The Trip (Part 1)
Of all that I have written about my childhood, this incident became a touchstone for my belief that God would keep and protect me all the days of my life. What happened occurred so soon after my sister died the previous December and my dad was killed in March, I could not have known that years later I would discover a verse in the Bible that includes my many deliverances from death. This trip is one of those deliverances.
“Our God is a God of salvation,
and to God, the Lord, belong deliverances from death.”
Deliverances. Plural. More times than I even know or can guess, God has protected me from danger. I am still here, telling my story to myself, continuous reminder there’s no other explanation for my life. Amazing Grace.
The Trip Begins
Bewildered when I heard people say, “Don’t Drink and Drive,” I thought, Mom could only drive if she drank. Anyway, that’s what she said. “My nerves . . . I can’t bear it . . . It’s the only way I can cope.”
Beer settled her down, she said. So, every trip, I crawled into the back seat of the 2-door Studebaker Hawk and Adolph sat in the front seat next to Mom. Adolph Coors. And on this trip, Mom’s sister, my Aunt Syble, sat in the front seat too, and Adolph sat between them.
My mother’s Aunt Ruby had insisted Mom and I not spend Thanksgiving by ourselves––the first family holiday without my dad and my sister. Days before my tenth birthday, Thanksgiving with relatives seemed a delicious prospect. Road trip. I loved road trips. I just loved to go wherever, hanging on to my mother’s coattails.
Traveling from Las Vegas, Nevada to Santa Maria, California, this trip was about 400 miles each way, much of it across uninhabited desert.
Thanksgiving dinner, I sat next to Grandpa Reeves, watching him eat peas with his knife. I hate peas. I watched as he moved the knife to his mouth, fascinated to see him maneuver the peas onto a butter knife, balancing peas––little green balls like a circus act––without dropping even one. The peas slid into the open cavern, where beyond his slack jaw I could see only a few teeth.
No peas for me, please.
My great-aunt Ruby told stories about Grandpa Reeves, my great-grandfather, who nearing ninety looked ancient, gaunt with sunken glassy eyes. Aunt Ruby loved to repeat stories about his wife, Grandma Reeves, my great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Norman Reeves, who she said was related to the outlaw Belle Starr. Belle associated with the Jesse James gang and other notorious outlaws in the mid-to-late 1800s. My family seemed to cherish connections to outlaws and pride themselves for having wild and crazy ancestors.
More recent history, Aunt Ruby’s sister Thelma and her husband Harry had played cards with the notorious Depression era outlaws Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie Parker’s sister lived next door to Thelma and Harry in Dallas. Spending an evening at Thelma’s house the night before Bonnie and Clyde continued their run from the law made Thelma a neighborhood celebrity.
The Vision
During that Thanksgiving visit, no one could have foreseen the impact of this trip to see Aunt Ruby and Uncle Andy. Circles inside of circles for Mom and me would extend far into a future we had yet to experience. But that future might not have happened if my mom had been drinking on this trip home.
Last night before our return to Las Vegas, Mom, Aunt Syble and Buddy, (Aunt Ruby’s son––their first cousin), went out again to a local bar. Until bedtime, I entertained myself playing with a reel-to-reel tape recorder. When they returned, Mom crawled in beside me on the couch bed––a kind where the back of the couch pulls forward, then releases and lies flat like a bed.
Already asleep, I didn’t wake up until she shook me. “Do you see anything?”
Rubbing my eyes, I raised up on my elbow. Stirred from a sound sleep, all I could see was faint light down a narrow hall. I thought Mom woke me to use the bathroom because after Renée died, I often wet the bed.
That next morning at breakfast, Mom shared with us the vision she had had. She lit a cigarette, her hands shaking, her face blanched, her body trembling. “I saw Vernon last night. The look on his face terrified me,” she said. “He looked angry. I woke Carol to ask if she could see him too.”
I looked around the table at the faces staring back at my mom, eager to see if everyone, or anyone, believed her. Of course, I believed her because in the months since my sister died and Daddy got killed less than three months later, circumstances forced me to rely on my mother’s instincts, her beliefs, and even pay attention to her superstitions. Mom said that she believed both Renée and Vernon were in heaven, but she also believed that my dad had some lingering connection to her, a special connection they had shared since childhood. Vernon had promised her that if he died first, he would find some way to reassure her that he was okay.
The previous night’s vision, however, was not reassuring or comforting. Shaken, on edge, cloaked in fear––a familiar garment she wore––Mom had to drive home with added anxiety. What could this mean? The look of disapproval Mom had seen on Vernon’s face forced her to admit she was not okay. Instead, she questioned if the message could have come as a warning that drinking and driving would lead to her death––as it had his?
I continued to wonder and worry, How could my mom even think of drinking and driving? How could she do the very thing that had led to my dad’s head-on-collision? Asking myself these complex questions fueled my own fears.
What could be more graphic? Or serve as a more sobering warning than Vernon’s appearance, whether real or in a dream? Terrified by this warning, on the trip back home, Mom decided not to drink and drive. Adolph did have a seat on this trip.
Our friend Maggie Nelson painted this for the cover of my book, leaving space for title and author. [1] Working title: From the Backseat of My Mom’s Life
Navigating through a dense northern California fog until beyond the Santa Maria city limits, once on the open highway, Mom began to relax. Aunt Syble, however, suffered a hangover. Undisturbed by visions of any kind, Aunt Syble readjusted herself in the front seat, trying to get comfortable, saying she wished she were lying in a bed to “sleep it off.”
Driving into the night on that isolated stretch of highway through the desert, Mom noticed the gas gauge registered empty. Though my mom knew the gauge’s needle settled on empty once the gas tank dropped below half-full, in those circumstances she regretted not getting the gauge fixed. She started worrying. She excelled at worrying about something.
Mom tried to estimate miles per gallon, figure miles traveled since buying the last tank of gas and calculate miles between towns. But where in the world were we? According to the map, we were somewhere in the middle of the Mojave Desert––not a town or gas station in sight. At first, Mom and Aunt Syble made jokes about entering The Twilight Zone.
A panic hovered as she and Aunt Syble discussed whether to turn back or press on. Faint lights ahead, she continued to drive, reducing speed to conserve gas. Mom drove past an isolated and rundown motel in the middle of nowhere. The motel sat by itself off the highway. Mom and Aunt Syble talked about the movie that they had seen just before we set out on this trip.
“It looks like the Bates Motel in Psycho.”
So few cars passed that Mom said she feared no one would stop to help us if the car broke down or ran out of gas. She pulled off the road, deciding to turn around. “We’ll ask at that motel how far to the next gas station.”
She was about to confront mortal danger at night in the Mojave desert.
to be continued. . .
[1] Maggie’s art website,