of universal expectation, could be said to have started with the advent of mass automobile travel on American highways. An efficient means of transportation, which was also cheap, became available through large-scale production to the bulging lower and middle classes. After the Second World War, when North America was flush with confidence and economic growth, roadways sprung up to provide corridors on which to use these vehicles. Suddenly, and it almost was sudden, millions of families could afford to travel as a family. Travel they did, and so did we.
*
By the time we got to Arizona, the car was beginning to feel more like a space capsule we’d been trapped in for months as opposed to a means to an end, as if the trip was not about seeing the world, but was simply a way to spend six weeks sitting in the car. My parents had done their research, though. They knew the kind of thing we’d like, and they knew about the Meteor Crater just outside Flagstaff. As we drove to it, they pumped us up. We were incredulous. An outer-space meteor hit the earth? The crater’s a mile wide and six hundred feet deep?! It hit fifty thousand years ago?!! When we pulled into the parking lot, the six of us kids, especially us four oldest boys, were so hyped we sprinted to the edge of the crater. My mom and dad ran after us, leaving Matt and Janine straggling behind in the middle of the parking lot.
“Hey,” my dad shouted. “Hold up, you little brats!”
They were terrified, I’m sure, that we were just going to go careening over the lip of the cliffside. Had we visited the Meteor Crater on our way back from Mexico City instead of our way down—in other words, after another month’s worth of driving, fighting, throwing up, getting lost on Mexican back roads, and an incident with a whip—perhaps they’d have egged us on. Yeah, there’s a great swimming pool right over the lip, you guys. Just jump right in.
Half an hour after we’d arrived at the Meteor Crater, my mother and sister were strolling around the crater’s rim, enjoying the heat, the brilliant sunshine, simply being out of the car. She’d sent my father off with the five boys. Mom and Janine stopped at one of the designated viewing areas and peered into the 600-foot-deep crater, taking in its awesome scope, perhaps recalling what she’d told us all earlier, that the impact explosion was 150 times greater than Hiroshima.
“Hey, look,” said Janine, pointing to the distant centre of the crater. “There are people down there.”
My mother peered deep into the crater. Her radar must have gone off, because she slotted a quarter into the viewing telescope and trained it towards the centre of the crater, half a mile away. Seconds later, she let it drop. “Gerry!! Gerry. Oh my God! Gerrrry. Helpp!”
My father came running over from the interpretive centre, where he’d been occupied showing Matt a display about the crater’s mineral-debris field. He’d assumed that when we left him, it was to head back to where our mother was.
We were quite happy, the four of us, me, Bruce, Keith, and Conor. There weren’t any fences once you got past the formal viewing area, and it really hadn’t been that hard a climb down to the crater floor, though some tricky descent work had been required. There seemed no reason not to explore the crater. After all, what was the point of visiting the thing if you couldn’t go to the middle? I wanted to stand there and look up and out. Who wants to be on the periphery?
The four of us didn’t eat that night. After the rescue, which necessitated an emergency scrambling of half the Crater staff on duty that day, we drove away in humiliated silence. As the oldest, I got the blame. I always got the blame. I hated being the oldest. Everybody else got to play the younger-sibling card, and my parents fell for it every time.
“I swear,” I said in the car. “I swear I didn’t know there was quicksand at the bottom. I swear, Mom. Do you think we’d have gone down there if we knew that?”
The logic of my argument didn’t sway her. “Quicksand!” she kept repeating. “I mean, quicksand. Didn’t you see the signs?! They were everywhere. What if you’d stepped in it? Disappeared?!”
“You know,” said Bruce. “That’s actually a myth. You don’t sink in quicksand.”
My mother turned around and glared at us, lips tight. It may have been the angriest I had ever seen her . . . to that point (the qualifier being necessary since we still had 80 percent of the trip remaining). But to this day I insist that I did not see a single warning sign as we crossed the lip or clambered down the cliff face. Okay, yes, we saw them at the middle of the crater, but by then we were already there, and the ground felt solid enough, so what would have been the point of turning back then? What a waste of effort that would have been.
Mom and Dad, and Janine and Matt, ate KFC that night in Flagstaff, and the smell of it—the thirteen secret spices, the fries, the gravy—was almost too much to bear. It wasn’t right. It was unfair. We pointed out that it was, technically speaking, child abuse to starve your children.
“We’re so hungry,” we said. “We have to eat. You can’t not feed us. We’re going to die.”
“Good,” said Janine.
“I don’t care if you’re hungry,” said my mother. “You should have thought about how hungry you were when you were walking through that quicksand.”
“I wasn’t hungry then,” said Keith.
My mom shot us a look that made us shut up. Who could blame her? She was probably wishing we’d found the quicksand. We spent the night in agony, stomachs growling, the scent of KFC everywhere. I have not eaten KFC since.
*
The early seventies was a tricky time to be making a trip like the one my parents had orchestrated for us. I doubt they would have set about planning it had it been even a few months later, given that it was in mid-October of 1973 that OPEC announced it was ceasing oil shipments to countries that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War, which meant the United States, Canada, most of western Europe, and Japan. OPEC also used their power to begin hiking the price of oil, so not only was gas in short supply, it cost more. Gas was about 30 cents a gallon in January of 1973 and had tripled by year’s end.
This was no small burden for my parents; my father’s business was steady but unspectacular, and my mother had only recently returned to part-time work. We were not exactly poor, but my mother shopped for cheap cuts of meat and had a friend at the bakery who put aside half a dozen loaves of day-old bread a couple times a week. We lived in a small bungalow in the Calgary suburbs, and I recently brought about dropped jaws and bulging eyes in our two teenage daughters, Jessica and Grace, when I told them I did not have my own bedroom until I left home for university.
The oil crisis had an impact, albeit a minor one, on our trip, but it had a much greater effect on car travel in general for many years to come—and therefore on the family vacation. In fact, it’s fair to say that the fall of 1973 may have been the last time when a family could look upon the cross-country car trip with virtually no guilt or worries other than those of individual family logistics. Following the autumn of 1973, the world of oil security has never been the same; these pressures increased throughout the seventies and early eighties, with another oil crisis in 1979 brought about by the fall of the Shah of Iran. There has also been a radical increase in the number of cars on the road, which has had an impact on traffic safety (which has been negatively affected even further by deteriorating highway infrastructure). The rise of environmental awareness has also changed the thinking of many families who otherwise might have hit the road for a few weeks to see where the wheel turned.
By the time we’d left on our trip in early December 1973 there were some gas lineups and the speed limit had dropped to
