We haven’t finalized our vacation plans yet, but I’m sure it will involve a couple of long road trips with a car full of kids. I have seven children total, and four are at home, and three of those are boys six and under.
Three little boys. One car. Do the math.
I’ve taken them across country by myself while my wife and at-home daughter were otherwise occupied. For approximately 36 hours — 18 up and 18 back — my 6-year-old never stopped asking questions. Answering machine-gunned questions from curious little boys is more exhausting than days of continuous pile-driving intercourse.
My father was into driving, so of course I picked up the habit. When my eldest son was about to turn 19, we got a wild hair and drove up into Canada, around Lake Superior, and picked up Highway 61, where it starts in Thunder Bay, Ontario. We rode it all the way down to where the road disappears into the French Quarter. It was like free-falling down the middle of the country.
The best thing about car travel, of course, is the company you keep. It’s not the places you see as much as the conversations you have that really matter. We saw a lot — Bob Dylan’s boyhood home, a funky cathedral made out of garbage, the place where Scott Joplin grew up, the delivery room of rock’n'roll and Charley Patton’s grave in a cotton field — but it’s that uninterrupted time with my son that makes that trip my favorite vacation.
We did a book on the trip (Highway 61, available at fine bookstores everywhere). I wrote it and Graham provided the pictures — and there’s rarely an hour of my waking life that doesn’t somehow find me daydreaming about being behind the wheel again.
All these cross-country road trips of my childhood weren’t bliss. In the summer of 1965, we traveled cross country — my mother and father and sister and brother — and took our five dogs along. Four of the dogs were female and all were in heat. The male sat in the front seat, turned around to look at the girls, who were in the back seat with us kids. Our job was to keep them apart. The male dog, Walter, was in such pain that his teeth chattered the whole way. Of course, the big song on the radio that summer was “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”
We stopped for lunch in Riley, Missouri, and it was my turn to watch the dogs. Everyone else went into a diner to eat. I was left outside, with five dogs straining on their leashes. I felt like some low-budget Ben-Hur, but managed to keep Walter from copulating with the girls.
My family took their time over lunch, ambled out to the car and suggested it was time to go. But what about lunch? Don’t I get to eat?
They had forgotten about me. Over my protests, we herded the dogs and humans back into the car. My father got a bag of chips from a vending machine and we drove on.
For this reason, I fucking hate Riley, Missouri. As far as I’m concerned, it is in the Zip Code of hell.
