Perhaps that’s why I can say we knew, even as kids, that our Mexico trip was significant. We didn’t have the words, but we understood it had meaning from the day we left until the day we arrived back home; especially once we were back home. Furthermore, home eventually became a fluid continuum rather than a specific physical structure, since that trip was part of what helped us understand that wherever we gathered as a family was our home, and that the support and togetherness we shared as a family was also our home.
Not that there weren’t times I would have loved to have escaped that car. And I know I wasn’t the only one. At one stretch my father drove seventeen hours. Halfway through that day, Keith turned from his spot in the throne and with no warning, delivered a wrecking-ball head butt directly onto my unsuspecting skull. I was briefly dazed and left with a throbbing headache for the next couple of days.
“What!” I half-shouted, trying to scramble back to retaliate, before my father shouted back at us to stop horsing around.
“He head-butted me . . . for no reason!”
“I’ve got a reason,” he said.
“I don’t give a damn about who did what,” said my father. “Stop horsing around. Do you want me to stop the car?”
I glared at Keith. “You’re dead. What’d you do that for?”
“Because I wish I had a comic to read right now,” he said.
Even though there were no comics to read, we made it through that day, and the days that followed in which there was still so much to come. There was Keith finding a dead baby hammerhead shark on the beach at Mazatlán, which he somehow persuaded my parents, and the American border guards, and the Canadian border guards, to let him bring home for show-and-tell at school, even though it had rotted badly by the time we got to Calgary. And then there was Mom, jumping up off her towel on the beach at Puerto Vallarta, shrieking at the top of her lungs, utterly hysterical, because she saw sharks in the water.
“Where?” said my dad, staring out over the water once we were all ashore.
“There,” she said, pointing. “Right there! See them?!”
My dad gazed out. “Pat,” he said. “Those are dolphins.”
She didn’t say anything more, but sometimes I’ve wondered, given the stresses involved in that trip, if she wasn’t screaming out of giddy hopefulness instead of terror. Who would have blamed her? Which was why it was so mystifying to me when my parents turned around less than a year later to buy a ratty old school bus and convert it into a long-haul recreational vehicle.
But I’ll come to that.
THE GILLESPIE FAMILY of 4232 Dalhart Road, circa 1975, was not poor in the strictest sense of the word: the family’s six children were clothed, fed, and in school. Still, we didn’t have wads of cash to throw around for frivolous expenditures like the latest toys, new ball gloves, haircuts, food. We ate out about once every four years. It was all about hand-me-downs, do-it-yourselves, and “I don’t care if you don’t want to use your brother’s old hockey equipment, and I don’t care that you think it smells like an armpit. If you don’t want it you can walk down the street and see if there are any other families that might want to adopt you.” I’m speaking hypothetically, of course; none of us played much competitive hockey. My mother and father were, however, parents of epic patience and resourcefulness who could have, and probably should have, been running the country; it would have been easier on them and better for the country. Ours was a small house for a family of four, let alone eight; for most of my teen years, my “bedroom” was a corner of the basement that I turned into a room by hanging a bedsheet from the rafters; it was a cross between a Moroccan yurt and the set of Midnight Express, depending on the state in which I kept it. As for privacy, well, that was like some foreign custom we’d heard about, but couldn’t imagine experiencing.
Our relative lack of affluence growing up was no hardship I recognized, resented, or even gave much thought, but it did mean that our early family vacations were usually low-budget. Or no budget. This meant camping, even though it has to be said, up front in the interests of full disclosure, that we were not one of those families deeply in touch with nature, who hiked regularly, who got out into the woods and mountains at every opportunity. Yes, we did the occasional hike, and we made it up to Banff National Park every now and then. But we were not the outdoorsy types. There were various reasons for this, chief among them that my mother liked plumbing. Communing with nature at that level never appealed to her much, and frankly it didn’t much to me, either. Whenever we hit a campground that had running water and indoor plumbing, she always seemed to cheer up and view camping as not so bad, really. I’ve since done my share of long hikes and roughing it in the bush, but I would still pick a decently equipped campground over the backwoods experience any day. I don’t know what that makes me, but what it does not make me is an outdoorsman.
We never journeyed too far away on our short camping trips around Alberta. We camped at Elbow Falls, just outside Calgary, or at Gull Lake, north of Red Deer. These were short trips, but in my memory they were some distance from home, journeys we had to plan for, pack up for, bring the tent, and generally just be organized about (to the degree that we were ever organized). I don’t think we camped much at these spots after I was about ten or twelve years old, but our early trips remain evocative for me, a true removal from home and our life there. Part of it was that we called it “a vacation,” which instantly gave it a meaning it wouldn’t have otherwise had. We had so little money when I was in elementary school that I’m sure my parents called camping at Gull Lake a “vacation” so that we could at least tell our friends we’d done something over the summer break.
But looking back, it seems clear to me now that what made our early camping trips worth remembering was the tent, the same one we would eventually take to Mexico; it may have been a beast, but it was a magical beast. The thing was gigantic and like no other tent I’d seen before or since. There were different rooms, caverns, corners, places to hide, folds from which to leap out and frighten a sibling, a hundred different smells, a separate room for the kids, a “living room,” our parents’ room, a front awning that always acted as a kind of water basin when it rained. It was both a curse and a temple, the kind of tent that for some reason my imagination wants to give a trapdoor leading to the underworld. A lack of plumbing may have prevented us from camping more, but the primary reason had to be the tent. Yes, it may have been a child’s portal, but it was also so daunting a proposition to set it up that I think my dad had to gird himself for days and weeks beforehand just to get in the proper mindset. It was so monstrously heavy and bulky and finicky that it made any trip—one night or ten—something that required full emotional commitment, not to mention a few days of Marine Corps physical preparation. Remember, we’re talking 1970 here. This was not a tent made of the lightweight waterproof fabrics of today, with their hollow, high-strength aluminum poles. Putting up one of today’s tents is a breezy five-minute stroll compared to the full-pack, army-boot, abusive-drill-sergeant swampy day-hike that was the erecting of that tent. It was not just a nightmare to put up, but I’m sure once it was up my father never slept, consumed as he must have been by nightmares of having to take it down. There were hundreds of poles of differing lengths, none of them attached by the interior elastic of today’s tents. They were heavy suckers, too, capable of braining you if one dropped on your head during decamping. Thick skin-shredding twine, attached to the four corners of the eternally useless rain guard, had to be regularly uncoiled and recoiled from many metres away. The tent itself was made of oiled canvas that through years of wear and tear had lost most of its ability to repel water but none of its ability to stain your clothes, leave streaks on your skin, integrate and return odour, and resist folding. It was a solid material, probably an eighth of an inch thick, and was so stiff that folding it, and keeping it folded, was like