ROLLING ON DOWN THE HIGHWAY

Just a few hours after I turned 16, my mother declared we were taking the family car to Missouri Department of Motor Vehicles to get my driver’s license. Being a busy mother of two toddlers and an infant, she had had enough of schlepping the brood to the store to pick up nappies and groceries. She had become downright resentful of picking me up after school for my endless club meetings, play rehearsals, games and other school events. She had a new job for me – Haas family courier and chauffeur.

I admit I was a bit embarrassed by our chunky old station wagon –with its bench seats front and back with another bench seat in the very back. At least that back bench seat, which faced backwards instead of forwards, was kind of fun if you were small enough to fit in it.  But basically, the station wagon was NOT the car I wanted to be driving. Even though it was far from the first car of my dreams, the minute my foot hit the pedal on my first errand by myself, I fell in love. Not with that old wagon which I would eventually accidentally wrap around the utility pole in front of my house, but with cars.

I blame it on my Mom.  Mom often had to raise my older sister and me pretty much on her own. My father, a journeyman lineman, liked to work natural disasters – hurricanes, tornadoes, floods.  When Dad was away as he often was, Mom stuffed her sleepy little girls in the backseat as she drove through the darkened, empty streets of Independence to relieve her loneliness. I grew up thinking cars were a great way to unpack your mental baggage.  Wheels were cathartic.

Although periodically homebound with little ones, Mom loved the freedom her cars gave her. To have two cars in the 60s was a rarity in our neighborhood and she was one of the few women on our street with one of her own. No doubt attempting to atone for his wanderlust ways, Dad bought Mom a sporty little Corvair Monza in the mid-60s.  Mom, my older sister and I loved that car.  But by the time I was 16, I had three more siblings and the Monza had given away to that hulk of a station wagon.

My senior year of college, my parents handed me down my first car, a Ford Fairlane 500 which was Robin’s Egg blue, probably got 8 mpg and could carry eight co-eds packed tightly (nobody worried about safety back then).  My lifelong love of cars was cemented in that car which I named Blue Bomb Betsy.  A few days after graduating from college in 1975, I took my first solo Road Trip – completely against the wishes of my concerned ‘young women shouldn’t travel alone’ parents . Betsy and I drove all the way from Columbia down the back roads and interstates of Missouri and Oklahoma to Yukon, the home of my grandparents. I had many miles and hours to dream of my future. I dreamed of getting a job and having my own apartment, a dream I sealed by buying a covered casserole from an Ozark Pottery factory outlet outside Springfield.  I felt unbelievably grown up and I still have that casserole.  By the time I made Joplin, I was totally and completely hooked on Road Trips.

Since then, I have driven hundreds of thousands of miles on back roads and interstates. Driving is my preferred mode of transport if I have the time.  I’ve driven over mountain passes in the Rockies with snow piled higher than my little Datsun pickup. I’ve driven the paved canals between endless acres of corn and wheat in Kansas and Nebraska with my growing son in my green Ford Ranger. I’ve driven through land so flat with roads so straight, a y-junction or curve was cause to celebrate our road hypnosis finally being broken.

At 36 years old, I carried my sleepy 8-week-old son to my pickup and drove all night through the inky blackness of New Mexico to spend a week in Vail, Colorado. Those long miles helped me sort through the big change from being a married adventurous professional woman to being all that PLUS a Mom.  Eighteen years later, long single again, I drove that same child to college in Montana, 1300 miles away from home. I left Missoula for a Road Trip down the West Coast to give me time to transition from being a Mom living with her child to being an empty-nester before arriving back home to the very loud silence.

One week from today, my well-maintained and road-worthy Toyota Tacoma YiHa and I head out on another Road Trip. The day I have to be in Mammoth Hot Springs for work, May 23^rd, is a Thursday. Leaving the weekend before gives me plenty of time to get there and more importantly gives me many miles and hours to unpack the mental baggage I accumulated over my 59^th year. My Road Trip provides me time to ponder my priorities for the next decade of my life.

I’ve been asked which route I’m taking. One of the cardinal Haas Rules for Road Trips is to take a route I’ve never taken if at all possible. Having lived in the west for nearly 40 years, that gets more and more difficult but consulting my Benchmark Atlases for roads I’ve never taken, I have a vague plan which takes me up through the Kaibab Plateau, through Northeastern Utah to Southwestern Wyoming and then up through Jackson.

Somehow it’s important to me that I enter Yellowstone from the South Entrance and slowly make my way to its northern entrance at Mammoth. I want to stop and visit old friends along the way - the deep blue Jenny and Jackson Lakes in the Grand Tetons and then, within Yellowstone, Lewis Falls, Yellowstone Lake and Old Faithful. I want to be once more awed by the powerful beauty and mystery of this tiny patch of the cosmos.

This patch, with its active geysers and thermal areas, soaring snow-capped mountains, rushing waterfalls and abundant wildlife, will be my home for the next five months.  I hope to leave Yellowstone with new friends and new adventures to share with my friends back home. I hope I carry away lessons from the forests and the fumaroles, lessons that will continue to guide me until I need to take my next Road Trip. Rolling on down the highway, for me, is more than getting from one physical destination to another. For me, it is the possibility of and a metaphor for change.