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Brooks Peterson
Brooks Peterson's column is published Mondays. Brooks also sits on the Caller-Times editorial board and can be contacted at petersonb@caller.com
Monday, September 11, 2000
Each road trip blends magic and tedium
Before launch, I should advise you that these ramblings will . . . well . . . ramble more than usual, if that's possible.
I have, you see, just returned from my first road trip in one heck of a long time. This was not one of your "Animal House"-style road trips, featuring non-stop debauchery, multiple wrong turns and narrowly averted catastrophe. Nothing like that. What it was, was transporting my firstborn, the college man, and his gear (more on that later) back to Ann Arbor for his sophomore year.
Being a family that reveres tradition, we of course saw to it that one of our oldest and most hallowed traditions was observed: Virtually no preparation until the day before departure - no, make that the evening before departure. My, what fun we had. It's things like this that bring a family together.
The next day, thoroughly fatigued before we had ever begun, we rolled out onto the tarmac, pointed the nose north and proceeded to amass a collection of impressions, insights and experiences that ran more or less as follows:
An August road trip drives home with brutal force the profound debt of gratitude that we owe to Mr. Carrier. A 1,500-mile trip can still be a bit of a grind. Sans A/C, however, it is an ordeal - pitting parents pitted against kids, kids against each other, dogs against . . . you get the picture.
And while we're at it, how about a vote of thanks to Dwight D. Eisenhower? Among other things, Ike was the driving force behind the development of the Interstate highway network. At the time the notion of a vast network of highways was floated, the justification was military preparedness. As it worked out, happily, the big beneficiaries are those of us who now and again pile into our cars to get to a specific place in a timely fashion.
True, Interstate motoring can be deadly dull - enlivened, at night, by interludes of sheer terror when you find yourself hurtling into the void with mammoth, soot-belching 18-wheelers beside you, behind you and in front of you - but when you need the Interstate, you need it.
A road trip can resolve mysteries. Years ago, on such a trip, I bedded down for the night in Sikeston, Mo., a pleasant enough little place just off the Interstate. I had noticed a couple of billboards along the way touting Lambert's Café, "home of throwed rolls." I was tempted to check it out, but I gave it a pass. For years, I've wondered:_"throwed rolls": What's that all about?
This trip took me back to Sikeston, and I prevailed on the college man to accompany me to Lambert's, a folksy place not dissimilar to the omnipresent Cracker Bar-rels, where all was finally made clear to me. "Throwed rolls" are, you see . . .
Nah - wouldn't be fair to ruin the surprise for you. Check it out the next time you're up Missouri way.
To paraphrase Tolstoy, every well-organized trip is well-organized in the same way. Every haphazard trip is haphazard in its own special way. In our case, the trek to Ann Arbor was made memorable by the fact that at each stop we had to offload the computer and the VDT, placing them gently in a favored place in the motel room sort of like . . . well, like tribal totems, I guess. Why were we toting these totems? Because the college man had shipped them home last spring on his return. Why did he do that, you ask? Good question.
Finally, every road trip produces at least one vignette or vision that somehow grabs your consciousness and just won't let go. In this case, it was an almost surreal tableau somewhere in . . . Arkansas? One of those little states. Anyway, there we were cruising along at the legal limit, and I spied, parked on the roadside, an immaculate '59 Cadillac coupe, towering fins and all - an Eldorado, I suspect, from the chrome gracing its voluptuous lines - with the driver reclining on a gentle slope in the shade of a tree, his arms locked behind his head, staring dreamily into the distance. There was no indication the car was experiencing mechanical distress: Here you simply had a guy taking time out even as the world rushed headlong by him.
We could all use a little of that.
Happy motoring.
Brooks Peterson
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