Roadtrip Through Hell

Roadtrip Through Hell
I used to think my dad had cut class for the entire week of high school when they studied Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath”, but it turns out my dad graduated seven years before old John penned his masterpiece. Nonetheless, I don’t believe my dad ever read that missive about the travails of crossing the Sonoran Desert because, in 1967, we did just that.
Three years earlier, my dad had purchased a brand spanking new 1964 Chevy step-side pickup with full length bed and heavy-duty overload coil springs on the rear axle. He did this in anticipation of purchasing the largest drop-in camper made, with a three-foot overhang at the rear of the truck and a full queen-size sleeping loft that extended forward over the truck’s cab.
Essentially, the camper was a flimsy aluminum box that bolted through the truck’s wooden bed with four (count ‘em, four) one-inch carriage bolts. The camper sported the aerodynamics and safety features of a giant cardboard box. To this day I don’t understand how I avoided a grizzly death amidst a debris field of splintered plywood and aluminum along side an Arizona highway.
Inside, the camper sported a kitchen sink with pump handle that accessed a twenty-gallon water tank, a propane gas cook-top, a “refrigerator” that was really an ice box cooled by a ten-pound block of frozen water, the afore-mentioned queen-sized bed, and two couches which did double duty as benches for the removable dining table by day, and exceedingly uncomfortable beds at night.
What both that old truck and the camper lacked was air-conditioning — not a minor oversight when traversing the Sonoran landscape in August. What the truck also lacked was an engine worthy of the load. While the suspension was adequate for a giant camper, the shyster who sold my dad that truck had convinced him to save money by ordering the small six-cylinder engine rather than the more adequate v-eight.
If you remember “The Grapes of Wrath”, you’ll remember the Joad family stopped, not infrequently, to deal with automotive issues. So did we.
My mother, father, older brother, and I left Garland early one morning around the first of August. Before we even reached Fort Worth, my older brother and I (riding in the death-trap of a camper) had stripped down to our shorts because of the heat. Did you ever try laying on a vinyl cushion whilst sweating from every pore of your shirtless body? If the sweat beneath your back dries, you can actually become glued to the vinyl like an upside down turtle.
Somewhere in the hideous heat of West Texas, we paused at a rest stop for lunch and to let the tiny truck engine cool down. On the sandy ground only feet from the picnic table, my dad pointed out the mesmerizing pattern left by a sidewinder rattle snake earlier that day.
These days, I’d snap a dozen photos of that snake’s trail from every angle but back then I only had a Kodak Brownie camera which was not really a working camera at all, but rather the hollowed-out box of a broken camera containing close to a hundred Black Cat firecrackers I intended to smuggle into California where they were forbidden. I’m not sure what my motivation was other than getting away with something I wasn’t supposed to be doing.
We spent the night in the camper a few hundred miles further down the road and even with all the windows open, the heat was still stifling. The next morning, we got an early start and had breakfast in the famous town of El Paso that I’d read about in school. Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be just another town full of asphalt streets lined with dirty cars and old buildings. What had Marty Robbins been talking about? There wasn’t a single old-West gunslinger in sight. At least the pancakes were good.
Later that day, we arrived at Carlsbad Caverns, one of the much-touted attractions of the trip. It included a miserably long walk through a dark and damp underground chamber. My dad, having a prosthetic leg, got to skip the hike. I pitied and resented him at the same time. Call me a geo-bigot but all stalagmites and stalactites look alike to me, only with the points on opposite ends. When the tour guide mentioned that they eventually grow together and merge, the kid in line behind me said it looked like they were having sex. His mother whacked him hard on the ear. I decided to forego asking the park ranger if that was true.
What seemed like a bazillion years later, we reached the California border. Guess what. They had a fence, yeah, a big frigging fence that stretched away from the highway in both directions. I guess it was to keep out illegal Texans. Anyways, we had to stop and wait forever in that heat until a stern-looking cop entered our camper and confiscated all our apples, oranges and bananas. He said it was to keep fruit flies out of their state but twenty miles down the road, we stopped at a gas station which was selling (you guessed it) apples, oranges, and bananas — probably confiscated from someone just a few cars ahead of us in line.
The good news was that the naïve California Highway Patrolman never glanced twice at my fake Brownie camera full of contraband. After only three more stops to let “the little engine who almost couldn’t” cool off, we made it over the mountain pass and into the Golden State. This was in the old days before the whole state got toasted by forest fires and inhabited by hobos, but it still looked less appealing than the television commercials had made it seem
The singular redeeming aspect of the trip was our visit to Huntington Beach. Forget that inspiring vista of the massive Pacific Ocean; for a twelve-year-old boy who had only experienced conservatively clad girls at the neighborhood pool, those California girls sported some thought-provoking swimwear.
What I Learned
So, back up a few days to that great tourist-laden hole in the ground. At one point during our endless trek through Carlsbad Caverns, the guide instructed everyone in our group to sit down on the rock wall separating the walkway from those priceless stalag-whatevers. Then, he turned off the lights — all of them — and it got blacker than black. Apart from the whimpering of the dumb-ass kid who had gotten his ears boxed, I could only hear the quiet rustling of clothes as people waved their hands back and forth in front of their faces. No matter how far away or how close up you passed your hand, it could not be seen, at all.
Even sixty years later, I can clearly recall that eerie five minutes deep inside Carlsbad Caverns when I realized how tiny we are in the universe and how little we truly know of it. When the lights are on and we’re trudging down the well-worn concrete path, we feel pretty secure — even secure enough to express flippant attitudes towards the creation that surrounds us. But get one fleeting glimpse of how vast our intellectual darkness really is, and the hairs on the back of your neck come alive.
Let’s talk. I’d really like to hear what you have to say, and it might even give me something to write about. Email me at guy@lawsoncomm.com.
I’ll buy you coffee and we can compare notes. I promise not to steal your ideas without permission.
We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
― John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America

Mysteries of the Microscopic World
— Bruce E. Fleury
Another interesting set of lectures from the Great Courses series. This guy delves into everything from viruses to bacteria and all sorts of other stuff you failed to pay attention to in high school and college.
A meeting of great minds who think alike