I can’t fault my parents for their vacation choices, though for the most part I disliked them. A family with 7 kids to provide for and not much money, we were lucky to get to go anywhere.
I always wished we were one of those families who went to the kinds of places I saw at the movies. A fun summer camp in the mountains like Hayley Mills did in The Parent Trap, where I could learn to canoe, practice archery, and have campfires. Or to a country house in Maine, like Hayley did in Summer Magic. Hayley, it appeared was living the vacation life I wanted!
I also longed to go west on vacations. To ride the range with Roy and Dale. To see the mountains in Colorado and California. To go to Laramie and Cheyenne, places where the “real” cowboys lived! To ride horses where the creeks and rivers were clear and bubbly. To watch an eagle fly.
I wanted to spend the summer in a big Adobe ranch house in a place with a Hispanic culture. Where the ranch hands spoke Spanish. In my mind I would immediately pick up the language and converse with them. Desert flowers would bloom around the ranch and saguaro cactus would cover the flatlands. Soft guitar music would come from the courtyard as twilight approached.
None of this happened. Not even close, not even a budget friendly version. We never got in the car, all 9 of us in our 3 seat station wagon, never pointed it west and just drove away.
My family was firmly rooted in the southern culture where we lived. All the men were hunters and fishermen. Our vacations, if we weren’t visiting family in Louisiana, were to fishing camps in the middle of swampy woods. We sometimes went to Lake St. John in northeastern Louisiana. We rented a cabin with our favorite aunt and uncle and cousins. The men and boys fished. I have no recall of what us girls did. I can remember somewhere cleaning little bream, scraping the scales off with a spoon. I asked my dad if it hurt the fish when we cut their heads off and he said no, they didn’t have any nerves. I suspected he made that up but I chose to believe it as I held the squirming little fish down and ended their lives.
Once we went to a horrible fish camp a friend of my dad’s owned beside a small lake. There wasn’t an indoor bathroom. You had to walk out on the wooden porch to get to the “outhouse” type room. Getting up one night to go there, I saw the moon shining on the lake, lighting up hundreds of alligator eyes lurking just above the water. I was horrified. That trip also sent my siblings and I scurrying as fast as we could to escape some wild hogs we ran across in the woods. When we saw the movie Old Yeller, I could identify with the time the boys had to climb a tree to escape wild javelinas!
But one time we went on a vacation that down the road changed my life. We had gone to the mountains of Arkansas to visit my mom’s Aunt Leta, my Mamaw’s sister. She lived in Star City, Arkansas. We went up to the mountains during that trip, not staying with Aunt Leta. I don’t even know where we went. I remember we drove on a road on the edge of a mountain and I saw chipmunks for the first time. I fell in love with small clear mountain streams. So different than the huge muddy, swampy lakes and rivers I was familiar with, filled with alligators, water moccasins, cottonmouths, snapping turtles, and giant alligator gars.
I vowed that one day I’d live somewhere where water was clear, where rocks were everywhere, and it didn’t rain all the time. It took years for that dream to come true. I married young and had kids. We seldom had money for vacations and anytime we went anywhere it was usually close to see friends or to Louisiana to visit relatives. But one time when the boys were around 9-11 we also went to Arkansas. To Lake Ouachita camping. And I remembered how beautiful the mountains were, how different from what I’d always known. How clear the water was.
Many years later, when Rickie and I bought our property in central Texas and later built our little cabin, I finally made it to a place of clear streams and rocks. And hills if not mountains. Today I live in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. As Merle sings after losing his love in Kern River, “I live in the mountains, I drifted up here with the wind”. And so I did after losing Rickie. I think had he lived we might have come here together, as we’d talked about it many times.
It took me 60 years but I feel like I’m finally where I always wanted to be. While my childhood vacations weren’t normally to my liking, one was and it was key to choosing both my home in central Texas and here in Colorado. Though the credit for both those places belongs almost exclusively to Rickie. Who taught me you don’t have to stay somewhere just because you’ve always been there.
I’m grateful for my family, strapped for money and having to travel with all of us kids in the car. I can’t imagine how stressful planning these trips must have been. Trying to get 9 people’s clothes packed, enough food for the road, and refereeing our squabbles. We rarely ate out, even while traveling. We stopped at rest stops for lunch and cooked our meals when we arrived at our destination. And though I didn’t like the places we went, I can appreciate that our parents tried to give us a break from our everyday lives. And, for me, that one trip influenced me more than they ever knew.
