Days of Wine and Roses, and Vasectomies

My siblings would probably mention the two trips we took to Nazarene General Assembly, in 1964 and 1968.  Those were month-long odysseys, covering thousands of miles each, but I am going to take a different route, so to speak, with this.  “Big” has many meanings, and one of the things I am trying to do with these essays is to present details you may not have heard, and to preserve them.

The other day a lot of Virginian motorists and their families spent the night on I-95 while VDOT was deciding what to do about a six-inch snowfall.  That put me very much in mind of our attempt to return to Rochester from Thanksgiving in Ohio, in 1958.

I don’t remember how many times we might have gone to Kent and Bertha’s place in Kent*, Ohio, for Thanksgiving.  There was at least one later time, in 1969, and we had a bit of fun with that.  I may get into that one in a later post.  (Where did we have Thanksgiving dinner, I wonder?  There was sort of an eat-in kitchen, and we would have filled it up.  There was no dining room there on Brady Lake Road.)

Kent was five hours from Rochester, easily negotiated by automobile, and I imagine we headed out on our return on the Saturday of the holiday weekend, so Dad could be back for his Sunday duties.  I seem to remember that Grandma offered to pack us some ham sandwiches, but Dad declined them.  There was definitely a forecast of snowfall in the region, and I suppose we (Roy, 31, Doris, 32, me, 6, Steve, 4, and Gary, 6 months) started out early to get ahead of that.

For the rest of the trip, I have just my own dim black-and-white memory, what I have heard others relate, and a few scraps of startlingly clear video-like full-color memories of certain scenes.  The first of those is of signs warning that the New York State Thruway, Interstate 90, was closed.  It must have meant “closed to normal people”, because it was not blocked, and a speed limit of 25 was posted.

I remember Dad scoffed at that notion, but as we bowled along the snow started to come down in earnest, and soon covered the roadway.  Our speed dropped steadily, and an early November darkness fell.  At some point we realized we were leading a column of other foolish travelers.  It became hard to see the edge of the roadway, and I remember Mom watching out through the window, face wrapped in a diaper, to spot the guardrails.

The next video scrap is the back end of a gasoline tanker, red-and-blue sign, maybe Esso or Amoco, three red taillights at the top, in the dark, snow swirling around it.  We followed the tanker for a while, and that was something of a comfort, but at some point we became separated from it.

I don’t remember feeling anxiety about all this, but I must have.  Steve and I sang a song that we had heard on the primitive TV of the day — “Ad-VEN-ture, is EV-rywhere!”.  Steve informs me that we regularly heard that on the after-school Mickey Mouse Club program.

Presently our forward momentum ceased — we were not out of gas, but the car stalled and could not be restarted.  By this time we were near Hamburg, New York, and Dad said he could see a light in the distance, maybe some solitary farmhouse, and he proposed to trudge over there and get help.  He did, and he later reported it took him an hour battling wind and snow to cover the quarter-mile.  They let him in, and he spent many minutes getting his breath back.

Somehow Dad arranged for a tow, and we got pulled out of there.  The car was taken to a service station, and the people went to the farmhouse, whose residents were pleased to offer us shelter.  Steve and I were assigned a couch to sleep on, and Steve announced, “Boy, I sure hope I don’t puke tonight!”

The last video scrap is of the underside of the 1956 Chevy, up on the lift at the station, water dripping from the radiator.  The fierce headwind had packed it full of snow, which caused the engine to overheat and shut down.  It was just a matter of waiting for it to melt out, and we were on our way.

I have long wondered what went through my parents’ heads during all that, knowing that they had put the kids in such a bind, which could have killed us (maybe something like what they thought in 1968, two years after leaving safe Rochester for dangerous Baltimore (not that I cared — I thought the National Guard on the street and urban rioting were just one more Ad-VEN-ture)).  I tell myself I don’t live with regrets and anxiety, but that would be the worst, to be the agent of disaster to kids or grandkids.  I am very happy I’ve escaped that, and I will continue to keep watching for the guardrails.

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* How my brother Stephen and I longed to find out that Kent of Kent also smoked Kent cigarettes — we’d have been famous!  But it wasn’t to be.