Travels with my Family (4 page)

I think even the sheep were laughing.

There's one good thing about having strange parents like mine. You get to travel a lot. You never have any trouble writing the “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essay that you have to write every September in school. Sometimes the teachers tell me I must be making this stuff up, and I can't really blame them.

My mother was still laughing at my father over the trick Tuco played on him when we reached California, a few days after we left George's farm. The first thing you need to know about California is that the whole state is about to fall into the ocean. It really is true. We went to a place north of San Francisco to see a big crack in the ground, where a shaker — that's what they call earthquakes out there — split the earth in two about a hundred years ago. We also saw a set of railroad tracks that swerve like a snake, as if a giant had picked them up with his bare hands and twisted them. Those are the kinds of things an earthquake can do.

“What'll we do if California falls into the ocean when we're on it?” my brother asked.

“It won't happen,” I told him.

We all peered into the giant crack in the ground. You couldn't even see the bottom. My mother held my brother's hand very tightly. As if anyone would want to jump in!

“I wonder what fell into that crack?” my brother asked, trying to lean over.

“Horses,” said my father. “Trees, houses, people, anything that was near.”

“It's really dark in there,” my brother said, worried. “I wouldn't want to get swallowed up.”

My brother worries a lot. I think he takes after my mother.

But he was right. It was pretty dark in that crack.

“Animals know there's going to be an earthquake before humans do,” I told him. “So if you see some animals acting strange, you know you have to be careful.”

My brother looked very hard at a cow that was grazing in the next field. “Is that cow acting strange?” he asked.

“It's acting perfectly normal,” I said. “For a cow.”

After we visited the crack in the ground and the swervy railroad tracks, our parents decided we should go to the seaside. The second thing you need to know about California is that it's not always warm and sunny. You've seen those television shows, right, with all the palm trees and the sunshine? Well, there's not a single palm tree around Punta Reyes, near the big crack in the ground. That's because there's too much fog, and you need lots of sunshine for palm trees.

I suppose that if you asked my parents, they'd say that fog is much more interesting than sunshine. “More mysterious,” my father would say. “More romantic,” my mother would add.

It was chilly and foggy, and we had to put sweaters on. But I have to admit, there were plenty of cool things to see. Every time the tide goes out, it leaves behind all kinds of starfish and mussels and sea cucumbers in the pools in between the rocks.

“We're going exploring, too,” my father said. “Have fun, we'll be back soon!”

Then he and my mother walked away.

But we were too busy watching a starfish drill a hole in a mussel shell to pay much attention.

“Hey, look!” my brother shouted. “That starfish has only four arms.”

“Don't worry, it'll grow a new one back.”

“Starfish can grow arms? How do they do that?”

“I don't know,” I admitted. “It must be all the vitamins in the seaweed.”

My brother started squeezing the little bubbles of air that seaweed uses to stay on top of the water. No matter how hard he squeezed, the bubbles wouldn't burst. They were as tough as old leather boots.

The rocks were covered with greenish-black plants. And when those plants got wet, they were as slippery as ice. And sure enough, my brother slipped and landed on his seat in the slimy seaweed. I helped him up.

“Hey, where are Mom and Dad?” he asked.

We both looked around. The beach was deserted for as far as we could see. Long curls of fog were rolling in from the sea and reaching onto the land. They looked like witches' fingers that had come to grab us. We jumped off the rocks and ran back towards the beach. No one was there, either. Just great piles of rocks and the waves coming in underneath the fog.

“I don't see them,” I told my brother.

“I think they ran away.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I think they abandoned us,” he said. “You know, like in Hansel and Gretel.”

Then my brother panicked. He started running down the beach, between the giant rocks, jumping over the tide pools. He didn't really know where he was going. He was too scared to think. I was scared, too, but not so scared that I didn't keep my eyes open.

That's why I saw it before my brother did. The wave.

A wave that was much bigger than all the others came out of nowhere and crashed right into him, like a football player tackling someone. My brother fell onto the rocks and the water rushed over him.

Oh, boy, I said to myself. This is going from bad to worse.

I grabbed his dripping sweater just in time, as the wave was dragging him out to sea. I pulled him out of the water, farther up on the shore. I was worried about another wave. But the sea was calm again, as if it had only one big wave in it, and that wave had gone after my brother, on purpose.

My brother looked as if he were half-drowned. He had seaweed in his hair, and he was shivering.

Then we saw our parents walking slowly towards us, coming out of the fog, holding hands and acting romantic. They had been there the whole time.

My mother ran and put her arms around my brother.

“What happened to you?”

“He was attacked by a wave,” I told them, “while we were looking for
you
.”

“It must have been a sneaker wave,” my father explained. “Come on, we'll get him into some dry clothes.”

The next thing I knew, we were in the car with the heater on full-blast, and my brother in the front seat, and we were driving into the little town near Punta Reyes, in search of a Laundromat. The only problem was that my brother didn't have a change of clothes in the car. He had to undress, and my mother wrapped him in the checkered tablecloth we had used for our picnic a couple hours ago, back when the weather was warm. He sat on a plastic chair in the Laundromat and stared at his clothes going around and around in the dryer, as if he was afraid someone would steal them.

“A sneaker wave,” my father told him, as if the science of waves would cheer him up, “is a wave that suddenly gets bigger than all the others, and
whoosh!
— it sneaks up on you. It happens because of the tides and the shape of the ocean floor.”

My brother sat there in his tablecloth. He
didn't care about why there were sneaker waves. He just wanted to get his clothes back on.

My father put his arm around him.

“You know we'd never, ever leave you like that,” he promised.

That helped cheer him up a little. My poor brother! He would need a vacation after all this was over.

Our travels had taken us east and west, but now my parents were eager for something new. Something completely crazy, like going to the desert in the hottest part of the summer.

“Something off the beaten track,” my father said, spreading out a road map of North America on the living-room rug.

“A place with greater vistas,” my mother said, closing her eyes, as if she could see those vistas already, in her imagination.

Did we have a say in their plans, my brother and I? What if we wanted something on the beaten track? But, as usual, we were prisoners of our parents.

My father pointed at the map. “Let's go to the Southwest,” he decided. “Down by the border.”

The border with Mexico, that is.

Then he began to sing. “
In a little town, just the other side of the border
…”

That's another thing about my father. He loves to sing. He knows all the words to old songs nobody has ever heard of, the greatest hits from 1965, or something like that, but unfortunately for us, he has a voice like a rusty gate. We keep on telling him that all the time, but he just keeps on singing.

The places he wanted to go looked really small on the map. That meant only one thing. There would be no airports nearby, so we would have to drive there. Already, I imagined the long days in the hot car.

There are all kinds of ways of making the time go faster when you're in a car — besides asking if we're there yet. There are car snacks, for instance. You know, chips or Fritos or chocolate bars or red licorice twists. But in our family, all we get to munch on are carrot and celery sticks, with spring water to wash it down. That sure does fill you up when you're hungry!

Then there's fighting. My little brother and I can always find something to fight about. At first it was Twenty Questions or the Alphabet Game. But our mother wouldn't let us play that any more. He and I figured out we could fight over what CD we would play in my Discman. But when the batteries died, we couldn't even fight over that.

Then there's the radio. My father wants to listen to baseball games, even if he doesn't know the teams or the players. My mother wants classical music. My brother and I want real music, that my father calls “all that crashing and banging.”

So we have to compromise. We usually end up with some serious talk show, with people discussing how bad things are in other parts of the world. That sure makes the time go by more quickly!

Then we have to choose a motel. I hoped that, this time, since we were going to be in the desert, we'd get a motel with a swimming pool. A pool and an ice machine, and maybe a playground with monkey bars where my brother could go ape after our day in the car.

But when we finally got off the road, it was so late that all the good motels with swimming pools were filled up. So the only exercise we got that evening was jumping up and down on the beds and having a pillow fight. That is, until my parents couldn't stand it anymore. Then we went to sleep.

On that trip, I learned that if you happen to be in the desert, and the sky turns yellow, you know you're in trouble. You know you're going to have an adventure. Especially in the desert, in the month of August, when the weather is at its hottest.

Since we were in the state of Arizona, my brother and I wanted to see the Grand Canyon. Maybe, just this once, we'd get to go someplace other people went to. I wanted to have a bumper sticker on our car that said, “I visited the Grand Canyon.”

But that would have been too easy. I knew what my father was going to say. And sure enough, he said it.

“Anyone can go to the Grand Canyon. It's full of tourists. I read about this other canyon…”

And that's how we decided — or
he
decided — to go to the Canyon de Chelly. Of course. It was different. To begin with, the name was spelled “Chelly,” which should rhyme with “jelly.” But instead, it was pronounced “shay.” Don't ask me why.

“On the way, we can see the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert,” my father announced. “They're some of the wonders of the world.”

Amazing, I thought. Even I had heard of those places before. They were almost as famous as the Grand Canyon. We were actually going to go to a place other people went to.

Of course, it wasn't that simple. It never is with our family.

On our way to the Painted Desert, not too far from a town called Winslow, the sun disappeared. It was the middle of the afternoon, but the sky turned black. Then it turned yellow.

“The sky looks like a bruise,” my brother said.

“That can't be a good sign,” my mother said, getting worried.

“It says here in the guidebook that the month of August is monsoon season. That's when they have the biggest storms, and the most rain.”

“You mean it rains in the desert?” my brother asked. “I thought it was always dry.”

“Maybe we'll have a sandstorm, too.”

“It's going to rain sand?”

“Don't worry, it's just a little storm,” my father said. He sounded very sure of himself. “It'll pass over, you'll see. We're not too far from the Painted Desert.”

“I don't like this,” my mother said. “Not one little bit.”

That's when the car began to shake in the wind, as if it wanted to take off with us inside and fly through the air like in
Twister
. Or maybe
The Wizard of Oz
. I liked that movie better.

Across the desert, a yellow curtain began moving towards us. Behind it, the sun was a smear of light.

“Uh-oh,” my father said. “I've never seen that before.”

That was the first time I'd ever heard him sound scared. Except, of course, for the time with the alligators in Okefenokee Swamp.

I noticed that we were the only car heading into the storm. All the other cars were going the other way. Then suddenly, so many weird things started to happen at the same time that I couldn't tell which one was weirder.

First, the road completely disappeared in the darkness. Then the sand beat against the car as if it were trying to take all the paint off. No matter how tightly I rolled up the window, the sand got inside the car, and inside my mouth, and it stuck in the back of my throat. If there had been streetlights in the middle of the desert, they would have gone on, because the sky was darker than night.

Bang!
From out of the darkness, I saw something come running at us and hit the car, but I couldn't tell what it was.
Bang!
It came out of nowhere, but this time I saw what it was. The kind of thing you see only in movies.

“My God, what's that?” my mother whispered.

“Giant tumbleweeds,” I told her.

“Tumble-whats?” my brother wanted to know.

“They're just a bunch of dried, rolled-up branches, but they're pretty mean.”

“I'd like to head off into the sunset, like a tumbling tumbleweed,” my father sang in his off-key voice.

He was trying to take our minds off the storm, but meanwhile, he had his face pressed against the inside of the windshield, trying to see through the sandstorm and the dark clouds.

Bang!
Another tumbleweed hit us, then bounded away. It was going a lot faster than we were, since it had the wind at its back.

“I don't see any sunset,” I told him. “I don't see anything at all.”

“Hey, I know that song,” my brother shouted over the noise of the wind. “I heard it in a cowboy movie once.”

“You three are going to drive me crazy!” my mother yelled. If we had been in a cartoon, she would have torn her hair out.

The sand and rain were coming in sideways, tumbleweeds as big as garbage trucks were hitting our car, the sky had gone purplish-black and the wind was howling like in a horror movie. Not to mention the rivers that were pouring out of the hills and flooding the road.

“The storm can't go on forever,” my father said cheerfully. But his knuckles were turning white on the steering wheel.

“Oh, why not?” my brother complained.

Bang! Bang!
The car lurched.

“I think those were tumble-twins,” my brother said.

Then my mother had had enough.

“I want you to turn around — right now!” she told my father.

And amazingly, that's exactly what he did. He probably wanted to the whole time. We got in line with all the other cars whose drivers had given up on the Painted Desert, and who were heading back to the town of Winslow.

It was quiet in the town when we finally reached it. The storm had passed, but there wasn't a light on anywhere. The power lines were lying like enormous spaghetti on the main street. Which reminded my little brother that he was hungry.

It's not easy finding a restaurant in the middle of a power failure. There was only one place open, but the food was great. We ate tacos and burritos by candlelight.

“How romantic!” my mother said, as she bit into her taco.

There was a double rainbow as big as the desert hanging in the sky. I wondered whether the tumbleweeds were tumbling into the sunset, like in a cowboy picture. The day ended like a movie, with red and yellow and orange rays of light in the west. All that was missing was a cowboy riding off into the sunset on his horse.

“Look at the colors,” my mother exclaimed. “They're so beautiful!”

When she starts talking about how beautiful everything is, it's a sure sign she's feeling better.

Oh, did I mention it? We actually got a motel with a swimming pool that night, just outside the town.

“For being so brave,” my father said.

The next day, we finally did see the Painted Desert, on the way to the Canyon de Chelly. The rain had mixed up all the colors, like in a giant paint box.

When my brother and I grow up, we're going to the Grand Canyon. You can count on that!