“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 55 mph; this was perhaps the first time since the end of the Second World War, nearly a full generation, that there was an inkling that an automobile trip was anything less than the most convenient and carefree way for a middle- or lower-middle-class family to take a vacation.
In many ways, the golden age of the gas-powered automobile is not only over, but died a long time ago; we’ve just yet to fully accept the inevitable. Of course, we are still reliant in many key ways on the car, but less so than we were a decade ago, a trend that will be even more pronounced a decade from now. And who knows if alternative fuel sources for cars, such as batteries or hydrogen, will allow us to fully recapture our traveller’s imagination. Even the automobile industry’s core incubator group—young teenage men—are increasingly getting their thrills from different places, such as electronics and other technology. A 2004 story in the Los Angeles Times revealed that in the decade from 1992 to 2002, the percentage of males aged sixteen and seventeen getting their driver’s licenses dropped from 52 percent to 43 percent.
The sixties and early seventies—through the automotive confluence of the cost, safety, environmental innocence, and overall convenience—may well have been the apex of the family car vacation. This mode of vacation has become less predominant since then, given the rise in cost of gasoline, the rise in insurance rates, the introduction of mass air travel, the increased cost of lodging and food along the roadway, the deteriorating state of the highways, all combined with what has become an often crushing sense of crowdedness on the roads. Sometimes it seems as if, against all logic, there are more people moving than stationary. Who are all these people? I often ask myself now while driving on teeming highways. And where are they in such a rush to get to? A long drive on the highway used to be a pleasure; now it has the air of a chore.
This sense of congestion is not solely about the number of cars on the highway, but is also related to the hassle it has become in many major urban centres to actually get to the highway. By 2000, almost 80 percent of the population in Canada and the United States lived in urban areas, and of that number close to two-thirds lived in the suburbs, meaning that fully 50 percent of us live in a suburban environment. Suburbs have metastasized to monstrous degrees. More and more commuters live farther and farther out from the urban core, and use the suburban freeway system to get to work and get home. It has become a trial to find the open road, let alone travel along it. Travelling from one major city to another, particularly along the eastern seaboard, is not so much a highway drive as a series of hops between vast suburban links and ring road freeways.
All