Travels with my Family (6 page)

One of the strangest trips we ever took started off with a close encounter. I think it was of the Third Kind, just like in the movie. Now, I don't know if you believe in extraterrestrials. You know, those little green men from outer space.

Okay, maybe they're not green, but they do come from outer space. And according to what I read in the guidebook, the only time they actually landed on earth was just outside Roswell, New Mexico. It's the little green men capital of the world.

We weren't actually looking for extraterrestrials. We had returned to the Southwest desert country when we happened to drive through Roswell, on our way to the Carlsbad Caverns.

First we saw the sign for the town. Then all of a sudden, we were surrounded by little green men. They were on posters, billboards and cardboard cut-outs. Inflatable plastic big green men were floating in the air above us. I saw an Outer Space Café and an Aliens Only Laundromat.

Extraterrestrials sure had a good nose for business. The whole town of Roswell was covered in green signs.

“I think we should stop for ice cream,” my father suggested.

My brother looked out the window suspiciously.

“I'm not very hungry,” he said.

“Since when do you have to be hungry to eat ice cream?” my father asked.

“Don't worry,” I told my brother. “There won't be any aliens. Look, are any of those people green?”

“What if they're disguised? How can we tell?”

“Their antennae. They'd be sticking out from underneath their baseball caps.”

“Very funny,” my brother said.

We went into the ice-cream shop. My brother stared very hard at the man who served us our ice cream. It was bright green, of course. E. T. flavor.

“Does this ice cream come from outer space?” my brother asked, staring at the man's cap.

“Of course,” said my mother. “It came by flying saucer. What does it taste like?”

“It's out of this world,” I answered.

My little brother laughed so hard he snorted green ice cream up his nose.

Then he wanted to send a postcard to Miro. A postcard with a picture of a little green man, of course.

“Miro's never seen one,” he said. “He'll think it's so cool.”

Even after my visit to Roswell, I still haven't made up my mind about people from outer space. Part of me wants to believe in them, and part of me doesn't. But you have to admit, it would be really interesting to meet one.

The Carlsbad Caverns are one of the wonders of the world, an enormous chain of caves deep under the ground. That sounded pretty good to my brother and me.

Everything was going well until my father picked up the guidebook while he was eating his ice cream, put his glasses on his nose and started reading.

“Hmm,” he said. “Three million people visit the caves every summer. The inside is entirely lit up. There are guardrails everywhere and a little train that takes you from room to room. There's a welcome center, a souvenir shop and a snackbar.”

My brother and I looked at each other. Now that sounded great!

My father closed the book. “I'm sure we can do better than that.”

“Oh, no,” we groaned.

That's how we ended up visiting Slaughter Canyon Cave. “No facilities,” I read in the guidebook once we climbed back into the car and started driving across the desert and around the mountains. Giant cactuses grew along the road, poking their heads out of fields of black volcanic lava.

“What's that mean?” my little brother asked.

“It means no snackbars, no souvenir stands, no roads and no water. And no toilets.”

“What if I have to —.”

“You go behind a rock. Just watch out for rattle — !”

Ka-boom!

The car started shaking and bouncing, as if we were driving down a railroad track.

“Nobody panic!” my father ordered in a loud voice.

My mother grabbed on to the door handle and closed her eyes.

He wrestled with the steering wheel to keep the car on the road, and finally we came to a stop. We all got out and looked. One of the back tires was shredded. Pieces of rubber lay all over the pavement.

“A flat tire!” my father groaned.

“I guess there aren't any gas stations around here,” my mother said, shading her eyes and looking out across the totally empty, totally hot desert.

“We'll just change it ourselves,” my father declared.

There was only one problem. My father had never changed a tire. In Mexico, our car engine blew up and a drunk man tried to fix it with a spoon. In Georgia, a flying rock shattered our back window. But we had never had a flat tire before. In all our travels, that was the only thing that hadn't happened to us.

“There's a first time for everything,” my father said cheerfully. “Anyone can do it.”

Well, almost anyone. My father took the jack and the spare tire and a tool with four arms out of the trunk and laid them on the ground. Then he rubbed his chin and looked up and down the road, as if help might come driving up.

But there was no help. There was nobody else on the road. All the other cars were on the other road, the one that went to the Carlsbad Caverns.

“There has to be a way of doing this,” he said. “A very logical way.”

But my father isn't the most logical person in the world. When he had to figure out how to do something, like putting together a piece of furniture that came unassembled, he started thinking so quickly and so hard that the furniture never looked like it did in the picture on the box.

That's when I had an idea. A logical idea.

In the glove compartment, there was a little book that told you everything you needed to know about the car. The Owner's Manual, it was called. I'm a logical kind of person, so I looked in the table of contents.

“If You Have a Flat Tire,” it said.

“Step one,” I read out loud. “Park on a level spot.”

No problem there. The desert was absolutely flat.

“Firmly set the parking brake.”

My mother reached into the car and did that.

“Remove the wheel ornament.”

We stood around looking for a while before we realized that the Owner's Manual was talking about the hubcap.

“It says here to avoid unexpected personal injury,” I added.

“Now that's a good idea,” my mother said.

“Insert the jack at the correct jack points,” I told him. “And don't climb under the car.”

“Who's Jack?” my brother asked. But nobody was in the mood to laugh.

It's amazing the useful things you can learn from a little book like this one. Luckily, the instructions were written for people who had never changed a tire before.

Step by step, we changed the tire. I read the instructions, and my father followed them. More or less. Every time I told him what to do next, he asked me, “Are you sure?” And every time, my mother gave him one of her looks, and said, “Honey, he knows how to read.”

Still, it took a long time. Wavy lines of heat rose up from the desert, and they made my head spin. It was enough to make you see little green men. I couldn't believe that the tiny, shaky-
looking contraption called a jack could lift a big heavy car like ours. But it did.

“Remember to replace the tools in the trunk when finished,” I read from the book.

“Obviously,” my father said.

Two very hot hours later, four very red-faced people continued on their way.

“See?” my father said. “That was easy.”

My brother and I groaned and prayed that the other three tires would hold up. And they did.

A little later, we were bouncing over the rough, rocky roads, on our way to Slaughter Canyon Cave. The cave that hardly anyone ever visits.

“The place doesn't have the friendliest name,” my mother pointed out.

“It's named after a Mr. Slaughter. It also says in the guidebook that you have to bring your own flashlight. One flashlight per person. Otherwise they won't let you in.”

“We'll find a flashlight somewhere,” my father said.

I looked out the window. Rocks and cactus. Cactus and rocks. But no flashlight stores. We should have bought one in Roswell. A green flashlight, of course.

Suddenly the road ended. You know the expression “the middle of nowhere?” That's exactly where we were. There was a parking lot made of rocks and a sign that said Slaughter Canyon
Cave, and a couple of rusty pick-up trucks. Nothing else. I guess that's what they mean by No Facilities.

I saw a smaller sign nailed onto a post. There was a list of all the things that could happen to you. Rattlesnake bites. Flash floods. Heat stroke. Lightning storms. Dehydration, which is a fancy word for dying of thirst. No one was allowed beyond this point without a one-quart bottle of water.

We had a bottle, all right. One quart for the four of us. We started walking up the trail.

A minute later, my little brother started saying how thirsty he was. After telling him he had to wait, my father gave in. Of course, my brother drank half the bottle of water. I could just imagine us, dying of thirst in the desert — all of us but him.

The trail kept climbing, which was very strange, since a canyon is supposed to be a low place, and we were going up the side of a mountain. The trail got narrower and narrower as we crept along the side of a cliff. Pretty soon we would have to turn into mountain goats if we wanted to use this trail.

Oh, I forgot to mention something else. My mother is scared of heights.

“Just don't look down,” my father told her.

She didn't answer. She was too scared. Meanwhile, to make her even more afraid, my little brother danced along the trail ahead of us, as if he didn't even know there was a cliff at his feet.

Out of nowhere, a woman in a khaki uniform appeared. A park ranger. She looked at us as if we were little green men.

“Coming to visit the cave?” she asked.

“Yes, ma'am,” my mother answered. I wondered what else we would be doing here, stuck to the side of the cliff like flies.

“This is the entrance.” All I could see was a crack in the mountain. “Where are your flashlights?”

“We don't have one. We thought that —”

“No entry without a flashlight.” She looked at us again. “
Four flashlights.
”

“But we came all this way —”

“I'll see what I can do.”

Then she disappeared into the crack in the mountain.

“At least she didn't notice that we don't have four bottles of water,” my mother whispered.

“I'm thirsty,” my brother complained.

Before we could start fighting, the ranger appeared again.

“You're in luck,” she said. She handed me a flashlight. “I've only got three. You two will have to share. Which means you'll have to stick together.” The ranger gave us a look, and smiled. “Whether you want to or not.”

“I'm holding the flashlight,” I told my brother.

“No fair!” he complained, and kicked a stone over the edge of the cliff, which you're never supposed to do, because you can't tell who might be walking down below.

We stepped into the cave. It was freezing inside. After the heat of the desert, it was amazing. You could actually see your breath. And it was completely, one hundred percent pitch dark.

With our flashlights showing the way, we started climbing down a long passage. A few other people were with us, the ones who owned the pick-up trucks back in the parking lot, I guess. The park ranger told us that we weren't allowed to eat or drink in the cave. That was okay — we were out of water anyway. We weren't allowed to touch the walls of the cave, either. One smudge of oil from a human hand could stop the stalagmites and stalactites from growing.

Down and down we went. One day, the ranger told us, a man named Mr. Slaughter was taking care of his sheep, and one of them disappeared right into the mountain. He went looking for it, and discovered the entrance to the cave. The mountain we had just climbed was hollow, and we were climbing back down to where we had started.