most of our luggage was roped to the roof of the car and covered with a tarp. The trip started as every trip did, whether it was to the local mall or Mexico City—a jostling for seats, superior position, bragging rights. No single seat was really that much better than any other, but we fought over them because they were something to fight over; usually the fighting was nothing but shoving and pushing, though often it escalated into rabbit punches, eye pokes, head butts, and nut chops. The monarch’s throne was the space between the middle row of forward-facing seats and the set of facing jump seats at the back; the throne wasn’t very comfortable, but there was room enough for just one child, which made it the only spot really worth having (and this was long before the days when seat belts were mandatory; in fact, I don’t remember if that old wagon even had seat belts). At thirteen, as the oldest child, I believed myself entitled to the throne, but I was slow getting to the car and when I tried to rough up my brother Keith for the spot, he and my brother Bruce ganged up on me and gave me a double nipple twist. I ended up in the jump seats with my sister, Janine. Sitting perpendicular to the direction in which the car was moving always made me feel queasy. I hated the jump seats.
We were smart enough kids, the six of us (though not nearly as smart as we thought we were), but we had zero notion that by travelling in this way in 1973 we were personifying the zenith of a significant historical trend. In fact, we were living in the last great gasp of the family car trip as a major North American cultural expression, an expression crank-started into life fifty years earlier by the introduction of automobile travel as a recreational pursuit and brought into full flower after the Second World War when the buying power of the middle class increased such that cars were widely available and families could afford them. Families could also afford to take a vacation; prior to the war, workers’ rights began to crystallize, and legislated paid vacation time, once unheard of, was becoming commonplace. The combination of paid holidays and being able to purchase a station wagon one could load to the roof (and above) was, in many ways, the starting line of what we now understand as the family vacation.
Which was what we were up to, even though, as mentioned, we were probably already living in the latter stages of the automobile trip as the predominant family vacation mode. It was history itself we were taking part in, though it was hardly history of a Hegelian stamp, since you might say the jury is still out on whether the automobile will ultimately be seen as progressive in humanity’s run. Not that we’d have known, or cared, anything about Hegel, history, progress, or the zenith of the automobile trip; we just figured we were going on a really long drive. My hope, though (no matter where history comes down on oil and the automobile), is that there will always be room for the road trip in the family vacation. It’s so rich in possibility. I know that driving to Mexico and back created something larger than a simple collection of experiences and destinations for our family; it created memories and moments so strong, so singular, that we saw our family as unique. It gave us a vision of the larger family project at work, particularly upon reflection in later years, of course. There wasn’t much conscious articulation of it when we were all sitting around watching TV a few months later, as if twelve-year-old Bruce said to nine-year-old Conor, “Hey, that trip really helped me understand and put into words the nature of our family dynamic, don’t you agree?” Yet, at some level, it did precisely that; spending six weeks in a car driving to Mexico and back became a key component in the shared baseline knowledge of what we were as a unit, of how we related to one another, of how we were moving together through time—reflections that have stayed with us as a family decades later.
Orvar Löfgren, in On Holiday, wrote about making a discovery one day, as an adult, down in his basement, where he found “an old holiday album, which I produced as a twelve-year-old. It describes a family trip across Sweden and starts with a pasted-in map where the route is carefully drawn. Snapshots, admission tickets, hotel labels, and picture postcards document each step, along with the author’s running commentary. It documents a vacation and shows the project ‘our family,’ an institution that became very visible during those summer months of intensive interaction.”
I love that notion of the family as a project, suggesting as it does that it takes time, that it involves construction, that it requires thought and craft, that it speaks to an ongoing evolution. The family as project helps create a family that can talk, be together, and travel together. Whether we realize it or not, our family vacations are key building blocks in the creation of a family, of a “project.”
Whatever piece of the family project Mexico was meant to be, however, all we knew, as kids, was that we were heading towards an intensely foreign place known to us mostly through the cliff divers of Acapulco we saw Saturday afternoons on The Wide World of Sports. My delicious nightmares leading up to the day of departure were of scorpions, rattlesnakes, and getting lost in the empty, wobbly-hot Mexican desert.
As we pulled out of our cold, gaunt northwest Calgary suburb, my mother lit a cigarette, turned around and did a head count to avoid a repeat of a trip to Edmonton a year earlier when we were an hour down the highway before realizing we’d left two-year-old Matt at home playing in the basement. The goal for the first day of our trip was to make it at least as far as central Montana. Seven or eight hours of total driving would be a good start. We’d been driving for half an hour, approximately six-tenths of one percent into the journey there, when Bruce, eleven months younger than me, shouted from the middle seats. “Pass me a comic book,” he said. “An Archie.”
I reached into the huge cardboard box between my feet. Our mother had spent the previous three months collecting thousands of comics and puzzle books to help occupy us during the slog ahead. She’d kept them locked in a closet leading up to our journey, under the not unreasonable premise that there’d be no point to having them in the car if we’d already read them all. Bruce and I had tried to break into the closet a month earlier. Somehow Mom found out and we were sent to confession at St. Luke’s daily for two weeks. Every one of us had been anxious to dig into the stacks. I pulled out an Archie for Bruce and held it aloft to show him who controlled the means of distribution.
“Give it to me, you loser,” he said.
I flung it at his head as hard as I could, the pages flapping like the wings of a buckshot-filled bird. He ducked, picked up his comic, and started reading. I looked back at the box. So many comics! It was a stroke of genius on my mother’s part to have hoarded them. I riffled through the stacks and found a Spider-Man, my favourite.
Ten minutes later, I was in trouble. I’d been concentrating too hard, reading too close, with the comic too near my face, and this, combined with the side seating and the relative cold of the back seats, brought the car sickness up from the bottom of my stomach to where it pressed against my windpipe. I swallowed hard to keep it down, but a tiny spurt of burning liquid came into the back of my throat.
“We have to stop,” I said thinly.
My sister, seated across from me, looked up from her comic.
“We have to stop,” I repeated.
“Dad! Curt’s gonna hurl! Stop the car!”
My mother looked back. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Just stop reading for a few minutes. You’ll be fine.”
“We just left the goddamn house,” said my father. “Why didn’t you throw up before you got in the car?”
Janine clambered a bit up onto her seat, and then with no fanfare my throat opened. The contents of my stomach splashed into the middle of the comic box, covering the entire library in partially digested Froot Loops and Cap’n Crunch. Janine put her hand to her mouth and nose, and watched my sickness run itself out across my chest and pants.
“Oh, gross!” she said, scrambling across the throne into the middle row of seats. “He puked! He puked right into the box of comics. They’re covered. All of them!”
