On the Road

Kerouac style. No, not really Kerouac style. The travel bureaus that hooked him up with lifts, I'm guessing they went the way of the linotype back when governments started passing laws against hitchiking (apparently they'd prefer guys on the bum to risk their necks hopping freights and getting beat up by RR bulls).

Not that my suburban panty-waste ass would be hopping any freights. For starters, I have to be back at work on Monday, and since I have no idea where the hell the trains that pass through my town go, I'd probably end up in Butte, Montanna asking a stranger, where am I? What day is it? Why isn't there a 110 outlet in a boxcar so I can plug in my CPAP?

Plus the trains that come through my town, we're out near the fringe so they're going a good sixty or so. If you did catch on, you're hand might be on the way to Butte, but the bloody stump and the rest of you would be be the tracks, maybe thirty or so feet from where you took the last step you ever remember.

Hobo jungles would make my town more interesting, but I'm addicted to the internet, and even with a laptop, no way could I continue so many of my favorite compulsive behviors as either a hobo or a hitch-hiker.

Oh, and then there's Frau Lobster, Mo & Em. Em whined about the distance we had to walk when I took her on a roughly one mile round trip trek through our town. Mo could probably walk to the South Pole, if you wanted to follow a really zig-zaggy path that stopped at anything you can climb on, jump off, or swim in. But getting her to walk hundreds of miles to a destination of your choosing, it's hard enough to get her to stay in a car long enough to cover those kind of distances. My wife's pretty tough, but we're Americans. We don't walk anywhere but to our car.

A family medical emergency that turned out not to be as severe as we feared is what headed us out of town. I'm not bitching, it was a relief.

Frau Lobster was adopted, and is one of those rare happy tales where she's gotten to know (as an adult) her birth mother. You only have one Mom, and Frau Lobster never confused that issue.

Turns out it's possible to also have a relationship with the person who, at 17, had the courage to refuse a trip out of town for an abortion. Instead, she put her baby up for adoption so she could grow up in a home no 17 year old girl could. Fortuitously, the parent who lobbied so hard for the abortion had already passed by the time contact was made between Frau Lobster and her birth mother, who lives with her second husband on a Nebraska farm. Getting to know them the past eight years or so has been great, and provides my daughters with an extra pair of adoring grandparents (you can't have too many, you know).

And a great-grandparent, the father of my wife's birth mother. He wasn't the one who felt the 'shame' of a teen pregnancy called for a death warrant, and he's as tough as he is sweet. But a few years ago, a bad heart attack nearly took him, and he's been left with congestive heart failure and other health problems. When we packed our bags in a hurry on Friday afternoon, it was looking bad. While we didn't get to spend as much time with the family up there, his condition was massively better than we had any reason to expect.

The guy's got 15% heart capacity left, is nearly blind, and has had to trade a cane for a wheelchair, among other things. His needs have also transcended the farm, where he's been staying, and after the hospital he's settling in to a nursing home eerily reminiscent of the one I remember visiting my own great grandmother in as a kiddo about Em's age. But he remembers Frau Lobster.

As far as the road trip goes, while I don't have anything to share that stacks up to Kerouac's Mexican brothels, it's been interesting. My job on the trip was largely to eat too much, drive, and attempt to wear the kiddos out in the hotel pool. This is difficult when you miss an exit the first night and end up in a motel with no pool, though it did have a pink Cadillac owned by an Elvis impersonator.

We passed 'Elmo's Liquor,' which came as a bit of a shocker. Also a boozeteria called 'Spirits and Awards' that can fill all your beer, wine, liquor and commemorative plaque needs.



First night, we passed up what might have been a bargain, called, no kidding, the 'One Star Motel.' The woman at the Casey's said she wouldn't board a dog there, and we found a Super 8, got the last room, with a crappy fold-out bed to make up for it being just the one king. The girls sanely rejected the fold-out, and spent the night depriving Frau Lobster of sleep in the one king bed while I managed to compress every single disc in my spine, from every angle.

For $15 more, tonight we're in a place with three queen beds, Internet thanks to Ron's loan of a wireless doo-hickey, and a pool.

The pool is critical, because short of hitching Mo to the van and making her pull it, there's just no other way to wear her out enough for sleep on a road trip.

And of course everything takes longer than expected, costs more than was budgeted, and doesn't work quite right but we've made it a fun trip overall. Mo has perfected a whine that is eerily reminiscent of Xena's war-cry (did that show get cancelled or did it just go away when we gave up cable 8 years ago?), and I have proven that while I can go a night or even several nights without a drop of booze, I get junk-sick when offline for only a few hours.

I'll have to do a seperate post to even come close to doing justice to the Prairie Peace Park, which I took the girls to while Frau Lobster took some time with rest homes and other kid unfriendly scenes.

I know, anyone who knows me would be stunned that I would expose my children to blatant peacenik indoctrination, but I'd rather my kiddos come to conclusions by critical thinking than shelter them from ideas. And if it wasn't three inches from I-80 and 93 degrees out, it would have been more fun. The guy who runs it may be a crank in a lot of ways, but he's a sweet old crank. And a retired special ed teacher, turns out, so he took Mo in stride and when she'd finally wreaked enough un-peace in the house that I felt the need to explain that she's autistic, he'd already figured it out.

A lot of his ideas for ending violence and war are naive at best, but it would definitely be a nicer world if there were more guys like Don Lilly. I didn't even have the heart to ask him how he reconciled folk art which attempts to illustrate the dangers of war, especially nuclear war, with folk art which attempts to illustrate the perils of overpopulation.

If he'd been an irritating sort of crank, I would have had to ask him, Wouldn't those 32,000 warheads go a long way towards getting rid of some of the billions of people you don't think the world can support?

This guy was so nice, I couldn't even give him my stock reply to anyone who suggests that population size itself is a problem: If we must thin the herd, after you...