No seat belts, no air conditioning, one paper map, and a father who would not stop for anything short of an emergency he personally recognized as one.
The Way-Back Seat and Eight Hundred Miles of Truce |
No seat belts, no air conditioning, one paper map, and a father who would not stop for anything short of an emergency he personally recognized as one. |
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News for the America we remember |
The station wagon had a third seat that faced backward, and whoever sat in it watched the entire country retreat. |
We called it the way-back. It was the worst seat and the best seat at the same time, and my sister and I fought over it every single trip. Worst, because you got carsick within an hour and there was no arguing with the smell of vinyl in August. Best, because you were as far from my father's right arm as it was possible to be while still technically being in the vehicle. |
That right arm was the enforcement mechanism of the entire journey. He drove with his left hand and reached back with his right, blind, swinging at a general area rather than a specific child, and the threat of it kept the peace better than anything he ever said. |
We left at four in the morning. Always. My father believed in beating the traffic with an almost religious conviction, and so we were carried out to the car half asleep in our pajamas, laid down on a folded quilt in the back, and told to go back to sleep. Nobody wore a seat |
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