to go get Phillip,” they grunted, “and some fishing rods. And worms.”

The rest of us took the kids to the playground and marveled at how much warmer it was just a few hundred feet away from the lake. “We should move the campers inland,” we decided, and hope blossomed anew. Maybe we could redeem this camping trip after all. The guys were still gone by the time the kids were tired of the playground. Brandon and I teetered over the limestone boulders down to the lake side so the kids could throw in sticks.

“Watch where you step. Don’t get too close to the water,” our song like a round between us, taking turns shouting at our kids. I had forgotten about the boulders along the lake, the ever-present danger we so readily ignored as kids ourselves, Bill, Phil, and me bold and leaping rock to rock. Poor Mom. Elvis and Lydia hunted for pebbles and sticks to throw into the water, their bodies wavering and swaying unbalanced by the shore. “Don’t poke that stick in that hole; there might be a snake down there!” Brandon and I sat poised on our own rocks, shivering, prepared to catch one of our brave children if one tripped, certain it would happen any second. We couldn’t take any more. “Okay, enough, let’s go back to the campsite. Maybe Pop-Pop is back.”

At lunch we moved the campers to a less windy part of the park. Phillip didn’t come with my brother and dad, after all. His absence hovered a bit, whistled through the branches overhead. Dad uttered his regret about their fight, “Phil should be here,” he said as we walked toward the playground where the kids were playing with Brandon. Dad utters regret often these days. The should’ve’s and could’ve’s and if only’s roll out like waves in the wake of a speedboat on the lake. I try to soothe the burn when I can, shore up the tide with some Look at all you’ve done for us and Look at all you’ve built around you and Look at your grandchildren, your children, your wife, but it’s only half-hearted—he was gone a lot, worked hard, long hours, came home worn out and weary, no time for play, no time for games, no time for vacation, just work and TV and sleep, precious sleep, napping on the couch, cap tipped low over closed eyes and snores, boots crossed at the ankles on the coffee table.

“He’ll get over it,” I said to Dad, about Phil, “You guys will work it out.”

Bill and his wife, Rachel, walked down to the edge of the small inlet with Brandon, me, and the kids while Henry took his nap. The trees blocked the wind, permitted rays of light to dance on low waves. We showed the kids how to skip rocks across the shallow pond. It was just like old times, only instead of Dad or Grandpa, we baited the hooks, untangled the fishing wire, demonstrated how to cast and reel and then handed over the rod to eager fingers. When Lydia caught a fish, though, we asked Uncle Bill to let it loose, all of us squealing like a bunch of little girls as it bent against his palm.

*

In the months and years after Lydia reeled in her first fish (just a little four-inch bluegill), she will remind us of this moment, “Remember the time I caught a fish?” and I will hear myself at eight and nine and ten and eleven, reminiscing about the eight fish I caught with Dad on my eighth birthday. What a day that was, there by the shore of some anonymous pond in Geauga County, just me and Dad and a tackle box, a Styrofoam container of night crawlers in black soil, and two rods, just us, fishing silent alone together until we caught one, then two, then three, then four, then five, then six, then seven, then eight! Eight fish!

It was the same pond the five of us floated on in a rowboat sometime that same era of my childhood, maybe even that same summer. I can imagine myself begging to go back to the pond after we caught all of those fish; I can imagine bringing it up again and again to Dad. When, when can we go to the pond again, Dad? I’m sure it was just a shallow pool of water but it felt like it spread for miles. The top of the rowboat barely stayed above the surface as we paddled along, the five of us, all of us, Dad and Mom and me and Bill and Phil, together, rowing in a scary wooden boat around a pond. We got yelled at for almost tipping the boat, hold still, sit in the middle, don’t lean over the edge like that! but the sun glistened on the surface, the cattails danced, frogs jumped into the water, and our hearts leapt with fear and joy. Do you remember the fish? Do you remember the pond? Do you remember?

*

After we all grew tired of casting and reeling, untangling fishing wire and re-baiting hooks, catching children before they were whacked in the eye by a mid-cast fishing rod, my husband played catch with Lydia and Elvis, and I chased Henry across the grass. And after the kids fell asleep that night, Brandon poured me a glass of American Honey. We unfolded our “love seat” lawn chair, a navy blue two-seater, and sat around the campfire drinking and talking with my parents and Bill and Rachel, keeping an ear turned toward our camper in case anyone stirred. Brandon brought out his guitar and started strumming. We had another round and stood while Brandon played John Mellencamp songs. Mom and I danced and sang along, “Little ditty, ‘bout Jack and Diane, two American kids doin’ the best they can,” without a care about being out of tune, laughed and swayed, “I love this song!” and “This is so great!” raising our hands and faces to the cloud-covered sky, all of us singing and drinking and warming ourselves by the fire, and me, grinning like I just caught my first sunfish by the water.

*

I tossed my phone in the console cup holder, the battery at 10% after all of my attempts to refresh and find service, radar, weather alerts, Facebook updates, hope composed in no orange, yellow, and green splotches splattered on maps. I sighed.

“Okay, here’s what I think we do,” Brandon said, “There’s a McDonald’s on the other side of the highway, and they usually have free wi-fi. Let’s go and grab a snack—ice cream, kids?—”

“Yeah!”

“—and see what happens,” for this last part, our eyes met, doubtful about the storm clouds in the distance, the missing rays of sun.

As the kids licked their ice cream cones and climbed around and over the sticky yellow and red plastic chairs, the torrent calmed to a gentle drizzle that gave way to the occasional ripple on a dip in an asphalt puddle and then only clouds heavy with the threat of rain, no more lightning, the potential for rain gray but, yes, I think it’s lightening, brightening a bit, don’t you think?

We checked in to Camp Sandusky and rolled down the mud and limestone drive of the campground.

“Look! There’s the pool! And there’s the playground! It looks like a castle!” the kids said, clawing at the windows, pointing at the slouching slides, rusting chain-link ladder, the rotting boards and chipping paint, the faded Little Tikes play sets. All I saw were puddles and mud, puddles and mud. Brandon chuckled under his breath, snickering as I slouched and sighed in the passenger seat.  The campground was deserted except for a car or two and a thirty-foot motorhome. We pulled to a stop in front of our very own 10×10 shed.

“Wow! I can’t believe we get to stay in a real cabin!” Lydia said, springing from the back seat and sprinting to the small deck the size of a wood pallet. The cabin had two electric outlets and a bare bulb light fixture attached to the wall, a set of bunk beds, a thin double mattress on a wood frame, and enough space for Henry’s pack ‘n’ play, a floor fan, and our duffle bags of clothes. Behind the cabin, semis and cars and trucks and trailers roared, muted by a small stand of wild grasses and sumac.

“I get the top bunk!” Lydia announced and proceeded to roll out her Disney Princess sleeping bag while Elvis spread his Pixar Cars sleeping bag. Henry crawled around on our bed giggling and fleeing from me. Brandon grabbed his hammer and started pounding at the nails that protruded from our porch.

We spent the afternoon in the pool, Lydia gleefully tall enough to touch in the shallow end, Elvis clinging as one tense muscle—comic bundle of nerves giggling and shrieking in terror—to my side, and Henry, just turned two, attempting with every ounce of energy in him to detach from his parents’ grasp and swim away. Except he couldn’t swim. None of them could swim, not yet, not with any confidence or control, not without inadequate, frantic kicks and gulps of chlorinated water, gagging.

After Brandon and I couldn’t handle anymore “swimming,” we wandered back to the cabin, chasing Henry away from mud puddles. Dinnertime was approaching. The natives grew restless. They played UNO while we unloaded the firewood and unpacked food. I worried a little about starting a fire—I mean, I know how to start a fire and all, but this was traditionally my dad’s role.  With some fancy footwork and balancing skills, I leaned each piece of wood in a pyramid and jammed a few wads of paper underneath, and it crackled to life. We pulled our patio chairs around the fire and cooked Italian sausages. “Don’t get too close!” we scolded. After dinner, we roasted the obligatory marshmallows, some burnt and charred, some toasted golden, then sat entranced and watched the fire, reading Shel Silverstein poems—Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me, Too, all set off in a flying shoe—before we escorted them off to bed, where they snuggled and giggled.

And then, finally, all was quiet in the cabin/shed ten feet away from our picnic table. The children slept. What now, I thought to myself, antsy for something to do, something to fill the space. All of those weekend camping trips of my youth ended with us kids in bed, our parents still sitting around the campfire. What did they talk about? What did they do in those quiet moments, after Mom cleaned up the pans and paper plates from dinner, after Dad worked in the summer heat on an excavator all day and then plowed and seeded the family corn fields in the evening, finally rolling into the campground as the sun began to set? All this time I had focused on what it meant to camp with my kids, and then it was just us. Just us. Two American kids doin’ the best they can.

It seemed as if Brandon and I hadn’t had this much time alone in months, which was mostly true—our lives had been chaotic, his travel for work more than anticipated. We talked via Skype and phone and text and occasionally in person, about babysitters and dinners, departures and arrivals, work schedules and conflicts in travel. But that season was finally over, it was summer, a brief respite before the fall football season began again. Brandon and I broke out the Firefly Sweet Tea Vodka and some ice and sat down across from each other at the picnic table.

“Want to play cards?” I asked.

“Sure, what do you want to play?”

“Let’s play rummy.” I shuffled the deck a few times and dealt. “This stuff is trouble,” I said, sipping the tea, “It tastes just like sweet tea, not at all like alcohol.”

I turned on my phone and played some music over Pandora. Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash sang my favorite karaoke song (“Jackson”), “We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout,” and John Hiatt chimed in, “Lying underneath the stars right next to you, wondering who you are, and how do you do? (How do you do baby?), when the clouds roll in across the moon, and the wind howls out your name and it feels like rain,” and then Blake Shelton promised, “You be my honeysuckle, I’ll be your honey bee,” and we sang along to the songs we loved, songs that have played into our story for the last decade.

“I play a lotta cards, obviously,” we said, quoting That Thing You Do, “You gotta be quick with me; I’m from Erie, PA.” We played a lotta cards and poured some more, played some more cards and drank and drank. Brandon grabbed a bag of Tostitos and a jar of salsa to snack on, and we ate through the bag. We played to 500. I scored the highest round we’d ever seen in rummy but after a few hands, Brandon caught me and then won. When it got too dark to see the cards without squinting, we stacked the deck and crept over to the fire pit, its blaze dwindling since we roasted marshmallows with the kids a couple hours earlier. I put the last of our firewood into the ring and snuggled in next to my husband on our love seat – that double foldout chair we had traveled with to backyard barbecues and baseball games for the last decade.

In the time we’d had the chair it was rare for us both to settle in it together. We sat in it together to watch fireworks in our friends’ backyard each Fourth of July. We sat in it together briefly at family picnics balancing plates of Barberton fried chicken and coleslaw on our laps, taking turns chasing toddlers around the yard or waiting for the other to respond to the bickering of our children. We sat in it last summer around the campfire with my parents. Mostly though, I brought it with me to watch him play double headers on Sundays in Akron, to afternoon ballgames he coached in Hartville while Lydia practiced taking her first steps between the families around the diamond, to Saturday morning soccer games optimistic the boys would let me sit, and to the t-ball field in Ashland as he helped to coach Lydia’s first team while Elvis climbed trees and Henry picked blades of grass. It has lasted a good long while now, the fabric still firm, the metal still sturdy, if rusting a little in places. After a long fall, winter, and spring of sitting in the chair alone, it felt good to fold into Brandon’s side. I sighed a contented sigh.

We watched the flames leap at the new wood and slowly burn down to red coals. The families and kids who had been at the amusement park all day drove up in a tour bus, a motorhome, a rusting SUV, and a parent’s Mercedes. I refilled my glass another countless time and stumbled back to Brandon. By then the bottle was empty. “Oh, would ya look at that?” I pouted and staggered.

The minutes of the night flitted by like fireflies; we reflected on the spring and dreamt about the future, confessed career goals and fears. Will this season ever end? Will we always be this busy? Is this what we will do forever? We never imagined being here, never imagined this life. We cycle through these narratives every six months or so, in the quiet and undistracted minutes alone. Our marriage is not just tag-team grocery shopping and babysitting, laundry washed and folded, dinners discussed and cooked and eaten; no, we are creators and dreamers, lovers and friends, ambitious and insecure, weathering the seasons together as best as we can.

The travel makes me nervous, the nights alone, our children’s childhoods passing in a flash. I love this life with him, this life we’ve built together. I don’t want either of us to miss it, to whisper our regrets in decades down the road. I want more than regret, more than solitary fishing memories, more than quiet nights around a fire sipping vodka, then slipping off to sleep, longing to be filled.

The embers glowed orange, the fire crackled and popped, and in the silence I turned my face toward Brandon. We kissed, hard, the sweet tea vodka potent. No sounds from our sleeping children drifted from the cabin/shed. I lifted off my side of the chair and sat across Brandon’s lap, engrossed and still passionately in love with this man, if not also a smidgen intoxicated, and we ran our hands through each other’s hair and over each other’s bodies. The family in the cabin a couple spaces down from us was forgotten, the kid who had asked to borrow a lighter for his fire was blaring some bad pop music hidden behind his parents’ car, the high school kids on a youth group trip were nestled in their cabins far away from us. Brandon lifted my shirt over my head, and somewhere in those moments we made a collective decision to move away from the fire, off of the chair so awkward with him pinned underneath me, my lower legs numb from sitting on him. We stumbled behind the cabin, grateful for the steady roar of semis behind us, the electric fan whirring on the other side of the cabin’s wall, the darkness to disguise the fun we had in the grass, (How do you do, baby?) fully absorbed in each other and lost in the delight of the night.

Afterward, I don’t remember slipping into the cabin with him or putting anything away on the picnic table, just waking up at three a.m. cold and naked. I thought the cabin would be stifling all night but the evening breeze had cooled the room. I pulled in close to Brandon underneath the one lousy sheet I brought for us and tried to generate warmth. We don’t snuggle. After making love at home we’re happy to roll to our respective corners of the bed and turn off the light, sigh, “That was awesome,” and say good night, the Great Wall of China that is his body pillow wedged between us.  But on that thin mattress with the cool night breeze blowing in through the windows and no clothes, we intertwined our limbs and hugged each other close, laughing and shivering and sleeping and waking. Around four a.m. I broke down and snuck out the door to find a shirt and the Indians blanket I’d used as a picnic tablecloth earlier. It was damp with dew. Screw it, I thought, quickly emptying the cards and cups onto the bench and lifting the wet blanket off the table. At least it would keep our body heat in. “Grab my jeans,” Brandon whispered, and I brought them in, too. With the weight of the blanket on us, we shivered and snickered.

“If the kids wake up before six, let’s get out of here,” Brandon said under the whir of the fan, “Screw the pancake breakfast. We’ll go to Panera.”

“Amen.” We curled into each other and slept lightly until 5:45 a.m.

“Mommy? Daddy?” Henry said from his pack ‘n’ play in the corner, and we brought him into our bed for a few more minutes until the older two awakened. They were only a little disappointed when we told them of our plans to pack up. Their enthusiasm spiked at promises of cinnamon crunch bagels and a stop at the McDonalds with the indoor playground.

“Did you guys have fun?” we asked. “What was your favorite part of the trip?”

“Sleeping in a real cabin!—Feeding the bison!—Swimming in the pool!—Playing catch with the football!—Roasting marshmallows by the fire!” the kids took turns shouting over each other and then quieted down again, looking out the window at the indoor waterparks and restaurants bordering the road.

“That was a lot of fun,” Brandon said glancing my way and then back toward the highway, “It’s always good, but it isn’t always fun. That,” he said, “that was fun.” I grinned and turned to face the road ahead. Yes, both good and fun. Good times. Fun times.

 

Picture a highway. The New Jersey Turnpike, to be exact. Picture two young women –early twenties — standing on the shoulder of that highway, backpacks resting at their feet as they raise their arms and cock their thumbs upward and slightly out in that universally recognized gesture that says: Hello stranger, I’m on the road, headed in the general direction you are headed; would you please be so kind as to pick me up and let me accompany you in your car, truck, van, bus – whatever you got.

Except there are no cars, trucks, vans, or buses. And I mean zero. Nada. Not a one. It’s mid-morning, a weekday, so this expanse of highway would normally be zipping and zooming with bumper to bumper traffic, but right now it’s as deserted as – well, a desert — as a back road in bum-fuck nowhere. The absence is eerie, like a scene in some post-Apocalyptic sci-fi movie where ominous music – perhaps a Theremin – might be playing.

As you might be guessing by now, one of those girls is me. The other is my friend, Marietta. Though this was many years ago and I have no head whatsoever for dates, I can say with absolute certainty – for reasons that will become obvious — that it was August 9^th, 1974.

 

Marietta and I had taken several trips together – psychedelic as well as geographic –though none of them quite as ambitious as this one. We were headed to California, and we’d set out early that morning with no doubt that we would reach our destination in due time. We prided ourselves on our superior hitchhiking karma, though we each had different theories about how to get the best rides. Marietta thought it was important to look as collegiate as possible. She’d tie back her unruly red hair, and swore by button-down blouses and cardigans as the best hitchhiking attire. I thought letting your freak flag fly a little was a better bet, since other counterculture types would see giving you a lift as the hip thing to do. We both agreed that most people picked up hitchhikers out of curiosity more than kindness. They wanted to be entertained by a stranger’s stories or to impress the stranger with a story of their own. Together Marietta and I had listened to a variety of tall tales and heartfelt confessions, and told stories – some true; some wildly fabricated.

We were headed to California that morning because both of us had friends from our former colleges living in the Golden State, and several people we knew from Temple — the university where we were now both students with indeterminate majors and class standings — were out there for the summer. Besides, California had an aura of mystery in those days for anyone who’d grown up on the east coast. We knew we were too uncoordinated to be surfers, and several years too late to swelter in any summer of love, but it was still the other end of the continent and about as far away from Philadelphia as we could get, considering our limited mode of travel, so we’d quit our summer jobs a few weeks early, ready for an adventure.

Before we had even packed, we managed to score a ride for a good part of the trip west. Our friend Dave had put us in touch with his friend, Dorothy, who was living in Maine but headed back to her native Oregon and planned on driving the Trans Canadian Highway to get there. She said she’d be happy to take us along – for company and a little help paying for gas. All we had to do was get to Maine to meet up with her, and it was California, here I come.

We’d gotten a reasonably early start that morning and were picked up right on our block by a salesman who drove us across the city, over the Walt Whitman Bridge and into New Jersey, where we got on the turnpike to head north. Our only problem there would be the Jersey State Police, who had a reputation among hitchhikers for being particularly intolerant. Hanging in my bedroom like a 4-H ribbon was an official warning I’d been issued the previous summer by one officer Schuenemann for “violating a safety principle.” He called my specific violation “begging rides,” and though I resented the implications of “begging,” I knew I had gotten off easy; he could have hauled my ass off to jail, instead of letting me continue on my way to Wildwood. That morning our luck did not hold out for long. Soon after our first ride dropped us off, we spotted a cop car heading toward us.

The cruiser pulled up. The cop stepped out and curtly asked for identification. Since I had no driver’s license, I carried a copy of my birth certificate along with my college i.d., both of which he eyed suspiciously. He got back in his cruiser, and radioed something to someone, as we stood there wondering what was going to happen next. Neither of us had informed our parents of our vacation plans. We figured that what they didn’t know couldn’t worry them, so we’d decided that we would inform them of our travels after the fact. Surprise them with postcards — perhaps a lovely view of the Pacific or the sun setting over the Golden Gate Bridge, a simple guess where I am? scrawled on the back. Calling them from New Jersey would definitely be a let‑down.

After a few minutes the cop reemerged from his vehicle and asked us where we were going. “Maine,” Marietta said.  I guess she thought this sounded more wholesome than California. He could picture us scoring lobster rolls in Bar Harbor rather than tabs of acid on the Haight. The cop grunted, handed us our cards and papers, mumbled something about being careful, got back into his car, and drove off. Once again, we thought, our karma had prevailed. We took it as a sign that it would continue.

A little game that we’d often amused ourselves with while hitching was to take on assumed names, and sometimes identities, for the duration of a trip, so Marietta announced that the next time someone – other than a cop, of course — asked, she was going to tell them her name was Caroline — as in Kennedy, whom she had often been told she resembled. I considered an alias of my own and, though there was no physical resemblance, decided on Patty Hearst, the kidnapped heiress who had been in the national news for months. The granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, Patty had been abducted by a little‑known radical group called the Symbionese Liberation Front. Instead of the expected ransom demands for hard cash, the kidnapping story had taken several unexpected turns. First came instructions for handing out free food to the poor in Oakland. Then there was a bank robbery in which Hearst herself reportedly participated. There were pictures of her wearing a beret and clasping a machine gun, looking like Che Guevara — if Che had ever taken the time to pose for Vogue. Denouncing her family and her capitalist past, Patty announced that she had changed her name to Tanya and joined the revolution.

It was one of those stories that periodically keeps the country riveted as it unfolds like a serial novel in the morning papers and on the evening news. The plot was so twisted that I could never figure out how to read it; the protagonist like a modern‑day Robin Hood, or a maiden who’d been carried off by gypsies and decided overnight that she was born to read tarot cards. I was alternately intrigued, amused, confused, admiring, and aghast. That day I went with amused. The idea of the unlikely duo of Patty and Caroline on the road like Kerouac and Cassidy appealed to our absurd sense of humor. Feeling like we owned the highway, we stretched out our arms, confident that California ‑‑ or at least Maine ‑‑ was just a few thumb flicks away.

 

Things get blurry at this point. It was what I liked best about hitchhiking ‑‑ the fact that I could decide on a destination and then just space out, trusting to the kindness of strangers. I didn’t really need to pay close attention to highway numbers and road signs unless somebody asked me to help navigate. Otherwise, whoever was at the wheel would determine — not where we’d end up, but the route we’d take to get there. For me, it was always the scenic one, because that’s where my attention wandered.  I loved watching the world whizz by, reading the names of towns we’d pass through, catching glimpses of people in their yards or on their porches or singing to themselves in the wide‑open privacy of their cars.

But the going that morning proved to be slow. We’d been in and out of several cars, each driven by a commuter who’d only take us a few exits before dropping us off again. “Maine,” we said, when a driver asked where we were headed.  When he asked us our names, Marietta answered “Caroline” and gave me a knowing look. “Patty,” I said, smiling sweetly.

 

Our last ride had dropped us off not far beyond a line of toll booths. He thought this would be a good spot, since cars were already slowed down and so more likely to stop for us. On the other hand, we were also clearly in sight of highway personnel, and if someone didn’t stop for us fast, a cop was sure to come along. We were praying for fast. Putting on our most All‑American girl faces. Trying to look as if we were traveling for educational, perhaps even charitable, purposes, like the kind of girls you were obliged to help along their way.

But there simply were no cars. It took a few minutes to register, but then it hit us — that traffic had inexplicably stopped. Completely. Not a single car had come through a single toll booth for – how long could it have been? We watched. We waited. We wondered what the hell was going on. Finally we saw one lone vehicle approaching, another police car – state troopers this time — cruising down the shoulder of the highway, heading straight for us.

Now Marietta and I may have considered ourselves born hitchhikers, but even if we did think we were queens of the highway, we were not suffering from any delusions about our importance. Surely, they had not shut down the entire state of New Jersey just to get us off the road. Nobody could be that determined to keep us out of Maine.

Once again the cruiser pulled up beside us. Not one, but two cops got out this time and demanded to see i.d.  One of them grabbed our cards and papers. He glanced from our pictures to our faces, then said, “wait,” and got back in the car, while his partner stood silently beside us, shifting his eyes from us to the cruiser every few seconds, as if he was just waiting for a sign to swing into action. Meanwhile the normally busy highway remained so empty we could have danced across it unimpeded – though I didn’t think the officer at our side would have appreciated such antics, even if Marietta and I did both have a semester of Modern Dance on our transcripts.

We did our best to act nonchalant, but it’s impossible not to feel guilty when you’re being scrutinized by men in uniforms. We were clearly in the middle of something out of the ordinary, but had no clue what it might be. The demeanor of the officer on guard suggested it was better not to ask.

I know time tends to feel like it’s stopped when you are caught in uncertainty, but I swear it took a good ten minutes before the cop in the car reemerged and rejoined his silent sidekick. He asked us where we were heading. “Maine,” we said in unison, though I was beginning to doubt we’d ever get there. He asked where we were coming from? If we knew hitchhiking was illegal?  If our parents knew where we were?  We answered each question truthfully, except for the last. And meanwhile, as we were talking, cars started streaming by. Drivers gawked at us, as if we were aliens, or at the very least, Bonnie and Clyde – or Bonnie and Bonnie. Then once again — and much to our surprise this time – the cops handed us back our i.d.s and told us we’d better be out of there — soon. We assured them that was our intention. We ended every other phrase with “sir.” And, miraculously, they both got back in their cruiser and drove off, looking extremely harried.

Once they were out of sight, Marietta and I both doubled over with the kind of laughter that often follows averted fear. We howled with a mixture of relief and confusion. “What the hell was that all about?” Before we could get very far through our list of possibilities, a car stopped and we jumped in, wanting desperately to be anywhere else but there.

I don’t remember how far this guy took us or what kind of car he drove. I don’t remember what he looked like or where he dropped us off. He lives on in my memory simply as a source of explanation – albeit only partial. There had been a roadblock. Police were randomly checking cars, though no one knew what for. The woman in the lane next to him had said maybe a prison break. Another guy had suggested a bank robbery. Rumors had passed from vehicle to vehicle, a good swath of the north Jersey turnpike abuzz with speculation: what could be forcing them to a halt? Whatever it was, we agreed it must have been something big, and now that it was over – at least as far was we were concerned – it felt rather exciting.

Still, Marietta and I were quite happy to leave the excitement behind. We made our slow but steady way through Connecticut and into Massachusetts, taking in as much as we could from speeding cars, making small talk with a series of drivers who were all good-natured, though unfortunately, we had still not run into one that would take us the distance. Between rides we’d find a spot to rest and munch on some of the snacks we’d packed or pee behind a bush.

It was sometime after noon when a guy on his way to Vermont stopped to pick us up. I don’t recall what town we were in, but I know it was still Massachusetts ‑‑ his home state ‑‑ because that day this simple fact gave him reason to gloat. “Can you believe he finally did it?” he asked, the minute we got settled into our seats and established our destination. We had no idea what he he was referring to. We thought he might have some explanation for the morning’s roadblock, but what he was talking about was bigger than New Jersey.

“He did it. He really fucking did it!” the driver yelled, banging on the steering wheel for emphasis. When the baffled looks on our faces registered our cluelessness, he started yelling even louder, “Nixon! Nixon! Haven’t you heard? It’s official. He gave his resignation speech and flew off into the god damn sunset. He was an asshole till the very end, flashing the freakin’ victory sign, but the bastard’s finally he’s outa there!”

His face displayed a combination of righteous indignation and glee. And who could blame him? For nearly a year Watergate had dominated the news ‑‑ accusations and counter accusations, tales of burglaries and cover-ups, shredded documents and erased tapes. It was difficult to keep all the facts straight, but easy to distrust a president whose arrogance and lust for power had seemed, at least to some of us, obvious for years. Apparently, Nixon had finally decided he was going to resign the night before, but our communal house had no TV, so we’d missed the big announcement, and none of our previous rides that morning had gotten around to mentioning it.

“You can’t blame us,” our driver yelled, his Boston roots clearly audible in his missing r’s. “We’re the only state that went with McGovehn. You can’t blame that dick head on us.” He reveled in the idea that history had proved that he and Massachusetts were right.

If champagne had been available at some roadside stand, surely we would have stopped for an appropriate toast, but instead our driver pulled out a joint the size of Rhode Island and lit up to mark the historic occasion. We glided into Vermont munching on pretzels, recalling our favorite reasons for hating the demagogue who had just stepped down from his throne. Around every curve in the road was a scene right out of a postcard ‑‑ some red barn or white-spired church, fields full of purple flowers or impossibly pretty cows lazing away the day. It was beautiful and we were happy. We wouldn’t have Richard Nixon to kick us around anymore.

 

That historic August night Marietta and I slept on a stranger’s floor in the great state of Maine with Gerald Ford at the helm of the republic. The next morning, we left the republic behind and headed into neighboring Canada, and over the next three days drove nearly non-stop across the often desolate, but gorgeous, expanse of it, stopping only to pick up the occasional lone hitchhiker — since we still had a little room in the car – or to sleep a few hours at a rest stop somewhere not far off the road. When we got to Banff, we took two days to hike and check out the sights, spending our nights in an enormous campground filled with serious outdoors’ types, other hitchhikers like ourselves, plus a few Americans who’d originally come to Canada to dodge the draft and now appeared to be living permanently in tents. Evenings everyone would gather around the fire to share what they had to share. People told stories and played music. Dorothy and I were a hit with our renditions of It Wasn’t God Who Made Honkey Tonk Angels and Long Black Veil. Then it was time to head back to the homeland again, but not before having our packs torn apart, down to my very last dismantled tampon, by the U.S. boarder patrol. Somewhere outside of Eugene, Marietta and I parted ways with Dorothy. We were back on our own. On the road.

 

As has no doubt been the case for thousands of dreamers throughout U.S. history, California was a bit of a bust once we got there. The friends from former colleges were happy to see us, but after a week of us crashing on their living rooms floors, were obviously just as happy to see us go. The east coast friends we planned on meeting up with were never where they were supposed to be when we got there. So we made the best of things. We hit the beaches. Camped out beneath towering redwood trees in Santa Cruz. Won a hundred and thirty bucks on a two dollar bet on the horses in Sacramento, which was a blessing, because we were almost flat broke by then and running out of people to crash with. Besides, it was just about time to head home in time for classes. We had given ourselves a week to get there in time for late registration.

Luck was once again on our side. We heard an ad on a local radio station for a guy driving to Indiana and looking for people to share the ride. He agreed to take us along for the few bucks we had to offer. Also on board was the driver’s pet white rat – rats being creatures I am borderline phobic about, regardless of their color. I would cower in horror when the driver took his rodent pal out of its little cage at rest stops, set it on his foot and let it climb up his leg and torso till it nestled on his shoulder and nuzzled his ear. I came close to jumping out of the car as it was speeding down the highway one afternoon when he decided he’d cure me of my phobia by letting the rat run free so I could see how harmless, how cuddly, it really was. Marietta saved both the rat and me by grabbing it before it got to my lap, and though our driver was pissed at my persistent aversion to his furry friend, he did take us all the way to Gary, as promised.

At the moment he dropped us off, our legendary road karma seemed to be on the wane. We were tired, and it was getting dark and beginning to rain – a hitchhiker’s trifecta of bad news. We were standing on the side of the road, scoping out a possible refuge from the elements, a relatively dry safe spot to spend what we figured would be a sleepless night, when not one, but two semis slowed down, blew their horns, then pulled up along the shoulder of the road with a great hissing and squealing of brakes. The driver of the first truck jumped out and started talking a mile a minute. He told us how he and his buddy in the truck behind him were bone tired but had a deadline to meet, so they had to keep driving straight through to Cleveland. They were riding convoy, trying to keep each other alert by chatting over their CB radios. They wanted one of us to go in each truck to help them stay awake.

I found the story dubious and was ready to bolt, but Marietta was clearly thinking the offer over. The guy talked a good game. He hopped up, opened the passenger side door of his rig, and demonstrated how the CB worked by calling his buddy, inviting him to join us. They seemed nice enough. They swore they were regular guys, not perverts, and would get us as far as Cleveland safe and sound. Though it went against all my instincts, Marietta said she’d go for it, and I was too exhausted to argue. She headed for the second truck, and I figured if worse came to worst and my driver detoured down some side road, she’d be feisty enough to start smacking the living shit out of hers and get down my guy’s license plate number. At least they’d find my body. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I glanced into the huge side mirror and saw her guy taking an unexpected turn.

Karma it must have been, because both drivers lived up to their word. Neither one of them tried anything untoward on either one of us. They really were nice guys who just wanted someone to talk and listen and keep them from nodding off at the wheel – though the speed at which my driver talked made me suspect he might have already downed a couple of black beauties or white crosses just in case. They showed us how to use the CB’s, which were the height of new technology then, and Marietta and I jabbered to each other  constantly – probably more than we would have if we’d been in the same cab. Our drivers also sent a call out to other truckers, advertising two mermaids on board, headed for the City of Brotherly Love. Why mermaids I never did figure out, but the moniker proved effective. Outside of Cleveland, we had just enough time to eat the breakfasts our drivers bought us at an enormous truck stop before another guy sauntered up to the table, introduced himself and said he was prepared to haul those mermaids as far as New York.

Ride two let us out at another sprawling truck stop where yet another trucker — this one going all the way to Philly — had also heard about the two stranded mermaids via CB and was waiting to take us on board. We had a fantasy of him delivering us right to our doorstep, but our street was too narrow for a eighteen wheeler, so he let us out at the corner and blew his horn as he headed down Broad Street. We’d made our way from Sacramento to Philadelphia in record time, spending less than ten minutes actually standing on the side of the road.

 

As hitchhiking sagas go, this was a pretty good one – complete with weird characters, amusing anecdotes and unbelievably good luck with rides, all set against the historic day of Tricky Dick’s resignation. But the story got even better when we learned that Patty Hearst and some of her SLA cohorts had reportedly been hiding out on a farm in Pennsylvania just about the time we had started out on our cross-country adventure. It seemed plausible that the road block we’d encountered that first day in New Jersey might have had something to do with the search for these outlaws. The irony of that possibility was so perfect, we convinced ourselves it had to be the case.

Though I can barely squeeze into it now, I still own a red tee shirt with iron-on letters proclaiming No, I’m Not Patty Hearst emblazoned across the chest. My friend, Steve, made it for me to commemorate the occasion, which may or may not have actually occurred. Of course, much of what officially passes for history also seems to come down to what we collectively choose to believe about the past.

When Richard Nixon died in 199 – twenty years after he resigned in disgrace — I felt compelled to watch some of the funeral ceremony that was televised. Though I’m all for trying to speak well of the dead, it galled me when people went so far as to praise him as a hero and give him credit for ending the war in Vietnam, like it was his idea, yet I couldn’t help getting choked up when I saw Julie and Tricia veiled in mourning. Tricia, who’d always been hyped as the perfect pretty one during Nixon’s White House years, looked dumpy; she seemed to have inherited her father’s jowls, while the once mousy-looking Julie had aged into an attractive, competent looking woman.

Tanya went back to being Patty Hearst and married one of the men who’d served as a bodyguard during her trial. She’s had a few bit parts in movies, including one hilarious role in John Waters’ Serial Mom, where she was bludgeoned to death by Kathleen Turner for daring to wear white shoes after Labor Day — a scenario no more bizarre than some years of her actual life.

Caroline Kennedy shows up periodically on TV at political events or family ceremonies that are so public they sometimes feel like political events.  First there was her mother’s funeral, then her brother’s, then her Uncle Ted’s – always bearing up under grief with the stoic resolve we’ve come to expect of that clan. She still bears a resemblance to my friend Marietta — at least the way she looked the last time I saw her.

 

Marietta never got over the travel bug. Two years after our California adventure, she signed up for a semester abroad in Europe and ended up staying for more than a year. She met John, the man she later married. Meanwhile, I had moved to New Orleans to live with a man I met when he picked us up hitchhiking in the Keys. He and I rendezvoused with John and Marietta in Switzerland, where they were picking grapes. Then they came to New Orleans and lived with us for a brief time, and when the boyfriend and I split up five years later, I moved in, for few months, with them. In 1980, they took off for extended travels in Central and South America. They eventually moved back to John’s native Australia, then later divorced. While I left New Orleans for grad school in Massachusetts and then a job in Virginia, and eventually Nebraska, Marietta settled into life outside of Sydney, continuing to travel every chance she got.

Even as email became more a fact of life, Marietta was never a great correspondent, so we’d be out of contact for long periods, managing nothing beyond an erratic exchange of birthday or holiday greetings or the occasional postcards she’d send out of the blue — sometimes from places I’d never even heard of before. She came back to the states only three or four times in more than twenty years — to visit her aging father in the Poconos. Once she made it down to Virginia to see me for a few days; another time she happened to catch me at my parents’ house in Pennsylvania the day before she was scheduled to fly off to London, and we got together for a cheese steak and a couple of beers. The last time we spoke was a few days after President Obama was first elected, when she called in the middle of the night to say we’d finally done something to make her less embarrassed about being an American.

Then, in late January 2011, I received a phone message from my friend, Pamela. I could tell from the hesitancy in her voice that something was wrong, so I called back immediately and heard the disconcerting news – how Pamela’s Christmas card had been returned from Australia along with a letter from an attorney who regretted to inform her that her friend, Marietta Sutherlin, had died the previous September.

Pam and I were floored. We both knew Marietta had been through a fight with breast cancer a few years back, but so had Pamela, so had several other women we knew — all of them diagnosed early, treated, recovered, in remission. Doing fine. Since we had not heard otherwise, we assumed the same was true for our friend living down under. It’s the kind of taking for granted thing we all do – going about our lives, trusting that all is well unless we hear otherwise.

We wondered why Marietta had not contacted us to tell us she was ill. To tell us she was dying. Not that I could imagine how to break that kind of news to people – especially friends you hadn’t actually seen for a while. Not that there was anything we could have done if we had known, beyond lending whatever support we could have from halfway around the world. Is that why she chose not to bother – because the kind of sympathy we might have offered from a distance would have been, at that point, more burden than comfort? Or was she hanging on to the hope of recovery until the bitter end? We would probably never know.

What complicated matters was the fact that I had received a holiday email from John, Marietta’s ex-husband. I knew that their divorce had been fairly contentious, but John was still a friend, and a thoroughly decent guy; there was no way he would blithely send me a Christmas greeting without mentioning her death. Not if he’d known about it. So I faced the excruciating task of informing him – via email no less, since it was the only means of contact I had.  As I expected, the news was a total shock to him, even more than it had been to me and Pam. He was, after all, the one who’d brought Marietta to Australia, and now she’d died there – in the same city – without his even being aware that she was ill. He immediately set out to find what information he could – some of which was a comfort to him, and all of us.

Marietta did have friends who were with her during her final illness, though – unsurprising to anyone who knew her – she’d left all her practical affairs in total disarray. Because she’d died intestate, her ashes were still sitting on a shelf in some crematorium while the State Trustee who had informed Pamela of her demise tried to figure out what to do with them. Both her parents and her only sibling, an older brother, were dead; the only remaining relatives were a few cousins.  It took John, as ex-husband with no legal rights in the matter, months of untangling red tape, but by July he finally managed to obtain permission to have her ashes buried. The marker he purchased for her lists the places and dates she was born and died, but also proclaims she Lived: The Big Easy – 1975-1980, followed by an unconventional epitaph I know Marietta would love, though it must surely perplex most Australians who read it:

I’ll meet you at Tipitina’s
on the corner of Napolean
and Tchoupitoulis at 8
Don’t be late – the Band’s great

 

Life as a journey is an age-old trope. Google the phrase and you’ll find quotable quotes from everyone ranging from the Buddha to Oprah Winfrey, words of wisdom or worn-out clichés advising us to find our own path, choose our own direction, focus more on the travel than the destination, enjoy the ride while it lasts. That good gray poet, Walt Whitman, saw the universe itself as “a road, many roads, as roads for traveling souls.” Some see that road as long, some short; most agree it can get rough, or at least a little bumpy, but it’s certainly wide open. We are all poor wayfaring strangers doing our best to find our way — to get by, get over, get to or away from somewhere. To accomplish whatever or become whoever we think we must do or be before we reach the end.

 

On the side of a very real road – that highway in New Jersey that August morning in 1974 — there were two girls, young women heading west on a summer adventure. Outlaws and heiresses were on the lam and some of the mighty were about to fall, but those girls were worried about nothing beyond the next ride, looking no further into the future than the promise of the Pacific and partying with the friends they’d meet up with on that far shore. If anyone had predicted that one of those girls would someday leave this earth without the other even knowing, we would have both thought it impossible. But, of course, all things are possible. We may be too busy to stop for death, but death will, as Whitman’s contemporary, Emily Dickinson, says in her odd and brilliant poem, stop for each of us someday — kindly or otherwise. Though the idea of hitchhiking surely never crossed Dickinson’s mind, she does envision her not-so-grim version of the reaper as a driver who picks her up, and eternity as a destination at the end of a road they travel, at least part way, together.

Marietta is not the first friend from my youth who has preceded me into whatever the hereafter may be and probably won’t be the last. It’s the learning about her death so long after the fact of it that distinguishes her passing, and leaves me with a haunting sense of loss while not allowing for that more acute emotion I might accurately label grief. This morning, as I once again tried to evade the frustration of a blank page by checking my email, I received one from John in Australia reminding me that today was the third anniversary of Marietta’s death. The message was sent out to a small group – my ex, another old lover, an even older mutual friend – all of us now scattered across the country, the globe, each of us a crucial part of each other’s journey, once and forever fellow travelers still making our way in the world, still on the road to whatever comes next, our memories of each other — even the painful ones — part of the baggage we lug along. Because without it, we’d be lost.