Yes, They’re Alive, Well and Happy--So There

Friends and readers and relatives who are following our family’s trip across America keep e-mailing us with one question: “How are you guys holding up?”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t help but read a few smirking implications into those inquiries:

“Does the RV’s exterior have dents from the kids popcorning around inside?”

“Are they enjoying the scenery, or have the darlings gouged each other’s eyes out?”

“Does Pam have you riding in the holding tank yet?”

I hate to disappoint you all, but we’ve now put more than 4,000 miles on our rented RV’s tires, and the trip is still as smooth as the freshly steamrolled blacktop on I-40 outside Amarillo, Texas.

I have a theory about why and offer a couple of scenes to illustrate.

* Scene 1: We’re three-quarters of the way up a winding, narrow, very steep dirt road in New Mexico when I notice a tree limb that seems eager to knock off the RV’s rooftop air-conditioner.

Trying not to sound like the Titanic’s captain suggesting that swimsuits may be in order, I say: “I need someone up that tree!” A seat belt unclicks and the RV’s side door pops open. Moments later, 10-year-old Emily is wrapped, opossum-like, high on a scraggly juniper branch.

“Go ahead!” she shouts. “You’ve got 5 inches.”

With twigs snapping on the roof, I edge our six-wheel behemoth up the steep road, confident in my daughter’s orders.

* Scene 2: “Someone get in there and stall them,” says Pam.

Ashley, 12, darts into the Federal Express office in Durango, Colo. A moment later, she’s back panting. “They say they’ll give us another five minutes,” she reports.

Then she joins Pam and Emily in sorting film canisters on the RV’s kitchen table as I scribble an address label for our package to The Times, and Robert, 7. . . . Well, he’s napping, but he’s been pitching in too.

It was there in Durango, I think, that Pam and I realized what had happened.

We’d always figured we’d give our kids the chance to “participate” in this summer-long series of stories investigating the state of the American family. But we’d used the word in an effete, 1990s, middle-class, city parent sort of way.

Instead, the participation has turned out to be very real, and the kids are getting a slight taste of the hard work they’ve now witnessed by ranch and farm children in Utah and Missouri, musician kids in Branson, Mo., and New Orleans, and the table-bussing, dishwashing order-taking offspring of restaurateurs just about everywhere.

In abject gratitude for this chance to tour America with my wife and three children, I volunteered for duties beyond just reporting and writing the stories The Times has been running. We’re also shooting our own pictures, audio- and videotaping for The Times’ Web site, and compiling masses of other material, making travel arrangements and driving, driving, driving.

So when I say, “Emmy, we need a shot of that weird trailer over there,” I’m not humoring the child.

And when Pam says, “Ash, go ask the man in the produce department if he has a phone line Daddy can plug his modem into,” it’s not a matter of making Ashley feel grown up.

The trip has gone so well so far, I think, because the kids sense that they’re on a mission, that they genuinely are needed, that “responsibility” isn’t just a big word Mom and Dad keep nagging them to absorb.

*

Not that everything is always entirely dandy. From the start there have been little glitches.

We picked up our 26-foot Phoenix Flyer from the Buena Park offices of Cruise America, the nation’s largest RV rental company. It was the day before our departure, and with Ashley and her pal Jessica aboard, I drove straight to Dockweiler State Beach, where our friends Jim and Debbie had put together an impromptu bon voyage gathering.

It was the sort of evening that makes folks wonder why anyone would leave Los Angeles, especially in the summer. Kids from our Mt. Washington neighborhood and assorted other nooks of Southern California boogie-boarded in the warm water and played pickup baseball on the beach until well after sunset.

They also toured, by the dozens it seemed, our new home away from home. (A month later, beige California beach sand would commingle with the pure white Florida stuff in our sheets and blankets and sleeping bags.)

After the party, we hit the 110 Freeway and dealt for the first time with a new reality: An RV is a big thing. (Note to drivers of conventional-sized vehicles: There’s a good chance that those motor homes you see, wobbling along in the lane beside you, are piloted by people who have no idea what they’re doing!) Because it wouldn’t fit in our steep driveway, we parked the beast down the hill at our friend Julie’s house and launched a massive supply shuttling operation.

Julie didn’t seem to mind since she was up anyway, listening to Desi Arnaz tapes and gluing little plastic fronds to palm trees for a diorama on Lalo Guerro, an 80-year-old whom Julie says is the father of Chicano music. (Yes, this behavior spooked us, but you don’t rock the boat when you’ve got a 26-foot RV parked in someone’s narrow driveway and kids streaming across her lawn at midnight clutching stuffed animals and paper goods.)

Somehow we got everything packed: clothes into tiny closets, pots and pans and food into the compact kitchen, basketball, football, baseball gloves, bats and balls, roller-blades, snorkeling gear, backpacks, beach chairs, a roll-up picnic table and the like into a side bin, and four bikes on a trailer-hitch rack on the back.

As we have driven, odds and ends and newly acquired items (an inflatable surf mat, fishing rods, an ever-growing bag of sopping swimsuits and towels, and, most recently, a sack full of high explosive fireworks picked up in Mississippi) have, as if of their own volition, ended up camped in the RV’s tiny shower.

*

The RV, for its part, performed flawlessly until we were a good three hours out of Los Angeles--when a dashboard light reading “ABS” went on, and we noticed that the carbon monoxide monitor didn’t work, and that the radio can’t pull in a station even when directly under its broadcast tower, and that the mysterious little stickers, stuck all over the vehicle by a previous user (“Snot,” they say), are kind of annoying.

Those and similar inconveniences seem par for such trips, though, and Cruise America has been helpful in fixing things, or convincing us that nothing’s wrong.

So all in all, we’ve adapted quite nicely to our portable habitat, with its interior of pastel wallpaper and oak veneer. Before we left, the girls, in a typical swindle, flimflammed their little brother out of the coolest berth: the big bunk over the cab. But within a week they’d decided that the bed made by folding down the kitchen table was better, and Robert now sleeps happily, all by himself, up above.

Pam and I share the small but comfortable back bedroom. I don’t know why, but I’ve never slept so well--though sometimes, when the kids flop in the night, I sit bolt upright thinking: earthquake.

To keep things running smoothly, we have imposed certain rules and regulations.

Hoping to keep panhandling to a minimum, we allocated each child $10 for each year that he or she has been around, so Ashley got $120 for the trip; Emily, $100; and Robert, $70. This windfall has inspired meticulous accounting as well as entrepreneurial shenanigans (during one long stretch, Ashley stockpiled candy and sold it to her siblings at a good 80% markup).

Mostly, though, they’ve been frugal, as this purchasing account attests.

Robert: one arrowhead from the Grand Canyon ($2); one arrowhead and an explanation of Native American symbols from Mesa Verde, Colo. ($2); four petrified shark teeth from New Mexico ($1); and one box of cowboy Legos from Branson, Mo. ($3.99).

Emily: one silver bracelet with a bird made out of purple rock and two silver roses from Arizona ($5.99); a silver ring with a turquoise heart from New Mexico ($2).

Ashley: a shell turtle from Ft. Pickens National Park in Florida ($2).

(Also, while I was filing a story on a shaky cell phone connection from Mesa Verde, Ashley and Emily chipped in $11 apiece to buy a T-shirt, a bottle of hot sauce and a cool, liquid-filled pen with a moving bus inside for my birthday, and Robert paid $5 to get me an awesome black wooden box with a silver eagle on the lid.)

We are sticking religiously to our “no franchise restaurant meals” rule, even when grumbling stomachs and a pressing schedule make those universally metastasized strips of McDonaldsWendysStuckeysTacoBells gut-wrenchingly seductive. In the long run this rule has paid off, though, having steered us to everything from soft-shell crab sandwiches to barbecue pork platters and, at the Taos Pueblo’s Tiwa Cafe, Indian fry bread tacos with buffalo meat.

*

The most important rule, however, might be called “the RV is our sanctuary, no squabbling or nastiness allowed” rule.

Admittedly, Pam and I snipe at each other over navigational issues from time to time, and briefly the kids will squawk, bicker and tease.

(One mild example: After passing through an Arkansas town called Booger Holler, Ashley launched into a detailed narrative about two parents named Bob and Pam who passed through the Holler years ago and were persuaded by an impoverished clan to adopt their infant Emily, “who despite her new parents’ efforts is never able to break the habits of her old family.”)

But we work hard at this rule and by and large it sticks.

We do have help: Friends contributed an assortment of games, puzzles and similar accouterments that have absorbed our and the kids’ attention for hours of travel. The kids also have been reading like crazy. But the runaway hit of the drive so far has been an unabridged 10-hour audiocassette of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

“Do we have to?” Ashley had whined. “I saw the dumb movie.” But by the time we were an hour into the tape, she’d started leading the kids’ mass pleading to put it on every time the RV’s engine fires up.

As we cut across Missouri, then worked our way along the Mississippi, Mark Twain’s tale of innocence and experience triggered yelps of laughter and brought the passing landscape and history into our lives, stirring mile-consuming conversations about how things have changed for better and worse.

We always look at summer as our time to deprogram the children after a school year packed with relentless pressure from peers who may or may not share our values.

This summer, our 14 weeks of forced togetherness are compelling us to reexamine and redefine those values.

A father looks in a new way at a daughter who proves to be a better navigator than he is. Children who bicycle alone to a campground store for supplies in the morning think differently about what their parents do to keep things on track.

I suspect it’s because we’re so absorbed in this fusion of work, play and learning that the mantra “Are we there yet?” has been mercifully infrequent. The cry heard more often, and one that Pam and I echo, is: “I wish we could stay here longer.”

It sounds corny, but our motivation to keep moving down the road--other than the threat of me being fired--is similar to what must have kept Huck Finn floating down the Mississippi: The chance that there’s even more adventure around the next bend.

Thursday: The Disneyfication of family.

*

ON THE WEB

Visit the Sipchens on the World Wide Web at https:// www.latimes.com/trip/ for maps, journals and sounds from the family’s trip.