Family! Road Trips! The Making of a Human Brain!

It’s been a solid couple of weeks of dissertation work – proceeding as usual slower than I’d like, but I’m getting better at accepting that progress is progress and keeping it steady as I move forward. Without much to report here, given the lull in travel that this semester has seen (I mean… relatively speaking), and a couple of weeks to go until my next quick trip overseas, I thought I’d toss out a quick li’l reflection on family, travel, and where we get things from. After the jump: memories!

The King Family Van, circa 1995. This thing took us everywhere. Huge, huge thanks to my mom for finding and scanning these photos, memory machines that fueled a lot of these recollections...

Growing up, I didn’t recognize how special my family’s commitment to travel (within our limited means) was. A lot of my childhood memories are from the annual (I think) road trips we took, piling into a station wagon and later a van to trek across America, usually focused on camping in national parks if we weren’t visiting my parents’ friends as they settled across the country.

The station wagon! I remember when we got the van being slightly disappointed that we could no longer sit in the backwards-facing rear seat; this was offset by the EXTREMELY COOL fact that the van had a table with cupholders that we could use to play cards on long trips. Sweet rides were a cornerstone of King family trips.

These are experiences that taught me a lot about travel, but also inevitably about partnership. Most of these trips, my folks wanted to maximize our minimal vacation time at our destination, and so they would tag-team these outlandish, sometimes-24-hour-long marathons driving through the night to get to a family friend’s Florida condo, or to Salt Lake City on our way out to visit friends and see the parks in northern California. It seemed natural at the time (I guess everything does to a kid), but in hindsight it’s striking how clear the values were: sharing the load to make things better for everyone, willing to sacrifice a little comfort or convenience to make exciting adventures possible, and above all a sense of mutual giving that still resonates with me. In hindsight, it’s surprising how clearly I remember my parents really trying to help each other, offering to take over the drive even when the other person said they were fine, making sure everybody was taken care of.

Role models/dream team in Colorado. Crimminy I love these two.

And the memories I have of those drives are vivid. Waking up in the hills of Tennessee with everybody else in the van asleep, listening to folksy Minnesota musicians on our cassette deck, having quiet conversations with my mom or dad at the wheel, watching the landscape slip by. These were my first memories of travel, inextricably linked to music and companionship.

Those trips also grounded me in a love of nature that I’ve at times forgotten in my city-bound years, but that always rushes back when I can get out into it. It’s stunning to me the vistas and environments I got to see as a kid, even growing up in a lower-middle-class household in suburbia. The Smoky Mountains, Mammoth Caverns, Yellowstone, the Badlands, Yosemite, the Boundary Waters, the Redwoods, the Rockies… We kept things simple at home, didn’t eat out much, made do with hand-me-downs, and I’m sure my parents made numerous sacrifices I still don’t know about, all to keep that sense of exploration alive. Those trips served as a reminder that a little shelter (a green canvas tent that held all six of us) and wheels to take you somewhere were all that you needed to open yourself to the world.

The aforementioned tent! This never seemed small to us, save perhaps the one night that it stormed so hard that the tent uprooted its stakes and rolled the lighter kids at the edges toward the middle. Some great, great, storms-while-camping memories, both from family trips and a cycling overnight I took with my dad.

As I got older, a pair of trips expanded my travel horizons: a missions trip to Chicago was my first foray into a major city, and my first real encounter that I can remember with poverty and income inequality – we may well have spent some time in the touristic areas, but I don’t remember it if we did, instead working on service projects in low-income neighborhoods, visiting churches from outside our home traditions, and taking most of our meals either via picnic or in ethnic restaurants, including my first taste of Egyptian food. (At the time, hummus and pickled beets seemed tremendouslyexotic.)

Not Chicago, obviously. A California rock-climbing adventure, though I believe I'm wearing the t-shirt from the Chicago trip in it? Um, nature is great, let's all go hang out in nature.

A few years later, a church trip to France, joining a gospel choir in Nancy, was my first time across the ocean; at the airport, somehow my dad and I accidentally swapped passports, and...nobody noticed. Different times.  I remember on that trip being (a) angsty about the usual teenage made-up problems, and (b) fascinated by all the cultural differences, from food traditions to the way people moved through the cities, to the language. I also had my first brush with globalism: having failed to see Titanic, I still had heard about it nonstop, much to my general irritation, not least when two friends on the trip ran back from the post office excited that they’d heard “My Heart Will Go On.” In the post office. In France. (Later on that trip, the daughter of a family we stayed with sang it on her way down the hallway, marking the first time I heard it myself.)

Also not France. Ten-year-old Pat taking very early to what's going to become a lifelong love of trains and mass transit in general, here in rural Michigan near my grandparents' place. I'm sure there are France photos somewhere in our albums and boxes, but I know I didn't take any when I was there because I was too fascinated by buttered baguettes and hot chocolate as a standard breakfast option. Plus all my teenaged feelings!

In my college years, my family took what at the time we assumed might be our last family vacation – a little over a week in England, split between London and Stratford. Unusually for me, I was fairly cognizant even at the time of what a privilege this trip was: packed with theatre, with a couple of days in which I was allowed to do my own thing (thrilling in that setting, at that age). It probably laid the groundwork for my own international travels, kicking off six or seven years later with a three-week swing through Paris, Amsterdam and Ireland. At this age, though, I was becoming aware of what an investment, what a sacrifice, a six-person trip like this was for my parents, and how much value they placed on togetherness, exploration, and shared experience. It cemented a lot of the things that I think were floating around in my emotional and intellectual DNA, and as I write about it I’m realizing how central that trip – in the details, but more so in the aggregate – was in shaping me.

King Family Kids, hanging out in the Atlantic ocean (or maybe the Gulf of Mexico?), which is a body of water that goes to England? I mean inasmuch as oceans go anywhere. Look, I don't have pictures from most of the specific trips I'm talking about, can't you be happy with what we have?

All of these things stick with you in different ways. I can draw clear lines from my parents’ mode of making travel possible to my own, sometimes quite different, approach to exploring the world. The simplicity of their experience of that travel – to exist in wilderness, or explore a foreign city, content to take joy in the novelty of the horizon and the unfamiliar landscape, ties very much to my preferred mode of travel. Their devotion to long-distance friendships (in a pre-email, landlines-and-long-distance era!) gave them a pragmatic but emotionally gratifying opportunity to see old friends in new places, which is almost certainly my favorite way to organize a trip. And the values of laughter and love that to me define my family taught me that, no matter your surroundings, travel can be pure pleasure if you approach it well.

This felt like the most extravagant splurge at the time: renting a vintage car in northern California, which also rented us driving caps and goggles/various other costume pieces (we had a similar "Wild West" experience in the Badlands, I think) for a couple of hours. Simple, fun, and ultimately just an excuse to have a fresh way to enjoy the world and each other. A++ GOOD FAMILY WOULD RELATE TO AGAIN.
Update: I am informed that the car was a favor-rental from friends-of-friends! Nobody get any big ideas, we were not blowing our life savings on this memorable junket.

As I gear up for a summer spent abroad, not in a (relative) sprint like last year’s but in a trio of long-term stays and a couple of hop-around weeks, I’m glad to have this history to build from, that I can embrace and grow from. As the years go by I’m more and more aware of what a gift, what a legacy, I have inherited from my parents, and I’m more committed to developing and strengthening the best of what they’ve given me. Here’s hoping I can do so in the wide-armed, open-hearted, joy-in-simplicity possibility of the months to come!

Yr humble narrator, 9 years old and already finding annoying ways to be dramatic. Halp.

Postscript: when I asked my mom if she had any digitized photos from these trips, we reminisced a bit about them, and she laughed about our trip through the Smoky Mountains, where my older brother was reading a book in the back of the van. "Wow, look at the mountains!" they encouraged him. He looked up, mildly said "Oh, is that interesting?" and went back to his book. He is currently on a multi-week hiking trip through the mountains of New Zealand, so... apparently some things do stick with you, whether you pick up on them right away or not...