The First Road Trip 1

12-26-2004

 One month later, we were in the Honda, on the road. Between Champaign and Indianapolis things proceeded as usual in the car with the cat. Amethyst, not in her carrier, walked her rounds, perching on my lap, eating, drinking, using the cat box, and making short speeches. When in my lap, she purred and rubbed her jowls on the steering wheel. Her speeches were in an ordinary, conversational tone. She was no worse a passenger than any number of hyperactive humans that I’ve been in cars with. She was, in fact, a bit more polite. (She didn’t tell me, for instance, that it might be faster to pass the truck in front of me, or complain that I changed lanes too often.) Still, I was determined not to push it. I had started off in the morning, and I had decided that I’d get a hotel room wherever I happened to be in the evening, around sunset. The sun sets around 4:30 PM in the Midwest in winter. Indiana is the western boundary state of the Eastern Time zone. Right off the bat, as one travels east, an hour is lost to bureaucracy. I mention this to reinforce the difference between the two species traveling by Honda in this tale: one of us does not care what time zone we’re in or what the clock says. That same one is the one that is expected to get fed up with automobile travel and call a halt. In fact, it is the other one that calls the halt, arbitrarily, in Cambridge, Ohio. I pull off the interstate and get a hotel room. I’m not sure about the pet policy, so I don’t ask and don’t tell.

Oddly enough, it is in objection to the hotel room that Amethyst pitches a fit. Luckily, it is not a screaming fit. As soon as I set her down in the room, she scoots under the bed and won’t come out. I set up her bowls, food and water. No cat. I make a point of crinkling the package that holds her beloved treats. No cat. Needless to say, I’m making that ticking noise that usually gets her attention. My pucker is wearing out, but no cat. I decide that having her under the bed is not the worst thing that could happen. I feel a bit guilty and perplexed, however. It has not been my intention to traumatize her. I try to read, on the bed, above the cowering kitty. I can’t concentrate. I’m talking to her the whole time. She can hear me, I’m sure, but this is a soliloquy.

           

“Kitty brain…yo! Kitty brain? Wa’s up? Are you gonna come out any time soon? Daddy’s got treats! You’re missing the local weather! C’mon. Sheesh. You liked the car….what’s wrong with Motel 6? Tom Bodett’s left a light on for us. Hey! I got water, I got food. Wanna use your box? Surely you need to at least to pee. I know I sure did!”

So on and on. I put my head over the bed and looked under. Amethyst has made herself into a mega-meatloaf, as small as she can pretend to be, and is right under the headboard, as far away from me as she can get. So I do what any self-disrespecting impatient cat owner would do: I totally take the bed apart and fish her out. Once out, I put her in front of her bowls. Now, she’s willing to eat. After eating, she’s drinking. I reassemble the bed. I take one of the dresser drawers and make a step up to the bed, which is a bit high, I think, for her to jump up easily. She demurs for a few hours, but does not slink back out of sight. Eventually, she’s up on the bed, beside me. No purr. The feline is a very curious beast.

The next morning, bright and early, the trip east resumed. The destination was my brother’s house in suburban Maryland. As it has turned out, none of my siblings have gotten as far as I have from the nest. The house we grew up in is, literally, ‘just inside the Beltway’. The ‘Beltway’, of course, is the “Capital Beltway”, the interstate loop around Washington, D.C., aka “I-495”. I remember, in 1962 or ‘3, the fire on the corner in our subdivision. We kids had never seen a house burn down before. My father always spoke of such things, as in, “turn out that light! You wanna burn the place down?” But there, after the fire trucks had gone, and the smoke had stopped billowing, were the remains of a family's life strewn in ruin in the yard. I can still conjure up the image of the TV set with the blackened, broken out picture tube and the melted knobs. Then came the earthmovers, and that corner became, bit by bit, the exit ramp from 495 northbound to New Hampshire Avenue southbound. In between the fire and the grand opening, we kids played around, and fantasized about, the construction equipment. The Beltway construction years spanned a fertile, hyper-imaginative period in our lives as children. I struggled then, as I do now, to form bonds with those more sophisticated and more intellectually or socially powerful than I. I learned from the older, tougher boys. We had walked across the fields before construction began, boasting, sharing half-learned facts, acting on misunderstandings. We ventured out onto the bare earth once those huge yellow machines had opened it up. We knew, or thought we did, all about them. We knew names, model and serial numbers. We stalked the monsters in the dark, climbed their steps, sat in their seats, and fingered their dangling keys. I don’t know of any boy that actually turned one of those keys. We had better sense.

As time passed, we grew up with the resulting road. We had our first cars out on it. We pushed those cars to and beyond the limit on that road. On its ramps we learned that there is a limit to how fast a vehicle can take a corner. On its Kafkaesque series of interchanges, entries and exits we learned to try our navigational wits, sometimes witlessly and occasionally brilliantly. Our first dates were somewhere around its circumference. It was a way of getting anywhere downtown. On the map’s paper, looking like a shakily drawn representation of our earth, I-495 was our world. The intersecting streets mostly looked like mine shafts descending around the sphere into the magma of D.C. culture. Add lust, desire, bravado, awkwardness, and ignorance together and you get: ah, a memory of drifting under some beltway bridge, in the early hours of the morning, looking up at the mound that bears the road home. I am driving home from a date with the most delicious creature on earth, who is right here next to me, exhaling clouds of vapor in the chilly car, smelling of perfume, and we’re realizing that there wasn’t an entrance here after all. Eventually, we learned to curse I-495. The traveler is well advised to avoid it, if possible.

I moved away from home first, me being the oldest. I went to Boston in 1973 to attend The Boston Conservatory (class of 1977). My siblings, somehow, never made it out of the State of Maryland. My parents, or any of my siblings have, in theory, enough real estate to provide me with a roof over my head while visiting my hometown. On this trip, my requirement was a guestroom with ‘no pets’. I had the idea that Amethyst, who was stretching her horizons aplenty by taking such a long trip as a senior citizen, did not need to get to know any other four-legged friends. The Dixie incident was still fresh in my mind. Since my sisters all have pets, that left my brother. My brother was ok with it, but my sister in law took some convincing. “If that cat croaks in my house, I’ll kill you.” Somehow, she was talked into it. With Amethyst in the car, avoiding being stuck on the Beltway was a no-brainer. It was not on the route to my brother’s. My brother lived out one of those shafts, well outside the ‘Circumferential Highway’. The arch of Interstate that brought us in from the west blasts through the Appalachians. It then pours the traffic down I-70 to I-270, and then into the capillaries of upper Montgomery County. As I had on one of those glorious youthful dates when the navigation went off without a hitch, I slipped into my brother’s cul-de-sac without having missed a turn. I had made it; cat intact, to terra firma, albeit just one-way. Now, I put Amethyst into her carrier to carry her into the house.