It sat in the driveway, our new-to-us, root beer-colored, 1957 Chevy Nomad station wagon, shiny fins sweeping along the rear quarter panels. Adventure perched on four Firestone tires, with room to sprawl, sleep and make up stories about the mountains, beaches and prairies we’d travel to. I could hardly wait for June!
I come by my wanderlust honestly, passed down through my mother’s genes. In 1926, at the age of 5, she climbed into a Model A touring car with Grandpa and Grandma and set off from Iowa on a thousand miles of exploration: Pike’s Peak, Yellowstone, South Dakota’s Black Hills and Badlands. She was hooked.
That station wagon carried us thousands of miles, making memories that have lasted over half a century. The interstate highway in our part of western Colorado was still a gleam in some civil engineer’s eye in the early 1960s, and two-lane roads wound and wandered across geography. I was the designated navigator and I still love to study maps, imagining what might be around the next bend.
Sometimes we’d pack the car the night before so we could be on the road before the day heated up. I knew I wouldn’t sleep, anticipating another journey. Yet at 4 a.m., Mom would shake me awake and in a sleepy stupor, my two sisters and I would stumble to the car in a cool June morning that smelled of grass and dew and magic.
On our way to visit relatives in California, we rolled out of town as the sun sank westward, to drive through the Utah night with only the AM radio to keep us company. I might ride shotgun while Joyce and Joanne slept on the air mattresses that filled the back end. Mom and I talked, wrapped in the anonymity of midnight, able to say things we would never mention at noon. The circles of headlights illuminated the road and bits of landscape along it. Jackrabbits’ eyes glowed red as campfire embers.
As we motored to Iowa to visit friends, the Nebraska prairie rippled in noon breezes as meadowlarks soared, their song trilling through the open windows. Fields of corn crowded the highway, narrow asphalt the only path leading east.
I thought of my grandfather who, with an older cousin, made a similar trip in a wagon in the early 1890s when Indians still roamed the plains and rattlesnakes lurked. For weeks they followed faint wagon tracks across the prairie to a farm in western Nebraska. Compared to that expedition we had it easy.
The only people who could afford Cadillacs and Buicks and other top-of-the-line autos had air conditioning, but we still kept our cool — most of the time — with windows rolled down.
When the heat got especially vicious (think Las Vegas at 110 degrees), Mom bought bags of ice to rest our bare feet on. Drippy but effective. She developed deeply tanned trucker’s arm from resting on the window frame.
The Nomad served as a camping “cabin,” too. After pulling off onto a side road in Wyoming or Montana, Mom and my sisters clambered into the back to sleep. I usually opted to make my bed on the bench seat in front. Mom was too exhausted to drive on to the next motel, and we kids were growly from being cooped up all day.
These days, my Ford Escape and I travel a thousand miles in a day, hitting 80 mph on interstate highways instead of touring at the modest 55 mph that was the top speed for the Chevy. I flip on the air conditioning or the heater for comfort, and when I’m tired, I stop for a quick lunch at any exit where Subways, Burger Kings and Mickey Ds have staked claims. The radio scans through a multitude of stations, or I stick a weensy computer into the dashboard USB port and listen to music I’ve chosen. My trips may be faster and more comfortable, but they’re infinitely less interesting than those treks across lonesome two-lanes and through small towns long vanished after being bypassed by four-lane freeways.
Though I may no longer slow down and smell the desert wind or hear the larks’ soaring song, in memory I’m still 14, still a rover, still on my way to the next great adventure.