Travels with my Family

by Marie-Louise Gay

  Then we saw our parents walking slowly towards us, coming out of the fog, holding hands and acting romantic. They had been there the whole time.

  My mother ran and put her arms around my brother.

  “What happened to you?”

  “He was attacked by a wave,” I told them, “while we were looking for you.”

  “It must have been a sneaker wave,” my father explained. “Come on, we’ll get him into some dry clothes.”

  The next thing I knew, we were in the car with the heater on full-blast, and my brother in the front seat, and we were driving into the little town near Punta Reyes, in search of a Laundromat. The only problem was that my brother didn’t have a change of clothes in the car. He had to undress, and my mother wrapped him in the checkered tablecloth we had used for our picnic a couple hours ago, back when the weather was warm. He sat on a plastic chair in the Laundromat and stared at his clothes going around and around in the dryer, as if he was afraid someone would steal them.

  “A sneaker wave,” my father told him, as if the science of waves would cheer him up, “is a wave that suddenly gets bigger than all the others, and whoosh! — it sneaks up on you. It happens because of the tides and the shape of the ocean floor.”

  My brother sat there in his tablecloth. He

  didn’t care about why there were sneaker waves. He just wanted to get his clothes back on.

  My father put his arm around him.

  “You know we’d never, ever leave you like that,” he promised.

  That helped cheer him up a little. My poor brother! He would need a vacation after all this was over.

  SIX

  Tumbling tumbleweeds nearly crush

  us in an Arizona sandstorm

  Our travels had taken us east and west, but now my parents were eager for something new. Something completely crazy, like going to the desert in the hottest part of the summer.

  “Something off the beaten track,” my father said, spreading out a road map of North America on the living-room rug.

  “A place with greater vistas,” my mother said, closing her eyes, as if she could see those vistas already, in her imagination.

  Did we have a say in their plans, my brother and I? What if we wanted something on the beaten track? But, as usual, we were prisoners of our parents.

  My father pointed at the map. “Let’s go to the Southwest,” he decided. “Down by the border.”

  The border with Mexico, that is.

  Then he began to sing. “In a little town, just the other side of the border…”

  That’s another thing about my father. He loves to sing. He knows all the words to old songs nobody has ever heard of, the greatest hits from 1965, or something like that, but unfortunately for us, he has a voice like a rusty gate. We keep on telling him that all the time, but he just keeps on singing.

  The places he wanted to go looked really small on the map. That meant only one thing. There would be no airports nearby, so we would have to drive there. Already, I imagined the long days in the hot car.

  There are all kinds of ways of making the time go faster when you’re in a car — besides asking if we’re there yet. There are car snacks, for instance. You know, chips or Fritos or chocolate bars or red licorice twists. But in our family, all we get to munch on are carrot and celery sticks, with spring water to wash it down. That sure does fill you up when you’re hungry!

  Then there’s fighting. My little brother and I can always find something to fight about. At first it was Twenty Questions or the Alphabet Game. But our mother wouldn’t let us play that any more. He and I figured out we could fight over what CD we would play in my Discman. But when the batteries died, we couldn’t even fight over that.

  Then there’s the radio. My father wants to listen to baseball games, even if he doesn’t know the teams or the players. My mother wants classical music. My brother and I want real music, that my father calls “all that crashing and banging.”

  So we have to compromise. We usually end up with some serious talk show, with people discussing how bad things are in other parts of the world. That sure makes the time go by more quickly!

  Then we have to choose a motel. I hoped that, this time, since we were going to be in the desert, we’d get a motel with a swimming pool. A pool and an ice machine, and maybe a playground with monkey bars where my brother could go ape after our day in the car.

  But when we finally got off the road, it was so late that all the good motels with swimming pools were filled up. So the only exercise we got that evening was jumping up and down on the beds and having a pillow fight. That is, until my parents couldn’t stand it anymore. Then we went to sleep.

  On that trip, I learned that if you happen to be in the desert, and the sky turns yellow, you know you’re in trouble. You know you’re going to have an adventure. Especially in the desert, in the month of August, when the weather is at its hottest.

  Since we were in the state of Arizona, my brother and I wanted to see the Grand Canyon. Maybe, just this once, we’d get to go someplace other people went to. I wanted to have a bumper sticker on our car that said, “I visited the Grand Canyon.”

  But that would have been too easy. I knew what my father was going to say. And sure enough, he said it.

  “Anyone can go to the Grand Canyon. It’s full of tourists. I read about this other canyon…”

  And that’s how we decided — or he decided — to go to the Canyon de Chelly. Of course. It was different. To begin with, the name was spelled “Chelly,” which should rhyme with “jelly.” But instead, it was pronounced “shay.” Don’t ask me why.

  “On the way, we can see the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert,” my father announced. “They’re some of the wonders of the world.”

  Amazing, I thought. Even I had heard of those places before. They were almost as famous as the Grand Canyon. We were actually going to go to a place other people went to.

  Of course, it wasn’t that simple. It never is with our family.

  On our way to the Painted Desert, not too far from a town called Winslow, the sun disappeared. It was the middle of the afternoon, but the sky turned black. Then it turned yellow.

  “The sky looks like a bruise,” my brother said.

  “That can’t be a good sign,” my mother said, getting worried.

  “It says here in the guidebook that the month of August is monsoon season. That’s when they have the biggest storms, and the most rain.”

  “You mean it rains in the desert?” my brother asked. “I thought it was always dry.”

  “Maybe we’ll have a sandstorm, too.”

  “It’s going to rain sand?”

  “Don’t worry, it’s just a little storm,” my father said. He sounded very sure of himself. “It’ll pass over, you’ll see. We’re not too far from the Painted Desert.”

  “I don’t like this,” my mother said. “Not one little bit.”

  That’s when the car began to shake in the wind, as if it wanted to take off with us inside and fly through the air like in Twister. Or maybe The Wizard of Oz. I liked that movie better.

  Across the desert, a yellow curtain began moving towards us. Behind it, the sun was a smear of light.

  “Uh-oh,” my father said. “I’ve never seen that before.”

  That was the first time I’d ever heard him sound scared. Except, of course, for the time with the alligators in Okefenokee Swamp.

  I noticed that we were the only car heading into the storm. All the other cars were going the other way. Then suddenly, so many weird things started to happen at the same time that I couldn’t tell which one was weirder.

  First, the road completely disappeared in the darkness. Then the sand beat against the car as if it were trying to take all the paint off. No matter how tightly I rolled up the window, the sand got inside the car, and inside my mouth, and
it stuck in the back of my throat. If there had been streetlights in the middle of the desert, they would have gone on, because the sky was darker than night.

  Bang! From out of the darkness, I saw something come running at us and hit the car, but I couldn’t tell what it was. Bang! It came out of nowhere, but this time I saw what it was. The kind of thing you see only in movies.

  “My God, what’s that?” my mother whispered.

  “Giant tumbleweeds,” I told her.

  “Tumble-whats?” my brother wanted to know.

  “They’re just a bunch of dried, rolled-up branches, but they’re pretty mean.”

  “I’d like to head off into the sunset, like a tumbling tumbleweed,” my father sang in his off-key voice.

  He was trying to take our minds off the storm, but meanwhile, he had his face pressed against the inside of the windshield, trying to see through the sandstorm and the dark clouds.

  Bang! Another tumbleweed hit us, then bounded away. It was going a lot faster than we were, since it had the wind at its back.

  “I don’t see any sunset,” I told him. “I don’t see anything at all.”

  “Hey, I know that song,” my brother shouted over the noise of the wind. “I heard it in a cowboy movie once.”

  “You three are going to drive me crazy!” my mother yelled. If we had been in a cartoon, she would have torn her hair out.

  The sand and rain were coming in sideways, tumbleweeds as big as garbage trucks were hitting our car, the sky had gone purplish-black and the wind was howling like in a horror movie. Not to mention the rivers that were pouring out of the hills and flooding the road.

  “The storm can’t go on forever,” my father said cheerfully. But his knuckles were turning white on the steering wheel.

  “Oh, why not?” my brother complained.

  Bang! Bang! The car lurched.

  “I think those were tumble-twins,” my brother said.

  Then my mother had had enough.

  “I want you to turn around — right now!” she told my father.

  And amazingly, that’s exactly what he did. He probably wanted to the whole time. We got in line with all the other cars whose drivers had given up on the Painted Desert, and who were heading back to the town of Winslow.

  It was quiet in the town when we finally reached it. The storm had passed, but there wasn’t a light on anywhere. The power lines were lying like enormous spaghetti on the main street. Which reminded my little brother that he was hungry.

  It’s not easy finding a restaurant in the middle of a power failure. There was only one place open, but the food was great. We ate tacos and burritos by candlelight.

  “How romantic!” my mother said, as she bit into her taco.

  There was a double rainbow as big as the desert hanging in the sky. I wondered whether the tumbleweeds were tumbling into the sunset, like in a cowboy picture. The day ended like a movie, with red and yellow and orange rays of light in the west. All that was missing was a cowboy riding off into the sunset on his horse.

  “Look at the colors,” my mother exclaimed. “They’re so beautiful!”

  When she starts talking about how beautiful everything is, it’s a sure sign she’s feeling better.

  Oh, did I mention it? We actually got a motel with a swimming pool that night, just outside the town.

  “For being so brave,” my father said.

  The next day, we finally did see the Painted Desert, on the way to the Canyon de Chelly. The rain had mixed up all the colors, like in a giant paint box.

  When my brother and I grow up, we’re going to the Grand Canyon. You can count on that!

  SEVEN

  We are nearly shot full

  of holes on New Year’s Eve

  in the town of Tehuantepec, Mexico

  My mother decided we would have a different kind of Christmas that year. An original kind of Christmas. With no tree, no Santa, no turkey dinner, no stockings and no Boxing Day sale.

  What was our present? A trip to Mexico.

  We started out by flying to the city of Oaxaca. The name is easy to pronounce. Wah-hah-cah. Simple, right?

  People do some pretty strange things with food in Oaxaca. They make a black sauce out of chocolate and hot chilies and spread it on chicken. They eat fried grasshoppers, too. Grasshoppers taste a little like potato chips. The only thing I didn’t like about them was that the antennae get stuck between your teeth.

  My brother didn’t like that, either. He would sit in the restaurant, plucking the antennae off each grasshopper, and placing the bodies carefully in rows on his plate. Then he would eat them one by one, with his eyes tightly closed.

  Then there were the radishes. In Oaxaca, people grow huge radishes, not to eat, but to make sculptures out of them. There are monsters, churches, musicians, villages, saints — all sculpted out of radishes. Then a few days before Christmas, everyone meets up in the main square to look at the radish sculptures. Of course, the best sculpture wins a prize.

  Now that’s what I call playing with your food!

  Every night there were parades with people on stilts and floats made out of crêpe paper, and fireworks going off everywhere.

  And piñatas, too. It was just like the stories we read in Spanish class. The piñata hangs from a pole or the branch of a tree, and a kid who’s blindfolded has to hit it with a stick to break it open, so that all the candies and little presents fall out.

  It looks simple, but it’s not, because the adults keep pushing the piñata just out of reach of the kid who has to hit it. I know — I tried it.

  After Christmas in Oaxaca, my parents decided we should go somewhere else for New Year’s.

  “Hmmm,” said my father, squinting at the guidebook. He needs glasses, but he won’t admit it. Sometimes we even get lost because he can’t read the road map. “It says here that Tehuantepec has one of the most famous markets in Mexico.”

  “I think I’ve eaten enough grasshoppers for one trip,” said my brother.

  “No, no, it says here that the specialty is

  iguana,” my father went on. “Sounds interesting.”

  “Well, I guess we’d better go there,” I said as a joke.

  “Great idea! Tehuantepec, here we come!” he yelled.

  And he went right out to look for a car to rent. That’s the problem with my parents. When you make a joke, they always take it seriously.

  So off we went, in search of Tehuantepec.

  This time I got to sit up front with my father. My mother sat in the back seat with her eyes half-closed. The day before she’d eaten something that hadn’t liked her at all. That happens sometimes when you travel in Mexico. The food is part of the adventure.

  Every time my father hit a bump in the road, and there were more bumps than there was road, she would moan, “Huevos Motul.” That was the name of the dish she’d eaten. Some kind of eggs that had come from a chicken in a really bad mood.

  By the end of the day, we reached Tehuantepec. And this wasn’t just any day, either. It was New Year’s Eve. We were going to ring in the New Year in a town where everyone ate iguana. Which, by the way, is some kind of giant lizard. Now that’s a really great idea!

  As we drove into the center of the town, a gang of kids ran across the street in front of us, dragging a man who was on fire.

  “El viejo año!” the kids were shouting.

  My mother half opened her eyes. “Oh, my God, what are they doing to that poor man?” she whispered.

  “Are they killing him?” asked my little brother. “Is he dead?”

  Since I’m learning Spanish at school, I knew that el viejo año means “the old year.” And I also saw that the guy they were dragging down the street was made out of straw and rags.

  I was about to tell my mother that, but she’d already closed her eyes again. When you have a
bad stomachache, nothing else matters.

  We finally found a hotel. It was a pretty strange place. There was no pipe under the sink, so when you washed your hands and face, the water ran onto the floor and splashed your feet. That way, you could wash your hands and feet together. It saved a lot of time, I guess.

  “I think I’ll have a little rest before dinner,” my mother said in a tiny voice.

  “Why don’t you kids go exploring?” my father suggested.

  “But I’m hungry,” my brother said.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him. “Maybe we can find you some barbecued iguana, or a cactus sandwich.”

  “What’s an iguana, anyway?”

  “A giant lizard that lives in the trees.”

  “I’m not that hungry,” my brother said.

  We went out the door before my father could tell us to be careful. He always says that. Even if we’re just going out to play in the backyard.

  There were more strange things about the hotel. Downstairs, in the yard, there was a monkey with a long tail and a sad face. He hopped over to us.

  “No tengo bananas,” I told him.

  “What did you say?”

  “That I didn’t have any bananas.”

  “I don’t like it when I can’t understand,” my little brother said. And he pulled his baseball cap down over his eyes. A Houston Astros cap. He didn’t know anything about the team, but he liked the star on the cap.

  Along with the monkeys, there were turkeys in the yard. They took themselves very seriously, walking around with their chests all puffed up, like they were all the presidents of some country. My brother was afraid of getting bitten.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him. “They’re not smart enough to bite you. Did you know that when it rains, turkeys look up with their mouths open to see where the rain is coming from, and they drown?”

  “But it’s not raining,” he said.

  He did have a point.

  I figured that there would be restaurants in the market, maybe even a fried iguana stand, and that we could find something to eat. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the market.