Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

Our Trip

My mother asks on the phone how our drive home was, and I say “Fine,” which is not the truth but a fiction. You can’t tell everyone the truth all the time, and you certainly can’t tell anyone the whole truth, ever, because it would take too long.

The word “fine” is the greatest abbreviation and obviously wrong. Even a long drive with two people can be difficult, and with three it can be much worse. We almost always start a trip with some cross words anyway, because I can’t seem to leave on time and Mac can’t stand leaving a minute late, and then there’s Junior. Mac generally cheers up once we’re on our way, but this time he went on snapping at me because I didn’t tell him where to turn far enough ahead of time or I gave him too many instructions at once. On top of that I kept telling him to shift up. The car is old and the transmission is noisy, so it’s hard for me to tell if Mac’s in the right gear.

Then we began to smell burning oil. There was another van in front of us, packed full of some religious group, so we knew it could be them, and when we came to a garage they pulled in and that was the end of the burning smell, so Mac’s mood improved a little.

But we were still in mountain country, and Junior started saying which mountains he was planning to climb next year — I’m going to climb that one, he said, pointing, and that one, what’s the name of that one? Whiteface? I’m going to climb Whiteface, and then that one. I’m going to climb that one over there, what’s the name of that one? Charles? What about that one over there? What’s the name? Mungus? Fungus? Mangoes? Mongoose? Hey, look at that one — that’s gotta be the biggest one. What’s the name of that one?

I was turning the map this way and that, trying to figure out what the names of these mountains were, and even though Junior was talking so fast, and acting more like six years old than nine, I didn’t see any big harm in this conversation. But Mac said he felt as if he was on a tour bus and would we be quiet. Anything a little out of control makes him nervous.

Eventually we got onto the highway and then of course I had to go to the bathroom. I always have to go to the bathroom when we get onto a major highway. Luckily we came to a rest stop pretty soon, and since we were there anyway we sat down at a picnic table to eat our sandwiches. The picnic table wasn’t all that clean — it had a few sticky spills and some bird lime on it — but the sun was warm and I was just beginning to relax and enjoy watching the people walk past us to the restrooms when Junior came back from the restrooms and asked me for money for a soda. He always asks for a soda if he sees a soda machine, and I usually say No, which is what I said this time.

Now he decided to make an issue of it, and said he wouldn’t get back in the car if we didn’t get him a soda, and he went off over the grass toward the Dog Walk Area and sat down to sulk on some kind of large bent pipe sticking up out of the grass. So then Mac, who is more likely to give in than I am, said to let him have his soda, and I called Junior back and gave him the money and he went off and came back with the soda. I made the mistake of reading the ingredients, though, and when I saw how much caffeine there was in it, I began going on about that and I wouldn’t stop, even back in the car, until I saw that now Junior was getting upset again and the whole thing was pointless. So I shut up and started cleaning my hands with some pre-moistened towelettes called Wet Ones which have a sickly sweet smell to them, and the smell filled the car so badly that now the two of them turned on me.

After that, Junior was pretty cheerful because the soda made him feel a few years older, I could see it by the way he slouched with his knees apart and his hands dangling, and the atmosphere in the car improved even more when a crowd of men and women on motorcycles passed us going about 90 miles per hour. Mac said he hoped they would get stopped for speeding, and the thought of that cheered him up so much he started a conversation with me. He asked me what kind of car we should get when we bought a new car. He pointed out a Dodge Caravan, and Junior woke up from his daydream and said he wanted a Corvette. Mac asked where he was going to get the $30,000. Junior didn’t have an answer, then he thought to ask how much Mac had paid for our Voyager. $7,000, Mac said, which stumped Junior but didn’t seem fair to me, because he didn’t tell Junior he had gotten it second-hand, so I threw in that information just to make it fair, and of course Junior said he would get his Corvette second-hand too. Cars aren’t my favorite subject, though, so pretty soon we had run it into the ground and I went back to doing what I had been doing, which was looking out the window.

We passed a spot where the Highway Department had cleared the forest by the side of the road and planted some trees. The trees were covered with shriveled reddish foliage and obviously dying. This started me thinking about deforestation, and then about the disappearance of family farms, which somehow took me back to caffeine levels again. At that point, I started trying to identify the new trees I had learned on our vacation, and when I gave up on that I just watched the fat on my arm ripple in the wind from the open window.

Things went on pretty much like that. At some point I began to think I had spider bites on my legs; later Mac asked me if I had put something strange in the sandwiches; Junior rolled up the toll ticket to make a telescope, and Mac yelled at him; but then we all quieted down to watch the remains of a pretty dramatic accident by the side of the road.

At the rest stop I had been thinking that about 50 percent of the people I saw looked as though they’d had a better vacation than we had. But then 50 percent of them looked as though they’d had a worse one, so I felt alright about it.

When we were twenty minutes from home, Junior wanted to stop at a Holiday Inn and spend the night and couldn’t understand why we said no. But I realized about then that as a family we have a certain kind of loyalty to each other, and the way it works is that no two of us will get mad at the third one at the same time, except occasionally, as in the case of the Wet Ones.