Travels with my Family (3 page)

After we had to swim for our lives that day, we were more careful with the ocean. My mother cut a page out of the newspaper that gave the times for the tides, high tide and low, for the rest of the month. The water wasn't going to sneak up on us again.

After a while, my father started saying that he had itchy feet. Which means he was thinking about going somewhere new. So instead of scratching his feet, he did what he always does at a time like that. He took out his road map.

“Look, Florida's not far at all. It's almost next door. And I've never been there.”

Florida? My brother and I looked at each other. We couldn't believe our ears!

“
Disneyland!
” we shouted.

You see, we were normal, my brother and I, even if our parents weren't.

But Disneyland was too normal for my parents. Too much like everybody else, too ordinary. Not original enough. Somehow I wasn't surprised.

“Why would you want to have a fake adventure in a theme park with plastic alligators?” my father wanted to know. “I'll show you real alligators. And they won't be made out of plastic, no, sir!”

So it was off to Okefenokee Swamp, to go canoeing. The little bit of the swamp that hangs down into the state of Florida.

I don't think anyone else has ever even heard of Okefenokee Swamp. I don't think anyone can even say it. Except for my mother, who told us about a comic strip called Pogo that had possums and alligators and skunks that could talk. They all lived in the Okefenokee Swamp.

“
We have met the enemy, and he is us!
That's what Pogo used to say,” my mother told us.

My brother and I laughed, even if we weren't quite sure what Pogo meant. Or my mother, either.

There we were in our boiling-hot car, with the windows rolled down, heading to Florida. I thought of Miro. He was probably relaxing under a tree in my grandmother's cool backyard. He was lucky.

Not like us. We were the only ones on the road. Everyone else was sleeping off the heat on their front-porch swings, or in hammocks under the trees, waiting for the sun to go down and things to cool off.

Meanwhile, we were in a big hurry to get to a swamp.

The problem with traveling in a car is that there's nothing to do. At first my mother played Twenty Questions with us. But my brother got mad because I guessed his animal too quickly. It was a penguin. It was too easy. There he was, sitting with his stuffed penguin on his lap. Category: animal. Color: black and white. Anyone could have guessed that, since penguins are his all-time favorite animal.

To calm him down, my mother said we would play the Alphabet Game. We had to look out the window and spot things that started with the different letters of the alphabet. A was for airplane, B was for billboard, C was for cow, D was for… We got stuck at D. When my brother pointed at me and said, “I see a dummy!” it was my turn to get mad. “E!” I shouted. “I see an egghead.” I elbowed him. He elbowed me back.

“F!” yelled my father. “F is for finished. The game is finished!”

That put an end to the game.

“I'm hungry,” my brother complained after we'd stopped yelling at each other.

“We're almost there,” my father told him. “Can't you wait?”

“I'm hungry, too,” I said.

“The next time we stop for gas,” my father promised.

He found a baseball game on the radio. The Atlanta Braves were playing the Chicago Cubs, and nothing else mattered. When my father wants to get somewhere, he won't stop for anything, unless it's a full-blown emergency. We could starve to death and he wouldn't notice. On we drove.

The next day, bright and early, there we were, all four of us in a canoe with our lunch in a cooler, and a park ranger looking at us as if we were about to become some alligator's dessert.

“Whatever you do, don't put your hands in the water,” he said.

He wore a Smokey the Bear hat and mirrored sunglasses, like a bad guy in the movies. Except he was supposed to be a good guy.

“And if you don't like your sandwich, kids, eat it anyway, because if you throw it over the edge, it'll attract them gators something fierce. And you don't want that!”

My mother was looking pretty nervous. When she gets nervous, she goes completely quiet. She even forgets to point out all the beautiful things around us. My father, who wanted us to have an authentic adventure with real live alligators, was smiling happily. He slung his binoculars around his neck and checked the film in his camera. I wondered whether my little brother was going to throw his sandwich overboard anyway, just to see if what the ranger said was true, and if I was going to have to save him again.

The thing you need to know about Okefenokee Swamp is that everything is always moving. The islands aren't nailed down. They turn around and around in circles, floating in the water. That's what Okefenokee means: the trembling land. I read that in the little pamphlet we got from the park ranger. I was reading to keep from thinking about what was going to happen on our authentic adventure. To keep from trembling, like the islands turning circles around us.

Which would be worse: getting lost forever among the floating islands, or getting eaten by alligators? And would we even have a choice?

We started paddling into the swamp. We were the only canoe on the water. That couldn't be a good sign.

Suddenly my mother, who was paddling in the front of the canoe, started waving her hands in the air and pointing. Something was in the water, dead ahead of us.

“An alligator!” she whispered, as if she were afraid it would hear. I don't even know if alligators have ears.

“Nonsense,” my father told her. “That's just a log.”

He couldn't see it from where he was, at the back of the canoe. “You're the navigator, we're counting on you to guide us,” he'd told my mother when we left the dock. But I guess she wasn't the navigator when it came to spotting alligators.

We kept on paddling, right over the top of the alligator. A second later, it popped up again, behind us, bobbing in the water. Sure enough, it was a log. Score one for my father.

Once the alligator turned out to be a log, I relaxed a little bit. Big water lilies floated by, with yellow and pink and white flowers. There were rows of painted turtles on the logs, all lined up, from big to little. When we came near, they splashed into the water in the same order, from biggest to littlest. My mother must have relaxed, too. She started saying how beautiful everything was. Standing in the swamp, white egrets stared at us with their strange yellow eyes. My father was taking pictures of everything.

I watched the islands floating past. Looking at them, you couldn't tell they were moving. In the Okefenokee Swamp, there were at least twenty-five different plants that you could eat if you got lost — I read that in the pamphlet the park ranger gave me. I wondered how lily pad sandwiches would taste.

Suddenly, my mother turned to me again and pointed at something.

“I suppose that's a log, too?” she whispered.

Right in front of us, lolling in the water, was something long and brown, with ridges on its back, its snout just out of the water, and two cold beady eyes.

“Dad,” I said as calmly as I could. And I pointed straight ahead, too.

“That's just another log,” he said. “Keep paddling, nice and easy.”

“If it's just a log, then why does it have two…”

That's when our authentic alligator adventure began.

Just before we reached it, the “log,” if you believe my father, sank down into the water. But not all the way down. We paddled right over the top of it.

Scritchhhh
— right over the razor-sharp scales on its back. My brother heard the sound, and he stared down at the floor of the canoe, his eyes bulging and his face very pale. We rose out of the water, ever so slightly — I swear we did.

My little brother started to stand up, as if he wanted to start running. Never stand in a canoe. Everybody knows that. Just in time, I grabbed him and sat him down again, and we both looked behind the canoe.

The alligator bobbed up again in the water, right where he had been. He had this look in his eye, as if he was just a little bit irritated. And a little bit hungry, too.

“See,” my father said cheerfully, and a little too loudly, “I told you we'd have a real-life alligator adventure, with real alligators. No Disneyland for us, no, sir!”

Then he started paddling fast — very fast — away from the alligator. We headed for a big island, and solid ground.

And what was basking in the sun on the shore of that island? You guessed it. An alligator as big as our car.

My mother gasped.

We made a quick U-turn. And started paddling like the wind.

I wasn't too surprised when, a few minutes later, a few scary silent minutes, my father looked at his watch and decided it was time to head back to the dock.

“Let's go for barbecue,” he said brightly. “I'm still hungry. These sandwiches aren't enough for me.”

But I knew better. And so did my little brother.

My mother just smiled and started whistling a tune.

By the way, I had a fried alligator tail sandwich for lunch. It was pretty good! And my dad was right. They weren't plastic alligators at all.

If you ever want to do something really boring, try sitting in a room watching grownups listening to other grownups reading stories from a book. I know, I've tried it.

You see, my brother and I had to go all the way to British Columbia, on the Pacific Ocean, on the other side of the continent, to listen to my parents read their stories to crowds of people. That's part of their job, or so they say. If you ask me, I'd rather read a book by myself.

The place was so far we had to take an airplane.

“I'm afraid we can't bring Miro,” my father explained. “He wouldn't like it, being locked up in a cage in the baggage compartment.”

“Besides,” my mother added, “afterwards we're going to a farm to see some friends. You'll like them very much, I'm sure. But I'm afraid Miro might not get along with the other animals.”

Maybe it was better that way. I'm sure Miro would have been bored silly listening to grownups reading stories to each other. Just the way my brother and I were. There was one cool part, though. We got to take a float plane.

A float plane can take off and land on water. Instead of wheels, it lands on something called pontoons. The plane was so small that our family filled it up completely. Just us and the pilot.

My brother and I drew straws to see who would sit in front with the pilot. I won!

The plane flew low over the water. We were so close we could almost see the fish in the ocean. The engine made so much noise we had to wear big earmuffs to protect our ears.

“Hey, isn't that a whale down there?” I shouted.

I pointed down to the water. But my brother ignored me. He was still mad that he had to sit in back with my parents.

We circled over an island and landed on the water. Then we floated over to the dock. We stepped out of the plane and pulled off our earmuffs. There we were, on Salt Spring Island.

“It will be great to be on a farm,” my mother said happily. “We'll have some peace and quiet in the country. It's really beautiful there.”

My brother and I couldn't believe it. Were we really going to have a quiet, ordinary vacation for once?

“A farm? Like Old McDonald's? With horses and cows and stuff?” my brother asked.

“This farm is a little different,” my father said.

Uh-oh! My little brother and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. But we didn't say anything. If it wasn't going to be a normal farm with cows and chickens and a farmer in overalls with a pitchfork, what was it going to be?

We found out soon enough.

Our very first morning on the farm, we were woken up by gunshot blasts.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
just outside our bedroom window.

My brother and I jumped out of bed and ran to look.
Bang!
We crouched down and peered over the windowsill. There was George, our parents' friend, shooting at the sky with a big shotgun.

“Blasted ravens!” he said. “I won't have you hurting my lambs, you varmints.”

He fired another couple of shots at a big pine tree.
Bang! Bang!
Then he looked up at us and winked.

“Those blasted ravens try and peck my poor lambs' eyes out. They're absolute pests. You've gotta scare them off!”

Then he shouldered his shotgun and walked away, chuckling to himself.

My brother and I looked at each other. This was definitely not Old McDonald's Farm. It was going to be different.

Later, we were having breakfast when something bit my elbow. Ouch! I dropped my spoon. Whatever it was bit my other elbow, twice as hard.

I looked around. There were peacocks in the kitchen. I know what you're thinking. How magnificent, all those feathers, all those colors, peacocks are so beautiful — you sound just like my mother. But let me tell you, peacocks are about as friendly as rattlesnakes.

I jumped up, and some of my cereal ended up on the floor.

“You don't have to feed the peacocks, kids. All that granola's not good for them anyway! Ajax, Olive, get out of there!” George laughed.

I never knew that farmers kept their livestock in the kitchen.

There was an uproar under the table as the peacocks fought over the granola. My little brother sat stiffly on his chair, with both legs folded tightly underneath him, trying to stay out of the battle. Now if only Miro were there. He would have protected us from the birds. At least I think so.

Just then, the phone rang.

“George, it's for you!” yelled a shrill voice.

George went to answer the phone.

“Hello? Hello?” he shouted into the phone. Then he slammed it down.

A minute later he returned with a large gray parrot perched on his shoulder. He looked more like a pirate than a farmer.

“Confounded bird!” he mumbled to himself. The peacocks looked offended and walked out of the room. Maybe they thought he was talking about them.

But George was talking about Tuco — that was the parrot's name. Tuco could imitate ringing telephones and voices. He loved playing tricks, and George fell for them every time.

“Confounded bird!” squawked Tuco.

“Does he repeat everything?” my brother asked.

“Does he repeat everything?” squawked Tuco.

My brother gave the parrot a nasty look, because nobody likes being imitated. We soon learned that Tuco knew a lot of words. But I can't repeat them here.

In the country, there's supposed to be peace and quiet. Well, the peace and quiet lasted another minute or two, until George looked out the front window.

“Jackson!” he shouted.

Then he ran out the door with Tuco clinging to his shoulder, squawking, “Jackson! Jackson! Jackson!”

“Who's Jackson?” my little brother asked.

“I don't know.” I took a quick look under the table. The coast was clear. “So far, we've seen a raven, a parrot and some peacocks. Maybe Jackson is a penguin. Let's go see.”

My brother jumped up and ran outside, a big smile on his face. Penguins, as you know, are his favorite birds.

We made it outside without being attacked by the peacocks. We passed the garden, then went along the driveway. I saw something large and black galloping down the middle of the dirt road that ran in front of the farm.

So that was Jackson — he was a horse. And George was running after him, waving his arms.

Jackson the horse liked to play games, just like Tuco did. He pretended to be very interested in eating the grass by the side of the road. But every time George got close, and tried to grab him to take him back to the meadow on the other side of the fence, he galloped three or four steps farther on, and went back to eating some more grass.

Little by little, we were exploring the whole island, in slow motion, with Jackson leading the way, and George, Tuco, my brother and I following in single file.

“He was a circus horse,” George told us. “When he retired, we took him in.”

“What did he do in the circus?” asked my brother.

“He was a clown,” George answered. “He still thinks he's pretty funny.”

I wondered how George knew what his horse was thinking. Maybe you learned that in farm school.

“Maybe he thinks he's still in the circus,” my brother suggested.

“This is a circus,” George declared. “The whole farm is a circus, starring Jackson the Horse.”

“And Tuco!” the parrot added loudly.

After a while, Jackson decided it was time to be caught. He probably wanted to eat something else, like oats, or apples. Grass must get pretty boring after a while. George took his bridle and we all walked down the dirt road, back to the farm.

There, we saw another strange sight.

“What on earth is your mother doing?”

We all stopped and stared. My mother was standing in the middle of the pen, surrounded by sheep. She was holding her drawing pad up in the air.

“She's drawing sheep, I guess.”

My mother draws all the time. She'll draw anything, even smelly, wooly sheep.

My mother pushed the sheep away, walked to the other end of the meadow and started drawing. The sheep followed her, baa-ing loudly. They were playing the opposite game from Jackson the horse. Every time my mother moved away to get the right perspective to draw them, the sheep crowded closer to her. Maybe they wanted to learn how to be artists.

They were watching her from very close up, as if they needed glasses. One of them put his nose right on her drawing pad, as if he wanted to help out.

“That's Velcro for you! He wants to be part of everything,” George snorted. “We call him that because he sticks to you like a burr on a dog. Come on, boys, let's save your mother from being trampled to death!”

George opened the gate, and we went into the sheep pen with Jackson.

“Give the lady some room, you incorrigible lot of fleabags!” George told them. And he gave them a few taps on their wooly rear ends.

“Thanks, George,” my mother said. I looked at her pad. She hadn't gotten very far, and there was sheep drool on the paper. “You should really brush their teeth once in a while. Whew!”

George laughed and patted Velcro. “I'll keep that in mind. I'm sure Velcro would love having his teeth brushed.”

My mother sat down to draw again. We were enjoying the peace and quiet when, thirty seconds later, I heard my little brother cry for help.

How did he do it? I'll never know. But he managed to get his head stuck in the fence. And you know by now how curious sheep are, and how when one sheep does something, they all want to do it. Velcro came over to see what the problem was, followed by Einstein, Cleopatra, Sneaker and Rocky 4, and pretty soon my brother had a couple dozen sheep around him, all trying to figure out what this new animal was doing in their meadow, and did he want to eat their grass, and was it really greener on the other side of the fence?

Velcro started to lick my brother's left ear.

“
Help!
”

“Don't panic there, lad. You're getting your ears cleaned for free.”

George was as strong as a farmer is supposed to be. Still, I helped him lift the top log of the wood fence, and my little brother squirmed free.

“I hate sheep!”

“They were just being friendly,” my mother said.

But I wasn't so sure. My friends don't lick my ears.

Just then my father showed up. He had been upstairs in the house, in George's office, checking his e-mail messages. He looked at us standing around my brother, who still had tears in his eyes. Jackson the horse was munching on George's straw hat. The sheep had surrounded us again, and were baa-ing as loudly as ever. The peacocks screeched from their perch on the fence.

Just then, Tuco started imitating a phone ringing.

“Did I miss anything?” my father asked.

“Not really,” I said. “But maybe you should go answer the phone.”

“Okay,” he agreed, and ran back into the house.