Travels with my Family

by Marie-Louise Gay

  by Marie-Louise Gay

  and David Homel

  Groundwood Books

  House of Anansi Press

  Illustrations copyright © 2006 by Marie-Louise Gay

  Text copyright © 2006 by David Homel and Marie-Louise Gay

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  This edition published in 2013 by

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

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  or c/o Publishers Group West

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  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Gay, Marie-Louise

  Travels with my family/ by Marie-Louise Gay and David Homel.

  ISBN: 978-0-88899-688-6 (bound). – ISBN: 978-0-88899-833-0 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-55498-466-4 (ebook)

  I. Homel, David II. Title.

  PS8565.O6505T73 2006 jC813’.54 C2005-906566-4

  Cover design by Michael Solomon

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF).

  To our two boys

  My Adventures

  1. Hurricane Bob

  2. Rip Tides

  3. Sandwiches with Alligators

  4. Farm Animals on the Rampage

  5. Abandoned on the Beach

  6. Tumbleweeds and Tornados

  7. A Shoot-Up on New Year’s Eve

  8. Revolution in Mexico

  9. Slaughter Canyon

  Heading out on the road...

  When you hear the word “vacation,” what do you think of? Beaches and warm water, nice hotels with swimming pools? Giant waterslides and amusement parks and miniature golf? Maybe even Disneyland? Me, too.

  But not my parents. They’re pretty strange that way. They want to have new adventures in some out-of-the-way place. So every vacation, my little brother and I have to go with them to some wild, faraway destination where no one else ever goes. The farther it is, the more remote it is, the better my parents like it.

  That’s called “off the beaten track.” No tourist traps, and no line-ups. No wonder! Nobody wants to go there!

  Half the time, I end up having to save them, or my brother, or both, from alligators, high tides or sandstorms. Let me tell you, sometimes it’s pretty tough.

  I don’t know why my parents are like that. I guess it’s their way of feeling young again, and different from other people. If it were up to my little brother and me, we’d be normal kids with normal parents going on a normal vacation.

  Even getting to where we’re going can be an adventure. Like the time we drove to Maine.

  “We’ll take the road through the mountains,” my father said, showing us the map. “It’ll be much more interesting.”

  When he says “interesting,” he really means we’ll be driving on bumpy back roads, folding and unfolding the map, and generally getting lost.

  “It’ll be much more beautiful, too,” my mother added. Which means we’ll have to stop and look at all the beautiful stuff along the way. It’ll take us forever.

  So there we were, bumping along the winding mountain roads, on our way to Maine. Our tiny car was filled to the brim with suitcases, books and fishing nets. My parents’ bicycles were on the roof and my brother’s and mine were tied to the trunk. Between us was our brand-new cat-carrying box with Miro, our cat, inside. It was about 100 degrees in the car. And 150 degrees in the box.

  “Why is the cat’s tongue hanging out?” my brother asked. “I thought only dogs did that.”

  “Maybe he thinks he’s a dog,” I said. Actually, he looked pretty sick. His furry face was pale, and his eyes were half-closed.

  “It’s too hot for him,” my father said. “Let him out of the box. He’ll be fine.”

  But he wasn’t. First he gave a pitiful howl, then he threw up on the back seat. Then he climbed in front and peed on my mother’s shoes.

  The next thing we knew, a wasp flew in the open window — our car doesn’t have air-conditioning, of course — and stung my brother on the knee. He howled. Not a pitiful howl. A loud, angry howl that startled my father. He slammed on the brakes and the bikes fell off the trunk. The car in back of us started honking its horn and flashing its lights.

  We pulled onto the side of the road. My father started attaching the bikes to the rack again while my mother put cream on my brother’s knee.

  Then Miro tried to escape. I couldn’t blame him. He jumped out the car window and crawled under a blackberry bush. My brother was still crying. My father was still figuring out how to get the bikes back on the rack. And I wasn’t allowed to get out of the car because it was too dangerous.

  So it was up to my mother to capture him. She got down on her hands and knees, and in her soothing cat-voice, she started talking to Miro. People were laughing as they drove by. There was my mother, down on all fours, talking to a blackberry bush! But slowly, one step at a time, Miro crept out from under the bush, and my mother scooped him up in her arms. Then she ran for the car. I didn’t want to tell her, but there were blackberry twigs in her hair.

  It was going to be a long trip. A whole day of beautiful, winding mountain roads and scenic vistas. But we’d get to Maine, all right. Just in time for…

  But you’ll see. Another family vacation was about to begin.

  ONE

  In Maine, we are nearly

  flattened by Hurricane Bob

  We had been hearing about Hurricane Bob on the radio all week long. After a while, I got pretty tired of it. How can you take a hurricane seriously when its name is Bob? No offense to people named Bob, but it’s just not a very scary name.

  If I was in charge of naming hurricanes, I would call them Hurricane Hulk, or Demon, or Destroyer. Now that would scare people!

  We had rented a cottage right by the ocean. We were so close to the water that you could sit on the front porch and spit watermelon seeds into the Atlantic. Or almost.

  And there were blueberry bushes, too, with tiny fruit the size of a baby’s fingernail. My brother and I picked the berries right off the bushes for breakfast.

  The other fun things you could eat were the sea urchins that lived in the water. They were brown, prickly animals with poisonous spines. You smashed them open with a hatchet, and there was an orange part inside that supposedly tasted really good, like the ocean. Or so my father said. I tried one, and that was enough. My brother pretended to throw up just looking at them.

  Our cat, Miro, loved Maine. It was a lot better than being in a boiling-hot car. He had never been to the sea before. Every evening, he went down to the pebbly beach to chase the little green crabs that lived there. When he caught one, or, should I say, when one caught him by pinching his nose, he wished he hadn’t, because crabs never let go. But Miro never learned. He caught furry brown wood mice, too, and left them
on the porch in front of the door. My mother would scream every time she stepped on one in her bare feet, first thing in the morning.

  Miro always looked miffed when she did that. After all, he was giving her a present. It’s funny, because my mother usually loves surprises and presents. When my brother gives her a bunch of dandelions, for example, even if they’re half crushed, she always looks so pleased. I guess dead mice aren’t at the top of her list of favorite things.

  The radio told us that Hurricane Bob was moving up the eastern shore of the United States. First he was going to hit Florida. Then Bob changed his mind and decided to go for North Carolina. No, not there. Why not try a little farther up the coast? Like Maine. No hurricanes ever went there. He’d have the place to himself.

  “Hurricanes like it hot,” my father told us. He was always explaining useful bits of knowledge to us. “They’re tropical storms. The water here is too cold for them. Nobody even swims in this water.”

  It was true. The water in Maine was so cold you couldn’t put both feet in at the same time. A minute in this water and your skin would turn blue. My brother was the only one who didn’t feel the cold. Maybe he’d been a polar bear in another life.

  “But the radio says the hurricane’s coming here,” my mother said.

  “The radio is just trying to scare us,” my father told her. He was always telling us that we shouldn’t believe everything we heard on the TV and the radio.

  “But if it’ll make you feel safer, we’ll go into town for some supplies.”

  “I’d feel safer if you paid attention to the radio once in a while,” she answered, smiling. “Now let’s go!”

  There was an enormous crowd in front of the Blue Hill General Store and Hardware. The parking lot was full of pick-up trucks with lobster traps in the back. Men in lumberjack shirts were leaving the store, carrying big sheets of plywood. Their wives were carrying huge cardboard boxes. Everybody was looking anxiously up at the sky.

  “Are those men going to build a house?” my brother asked.

  “Not exactly,” I told him. “The wood is for covering the windows and doors when the hurricane comes.”

  “Oh,” he said. Then he peered anxiously at the sky, too.

  A moment later, he asked, “What do you think those ladies have in their boxes?”

  “The usual things,” I said, as if I prepared for hurricanes every day. “Batteries, flashlights, candles. Duct tape.”

  “Duck tape?”

  “Sure,” I told him. “If you have a duck, and he asks too many questions about Hurricane Bob, you can tape his beak shut.”

  “Stop teasing your brother!” my mother ordered.

  She was pretty nervous. It must have been Hurricane Bob’s fault.

  In the end, we came home with practically nothing. I was disappointed. Everyone else was driving away with big sheets of plywood and boxes of heavy-duty batteries. And us? Just some scented dinner candles, a couple of gallon jugs of water and two little packs of batteries for the radio and the flashlight.

  Were we getting ready for a hurricane or not?

  My mother sat next to the radio, reading a book. I don’t know how anyone can concentrate when the radio is screaming away full blast about hurricanes, and thousand-mile-an-hour winds. She wasn’t really reading anyway. She was just pretending. After she got tired of pretending, she went out on the front porch with a determined look on her face. My father was there, watching the waves crash on the rocks. You couldn’t spit a watermelon seed into the ocean anymore. The wind would blow it back in your face.

  My mother must have convinced my father that we should at least prepare a little for the hurricane, because when they came back in, things started happening. My father filled the bathtub with water. My mother filled up all the pots and pans, and put covers on them. Then he went outside and turned the car around so it was facing the road, in case we had to leave in a hurry.

  “Put all your favorite things near the door,” my father said. “You never know, we might decide to leave.”

  I didn’t think we would be doing the deciding. Bob would. I piled my Discman, my baseball cards and my binoculars by the door. My brother put his stuffed penguin on top.

  “Look, the neighbors are going!” he shouted. “Do you think we should, too?”

  Along the shore, just a stone’s throw away, was another cottage, just as close to the water as ours. The people living there had packed all their things in their car, and they were driving away.

  “Are you scared?” I asked my brother.

  “Me? No way! It’s only a hurricane.”

  But he didn’t sound very sure. His voice was a little squeaky. And he went over to the door to check on his penguin.

  All of a sudden it started to rain. It had been raining before, off and on, a normal sort of rain. But now the wind started blowing and the rain came in sideways and made a terrible racket on the roof.

  “Great!” my father said, rubbing his hands together. “We’ll see if this guy Bob’s the real thing or not.”

  “What if he is?” I asked.

  “Come and look!” my brother shouted.

  The waves had swallowed up the shore. The pebbly beach where Miro hunted crabs had completely disappeared.

  And that’s when the electricity went off.

  “I was expecting that,” my father told us.

  “We were all expecting it,” my mother groaned. “There’s a hurricane out there, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  My father opened the pack of batteries and put two in the radio.

  “We won’t listen to the radio all the time,” he explained, “in order to save the batteries. Anyway, the radio is driving us all crazy.”

  “Hurricane Bob! Hurricane Bob!” my little brother started shouting. When he pinched his nose with his fingers, he sounded just like the announcer on the radio.

  “Stop that racket!” my father told us.

  My brother and I looked at each other. We started laughing. The wind was roaring. The waves were crashing on the rocks right in front of the house. The rain was hammering on the windows. The radio was screaming at us. We could hardly hear ourselves think. Here we were, in the middle of a hurricane, and our father tells us to be quiet!

  We decided to go out on the porch and watch the waves. The water was gray and angry-looking. The pine trees were rocking in the wind. Miro was in the window behind us, looking worried. When a big wave hit the rocks right in front of the house, he jumped into the air, then dove under the sofa. That was another useful scientific fact my father had taught us. Animals can feel the low pressure brought by big storms, and they don’t like it at all.

  My brother stared up at the howling trees. “I think they’re going to take off.”

  Then he put his arms out like wings, and let the wind grab him.

  “I can fly!” he shouted.

  A great gust of wind picked him up. He was flying! The next thing he knew, he was in the meadow in front of the house, lying on his stomach, with his nose in the tall grass.

  He tried to get up, but the wind pushed him down again. I pulled him to his feet. It was raining so hard we could scarcely see the house, a few feet away.

  “We’re getting soaked,” I said. “Let’s go inside.”

  “I don’t want to. I like flying.” But I dragged him inside anyway.

  My parents had started a fire in the fireplace. Every so often, the wind blew the smoke back down the chimney and into the living room, and we all started coughing. But that was where we spent the rest of the afternoon, and the night, too. The wind blew, the walls creaked, and there were times I thought the roof would fly away. Miro was hiding somewhere, probably still under the couch. I put some food in his bowl, but he didn’t come out. He must have really been scared, since he can’t resist a snack.

  We heard that Bob was suppos
ed to hit us — the announcer called that “landfall” — in the middle of the night. Every once in a while, my mother would get up, go to the front window, turn on the flashlight and point it into the darkness. But it was useless. Everything was pitch black.

  It was the longest night of my life. But not for my brother. He fell asleep. He didn’t even hear the enormous crack! in the middle of the night.

  “What was that?” my mother yelled.

  We rushed to the window, my mother, my father and I.

  “I can’t see a thing,” said my father.

  “Is the world still out there?” my mother wondered.

  Sometimes I think she reads too much science fiction. Of course the world was still out there — wasn’t it?

  The next morning, the sun was shining weakly. My brother woke me up. I had fallen asleep in the chair. I opened my eyes and saw Miro on my lap.

  “Hey, what happened? Didn’t Hurricane Bob get us?”

  Miro jumped off my lap. He walked over to his bowl and started eating breakfast. I could hear him purring. Everything was normal again.

  We went outside. The ocean had gone back to where it was supposed to be.

  Then we went around to the side of the house.

  “There’s something wrong with our tree,” my brother said.

  He was right. The pine tree closest to the house looked as though it had been turned inside out by the wind, like a giant umbrella.

  Then I saw what had made the noise during the night.

  Hurricane Bob had knocked over the enormous pine tree in front of our neighbors’ cottage. Its roots were hanging in the air. The tree had crashed through the porch and flattened the front of their house. It looked like a bunch of pick-up sticks.

  “What if that had been us?” my brother wondered.

  “Well, it wasn’t,” I said. “We made it! We survived the hurricane.”

  “And without duck tape!”

  I started making quacking noises in his ear. He pinched his nose with his fingers and shouted, “Hurricane Bob! Hurricane Bob!” Then he chased me across the wet field.