Station Wagon Days: A Song of the American Road

Probably we’ll not own another station wagon. You live life once, and those days will never come again.

I say it with the same sharp ache of separation a general must feel for his last command, or an octagenarian for his lost teeth. The blue station wagon was a wonder. It carried us 237,000 miles--more than nine and one-half equatorial circumferences of the Earth.

In memory, that splendid machine represents a time when we had it all.

It was a time when traveling, for most people, meant traveling in America. It was before casual bi-coastalism, before many of us were on intimate terms with crowded international airports. Oh, you heard about the occasional honeymoon in the Bahamas, and some went to Europe at least once.

But most destinations were domestic, and most often that meant piling into the family car. The trunk had been packed the day before with a precision usually reserved for outfitting scientific expeditions.

Our daughters made their first trips in the blue station wagon, plucked small and groaning from their beds in darkness and installed in the back with sleeping bags, pillows and stuffed animals--waking later, like queens of the Nile, the road and adventure unrolling ahead.

The blue wagon was with us 10 years later, when the younger one came of age to begin driving. On the afternoon of her first tutorial, she left part of its chrome trim from the right-hand side attached to a neighbor’s tree.

Our family’s earliest destination was a cabin in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

Interstate 70 traverses the eternity of Kansas straight as a carpenter’s chalk line. If you travel it with small children--restless and territorial in their nest behind--you become an authority on roadside rest areas, small-town parks and arcane tourist attractions: The world’s largest ball of twine, the world’s deepest hand-dug well, the billboards that issue unpunctuated invitations to See the World’s Largest Prairie Dog Turn Right at this Exit or See the Live Rattlesnakes Pet Baby Pigs.

Kansas is profligate in its offering of wonders.

Then, in the westernmost part of the state, the land inclines gently upward. A ragged blue shadow appears astride the road, resolving after several hours into a rank of peaks with shadowed clefts between.

No matter how many times we went--10 summers, it was, at least--that first view of the Front Range always took our flatlanders’ breath. Coming late to our destination, the mountainside cabin, we would lay a fire and sit together in its light, promising that whatever else, we would not count the days.

Another favorite place was a different cabin, older, built of logs, a long day’s drive to the north in Minnesota, fronting on the sparkle of a lake the glacier carved. Parts of my own boyhood had been spent at the edge of that same water.

The end-of-summer days there are uneven, undecided. One night will be chilly almost to frosting. Sharp-combed waves can be heard chopping at the shore. The sky spills a biting spit of rain, and you are sure that you will wake to raw November. Then morning comes still and sunny, with a hum of fishermen’s motors slicing the pewter of the lake toward the reed beds. And noon is warm as May again.

I loved to step outside the cabin at night, watching the aurora borealis pulse across the sky exactly as I had first seen it more than 40 years before. And then go back in, feet wet, chilled through in August, and look at my daughters breathing easily, untroubled, in their dreams. Childhood, like the northern summer, is of such a sweetness that surely it was made to last. You would think that--would wish it, and sometimes almost believe it.

In middle age--with two cracked piston rings and trailing a plume of blue--the station wagon extended its range. Just off the Florida coast, on the Gulf side, there is an island called Captiva upon whose shores are flung up seashells of a hundred kinds, spiral egg cases of the whelk, broken pieces of wooden boats and much other glorious wrack, including, sometimes, blown-glass floats from the nets of Japanese fishermen.

What magic current bore the floats eastward across the isthmus, or how, in their delicacy, they survived so great a passage, I’ve never understood. But occasionally, after a night of storm, they were found along the beach of Captiva in fair numbers.

That was our March place, during spring holidays of our daughters’ school years. Most people fly to Florida, but the blue wagon was our wings. The truth is, I preferred to drive. I loved setting out on a bitter plains-edge morning in the shank of winter, often with the ground under a cover of snow, and following the lines of the map southward to another, gentler season.

We traveled fast, too. On vacation, I always was unsatisfied by any day of travel that did not end with the parched throat and bone-weariness of a forced march. Intermediate points never interested me. My eye was fixed on destinations. Each daybreak found us already briskly in motion. Except for stops for gasoline and carry-out boxes of greasy victuals, I did not mean for any of my passengers to set foot on earth again until the moon had ascended far up in the east and cries of lamentation had risen loudly in the rear seat and my own eyes had glassed over.

Finding a room at nearly midnight along a major tourist route in peak season takes patience and some luck. Our luck ran most often to smallish motor courts operated by families of immigrants from India, located next to 24-hour restaurants with names like EAT and TRUCKERS WELCOME. There, under the naked bulb, while wife and children sank into the sleep of exhaustion, I would pore over the map and lay plans for the next day’s rampage across several states.

On those drives to Florida, scenery meant almost nothing. The Smoky Mountains, in full darkness, registered as a slight stuffiness in the ears. My daughters’ impressions of the antebellum South had mainly to do with the greater number and size of bugs striking the windshield.

Not all people travel that way, I know. But we did, and obviously we were not alone. On one of our last Florida vacations, we stopped in late afternoon at a service station to fuel the wagon and ask advice on how to bypass the next city, avoiding the hazard of being distracted and delayed by some interesting sight to see.

A small boy was sitting on a chair in the station’s office--a boy of 12 years or so, looking long-faced and bewildered. The lad was from somewhere in Illinois, the attendant said. His parents had stopped for gas. He had gone to use the restroom. His parents had finished fueling the car and had driven on without him. That had been 30 minutes or more ago. When the parents noticed he was missing, presumably they would come back. That is, if they could remember where they’d misplaced him.

Now there was a family whose whole attention was concentrated, as mine always has been, on the real purpose of any journey, which is to click off the miles and get to the end of it.

That encounter made a terrific impression on my daughters. They knew my nature behind the wheel. Very close together, very wide awake, they sat in the back seat. They did not ask the possibilities for dinner. They did not inquire when we might call the night’s halt --how soon, or in what town. And they did not speak of any need for comfort stops. Above all, not of those. However long until bed, they did not mean to leave the car again.

The final great journey of the blue wagon was again in summer--to the house of friends, on a lake in upper Michigan--the last month before our younger daughter went off to college.

The machine’s health was fragile. The automatic transmission had begun slipping badly. Some days it could not be driven in reverse at all. Reverse gear is something you may not think about a lot, but I can tell you it complicates a 700-mile trip when the only place you can park is on a street corner.

That was the end. We made it home, put our daughter on a plane to the place of her improvement, and traded the wagon in on a sedan. Dollars for Anything That Moves, said the dealer’s ad. We gave him reason to regret it. Our daughter’s shock, when we told her the news by phone, could not have been greater if we’d announced we’d eaten the family dog. That last summer, she’d considered the car hers. “It was part of me,” she said.

That was three years ago. A few months afterward we saw it being driven by an older man, perfectly recognizable by its distinctive dents, still missing its right-side chrome, but waxed to a blinding shine and clearly loved. Then, just last week, amazingly, we met it yet again. That same evening, our daughter called us from Paris where she is spending a student year. We reported the latest sighting, and her voice came fierce and unforgiving from an ocean and half a continent away.

“I’m going to save my money, and someday I’ll buy it back,” she declared. “It’s my life ambition.”

And why not. She means to be a poet. That car carried us through all our best years together. It must remember almost everything a poet needs to know.