Road trip

Small Revelations / Chris Smither










Although I was born a Pisces in the sunny state of California, I can barely swim and have never managed to get a deep dark savage tan. Some would say this is because I just didn’t spend enough time there. As the stories go, I was conceived on the East coast, where everyone thought I would remain. However, that was not meant to be.



At some point in February, my parents moved to Southern California, just out side of L.A. for my father’s job. My father’s jobs were some times quick to change. I was born in early March. And we moved back East in early April.


Although my memory is good, I can remember standing in my crib at a year that had to be less than one, I do not remember this trip. The stories however have remained constant.


Even after a messy divorce, both my parents agree: we drove back East early April. Me, my parents and my mother’s mother. She had come West to help with the baby, me. All also agree that we took the Southern route to cross the Rockies at that time of year, but it was a bad ride. The pass closed behind us.


Of course, the details of the story alter a bit depending on who you talk to. My mother says my father was an idiot. That it started to snow on the way up one side of the mountain, but he didn’t care. She claims he pulled off at the top to brush the snow off the sign to take a picture, but the snow was too thick and the picture impossible. As a result of this dawdling, we were all nearly killed on the way down.


My father says it started to snow on the way up and he was getting nervous. Near the top, he pulled out and passed the plow, so that while the drive might have been harder, if we had a problem, someone would find us. He claims there was never a picture.


Who knows?


Everyone agrees on another story. Stuck in a motel room in Kansas, my father went to the desk and asked for a church key, a bottle opener that was apparently required to open my formula. Apparently, a church key is a regionalism. The good Kansonians had no idea what was being asked for, but trying to be helpful… The motel staff combed the town, finally producing the minister, whom confused, produced a church key.


The trip apparently after this was uneventful and we arrived back East where we started and that was the end of my California adventure. However, I’m fairly certain that two other things came out of this trip. First, is my unique relationship to cars and driving. A lot of significant things of my life have happened with some kind of connection with the automobile. However, I cannot prove this connection.


Second however, I am more convinced about. For most of my life, when I couldn’t sleep I would count. 1…2…3…4… While most kids asked for bedtime stories, I’d asked to be counted to. I had no love of math or numbers, I just liked the rhyme of hearing a count. When upset, I’d count to calm myself. I did this into and through adulthood. When I got older and counting was too simple, I’d count backwards. 100…99…98. When that was not successful, I’d increase the start number 1000…999…998…997.


I always wondered about this in myself. Why? Why did I do this? It was, quite frankly, weird. One day, as an adult myself and my father a old man, he sat over a meal rambling and telling stories. This was pretty common and the stories pretty consistent. But this one day, he started talking about that trip across country.


“You loved those magic fingers machines on the beds.” He told me. “We’d have driven for hours and end up in some motel room. Your mother and grandmother would go to eat, and I’d be tired and sore and say go, I’d stay with you. They’d go off and I’d put a bunch a quarters into that machine and the bed would vibrate and we’d both lay there and I’d count to you. You loved it.”


And at the moment, a life time of weird suddenly became perfectly clear.