MEANDER
As various books and movies have shown, most of us love road trips. When my Mom was moving from the San Francisco Bay Area to Ann Arbor, Michigan, she asked whether I’d drive a rented truck containing her furniture and other things. “If a mover damages any of my furniture,” she said, “I could get an insurance check, but how would I replace items that I had designed and my father had built?” That included most of her tables, chairs, bed-frames, and chests of drawers. All were made of fruit-wood (cherry), nut-wood (walnut), or mahogany.
I agreed on two conditions: (a) that I could load the truck, and b) that we’d spontaneously stop every day at a place to which we were drawn. Our goal was Michigan, but it being winter we took a southern route.
Our first stop, on impulse, was at an Arizona crater advertised on a sign so faded we wondered whether the gravel road would be washed out. When we arrived at the rim there was an old museum and a hole so unearthly that astronauts had used it as practice for the moon landing. An asteroid had smacked into the surface of our planet, in what is now a desert, and ejected rock all around.
My Mom and I doubted we’d find another sight so astonishing. We didn’t but we had other happy surprises. The Mississippi was in flood and we were happy, on the east side, to find an open restaurant,. It had a buffet line and advertised ‘all you can eat.” This is not usually a sign of the best cuisine, but we were hungry. Perhaps that’s why my Mom, thinking of the long drive ahead of us, stuffed her large purse full of roast chicken for tomorrow’s lunch. When the waitress came to the table to take our drink orders, the clasp of the purse opened spontaneously, and several drumsticks fell out. Thinking of her tip, perhaps, the waitress just laughed.
The final day we stopped at Wright-Patterson field in Ohio, which had a public museum of historic aircraft. Rounding a corner, I saw at the end of a long bare corridor a model of one of the atomic bomb s dropped on Japan. I had seen photographs and, in particular, recalled a magazine article of my youth asking what would be the effect if such a bomb exploded over Times Square in Manhattan. (Link to a recent article in the same genre.) Since my father’s office was then a few blocks away, I had carried that squat image through much of my life. As the museum sign confirmed, the bomb was called “FatMan.”
When we got to Ann Arbor and unloaded the truck, all the furniture was undamaged, even after an asteroid strike, bumbling food theft, and a nuclear bomb.
(For more material on the 1980s, see my book, Enlarging Our Comfort Zones)