It began, in my remembering, in four a.m. dark on muggy summer mornings that left us damp and chilled before Sonja and I ever settled into the back seat of our second-hand black coupe. Half asleep, nesting up among hanging clothes and the family’s train case, Mother’s fancy work, last minute shoe additions, the big Rand McNally atlas.
“It” was the invitation to travel—to leave home—to understand that we lived in a wider, interesting world. And that the wider world held relatives and friends to visit and sights other than sunflowers to see.
The hour of departure in my growing up life reflected my parents’ wish to be halfway THERE before noontime summer sun and humidity added unbearable degrees to our car’s interior. And the reality that my dad–ever anxious about all the 1950s car troubles that could plague us (flat tires, air lock, overheating, road construction)–had been awake from midnight anyway. And if Paul was awake worrying, Esther was awake worrying about Paul.
The remainder of those long travel days now blend into a single whole in my mind: being called awake from the front seat as the sun came up over the Flint Hills—Kansas’s rare multi-dimensional landscape; rubber and steel-tasting ice water slurps from the lid of the Little Brown Jug thermos that Mother kept at her feet; a Rainbow bread and bologna sandwich, slapped together dry from corner grocery stores; my shyly-voiced wish to go THROUGH towns rather than around them so I could scope out sleepy main streets and turreted Victorians on bluffs above rivers; my dejection when the allure of turnpike time kept us on the move; fields of corn breathing their humidity-laden fogs; and if our destination was Iowa, the tang of hog farms.
Then stilted, fuzzy arrivals. First dinners replete with summer riches: corn on the cob and green beans, new potatoes, cherry pie, ice tea. Awkward adjustments to strange bathrooms and someone’s relinquished bedroom; and if we’d gone east or north, nights too hot for covers.
My dad got two weeks of vacation each year and intended to spend them out of McPherson—balancing his automobile angst against Mother’s plans and his desperation to escape work! Our most frequent destinations were Iowa and Indiana and Ohio—relatives from both sides and Mother’s friends from her teaching years. Less often, Colorado, and once Louisiana. And twice, gloriously twice, a rented cabin up the South St. Vrain watershed outside Rocky Mountain National Park. No relatives to accommodate. Only adventures of our own making, the sweetest of which was watching Mother and Daddy delight in the rituals of their youth: stoking a wood burning range; chilling our groceries in a spring box; reading by oil lamps.
We traveled around McPherson, too. Sunday drives along the grid of section line roads. Outings to farm family friends. Treks through subdivisions under construction where I collected electrical outlet punch-hole coins. Drives at dusk in summer when a car ride’s moving air soothed us all, especially with the promise of a baby root beer mug after dark. Nothing exotic or expensive. But still—a life that, even with my dad’s long-journey timidity–welcomed travel. Found it therapeutic, as my mother so briskly put it, “to the get the house stink off.”
So I grew up understanding that travel was a privilege, an adventure. That being away from home, even in sedate, but moderately unfamiliar and uncomfortable settings, had serious worth. My mother’s 1930s typed and bound travel journals lived on our bookshelves, not far from the Lincoln Library and Bartlett’s Quotations. Three Tripping Tramps, Four Friendly Flyers, and Five Flashing Flitters. Detailed and dated, complete with hand-drawn maps and photos, those trip diaries chronicled well-planned but easy, laughter-filled trips that Es (as she was called then) took with friends in her single years. Through the Great Lakes region; up and down East Coast history; into the Midwest “west.” Es’s faithful second-hand Chevy named Dorcas carried Mother and her buddies on all three trips and earned a book dedication in the process.
Introducing Five Flashing Flitters, Mother wrote:
“I have hoped to make this journal a reminder of the many giggles and pranks of a group of carefree people during one summer’s trip. Perhaps it may help to brighten some gloomy day when age prevents us from taking new trips, seeing new beauties, and playing old pranks.” Esther W. Pyle
Somehow, Mother’s spirit, even if a bit muted when I was a child, became the catalyst that’s defined much of the rest of my life. Why not go off to Washington D.C. and be a human guinea pig at the National Institutes of Health; why not apply for that summer job at Gettysburg; why not choose the University of Oregon over the University of Kansas for grad school. Why not spend the night in Washington National Airport to get that half-price fare home. Why not!!
And once employed by the National Park Service, the nation was my oyster. Six weeks at the Grand Canyon. Four on Lake Geneva. Astonishing park familiarization trips i.e. junkets of the kind today’s taxpayers have suspected all along. Public meetings, conferences, training sessions, work groups. I navigated my share of hotels and car rentals and way findings in big cities. Ridden to the rescue of resources in Boston and Yosemite. Banqueted across from Ed Abbey in the craggy landscape of Arizona’s Chiricahua’s.
And then, why not Montana! Well, why not! Not at all married, and likely a little too unafraid! Once in Montana’s Preservation Office, my calendar filled. Site visits, forest supervisor confabs, local historical society fund-raising dinners, tribal culture committee meetings, toe-to-toe negotiations with land managers, EPA engineers, mining company bullies. Helicopter tours. Fixed wing surveillance. My Tercel, a BPA “rig,” or one of a hundred bland state vehicles. I skidded across the icy landscapes of a historic hot springs and executed a 360 spin on top of Bozeman Pass in the snow. I wandered the Missouri Breaks badlands.
In a brief stint with Fish, Wildlife and Parks, I rafted down Belt Creek at Sluice Boxes State Park (and survived an unplanned ejection when the raft hit a boulder), walked through Plenty Coups’ home, watched for rattlers at Makoshika. And the Montana Heritage Project took me to tiny town high school gyms, to buffalo jumps and vision quest sites, and along empty small town main streets that I’d loved years before as a traveling child.
I treasured that work travel all the more because my excursions with Dave rarely varied: to the North Fork of the Flathead and back; to high school Class AA or college Frontier Conference basketball games; and to the occasional speaking engagement. Dave rejected most out-of-state travel as unneeded and onerous.
And so my primary long distance journeys became the Delta route from Helena to Salt Lake to Dallas to Wichita, and on to McPherson through that familiar panorama of osage-orange hedges and wheat. Contributing what care I could for my aging parents. After a decade of magical senior bus tours when someone else was paid to drive, that “gloomy day” had arrived for Paul and Esther with no new trips and scant beauty to brighten their lives.
As I kept vigil in my folks’ darkened living room, I treasured the fat, glossy catalog of images I carried in my brain. A king’s ransom of memories, stage sets, landscapes. Southwestern missions; Spanish coastal forts; the Canyon’s improbable and breathtaking distances; the North Fork’s clear, icy water; the humid hush of East Coast art museums; native burial mounds; summer sun on ghost town sage.
I knew myself to be fortunate beyond measure. Beginning in that now stilled living room, I had absorbed my parents’ appreciation for a world bigger than they knew and their willingness, even shaded by worry, to go out and explore a bit of it for themselves. With us. And fueled by the incredible gods of good luck and timing who had landed me in a career that feasted on travel. ©
*I’m taking “Ticket to Ride” completely out of its Beatles context – shamelessly!
