My husband calls Greyhound Bus Lines. He can’t get through. Two days before Christmas, everyone’s calling.
I’m awake most of the night watching soundless images on the television screen.
The next day, about noon, my husband finally reaches a person at Greyhound. No bus station in Lanett. We have to go to Opelika, a half hour away. I don’t ask my husband how long it’d take to walk carrying presents, frilly dress, etc. Assuming we even get to Opelika, it’s an eighteen-hour bus trip to Houston, with two transfers. Plus, there’s still Aunt Beulah waiting for us in Pensacola. Opelika to Pensacola is ten hours, one transfer. Pensacola to Houston is another eleven hours with one transfer.
By car or camper, which we no longer have, it would be only an eleven-hour drive, total.
I don’t mention it to my husband but, given the options, I’d prefer to stay in the Super 8 in Lanett, Alabama, for the rest of my life.
As the Crow Flies
“Let’s see if we can rent a car,” I say.
We both glance out the motel window. Across the street is a field of winter grass. No Avis or Hertz. I look up car rentals in the phone book. After calling an 800 number, I learn that the closest car rental is at the airport in Columbus, Georgia. Forty-six miles away, about an hour on US 27 north, Martha Berry Highway. In other words, retrace our footsteps. Or tire tracks.
It takes another night and most of a day before we locate a taxi willing to drive us to Columbus. For a small fortune. On the way out of town we pass the garage, the orange camper hunkered in the lot.
German Engineering
A few years earlier, when we live in Missouri, where my husband teaches at that Southern Baptist college, he arranges for a Holocaust survivor to speak to a class of students. The temperature hovers near zero on the appointed day. Should he pick up the Holocaust survivor in the camper or the bug? The heating and defrost system work about as well in each, but he figures he might as well drive the camper since it’s roomier. On the return forty-five-minute trip, the Holocaust survivor begins to shiver. My husband apologizes for the lack of heat. The survivor asks if there’s a box in the car. A box? My husband pulls over to the side of the road and, in fact, finds a corrugated box in the back. The survivor props his feet on top of it. He says he learned in a concentration camp that you’re less likely to get frostbite if there’s space between your feet and the ground.
Volksmarch
Our first October in Rome, we plan a day trip in the camper to Helen, Georgia. We follow US 53 to Dalton, meandering through the Chattahoochee National Forest to Dahlonega, before cruising north on US 75 into a 1970s re-creation of a Bavarian mountain village. Oktoberfest is in full swing. We drive amid traffic and crowds along cobblestone streets until we find a parking spot close to the Chattahoochee River. We wander boutiques and specialty shops selling beer steins, candles, and cuckoo clocks. During the rest of the year, Helen boasts winefests, Alpenfests, all-American Fourth of July fireworks, as well as Bavarian Nights of Summer.
Sun drills the north Georgia air. I wear a short-sleeve t-shirt and sandals, which balance precariously on the uneven cobblestones. After an hour of tramping through hoards of sullen children and beer-crazed parents, I’m ready to go home. But first we decide to eat. Restaurants sell schnitzel, sauerbraten, and sausages. Others offer country ham, grits, biscuits and gravy. Street vendors hawk funnel cakes and homemade fudge. I buy a Caesar salad, my husband a brat dripping grease. We carry the boxes of food back to the camper, open the sliding door, and sit on the cushioned seats in the back, our food on the table. I prop my feet on the camper stool, watching the Chattahoochee flowing south to Atlanta.
After eating, we buckle ourselves into our seats. My husband turns the key in the ignition. It starts right up. I’m surprised, having convinced myself the camper would develop some new ailment in order to stay in this German village, no matter how faux.
We Have a Problem
We rent a gold Plymouth at the Columbus, Georgia, airport and drive south to the Pensacola trailer park and Aunt Beulah. Originally, we planned to spend the night, but now we’re running late. We can’t miss the wedding, so we pack Beulah and her suitcases into the backseat before heading west to Houston . . . Houston, which floods during rainstorms since it’s built at about sea level with too much asphalt and concrete.
During the time I live there, after leaving Galveston, the starter on my Volkswagen, placed beneath the engine (an engineering breakthrough that no mechanic can explain), floods out. Three times. All three times I have to replace the starter box.
One flood is so severe that, glancing out the window of my small house, I watch my Volkswagen float down the street.
I run through near-hurricane conditions to rescue it.
I Spy
My husband, Aunt Beulah, and I partially follow the route a boyfriend and I once took, years ago, in his tan Volkswagen camper. Then we drove cross-country from Washington DC to California before traveling the Pacific Coast Highway north to Portland. Where the Volkswagen stripped its gears. Where we lost second, third, and fourth. Where we were stranded for several days waiting for a mechanic to fix it.
Later, following the northern route back to Washington DC, somewhere east of South Dakota, after visiting Mount Rushmore, I got food poisoning from eating at a Stuckey’s. I vomited for more than three hundred miles in the rear seat of the camper.
Now, for eight hours, from Pensacola through muggy Alabama, stifling Mississippi, humid Louisiana, and into east Texas, Aunt Beulah points at swamps out the window and says, “I bet there’s a lot of cottonmouths in there.”
Superbug to the Rescue
Once, when I fly back to Georgia from visiting friends, my husband plans to pick me up at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport. The plane lands a little after eight o’clock at night, but no husband at the gate. No husband at baggage claim. I try calling from a pay phone. No answer. We recently purchased a Ford Escort station wagon to replace the camper (foreshadowing here), the first new car for either of us, so it can’t be car problems. It is, however, storming, so I imagine a collision or accident on a slick I-75.
I sit in baggage claim until two o’clock in the morning, virtually alone in the airport. The custodians sweep the floor around me.
My husband finally rushes in. He’d made it halfway to Atlanta, over an hour away, when the Ford developed (we later find out) vapor lock. He left it on the side of the road, walked to a gas station, had it towed, called friends who picked him up and brought him back home to get another car. We owned three.
He decided to try the yellow Opel next, figuring it’d be more reliable than my Volkswagen. The secondhand Opel was a dubious present from my parents. It had to undergo a complicated and elaborate ritual—almost an exorcism—in order to start the engine in such a way that it wouldn’t stall out: pump the gas five times, wait a full sixty seconds, pump the gas ten times, wait exactly three minutes, turn the key with your foot off the gas, allow the engine to idle precisely four and a half minutes, slowly, slowly ease the automatic stick from neutral to drive. Put your foot on the accelerator.
My husband must have either missed or rushed through one of the steps. Or, since it lacked a working gas gauge, perhaps it ran out of gas. In any event, a mile from home it stalled out on the side of the road.
He walked home and got the Volkswagen bug. Which made it to Hartsfield Airport without a hitch.
Taking It and Leaving It
After the wedding and Christmas, we leave the aunt in Houston and drive the Plymouth back to Lanett. It feels as if we’re returning to the scene of a crime. The mechanic, at whose place the camper has taken up residence since the breakdown, says it’ll cost at least a thousand dollars to fix. Probably more. My husband is tempted but says he’ll think about it. He asks the mechanic if he’ll consider purchasing the camper as is, for parts? Or, of course, the mechanic could fix it and sell it, recoup his investment. I’m mum about the dual carburetors. Hubcaps. Windshield wipers, etc.
We return to Rome in the Plymouth, while everyone considers options. We pick up my Volkswagen, and I follow my husband back to the Columbus airport to return the rental car. Then we cruise over to Lanett again. The mechanic says he’ll give us $200. We say we’ll take it. No hesitation.
We clean out the rest of our stuff from the camper. Even though, officially, the stool belongs with the camper, my husband takes it, a souvenir. He majestically places it in the backseat of the bug.
Of My Own Accord
I secure my first teaching job, earning enough to buy a new car: a Honda. I sell my Volkswagen.
The man who purchases it is overjoyed beyond all reason. After all, the plastic seats are cracked with straw-like stuffing leaking out. At some point, the Blaupunkt was stolen. The left-side molding is a shinier shade of green paint than the rest of the car, a result of a repair job following a minor accident during one of the Houston floods. The right-side molding, from another mishap, remains bashed in, never repaired. The windshield has a small, spiderweb crack. The heater has never worked.
But its original hubcaps shine like only slightly dented moons.
After my parents die, we inherit their Toyota Corolla. We sell the Opel to a woman who wants it solely because her fondest memory of adolescence is driving in her father’s Opel. I write out detailed instructions on how to start the engine. We sell the Ford Escort station wagon as well since, shortly after we purchased it, a drunk driver rear-ended us. Despite five or six trips to the Ford dealership, the rear window still leaks. Whenever it rains, water drips in around the rubber gaskets, soaking the carpet. The ongoing vapor lock is also problematic.
At the same time that we inherit the Toyota and sell the other cars, we buy our first house. It’s a split-level ranch with a two-stall garage and automatic door opener in the suburbs of Rome. The spotless, well-ordered house, along with the Honda and Toyota, are all clean, reliable, watertight, dependable. So we soon grow bored without the drama and distraction of a monthly breakdown or crisis. How else to explain why, for my husband’s birthday (using money that was a gift from my parents), I buy him a car he covets. It’s a white 1963 Ford Galaxie convertible with Rangoon-red leather seats and a 352-cubic-inch engine. His fondest memory of childhood is working on his family’s Galaxie with his father.
This Galaxie, which he happened to notice in a used-car lot, is not in mint condition, which, of course, is the appeal. He wants to restore it. He, sometimes accompanied by me, scours salvage yards for replacement parts: grills, bumpers, a toggle switch to activate the hydraulic pump that raises and lowers the convertible top. Followed by a new hydraulic pump itself. Then, of course, the car requires a new white canvas top to go with the toggle switch and pump. Soon one stall of our garage resembles a salvage yard strewn with bumpers, metal molding, lug nuts, levers, spark plugs, cables, knobs. My husband purchases a subscription to Hemmings Motor News to search for additional parts. After about a year, he’s replaced over 60 percent of the engine and body. He proudly enters it in classic-car shows, even wins trophies, which he displays on the mantel. By the time we move to Michigan from Georgia, it’s his prized possession. Afraid something might happen to it during the move, he hires a carrier that specializes in classic cars. They ferry the Galaxie in an enclosed van so it won’t be exposed to the elements—or rude, oncoming cars.
My husband and I are in Michigan only about a year before we divorce. We own three cars to divide between us. We decide I’ll keep the Honda, he the Toyota. I also request the Galaxie. I don’t know why. After all, I bought it for him as a present. He’s restored it. I wouldn’t be able to repair it when parts need replacing. Besides, it’s his car.
Maybe I only want to spite him, since I know how much he treasures it. He spends time lovingly restoring it, more time than he ever spent with me (my italics).
I finally concede it to him, in the end.
After he moves out, I remain in the Victorian house we purchased together. One day, a year or so after he leaves, I discover the pumpkin-colored camper stool in the basement. It glows like warm autumn sunlight amid the dark disorder of boxes, cobwebs, broken furniture, discarded books, old computers, and long-forgotten knickknacks. I wonder if he meant to leave this questionable memento. I sit on the stool. The metal legs wobble on the brick floor as if on uneven cobblestones, in a tourist town you drive hours to reach, just to experience history whose worst moments have been so carefully expunged.
Almond Butter in the Ruints
Meteorologists predict a blizzard for March 12. Everyone in Rome, Georgia, scurries to Kroger and Piggly Wiggly to stockpile bottled water, flashlight batteries, food staples—everyone, that is, except me. I ignore all warnings. I pooh-pooh the approaching storm. The entire state, after all, virtually shuts down if so much as two snowflakes drift from the sky. Surely this is another false alarm. Initially, when I moved here from Missouri, I took winter storm warnings seriously. Now I go about my business, anticipating, at most, one-eighth of an inch of snow. Besides, my husband, my cat Quizzle, and I recently moved into our sturdy brick ranch house after living in that log cabin on campus for years. Now we’re snug and secure in our new home.
Starting around midnight, we lie awake in bed. Thunder cracks. Lightning flashes. The ground shakes with the thud of loblolly pines crashing in our yard. The trees, high as telephone poles, are unable to withstand severe winds because of their shallow root system.
“We should go to the basement,” my husband says. He worries a tree will crash onto our roof.
“But in the basement both the roof and the first floor could fall on us,” I say, comfortable beneath the quilt.
Quizzle, usually a calm and fearless cat, hunkers between us in bed.
The next morning we stare out the glass sliders in the kitchen. About seven loblollies, huge root bulbs exposed, crisscross the snowy yard. Luckily, all crashed to the ground away from the house, though they severed power and phone lines.
We’re without heat and electricity. No working flashlights. No phone. No logs to burn in the fireplace. The South, lacking snow-removal equipment, can’t plow streets, now several feet deep in snow. We don’t even own a snow shovel. Plus, we’re probably the only people in the state out of food.
We sit at the kitchen table bundled in jackets and caps eating almond butter on crackers for breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. When we run out of crackers, we dip a teaspoon into the jar and lick. I don’t remember whether I bought the almond butter or whether it was a present, but it has languished on various shelves for years, continuously moved from house to house, refrigerator to refrigerator. Not that I’m much of a cook—a fact that contributes to our present lack of food—but I’ve never used, let alone seen, a recipe that actually calls for almond butter. Yet since it’s relatively expensive, and packaged in such a cute jar, I’ve never thrown it away.
Our only means of communication is a shortwave radio belonging to my husband. Miraculously, it has a set of working batteries.
Hour after hour, Romans who still have phone service call the radio station. They share their storm emergencies, anecdotes, and general feelings. Can anyone provide an elderly woman with a ride to Floyd County Hospital? Can anyone stop the snow and clear the streets for a young woman supposed to get married today? Can anyone airlift in a prescription of Prozac? Can anyone obtain kerosene for a heater for someone’s grandmother?
Most calls concern food stockpiled in refrigerators and freezers. Now, lacking electricity, it’s being ruined . . . or, as it sounds to my Northern-Yankee ears, “ruint.” Chickens, roasts, deer and rabbit meat, ice cream, sweet potato pies. All ruint.
“How can food go bad when their houses are cold as a freezer?” I ask.
My husband glares at me since I convinced him the storm wouldn’t be, well, a storm. He’d suggested we purchase supplies like firewood or kerosene or, at least, groceries.
“But five hundred years!” We’d just heard on the radio that this type of freak storm occurs o
nly once every half millennium. “Plus, it’s March,” I add. “What are the odds?”
In between reports of ruint food, we learn that in this storm near-hurricane-force winds gusted over fifty-five miles per hour. It slammed most of the East Coast as far south as Cuba. A disorganized area of low pressure that formed in the Gulf of Mexico merged with an arctic high-pressure system in the midwestern Great Plains. Both swarmed into the midlatitudes because of an unusually steep southward jet stream. In Georgia temperatures plummeted from sixty-five degrees to the teens in a matter of hours. Thundersnow, it’s called on the radio. A cyclonic blizzard. A Nor’easter.
I just bought twenty-five dollars of stew meat to get us through the storm. Now it’s ruint.
“See,” I say. “If we’d stockpiled groceries, it’d all be ruint.”
“Bread? Bottled water?” my husband says.
“We’ve got water.” I clomp over to the sink in my boots and turn on the faucet.
I run the hot water till it’s steaming. I fill up a mug and drink it.
Then I refill it, holding the steam close to my face. Who knows how long the water in the heater will stay hot? Quizzle jumps on my lap when I sit down again. I press the mug against her fur before tucking her under my jacket. She purrs.
Anyone with pickups and chainsaws, Georgia Power’s looking for folks to help cart logs from downed power lines.
My husband spends the day grading student papers. I also have a batch of freshman essays to grade, but I’m too cold to remove my gloves, too cold to grip a pencil. After being unemployed for several years (when I quit my job at the public library), I returned to school for an advanced degree. I now teach as an adjunct at the community college.
I remain in the chair, Quizzle on my lap, seemingly incapable of movement. I just stare out the sliders at the snow and fallen loblollies. I wish, at least, we had television. I hate to miss episodes of my favorite show, Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Pat Boone Fan Club Page 14
