Grampa's Travel Notebook

It’s a sunny July day and my sister, brother-in-law, brother Timothy, and Jim drive my 91-year-old father to the broken-down ranchhouse where he grew up. It’s outside of Highwood, Montana, east of Great Falls, abandoned in a golden field of wheat. Dad stays in the car, not wanting to disturb memories of his childhood home, but we walk down the pickup truck tracks over the prickly wheat stubble. Wearing capris and with bare ankles, I walk gingerly to avoid being stabbed by the sharp wheat stocks. My brother, Timothy, strides ahead of me in his boots and jeans, shaking his head at my foolish clothing choice. He spent summers here as a farm hand when he was in high school and loves the Big Sky Country. The old house was electrified years after it was built, but never had running water. The old outhouse (a two-holer) is tipped over in the back yard.

           In the distance, behind the old barn, some people are shooting targets with their guns. Walking around the house we discover the only way in, through an open window, and slowly climb in, avoiding the nails sticking up on the sill. The place is a mess, strewn with picked over magazines, random old feed company calendars, and animal droppings. Upstairs I discover three black student composition notebooks, the kind with the marbled cardboard cover and lined paper bound together with string. They were designed in the days before cheap metal spirals, though I still can buy them at Staples.
The first notebook is titled "State Routes Traveled" and the heading of page one is ‘Alabama’. Each subsequent page has a state name, all in alphabetical order. (There actually aren't any routes listed in Alabama.) My grampa drove all around the country with Gramma. Winter was the slow season on the wheat farm, which gave them the freedom to roam the highways.
I’m thrilled to find the notebook and flip through it with anticipation. What sort of travel journal did he leave? I find each page lists highway numbers and place names, nothing more. They are ledgers of every highway he’d traveled on. No motels, no historic sights or tourist stops, nothing but rows of highway route numbers and place names. Arizona: #69---Jct #79 to Phoenix. Maryland: #39---W Va line to Jct #219 US. Out of hundreds of entries four are dated: 1964.
           The second notebook is titled "Routes North & South Traveled" and the third "East & West Routes Traveled". I take the notebooks with me, thin reminders of my grampa and his travels.

I know from family stories that Grampa drove to each of the lower 48 and took a photo of the state capitol. In my childhood I saw some of those pictures. That gene has been passed down through the generations: I visited each of those 48 states with my kids in 1995. Our son, Matt, is halfway through running a marathon in all 50. He’ll run the Boston Marathon for Patriots’ Day on Monday, April 18th, in honor of David, as part of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. (If you want to know more, or donate to the cause, here’s the link: http://pages.teamintraining.org/ma/boston16/mjohnston.)

My oldest brother, Steve, tells me that Grampa Hazen drove much of Route 1. Here's a notebook entry:
#1 US                                                                                          Baltimore Md. to
              Columbia S.C.
               Daytona Beach Fla to Key West Fla

          He was a wheat farmer who worked hard from spring to harvest and then traveled in the winter when the work was done. He took a photo of every state capitol of the lower 48 and in retirement traveled to Alaska and Hawai’i to finish the job. There’s an “all of” project.

Would I Do It Again?

We returned to Lexington from our two week road trip exactly two weeks ago. In Route 1, Day Eight: KEY WEST! Maggie T. comments that she wants to convince Jeremy to drive down to the Florida Keys via Route 1. Do I recommend it? Would I do it again?

Sometime after my epic Cross Country Trip in 1995 (15,900 miles, 48 states, 3 Canadian provinces, and 1 Mexican state, with six kids ages 4 to 14, in a blue minivan with a purple tailgate pulling a pop-up tent trailer), I dreamed of traveling Route 1 from Maine to Florida. I love the idea of doing all of something: driving through all 48 states… hmmm, actually, I can’t think of any other ‘all of’ things I’ve done.

Further back in time I read William Least Heat-Moon's travel book Blue Highways. It was one of the inspirations, along with John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, for my Cross Country Trip. The ‘blue highways’ are the secondary roads, color-coded blue in Rand McNally’s road atlas. He didn’t want to zip along interstates; he wanted to experience real America.

       Route 1 is not a ‘blue highway’, but I imagined I'd find a piece of America, more real than the interstate. What did I mean by real? I wanted to find diners with fresh pies on display                          

        

kitschy tourist traps, cheap motels.
                             

 I wanted to experience the highway that has connected Maine to Florida since 1926. I did find diners, and plenty of cheap motels (I chickened out there, fearing bedbugs and drug busts), but in the suburbs, instead of local color we passed mile after mile of Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond, Kohl's, Wal-Mart, and Target.
                    

 In areas too unpopulated to support those big box stores there were still the ubiquitous CVS and Walgreens, often just across the street from each other. Route 1 is teeming with car dealerships: Honda, Chevrolet, Hyundai, even Porsche, and BMW.
                                         

Small towns often had used-car lots. I can just imagine an early twentieth-century family getting in the family buggy, going to Route 1, and trading their horse for a Ford. Whatcha think?
                         

What surprised me? The lovely villages of Rhode Island and Connecticut, with their brick two-story shops
                      

and rolling countryside. Boston Road in Yankee Bronx. (It's part of the original 1673 'King's Best Highway' or Boston Post Road that was established between Lower Manhattan and Boston.) In Philly, our highway dipping below grade, then becoming a grand boulevard, passing handsome stone and brick houses. I didn't expect the loneliness of South Carolina and Georgia along Route: we passed mile after mile of tall thin pine trees in sandy soil.

The Historic Route One website suggests, “Avoid the congestion of East Coast interstates such as Interstate 95.” The reality is that on Route 1 we averaged twelve miles an hour for three hours through Miami. Since Route 1 doesn’t bypass cities and towns like the interstates do, it has several hundred traffic lights from Massachusetts to Key West. Through the densely populated areas, there is plenty of congestion. I can imagine taking a trip to explore smaller roads or even a section of Route 1; I feel no need to traverse the length again.

So, I've driven to all 48 states and all of Route 1 south of Boston. Jim and I plan to drive the northern section of Route 1 this summer. We’ll start at the Tobin Bridge and pass the northeastern cities and towns of Massachusetts, cross a bit of coastal New Hampshire, and then follow the coast of Maine till Route 1 turns inland toward Caribou and then Canada. "I'm goin' out on a limb here" (Groundhog Day): I don’t expect to see a big box store once we pass Freeport, Maine (home of many outlets); I do expect to see a lot of pine trees of the northern variety.

       Then I can brag about doing 'all of' two things: 48 states and Route 1.

Triggers

For Christmas I give Jim a boxed set of vintage movies with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  We discovered this pair of Hollywood dancers as newlyweds at the University of Chicago.

                                                 
As part of our taking it easy in this New Year, we watch a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie each day for five days. Towards the end of the fifth movie, a young man dies suddenly. Jim breaks our stunned silence: “These are supposed to have happy endings.”
Triggers abound. Jim’s Aunt Bee, his dad’s sister, died last week. We’re in Utah for the funeral. We certainly don’t have a corner on pain and grief.
On the airplane to Utah I read a book my sister sent me: What Are We Doing on Earth? by an Australian Jesuit, Richard Leonard. A phrase pops off the page: ‘a Christian burial’. Suddenly I’m in a foggy cemetery, two soldiers standing watch over a flag-draped coffin, a bugler in the middle distance.
Further along in Leonard’s book a man writes a letter to him, describing the return to his wife and sons after a self-imposed absence. His wife dies of breast cancer shortly after his return. That’s in the second sentence. The third stops me in my tracks. “After the undertakers took her away…” Have I ever stopped crying, somewhere inside, since watching the black hearse’s brake lights as it paused at the end of our driveway, the left turn signal flashing for moments before it pulled out and disappeared into the night? I often think I have moved on, but in a second I’m back there, silently saying goodbye.

The Trip North

On January 7th, we leave Route 1 North in Miami and take Florida’s Turnpike through the Everglades. In the 84 miles between Fort Pierce and Three Lakes there is just one exit, at Yeehaw Junction; it’s lonely highway. We are surprised at how much of Florida is wilderness. At sea level and treeless, but wild nonetheless.
We sleep in Lake City in north-central Florida and on January 8th we breakfast with Jim’s cousin, Kristin. Frank is at work, so we can’t thank him personally for the wonderful day we had in Key West with the free tickets he arranged.
In the afternoon we visit my brother, Timothy, in Savannah and he gives us a tour of The Home Depot, where he works. Supper is in Charleston, South Carolina, with Jim’s sister Mary and family; we sleep in their FROG. That’s a Charleston architectural feature: Finished Room Over Garage. Theirs is an oasis of peace and serenity.
January 9th is our big travel day: 550 miles. After a breakfast of steel-cut oats with John, we leave Charleston, drive through North Carolina and southern Virginia, and have supper with my Bryn Mawr College friend, Stacie, and her husband Frank, near Richmond, Virginia. Then I drive through heavy rain on I-95 and I-495 to Bethesda, Maryland, where my brother Steve and his wife Maria host us for two nights. On the way we pull off I-95 in Aquia, Stafford County, Virginia, for gas and find ourselves briefly back on Route 1. En route we take turns driving and reading The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, by Alexander McCall Smith.
January 10th is our second Sabbath on the road. We attend the Rockville Maryland Ward, adjacent to the Washington, D.C. Temple, then drive around the temple grounds. We made a lot of trips to the temple in the years before the Boston Temple opened in 2000, but one day stands out: June 5, 1979.
Supper is a happy, noisy affair with my niece, Maria, her husband, Karl, and their four energetic young children. They remind us of us twenty-two years ago, when we had kids ages one to eleven. What sweet (sometimes) memories.
January 11th we stop at Peter’s and Xiomara’s for supper; R’el and Mike visit too. At 10:30 p.m. we start on our final 200 miles. At 2:30 a.m. we sink into our own bed. Two weeks on the road.

Reminders of David

The first night we meet Roberta and James on their sailboat in Key West, she mentions that her two sons had been in the military: a soldier and a Marine. I decide not to mention that two of our sons also joined the military; David joined the Army and Peter the Marines. I don’t feel like being the grieving mother, I just want to be a tourist.
Four days later we approach Bethesda from the south on Interstate 495. We cross the Potomac, as we did on March 26, 2014, on our way from Dulles Airport. David and an Army buddy had flown in from Korea. We had driven down from Lexington that day, picked them up at Dulles, and gone to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (which I affectionately named WReNMiMiC). From then on I spent my days at Wrenmimic and my nights in Steve’s and Maria’s guest room in Bethesda, exactly 2 miles away. I was in that guest room when Mercy, the kind medical student, called to tell me David was having an emergency appendectomy. I posted my blogs in that guest room, until the Army lent me an electronic ‘hotspot’ to connect to the internet in David’s hospital room. That guest room was my home away from home for nearly two months.


And today David has been dead for five months. Our trip was a way to leave our everyday life for a while. We’re back. What’s next?

Route 1, Day Ten: The Last Sunset

It's January 7th, and Roberta cooks up some bacon and scrambles eggs for our breakfast. Then it’s time to say good-bye to her and James.

Frank, husband of Jim’s cousin Kristin, grew up on Key West. His family lived there for multiple generations, coming originally from the Bahamas. He arranges free tickets for us and we spend the day as unabashed tourists. The Shipwreck Museum reminds me of the Nantucket Whaling Museum, complete with a lookout on top.

The ocean around Key West was the site of an average of one shipwreck a week for many years. “Wreckers” in small boats would go out in the storms and hurricanes to rescue passengers and crew, which was the first priority, and salvage any cargo they could bring in. Depending on the effort required and the risks involved, wreckers received a percentage on the sale of the salvaged goods.
The Conch 'train' threads its way through the streets of the old town, hitting the major points of interest, including the colorful buoy at the southernmost point in “the continental U.S.” It seems a stretch to call an island 100 miles from the mainland “continental”, but whatever floats your boat.
The Key West cemetery is full of above-ground crypts; many of them are stacked. It looks like an eerily deserted white marble city for children.











I enjoy seeing the Caribbean fish in the aquarium, including my personal favorite: the fairy basslet. (Have I mentioned I like purple?)
                                               
By 3 p.m. we’re touristed out. I give up trying to read all the biographical sketches in the historical sculpture garden: it has about 20 or 30 bronze busts. We eat at a restaurant specializing in Cuban cuisine. The pork chops marinated with lime and garlic are extremely tasty. Since we first entered the town two days ago we’ve heard roosters crowing frequently. When cock-fighting was banned in the 1970s, the birds were released and their descendants roam the island freely. It is illegal to capture them or harvest their eggs.

About 4:30 p.m. we leave Key West and drive Route 1 North, a.k.a. the Overseas Highway, in daylight. Around 5:30 p.m. I spy a huge orange disk behind me, a quick glimpse of the setting sun. Too bad we can’t be at the sunset festival tonight.

Route 1, Day Nine: More Research Required

January 6th we wake to a rainy morning on the sailboat docked at Stock Island in the Florida Keys. Roberta scrambles eggs and cooks up sausage for our breakfast. We’ve been on the road for eight days, so it’s laundry day. James fires up the dinghy and gives us a ride to the laundry/shower house. I put our laundry in the washer and head for the shower. It doesn’t have a ceiling, just a palm thatch roof about 15 feet above my head. Wish I had a shower like that (during the New England summer, that is).

Walking around the marina, Roberta points out a boat completely wrapped in a red and yellow tarp with a sign:

                   
                                   
 She says it’s termite extermination and shudders at the thought. The marina has a clubhouse with gym and restaurant and a small sandy beach. Unexpectedly, all the sand on Key West is imported from the mainland.
After the laundry is done James takes us in his dinghy to Old Town Key West. Earlier in the day there had been a small craft weather advisory, but he thinks it will be alright. (Obviously we make it.) We motor along in fairly open, choppy water. It does occur to me that I have put my physical safety in his hands: I can swim a mile in a swimming pool, but am not confident of my survival in open water. He doesn’t offered life jackets, and I’m too cool to ask, but before we are underway, when he opens Jim’s seat to tinker with the battery, I notice the bright orange jackets and rehearse mentally how I will retrieve them if we capsize. Closer to shore, James winds through the “mooring field”, an area of the harbor with dozens of buoys for rent, each tethered to the sea floor. Boat owners tie up their boats and go ashore by dingy. The marina where we are sleeping has actual slips and docks: our car is a few yards from the sailboat.
On land once more, we have a meal at Sloppy Joe’s. The eponymous owner, Joe Russell, was great friends with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is big on Key West. He only lived there for 8 years, but he wrote some of his greatest works, including A Farewell to Arms, there and his home is a Mecca for aficionados. For dessert at Joe’s we have key lime pie, again.
Then we head for the west end of the island. Crowds gather there every evening to watch the sun set. There is a man with large glasses, an unassuming Clark Kent kind of guy, without the handsome actor behind the glasses. Like a businessman from the fifties he wears a white shirt, with combed-back hair, but also sports diamond ear studs and is reading a man’s palm. A steel band pierces the air with bright West Indian music. Street performers have laid ropes on the ground, defining makeshift stages. The cruise ship Constellation sounds its bass horn and we stand above the dock watching the workers lift heavy ropes thick as your arm off the bollards to release the ship. Counter-intuitively (to us), the ship pulls away from the dock, sideways, staying parallel to the shore, and then turns 180 degrees to exit the harbor.

                                                     
We walk through the crowds, passing a street performer with an annoying voice and about six cat carriers. The performers all have the technique of warming up the crowd by acting like they’re about to start, but it’s mostly talk until a good crowd has gathered; I don’t have the patience to wait for the cats to appear. Another performer is waving a flaming torch around. He has a compelling technique: all through his show he’s encouraging people to step right up to the line. He even calls out to passers-by: come on, you in the pink, step up here.
After watching his show we find Kermit’s and buy a whole key lime pie to share with James and Roberta. After four pies my study proves inconclusive: more research will be required.