Sunday, May 07, 2006
By Beth Dalbey, bethdalbey@bpcdm.com
Because of the cows, we didn’t take a lot of family vacations, unless you consider hauling the cattle to one show or another across the Midwest short vacations. As a kid, I felt a little cheated that the length of my stay was measured by the size of the manure pile outside the livestock pavilion, while my friends were counting the number of complimentary hotel soaps they’d accumulated on the way to Disneyland.
As an adult, though, I don’t seem to be permanently scarred by this, the area on my left kneecap where I ran into the tines of a pitchfork notwithstanding. I learned some real-life skills, like how to remove offensive matter from a bed of straw without removing unnecessary bedding, while my friends in were immersed in a fantasyland of half-truths and outright lies – even if mice can talk and are fundamentally good, is it unreasonable to expect them to take the gloves off once in a while? – with no possible practical application.
But there were enough similarities between these jaunts to cattle shows and the full-fledged family road trip portrayed in “Leaving Iowa” that I spent a couple of hours giving in to deep belly laughs that Tim Clue and Spike Manton evoke with their satiric. I made a real connection with the character of the sister, played by Cindy Tegtmeyer, who spent part of the trip in the back seat throwing up.
My dad drove fast, and it seemed especially so on the hilly roads that marked the topography of my native Missouri. His unit in the Army was the Red Ball Express, and the key to staying alive was to get supplies behind enemy lines quickly and retreat to safety just as quickly. Those same driving skills that saved many a World War II soldier’s life caused me to – it seems incongruous to be delicate here – blow my beets.
On those rare occasions when I wasn’t jaunting across the countryside in the cab of a stock truck, I was in the rear-facing back seat of the family station wagon, the express province of “the three little kids,” trying to hold at bay the volcano of vomit that was about to erupt while giving charade-like signals with my hands that I needed to stick my head out of the window of the car, preferably while it wasn’t moving.
“George,” Mom would say, “You need to stop the car. Beth is about to throw up.”
No, Mom, I would be thinking. You need to drive the car.
So I started taking Dramamine when Dad got behind the wheel. The drug kept me from getting sick, but it plain ticked him off that it also caused me to sleep through some of the exciting spots he wanted to point out along the road, like the sign that warned motorists to “beware of falling rocks” on a narrow ribbon of highway along the Missouri-Arkansas border.
“Pay attention, you girls,” he said once as we were delivering our older sister to graduate school in Little Rock, Ark., “you may never see scenery like this again.”
That was a depressing thought, that I might never venture as far away from Burlington Junction, Mo., as Little Rock. Eventually I did leave Missouri, and “Leaving Iowa” reminded me how much I miss the steaming piles of manure, throwing up in the back seat of a car and sailing up and down the “thrill hills” of Missouri.
They were, as Jerry Garcia once noted, even if he was talking about something inconceivable in the idyllic world I grew up in, long, strange trips indeed.
