Unearthing a life.....

Me sitting on the hood of Dad's automobile ca 1937-1938.
Grandpa Charlie M. on his horse 'Jap'.

TRAVEL
When I travel to see my daughter in California, I usually leave home (in Puget Sound country, Washington) about 7:30 AM and arrive in Sacramento by noon -- assuming no delays in the schedule.
When my family first came to the Pacific Northwest in 1875, they had to come by boat out of San Francisco bound for Coos Bay, Oregon. Several days at sea! Now it’s a trip that can happen between breakfast and lunch.
The first time I went to California (from Smyrna, Washington) was probably about the summer of 1947. We traveled by car . It was a two-week round trip (the length of Dad’s vacation, not the driving time directly to California and back).
On a two-lane paved highway in the mountains near the Oregon/California border, we ran into a horrendous storm. The rain was like something out of a fantasy, worse than an Eastern Washington cloudburst! Mud was sliding down off the hillside onto the road. Dad was doing his tight-lipped, beady-eyed stare through the windshield (mostly obscured by the hammering rain) and zipping right along, skidding through all the little mud slides. Mom was yelling at him to stop before we were washed off the road. He didn’t stop.
I think there was some hail along with the rain. At one point a bolt of lightning struck a tree (pine? fir?) just as we passed it and my memory thinks that part of the tree fell across the road behind us -- but that may be an "enhanced" memory. Old memories sometimes add dramatic detail that may have come from somewhere else.
Mom was seriously pissed off royal! Dad’s explanation was that he had been afraid to slow down or stop for fear we’d get trapped between two mud slides and be stuck there. My father always had driving tendencies that enraged my mother. They were both oldest siblings -- two top-dogs, two know-it-alls, two five star Generals in a very tiny army. But I think Dad screwed up more often than Mom, which sort of gave her the edge as Chief of Family Staff. The moral high ground, so to speak.
Right after World War II (1945 or 1946 and still driving our old 1939 Chevrolet sedan) we were traveling with Chadbournes along a snake-like meandering dirt road through the mountains, or maybe the foothills of mountains, north of Spokane. I was riding in Chadbourne’s car and Dad was following us. Too closely. He was driving in the dust plume that Forrie Chadbourne was throwing up and I imagine Mom was in the process of speaking to him on that subject. Bitchin’ him out. Anyway we (Chadbournes) went around a tight curve and looked back just in time to see Dad emerge from the dust in a straight line. Off the road! Down into a grassy little valley strewn with barrel-sized boulders.
He never slowed that car down a whit. Down the slope he went, dodging boulders. Up the far slope he charged, dodging more boulders. Finally the old Chevy gave a leap and a bounce over the edge of the road and landed right where it should have been -- but early. Now he was ahead of us. A quarter of a mile of broken field driving put him in the lead. Mother was, as goes without saying, ripped, but he stuck to his philosophy, to wit, "To stop is to chance getting stuck." Traveling is a grand thing -- sometimes.
Gil’s Theory of Forward Progress: Your chance of getting where you’re going is directly proportional to the velocity with which you attack impediments.
This theory was always in play. In winter the old dirt road route to Othello sometimes had flooded spots. Mud and water fell victim to Pop’s acceleration. So did sand dunes blown across the road both near Beverly and down river where we’d go on Sundays to hunt arrowheads. I only recall one time that Dad was actually brought to a serious halt.
One day he loaded all of "us kids" up in the ‘39 Chevy and eased up the cliff road north of Smyrna and onto the United States Army Airforce practice bombing range. Mom was not with us. He found a bomb that hadn’t gone off when it hit. These bombs were about four feet long and filled with sand (for weight), but had a quart of black powder in a canister suspended in the tail-fin section. When they did go off, they made a hole about a yard across and a yard deep -- though some of that cratering ability was due to impact velocity.
Dad wanted that bomb as a curio. As some sort of small reminder or memorial of World War II. He loaded it into the back seat of the car and had us three kids sit on it so it wouldn’t fall off the seat. We were not on a road at this point. He was driving freelance out through the brush. BUT, as we jounced and clattered back towards what passed for a road, he managed to drive through the ashes of an old house that had been burnt to the ground during practice bombing runs.
Back in those "olden" days you not only carried a genuine spare tire, but also a tire pump and a kit of inner-tube patching stuff. We got back home quite late, but we got home with the bomb. Looking back, I think he took a crazy risk sitting us on that bomb. I seriously question if he really knew whether that bomb was totally "dead" or not.
I recall another time we were caravaning with Chadbournes -- must have been close to the time of Dad’s accidental shortcut across the bouldered valley . We were still in our pre-war cars and camping overnight in a gravel pit high in the Montana Rockies (on our way to Yellowstone Park). Mom and Florence Chadbourne put a huge pot on the campfire and began to boil up a stew for our supper. The sun set quickly and the evening chill set in. The stew boiled along merrily. But an hour and a half later, the spuds and carrots remained as hard as rocks. It was a great upset and a mystery until it finally dawned on one of the adults that water boiled at a much lower temperature on a mountain top. They finally got tired of listening to we five kids (me, Lou Ann, Neil, Harriet, and Norma) whining about starvation and fed us crisp stew.
Brother David was on the trip too -- as an infant. According to Mom, she spent most of her time in Yellowstone washing and drying David’s diapers. I don’t remember him being along, though I do seem to recall those diapers hanging on a rope strung between two trees in the Yellowstone campground.
I do remember him at that age though. One day Mom and Dad went to Ellensburg for groceries (about a 120 mile round trip) and left me in charge of "babysitting" him, I must have been all of eleven years old. I put him in his crib with a bottle -- for his scheduled nap, but he was "restive". He kept standing up and shaking the sides of the crib while howling at the top of his lungs. Always an inventive sort of child, I wrapped "diaper handcuffs" around his wrists and safety-pinned his arms to the crib mattress.
Then there was the Christmas morning I was carrying him down the stairs and I tripped at the top and flung him all the way to the bottom -- and came crashing down after him myself. No serious damage that I can recall. Too much excitement. Too big a hurry. But this is beginning to deviate from the topic. Travel. Well -- maybe not. Flying through the air is a form of travel. Right? Right!