Before our family leaves on any major road trip, I’m the one who adjusts the thermostats, arranges for the diversion of all deliveries and plugs a variety of burglar-frightening timers into lamps and radios. Johanna, meanwhile, packs for herself and our three kids–including snacks, books and art supplies.
Then it’s up to me to get everything into the van, onto which I strap the clamshell luggage carrier we have on permanent loan from my colleague Barbara Brotman, who is too classy to use it. I also do the driving–all but 2 of the 1,135 miles we covered on Friends & Relations 2002, our recent eight-day, five-state, multi-tantrum vacation.
My wife and I have never formalized these divisions of labor. But by now, nearly 17 years into our domestic project, they reflect a certain learned helplessness. I doubt she knows where I store the light timers, how to put all our devices into “holiday” mode and how to attach the rack, and I’m sure I don’t know what proportion of socks, underwear, pajamas and so on go into a well-packed child’s duffel bag. She knows how to drive, of course, but her patience for the demands and requirements of our 5-year-olds is so much greater than mine that shotgun is her default position and Grand Caravan Mistress of Ceremonies her unofficial title.
At one point in the trip, one twin was shrieking as though stabbed at some irritating incursion across the midcar boundary while the other was wailing in distress at having been scolded for the offense. And while Johanna was mediating, soothing and redirecting, I remained perched serenely in the driver’s seat like the guy on the old Colt 45 Malt Liquor TV commercials who never noticed the chaos all around him.
Ideally, the “completely unique experience” jingle would have been going through my head, but Ralph Covert’s catchy “Freddy Bear the Teddy Bear” would not yield any cranial real estate.
Selecting the soundtrack for road trips is also my job. I included CDs by Covert, Justin Roberts and Joel Frankel–three inventive performers of music for the young. They’re all local, and along with Ella Jenkins, Nelson Gill, Fred Koch, Susan Salidor, Jim Gill, Chuck Webb, Steve Rashid, Amy Lowe and many others on the folk and rock scene they’ve made Chicago to children’s music what Nashville is to country and Seattle is to alternative. I’ll be sorry when the twins outgrow these lyrical celebrations of everyday life, but at least then they’ll be trip-maintenance-free, like our 12-year-old. He sat in the third row, usually plugged into headphones, transfixed by a game on the laptop and oblivious to the passing … well, “scenery” overstates it.
Looking out the window at houses, schools, barns, stores, people and animals was overrated fun even before the interstate highway system bypassed most towns and homogenized long car trips. Now, telling a kid to be in the moment and experience the journey is like giving him a time-out.
We recently bought a small TV-VCR combo that plugs into the cigarette-lighter socket, but we decided not to bring it along. I didn’t want to surrender totally the idea that a car trip ought to feel qualitatively different than an afternoon on the couch. Johanna was against it because even though cathode ray therapy distracts the kids for a few hours, she’s found that, like sugar snacks, it only makes them more surly in the long run.
These trips along familiar roads to see familiar faces aren’t “vacations” in the usual sense of relaxation or grand discovery. But they allow and even force us to linger on the smaller things–the little thoughts, experiences and dilemmas–that we rush blindly past in attending to the big things of daily life and current events.
Octane, for instance. On the Ohio Turnpike, gasoline with an octane rating of 86 sold for $1.34 a gallon, 87 octane went for $1.35 but 89 octane cost $1.44. Given the leisure of the road, I was able to wonder about this peculiar pricing scheme for miles and to confront at last my near-total ignorance about octane, a fault I didn’t even know I had.
There’s so much to learn and so much to consider, even along the bleakest highways. Sometimes you don’t even know what until you slow down to 70 miles an hour for a better look.
