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!”
My father pulled over. Everybody piled out onto the side of the highway. We were still less than an hour from home. My mother stood with her arms crossed, smoking a cigarette with great melancholy as she watched my father create a minor ecological calamity by hurling the entire swampy box of bloated comics into the snowfilled ditch. There was no such a thing as the environment back then. My mother dropped her cigarette on the ground and extinguished it with the toe of her boot. Her months of hoarding and protecting and planning were ruined. Everybody hated me. On the way back to the car, my brother Conor punched me in the kidneys from behind, doubling me over. “Loser,” he said.
“You’ll all have to find something else to do in the car now,” my mother said. “And it’s a long way to Mexico City and back.”
Nobody would sit with me in the jump seats, where the smell of vomit would stay sharp for days afterwards. I had to strip down to my underwear, but my father refused me a change of clothing on the grounds that my duffel bag was on the roof rack buried somewhere under that canvas tent, and there was no goddamn way he was untying that goddamn tent an hour into our trip. I hated that tent. My father hadn’t had a cigarette in three years, but he was smoking again two hours into the trip. As we neared the U.S. border I sat alone in the back, despised by everyone, myself included. The U.S. border guard said nothing about the naked shivering boy