Summer
Vacations
Kathy
Rhodes
May
days are going by fast now, headed straight for free, frolicking
summer. The anticipation—shorts and bare feet and swimsuits
and flip flops and the possibilities of things never before experienced—they
all make me think of the summer vacations of my younger days.
Back
then, before all the interstates were built, vacations meant travel
on two-lane highways that went through the wide-open countryside,
as well as every small town, burg, and hamlet, with red lights
between every city block. It was a slower time, and it was not
only about the destination, but also about the trip to get there.
It took forever to get anywhere, but travelers got to sample the
flavor of America. I could look out my car window at downtown
storefront displays and see mannequins in high fashion and then
meet eye-to-eye with their real life counterparts walking down
Main Street. I could watch tumbleweed blowing down a weathered
wooden sidewalk in a dusty Texas panhandle ghost town. I could
get wrapped up in the big, lonely western sky at sunset, so permeating
that it cut to my soul and brought tears to my eyes. "I'm
going to leave ole Texas now..." I sang the cowman’s
lament with chill bumps popping up on my arms. “I’ll
take my horse, I’ll take my rope, and hit the trail upon
a lope. Say adios to the Alamo and turn my head toward Mexico.”
When
I was a little girl, summer vacations meant long road trips. My
little sister would always turn around and look out the back window
and say, "I can't see my house any more." It was a little
unsettling for her. For travel, Mama always bought us new coloring
books and crayons, a new toy, and she packed blankets and pillows
for when we left early and my sister and I slept in the back seat.
I always wanted the floor, wanted to be part of the hum and motion
of the car. I remember asking Dad, “We don’t have a
hole in the muffler, do we?” I’d heard people died from
holes in the muffler. But when it was daylight, I was into the
travel experience. I didn't want to sleep; I wanted to soak in
every second. I loved to look out the window and watch the world
passing me—to observe every house of every income level and
wonder about the lives of the people who lived there, to note
every muddy pond and river and bridge and every dirt road meandering
from the main road and wonder what was at the end of it.
I
walked in the Gulf waters and watched the shrimp boats come in
and collected shells and listened to the ocean inside them. I
rode the coastal highway from Houston to New Orleans and pulled
over on the beach where the salty water rubbed against it, for
a picnic of olive loaf sandwiches and salty chips and ice cold
Coca Colas from the red Coke chest that went along with us. I
walked deep into the cold caves of Kentucky, saw seven states
from a mountaintop in Chattanooga, rode the backroads of Appalachia,
ate berry pie in the Ozarks, slept in an ocean breeze on the North
Carolina coast, and eyed with wonder the horses in the bluegrass
country and begged relentlessly for a mint julep at the age of
ten because I liked the sound of the words.
My
family stayed in numerous motor inns along our routes, and I made
friends all along the way, especially when I was a teenager. An
evening by the pool at a Holiday Inn in Dallas with a boy from
Kansas. An afternoon at a neighborhood pool in Cincinnati, hanging
out with Pete Rose’s little brother and other kids who begged
to hear my southern accent. Meeting a girl from Waco, who became
my pen pal and whose beautiful handwriting I learned to emulate,
even to this very day. Kisses on a cold August morning in the
mountains of New Mexico, kisses that would stay with me the rest
of my life. Yes, the world was passing my window, and I got to
stop now and then and join hands with people from other places.
“It
was when I came to see it was I who was passing that my
self-centered childhood was over. But it was not until I began
to write, as I seriously did only when I reached my twenties,
that I found the world out there revealing, because memory had
become attached to seeing, love had added itself to discovery,
and because I recognized in my own continuing longing to keep
going, the need I carried inside myself to know—the apprehension,
first, and then the passion, to connect myself to it. Through
travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through
travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part
of it. This is, of course, simply saying that the outside world
is the vital component of my inner life. My work, in the terms
in which I see it, is as dearly matched to the world as its secret
sharer. My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction
from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my
living world.” [Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings]
A
few years ago my husband and I took a short trip to Kentucky on
the backroads. We enjoyed barns and horses, we stopped in a small
town’s fountain drug store and had an old-fashioned milk
shake, we visited a Shaker village, we dined in downtown Bowling
Green. But most of all I remember the open tobacco fields in the
country. We were the only car on the road, and it was like someone
had taken a tool and burned out a narrow strip through the fields.
Tobacco rose straight up like walls at the edge of roadway. And
there we were, curving through it. It was breathtaking. You don’t
get to do that on the interstate.
It
reminds me of a trip I took alone to southern Mississippi just
a few weeks after Nine Eleven, a time when every household in
America, it seemed, was flying the flag. I exited the interstate
and cut through the backroads of rural Alabama through dire poverty
and big logging trucks. One ramshackle cypress farmhouse had nailed
to a tree close to the road their own version of the flag—a
worn wooden piece of scrap board, chipped away at the edges, with
some white and red handpainted stripes and some white stars splashed
on blue. It wasn’t an artistic rendering, but it got to me
and made me cry. I shall never forget.
The
land. The people. I’m part of it. It’s part of me—every
trip I took, every summer vacation, every image burned into my
memory.
©
Kathy Rhodes