Roadtripping 2018: Seattle to Vegas, with trips down Memory Lane

Our trips anywhere often start on the Seattle ferry, even if it’s just to see a play at the

Seattle Rep. In summertime the boat bursts with tourists snapping photos, hanging on the rails, soaking in the views.

I usually read a book, but this time I donned my tourist glasses – Wow! What stunning vistas I’ve been missing. That’s why I love road trips, since they open my eyes to everything I’m not seeing in ordinary life.

In the last few days we’ve learned a lot about our younger selves on our long drives:

• how 18-year-old Annette’s Trailer Park Blues set her course for the next 49 years
• why you should never rush into a burning house to save a cat
• why neither of us want to live in small towns ever again (but love to visit them)
• why we still love the music we loved when we were teenagers – and you do, too
• why we should put current events in the context of historical memory. And yes, this high-falutin’ insight relates to how the Watergate podcast turned out.
• That we thought there were moments in our lives we’d never forget, but poof! Gone. Memories that stick, however, make us who we are.

ROADTRIP MUSIC

Every road trip has a soundtrack, and ours starts each morning as I skip around in a

voluminous I-tunes library, playing songs I think Padre will enjoy as the scenery rolls by. Our nominations for top road trip classics: Me and Bobby McGhee (Janis Joplin); Born to be Wild (Steppenwolf); Take it Easy (Eagles); American Pie (Don Mclean); and Respect (Aretha Franklin – and just because).

Notice anything about our list? Sure you do. These are OLD songs, old like us. And sure enough, there’s a reliable study supporting the fact that the mechanics of memory ensure that the songs we first heard as teenagers – right smack at the same time we form our identity – stick like glue our whole lives. So your road trip playlist may be completely different than ours, depending on your age. The Slate article’s author on this phenomena, by the way, was in his 20’s, bemoaning the musical tastes of younger folks – why he didn’t like Katy Perry’s stuff, but some group called Ludicrous. Puhleeze.

But the study’s not totally correct, since we enjoy lots of songs no one’s ever heard of, picked up on our forays to the New Orleans’ French Quarter Festival or other places we’ve visited. Classics like Honey Island Swamp Band’s Party ‘til the Money’s Gone, or Soul Rebels Brass Band’s Drinka Little Poison (4 U Die). So we’re kinda hip, right? Maybe not, but we’ll always have the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Sly and the Family Stone….. top those groups, young whippersnappers!  At the very least, the children who cue up our nursing home Spotify playlists will have easy pickins’, true ‘dat.

ROADTRIP STOPS, STORIES, AND SMALL TOWNS

Since Padre hasn’t heard all my life stories yet, I made him visit Ellensburg, Washington, as well as the tiny town of Cascade, Idaho. In 1972 I spent my first quarter of college in Ellensburg, living with my sister and her husband in a trailer park on the wrong side of the tracks. While my sister did her best to make me feel at home, I felt lonely and lost – I missed my gregariously social high school life. (…and I was dramatic about it all, of course. Hey, I was 18.)

I can’t believe that Cascade Trailer Park is still there, since Ellensburg’s edges now sprawl with Big Box stores and strip malls. We poked around, and lo and behold – even the trailer we lived in, #24, sits defiantly in place after all these decades. The phone booth I’d walk half a mile to on windy nights to call my boyfriend is gone. But I remember my weepy calls, cursing my fate as I tried to figure a way out.

As a teacher I used non-examples all the time to make a point, and this non-example taught me what I did NOT want for my life. No, I wanted much, much more – and I high-tailed it out of Ellensburg at the end of the quarter, on to better things as soon as my bank account could handle it. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with trailers (I lived in one later, and loved it). But for the first quarter of my new adult life it was just wrong, at least for me.

Growing up I took several road trips across Eastern Washington, and just like that defiant

old trailer, the tumbleweed-strewn highway through dramatic Columbia River scenery will probably sit there forever. Signs of modernity peek up here and there (one hill festooned with artistic hilltop horses), and trendy B and B’s perch on the cliff above the river. The almost-empty ghost towns I recall from 1972 – Cle Elum, Washington, or McCall, Idaho – are filled with sprawling log cabin homes now, with designer kitchens and three-bay garages.

Not Cascade, Idaho, though. That’s where I went on my first road trip without my parents in 1969, when I was 14. Cascade still looks stuck in the 1950s, and the house my friend and I saved from destruction is still there.

Here’s the story: My sister and her husband drove downtown to have the power turned on for their rental house, leaving the younger sisters to goof around town, as 14-year olds are wont to do. The two of us walked up the driveway to see an enormous plume of ugly black smoke pouring out of the rental’s attic window.

An adult would call the fire department, but two young girls who love cats (there was a cat in there), rushed in to save the day. Turns out groceries stacked on the stove caught fire when the power came on, and the wall behind the stove was about to go up as well. We doused the flames with water from the sink faucet, then crawled back out under the heavy smoke and collapsed on the front lawn just as sirens began to wail.

That was stupid. And we’re lucky our road trip to adulthood didn’t get snuffed out right there.

I did think about knocking on the current owner’s door to let them know I saved their house 40-some years ago – so you’re welcome, 2018 Cascade, Idaho residents!  But I didn’t. Leave them to their own memories of home, and me to mine.

Our visit to Cascade reminded me of another home that no one saved: our home for 25 years had burned to the ground, we’d learned from our old neighbor a few years back. Fortunately (for us, anyway), we’d sold it to build our current home, but its loss brings tears to my eyes to this day. I am really mourning the memories, of course: 25 years of family dinners, backyard barbeques, a baby’s birth, the deck we built, the tree we planted. Those memories are still with me, but on this trip I’ve realized that the geography of life – the homes, the workplaces, the road trips – form the context for how and what we remember: good, bad, unforgettable, or swept away to forgetfulness forever.

And one person’s enchanting small town may be another’s nightmare, depending on the memories. Take Rupert, Idaho. Town elders have restored its charm, and the quiet, tree-lined streets, with a retro library and a book bike rack? Very peaceful.

Padre would say cloistered, since he lived in Web, Iowa, for three years, nine months, and 17 days, as he likes to describe it with a grimace. And we both noted the boarded-up Masonic Lodge – what small-town secrets hide inside its walls? Politics and pettiness live in Padre’s memory, and he won’t live in small towns because of it, just as I won’t return to trailer park life on the wrong side of the tracks if I can possibly avoid it. Memory indelibly shapes the lives we end up living, long after the places and events recede in life’s rearview mirror.

PODCASTS AND EVERDAY AMERICANS

Which brings me to….Watergate! You didn’t think I’d forget, did you? How could I forget that, when the Slowburn podcast left us rapt for hours? We knew all about Watergate, but Slowburn focused on obscure subplots of the scandal, such as Martha Mitchell’s role or Wright Patman’s defeat.

I remember Martha – who could forget her late-night drunken phone calls, the Mouth of the South with a princess phone in her hand? What I didn’t know was that Nixon’s cronies kept her locked up and drugged early on, so she wouldn’t spill the beans on the break-in.

Or walt…what about Wright Patman? Never heard of him. He was the congressman who led an early investigation into the Watergate break-in. A Nixon-era Adam Shiff, as if were, but with more power. Nixon’s buddies in Congress successfully squelched his investigation anyway.

Or how one investigator’s wife smuggled papers out, shoved in her pants, when the FBI rushed in to shut the Special Counsel’s office down. (Love that one. Go wives.) And how the tapes were almost lost to history.

We remembered that George Santayana quote, “Those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it” as we rolled into Utah (where the welcome sign says you can live life ‘elevated’ – that’s a whole podcast right there…), and we imagined how our world would be altered if Nixon had never resigned. Our conclusion? Today’s events, just like trailers and small towns, should be considered in their historical context, and hindsight offers much wisdom about which road Americans will choose going forward.

And Americans are in this together, as our road trip made clear. At our hotel breakfast one morning, Americans of every political persuasion sat together at breakfast, watching John McCain’s memorial on TV, no comments or political anything. We’re all just…watching, as another dramatic moment in our country’s history unfolds.

America’s diversity shows up everywhere out on the road – a copy of the Book of Mormon in our Salt Lake City hotel desk drawer, and grand hilltop temples instead of Catholic and Protestant churches like back home in the Pacific Northwest.

And just down the road from this very Mormon City? Finally, it’s Vegas, Baby! Our Vegas niece joked that she became way more cool when she moved to Vegas.

And you know what? She just might be right about that – the drive down the Strip alone left us gob-smacked, and we haven’t even seen the Beatle’s LOVE show yet.

And it can’t really be true that ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’, can it? All sorts of memories seem to inevitably follow us back home from our travels. In the next few days, Padre and I plan to make some good ones, and I’ll bet the Mob Tour about Sin City’s dark past will be one for the history books. Stay tuned for the latest, and thanks for joining us for some philosophizing* along the road.

(*as Padre likes to say).