I’m on the road again. This time, on a road trip in an ’87 Dodge camper van headed for the American southwest. I’m with my husband and our nine-year-old son Quinn who we’ve taken out of school in our home of Wakefield, Quebec, promising we’ll keep up his French and drill him on his times tables. We just missed a tornado the other day as we drove through a winter storm where trucks careened into ditches all around us. The next day, in rural Nebraska, our van suddenly refused to exceed 30 miles an hour. It barely climbed hills. We pulled into a dirt-poor prairie town full of 1950s trucks driven by ancient farmers and found a mechanic named Chad. He told us our transmission was probably blown. We were faced with either leaving the van with Chad in Hooterville and taking a bus to my sister’s place in Colorado, or hobble along on back roads, hoping we wouldn’t break down completely with nothing but cows to witness the event.
The wise choice was leaving the van with the mechanic, boarding a Greyhound, and returning for it whenever it might be fixed. But the idea of the bus, and worse, deserting our beloved van with all our stuff in the forlorn little town made me queasy. Still, we decided it was best. As we crawled along the main drag looking for the bus station we realized we were also on the road that in seconds would lead out of town and eventually, to Cheyenne. Suddenly I felt a reckless freedom that can only be attributed to the open road and to seeing Thelma and Louise fourteen times. “Let’s do it! Go! This is so Thelma and Louise!”
So we did. We left that tiny fifties Nebraska town in the dust and headed for Cheyenne. I felt light as the prairie wind, even though we were clocking 20 miles an hour. If there’d been any cyclists in that part of the country (there aren’t) they would have sailed passed us. As we listened to Huck Finn on the iPod, what we did see on that back road were hawks soaring on thermals, golden grasslands stretching as far as the curvature of the Earth allowed us to see, a freight train chugging along at the same speed as us, and little white shacks straight out of Brokeback Mountain. You never see this on the interstate.
Incredibly, we didn’t break down. It took us eight hours to drive less than 200 miles, but we made it all the way to the Rockies. Today, we found out that it wasn’t the transmission after all. It was the cheap gas we bought just before the van started going wonky. I’d never heard of this. This doesn’t happen in Canada. All the gas stations in Canada are the mega, well-known ones—you know, the ones owned by the oil companies ripping us all off and polluting the oceans. But at least you can trust the gas they sell. I’d never imagined you could pull into a little town on a Sunday morning and buy gas for fifty cents a gallon less than it’s sold everywhere else, and then have it screw up your vehicle. But I looked online and it seems to happen in the U.S. with surprising regularity.
But at least we found that back road through the lonely rolling endless plains where the buffalo once roamed. Out there, you could almost see their ghosts.
The wise choice was leaving the van with the mechanic, boarding a Greyhound, and returning for it whenever it might be fixed. But the idea of the bus, and worse, deserting our beloved van with all our stuff in the forlorn little town made me queasy. Still, we decided it was best. As we crawled along the main drag looking for the bus station we realized we were also on the road that in seconds would lead out of town and eventually, to Cheyenne. Suddenly I felt a reckless freedom that can only be attributed to the open road and to seeing Thelma and Louise fourteen times. “Let’s do it! Go! This is so Thelma and Louise!”
So we did. We left that tiny fifties Nebraska town in the dust and headed for Cheyenne. I felt light as the prairie wind, even though we were clocking 20 miles an hour. If there’d been any cyclists in that part of the country (there aren’t) they would have sailed passed us. As we listened to Huck Finn on the iPod, what we did see on that back road were hawks soaring on thermals, golden grasslands stretching as far as the curvature of the Earth allowed us to see, a freight train chugging along at the same speed as us, and little white shacks straight out of Brokeback Mountain. You never see this on the interstate.
Incredibly, we didn’t break down. It took us eight hours to drive less than 200 miles, but we made it all the way to the Rockies. Today, we found out that it wasn’t the transmission after all. It was the cheap gas we bought just before the van started going wonky. I’d never heard of this. This doesn’t happen in Canada. All the gas stations in Canada are the mega, well-known ones—you know, the ones owned by the oil companies ripping us all off and polluting the oceans. But at least you can trust the gas they sell. I’d never imagined you could pull into a little town on a Sunday morning and buy gas for fifty cents a gallon less than it’s sold everywhere else, and then have it screw up your vehicle. But I looked online and it seems to happen in the U.S. with surprising regularity.
But at least we found that back road through the lonely rolling endless plains where the buffalo once roamed. Out there, you could almost see their ghosts.
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