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Standing on a corner in Winslow, AZ (Apparently, “Take It Easy” was written in Flagstaff, but the name didn’t have as nice a ring as Winslow.)

Finding out what all the hype is about on The Strip.

Petrified wood in the Painted Desert

Hoover Dam

I have a reputation in my family as a Disney hater. I know, I know. For the moment, I’ll skip my philosophical misgivings and just complain about the Packaged Trip, which is guilty by association. Ignore the one gargantuan price-tag and gaze upon all the savings and ease of the all-inclusive. It’s just not my style. I’m always sure I can come up with a cheaper option, for one thing, and I don’t like to be told what to do, for another.

However, the loss of my secure little RV home-on-the-road did a number on my confidence. I signed up for the Grand Canyon Railroad Experience, Rails to Rim Plus. The salesperson assured me I had scored a significant AAA discount. Here’s hoping.

Hotel rooms, buffet meals, train rides, gift shop vouchers, live-action entertainment. It was great fun. I just sat back and enjoyed myself.

When we said we were from Lubbock, our troubadour led some Buddy Holly songs.

Also, there was a conga line.

And gambling.

And a train robbery.

The consequence of the Packaged Trip was having to listen to the kids describe both the California condor and Cut-throat Kitchen (Food Network was playing on hotel room TV) as “uh-mazing” all in the same breath. Ditto for Grand Canyon vistas and seconds (or thirds, BECAUSE I CAN!) in the buffet line. With that stirring review, I’ll just post the pics and give this recommendation: Visit in bad weather, if you get the chance. The play of light and fog that we enjoyed on our stormy-day visit was much more dramatic than on the clear, sunny day.

What has always bothered me about Walt Disney’s philosophy was his desire to whitewash the ugly realities of life. For instance, when making The Jungle Book movie, Disney told the screenwriters not to read the actual Kipling book because he considered it too dark. It’s an impulse I struggle against in myself, I must confess.

Real life keeps butting in on my idyllic vacation. As we drove through one gorgeous mountain, canyon, or desert region after another, we listened to several historic novels that record the behavior of the men and women and children who took up residence in these places over the years. It marred the view to hear some of the accounts. And that’s just history. As horror stories from Beirut and Paris flooded my news feed, I wondered, “Can I just pretend it isn’t happening for a few more days? Do the kids really have to bear this right now?”

Out of the car speaker came an answer from Walk Across the Sea, an audiobook that was concluding. The narrator is a young girl who’s witnessed the expulsion of Chinese immigrants from her California seaside town in the late 1800s. She’s still sorting through the experience as she addresses her newborn baby brother:

“There are astonishing things in this world, Andrew John, and beyond what we can see are things more astonishing still. In the magnifying glass there is a whole secret world. Snowflakes like tatted doilies. Fantastical creatures in a drop of pond water. Jungles in a patch of moss. We are living in a place where there is mystery all around. Mystery inside, in the cells of our blood, mystery outside, in the stars. Mystery before we are born, mystery after we die. Mystery so deep it busts clean out of the charts we try to pin it in.

Terrible things can happen in this world, things you can’t explain away. It’s not safe here. I can’t promise you’ll be safe.

But there are miracles, too. Like you. And love. And glories, well beyond our knowing.”

Lake Mead at sunset

My search for a “safe” slot canyon brought us to Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada.

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The days leading up to our southwest tour were packed with activity. Things got so busy that Brandon flagged me down coming out of the gym early one morning with coffee and a bagel in order to update our schedule. One of us had been sleeping when the other left or arrived home for two straight days. Nice as our break in Lubbock had been, I was looking forward to being squashed up together in the RV again.

Actually leaving town proved just as difficult as usual. I told everyone we’d go by 9, secretly hoping for noon. It was ten after twelve when we pulled out of Aunt Rebecca’s driveway, but we still had to stop at Aunt Melissa’s barn to rifle through boxes for winter coats and a math book. Then we remembered the frozen meals the big kids had cooked up in an effort to eat more economically on this trip. Back to Bec’s. Before we hit the city limits, a burning electrical odor filled the RV. Brandon determined the problem would not result in fiery death, just a lack of air conditioning, so we ventured on, holding our breath now. Even the weather seemed to conspire against us; a dust storm was blowing in from the west, and the RV struggled against it at barely 60 mph.

Then, about an hour from our first stop in Albuquerque, the RV really disappointed us. The warning code for engine trouble, which plagued us at the end of our last trip, began to flash. We hobbled into town, crushed. This would not be an overnight fix. I tried to recall details of the various cancellation policies I’d agreed to between New Mexico and California. Could the RV even make it, if we turned around for home?

Relief in the midst of our distress came in the form of Chelsea and Josh Collins. They’re old friends from Lubbock who moved to Albuquerque. We’d made plans to spend the night with them and hang out the next day. They immediately invited us to extend our stay while we figured out what to do—no small gesture considering they have young children of their own and live in somewhat tight quarters. Also, they helped raise our kids for several years, so there were no illusions as to what it’s like to bunk with a bunch of Mulkeys.

At sunset, Chelsea showed us why the mountains behind her house are called the  Sandias. Sandia means watermelon.

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Life appeared more hopeful in the morning. We’d just retired our old family van before leaving Lubbock, planning to replace it after our travels. Now Brandon decided we should leave the RV in Albuquerque for repairs (the German engine that so wooed him now required a replacement part from Germany), shop for a new car, and keep traveling. While Chelsea entertained the younger kids, I spent the day changing reservations, and Brandon tutored the boys in the art of purchasing a vehicle.

At the ABQ BioPark, we tried out the new Bug-arium and learned, to our delighted horror, that the Tarantula Hawk wasp is the NM state insect. We’d just been reading a gruesome description of its habits at breakfast. Read all the gory details here:

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/absurd-creature-of-the-week-tarantula-hawk/

Chelsea was such a beloved babysitter that my neighbors still recall the weeping and wailing that followed her move to Albuquerque. Now Jane babysat for Chelsea and Josh’s kids, so we parents could go out to dinner one night.  It felt very circle-of-life-ish!

We also got to eat supper with Brandon’s Aunt Anne and his cousin, Matthew. We loved meeting his new fiance, Amanda.

I’m grateful for Brandon’s cool-headed approach to problems. He never seemed very panicked by the potential implosion of our trip. “It’s an adventure,” he reasoned, as he cheerfully arranged eight people, a dog, and all their possessions in a shiny Chevy Traverse. The fella is practically Gandalf, absent beard and pipe.

We hoped to make it to Denver on Saturday, but the RV repairs stalled our progress. Our old friends, Nikki and Eric Sartin, whom we hadn’t seen since they moved from Lubbock a few years ago, invited us to eat supper and watch the football game at their house in Fort Collins. They fed us a delicious meal, and UGA won the game. The kids played until they were exhausted, and the grown-ups enjoyed a mini-tour of Fort Collins microbreweries. What a happy reunion! Eric’s parents hosted us for the night, and Jackie, Eric’s mom, fixed a huge breakfast the next morning. It did not take the little girls long to realize they’d landed in Grandma-Central. They soaked up all the benefits.

In Denver, we caught up with Misty and Nathan Holman, friends who just moved from Lubbock this past Spring. (For most of my life, I’ve been moving every few years, so it is strange to be the one more permanently fixed in Lubbock, while others go on.) The kids played until they’d burned up all their breakfast, and then we ate again!

In the afternoon, we shared a hike and a meal with another friend we’d met in Lubbock, Stacy Adair. She hosted us overnight at her house.

The end of our trip had become more about people than places, and we started longing for all the folks back home we hadn’t seen in three weeks. From the heights of Colorado Springs, we thought we could almost see Lubbock.

I met my first Texans when I was a teenager at summer camp. They were loud, relaxed, friendly, and unfailingly enthusiastic about their home state. It was a little infectious. Later, when I started dating Brandon, my daddy warned me that if I wasn’t careful, I’d be carried off to Texas a la Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and the Sabine women. He wasn’t far off the mark, he just failed to foresee that he would be borne away, as well! All of my immediate family are happy residents now.

Lubbock has not been an easy adjustment for me in some ways. After years of longing for a permanent home, it feels like a bit of a mean joke to find my rest in America’s scrublands, the last region of the country to be settled. I sometimes envision Lubbock as the great suburban parking lot of the southern plains. For someone accustomed to the eastern landscape, living in West Texas is akin to habitation on Mars. It’s a dusty, dry, seemingly featureless terrain. That’s when I need my painter friend, Laura Lewis. She knows how to capture the Panhandle on canvas in a way that trains my eyeballs to a new kind of beauty:

With such a roomy sky to showcase it, a full moon grabs me in its thrall every twenty-eight days. I never paid much attention to the moon back east. In fact, there is almost always something jaw-dropping going on in the theater that is our sky. (This morning it was an oddly shaped, brilliantly colored prism, poking out of otherwise black clouds.) I rarely see the songbirds or brightly dressed cardinals and jays of Georgia; our birds match the landscape, but they are pretty impressive carnivores. And under all that pavement lies a fascinating history by turns tragic and triumphant, reprehensible and inspiring. Lubbock is also a loyal and loving community where we enjoy all kinds of freedom and stability at work, in church, and in school. I’ve joked that we are running away from home this year. Surely, I didn’t mean it?

We miss the very routines we were wishing to escape. Our circadian rhythms are off. We are “gunning the throttle for the Llano Estacado.”

Last stop at the Raton-Clayton volcanic field in eastern New Mexico

Inside the Capulin crater, a nice example of an extinct North American volcano

(If you’ve never heard it, tune-in to a great podcast on BBC Witness Archive 2012 of a geologist describing what it was like flying over Mt. St. Helens as it erupted.)

The battle against shoe funk never ends.

It’s amazing how sharply the landscape changes in the short distance between the Badlands and the Black Hills. Rolling plains and eroding sedimentary formations shift to pine-covered mountains of tall, dark granite. Brandon was tempted to try the Needles Eye highway in Custer Park (he watched several youtube videos of buses and RVs pulling it off), but good sense prevailed. We’ll have to see it next time.

We did attend the evening lighting ceremony at Mount Rushmore, and the next day we visited the still-in-progress-after-fifty-years Crazy Horse Memorial. The original sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, was an interesting character. Born in 1908 to a Polish prizefighter in Boston, Ziolkowski left home at sixteen because he “still couldn’t whip him.” He eventually won a sculpting prize at the New York World’s Fair, and he assisted Gutzon Borglum at Mount Rushmore. He worked on the Crazy Horse Memorial from 1948 until his death in 1982. His ten children are still working on the giant project.

Pete, Nan, and Brandon learning to hoop dance

After Crazy Horse, we drove to Devil’s Tower in eastern Wyoming. That’s a gorgeous spot. It has an easy walking path around the base. We watched ant-sized climbers working their way to the top.

Our Cheyenne friends were out-of-town, but they suggested a route through Caspar, so we could visit the National Historic Trails museum. Western settlers crossed the North Platte River at Caspar before diverging onto the California, Oregon, and Mormon trails.

Brandon was content to watch highlights from the first few UGA football games this season, but the final Saturday of our travels was a big game day: UGA vs. SC. Brandon’s goal was to make it a hotel room in time for kick-off. Then the RV went bonkers. Here’s where it happened:

“Don’t worry,” Brandon said, as we limped to a rest stop. “I think I know what the problem is.” He’d purchased a little computer scanner, which reads the problem codes for the RV. The diagnosis was just as he suspected.

Apparently, our engine has a common issue, and Brandon read about it on an RV blog when he was researching which vehicle to buy. He’d purchased a replacement part, just in case. Now he calmly installed it. Boy. Scout.

Two-and-a-half weeks into our trip, we were SO tired.  Not only was the physical part of the trip wearying, but the constant input of new sights, sounds, and stories taxed our brains.  There were other troubles, too. A date night turned into, me, washing a mountain of laundry at the Loads of Fun, and Brandon, repairing the RV in the parking lot. Jane, who is virtually blind before she puts in her contacts, almost loaded-up in someone else’s RV, as she felt her way back from the shower, on more than one occasion.  A couple of middle siblings were fighting more than usual, inspiring an older sibling to revolt in an uncharacteristic tirade. The RV was beginning to smell, and there was constant accusation as to which feet were to blame. Suddenly, I did not want to be on a road trip with anyone anymore. “Let’s just go home.” I demanded. “Now.”

“We can’t go home because you rented our house to strangers,” some kid reminded me.

I launched into a long diatribe about all the people in the world who are actually displaced right now. The air in the RV was thick with resentment and other funk. I think Brandon considered ditching us all.

Instead, he drove us to Wall Drug for five-cent coffee and doughnuts. And we kept trucking. “Bad lands,” as the Indians warned.

Everyone perked up when we visited the Minuteman Missile Site. The children got a kick out of hearing us chat excitedly with the park ranger about history we’d actually lived through. Brandon rented the War Games movie, and I made the kids listen to the whole Dream of the Blue Turtles album, not just the “Russians” song. Walking through the underground bunkers, it all seemed like a strange exercise in paranoia, until we read disturbing news updates on Russia and the U.S. in Syria the next morning.

For almost thirty years, the Air Force operated sites like this around fairly uninhabited areas of the West. It took at least two people to input codes and turn keys to arm the missiles. They rotated shifts every three days. If the servicemen in the bunkers could not complete the mission, the Looking Glass aircraft, always flying above the region, could launch the nuclear weapon. The Minuteman II program ended in 1992, but Looking Glass still operates. Though it is not continually flying anymore, the jet can be in the air in five minutes.

There was armed security for the underground launch control rooms, but the silos, themselves, were located miles away and monitored by motion cameras. Servicemen claimed grasshoppers even set the cameras off, and there were constant excursions to check for trouble. One winter, the perpetrators turned out to be camels, escaped from a live Nativity scene in Wall, who were using the tall fences around the missile site as scratching posts.

Our good humor did not last. We were hungry and out of food. Brandon took the two most offensive children into the grocery store for a heart-to-heart and a forage for provisions. He came back with a 4-pack of Robin Williams comedies for the kids and a People magazine for me. As he proudly handed over my prize, he noticed the cover article was entitled “Love the Size You’re In,” but it was too late to grab it back. “That’s not a message!” he assured, “I just thought you’d like the magazine.” Fortunately, I’d enjoyed a mug of wine and a couple of chapters in my book while they shopped, so I was in a friendlier mood.

When even treats and distractions would not cure us, we turned, at last, to the Scriptures. “Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near.” We journeyed on, by the power of the Spirit. It’s how we’d arrived thus far, only we didn’t notice, when we still thought we were Reasonably Nice People.

Happier days before the big meltdown:

College visit in downtown Minneapolis

Lunch at Sioux Falls

Jellystone Parks are the kid-resorts of RV campgrounds.

If we make it home without a cat, it will be a testament to Brandon’s fortitude.

Outsider art at Porter Sculpture Park (a big pasture along I-90)

Mr. Porter knew all about the Cadillac Ranch, but we impressed him with our knowledge of Texas roadside art when we showed him pictures of Ozymandias of the Plains.

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,

By the shining Big-Sea-Water, 

Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,

Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

Dark behind it rose the forest, 

Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,

Rose the firs with cones upon them;

Bright before it beat the water, 

Beat the clear and sunny water, 

Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

-Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha”

Over the giant Mackinaw Bridge is the upper peninsula of Michigan. Referred to as the “U.P.,” this remote area is populated by people who call themselves “Yoopers.” Not only were the folks here immune to my twang, they seemed suspicious of it. A popular book in tourist shops is entitled You Wouldn’t Like it Here. There’s a sequel, too: You Still Wouldn’t Like it Here.

As we drove along, the evergreens grew thicker and taller on either side of the highway. It felt like the RV was climbing higher with every mile. Not far over the bridge, we saw another RV parked haphazardly on the roadside. As I strained to see if there’d been an accident, a big brown motion in the woods caught my eye. “A MOOSE!” I screamed. “It’s a MOOSE! It’s a MOOSE! It’s a MOOSE!” Brandon jerked our RV off to the side of the road as well, and everyone mashed their faces against the windows. It was a moose. It was huge, and it sported a wide rack of antlers. The big creature stood looking back at us for a long moment, and then it turned and trotted off into the woods, it’s quick movement as astonishing as its imposing appearance. Everyone in the RV was still screaming when it disappeared. Suddenly, we noticed how loud we were, and we all fell quiet and still. Brandon chuckled as cars zoomed past us on the highway. “I guess they see them every day. Probably think we are idiots.” I didn’t care. I’d just been thinking how great it would be to see a moose, and moments later it had appeared. I was sure it was some sort of divine appointment.

I think of water as sitting low in the ground. When we go to the Gulf of Mexico, I get the sensation of driving down to the edge of the earth. But in the U.P., the water often seemed to tower above us as we approached it, like blue mountains on a distant horizon. It was a little disorienting.

Our first stop was Whitefish Point, home of the Shipwreck Museum. We toured the lighthouse, once occupied by a mild-mannered keeper who discovered his 1918 assistants were German spies, and we examined artifacts from famous Lake Superior shipwrecks. “Lake Superior,” Nan told us in her report that night, “is the coldest, largest, deepest body of fresh water in the world, by far, and it has swallowed up over 550 ships.” The Edmund Fitzgerald, immortalized in song by Gordon Lightfoot is one of them. We know the Lightfoot song because a comedian we like makes fun of how many verses it has. He summarizes the song in one verse, concluding, “and the people all died…bummer.” We were snickering about his version of the song as we approached the museum. One of the first exhibits featured a short movie about that very shipwreck, which happened in 1975, not hundreds of years ago, as we assumed. The color drained from our faces as we watched surviving family members tearfully ringing a bell in remembrance of lost loved ones on the screen. We are thinking of emailing that comedian a warning about what-sketches-not-to-perform-in-Michigan.

Glass-bottom boat tour of local shipwrecks on Munising Bay

Besides a moose, the other thing I was itching to see was Northern Lights. I’d been doing a little online research, and I thought there was a chance. I mentioned my ambitions to Brandon, and he became determined that we should see them. Finding a dark shore proved harder than expected. In fact, finding any place to camp was a challenge. The U.P. is booked on Fall weekends. Finally, we found a spot just across the highway from a large, empty stretch of lake outside Marquette.

Brandon monitored solar weather patterns and added alerts to his phone. In the wee hours of the morning, he woke me up, and we stumbled up a dark path out of the campground, across the highway, and over the dunes to Lake Superior. The sky was completely clear, and the few constellations I can normally pick out were crowded with gazillions of other stars. Along the horizon, we could see silvery movements. They had the shape and motion of video clips we’d seen, but there were no brilliant colors. We debated whether we were just seeing clouds, but we really didn’t want them to be clouds, so we cautiously overruled that notion. It was cold, and we were shivering. Then Brandon’s flashlight went out, and it was really dark. We heard a car door slam and a low voice cough and some feet shuffle. We could just make out the shape of a man leaning against a vehicle along the side of the road. I couldn’t tell if he was an axe-murderer or just a lights-hunter, like us. That’s difficult to discern on a pitch-black night in the middle of nowhere. His presence kind of killed the romance of the moment, and we decided to head back to the campground. As we stumbled along in the dark, straining to see the skinny path through the woods, it occurred to me that if I was not murdered by the stargazer, a bear might eat me. When we finally found the RV, we locked the door and dove under the covers. “I’m sorry I didn’t kiss you out there under the Maybe Northern Lights,” Brandon confessed. “My nose was really running. And I was trying to keep an eye on that murderer.”

Georgia, giving her report on a Graveyard Coast shipwreck

Munising water fall, where we ran into some people from Austin

It was dark when we pulled into our campground at Mackinaw City. We could make out the blacker shapes of trees looming above, and the chilly voice of wind blowing over water identified Lake Huron. Promising, but for the moment we just wanted fuzzy socks and beds.

When I pushed up the RV window shade the next morning, I gasped at the view. And I started crying, of course. (Jane said it made her want to cry, too, but she had better self-control than me.) We bundled up and scrambled out to see it closer. That’s when we realized it takes feeling the lakes in order to see them properly. The wind pushed on us from above, it seemed, from clouds that hung down low and fat. I just knew there had to be someone big up there, doing it on purpose. No wonder gods are depicted riding on clouds and poking supernatural fingers down at little humans. The water was blue, like on a peacock feather, and it had a busy, rhythmic motion punctuated by little silver wakes. It stretched out from my feet as far forward and left and right as I could see. It was noisy, but not roaring like the ocean.

Tears and worship seemed like the only reasonable response. In between crying jags, I sputtered out lines of psalms and hymns like this one from Isaac Watts:

I sing the mighty power of God, that made the mountains rise;                                                        That spread the flowing seas abroad, and built the lofty skies.

I sing the wisdom that ordained the sun to rule the day;
The moon shines full at His command, and all the stars obey.

I sing the goodness of the Lord, who filled the earth with food,
Who formed the creatures through the Word, and then pronounced them good.

Lord, how Thy wonders are displayed, where’ er I turn my eye,
If I survey the ground I tread, or gaze upon the sky;

There’s not a plant or flow’r below, but makes Thy glories known,                                                    And clouds arise, and tempests blow, by order from Thy throne;

While all that borrows life from Thee is ever in Thy care;                                                                    And everywhere that we can be, Thou, God, art present there.

 

 

We caught a ferry ride over to Mackinac Island. I have been daydreaming about Mackinac ever since I had a middle school crush on Christopher Reeve.

Grand Hotel where Jane Seymour (the actress, not the queen) emoted in Somewhere in Time.

I was not disappointed. We hopped off the ferry and into the arms of bike rental agents, who equipped us with our wheels for the day (horses, bicycles, and feet are the only forms of transportation allowed on the island). It was a bit of a wobbly, worrisome start trying to ride through downtown without running over other tourists (Nan had just learned to ride a bike, and she insisted on piloting with her handle bars backwards), but soon we were out on the main road around the island, sun in our faces and breeze at our backs. It was pretty idyllic.

When we stopped for lunch, we starting reading Once on this Island by Gloria Whelan. It’s about teenagers in the early 1800’s who run the family farm on Mackinac while their father is off fighting. (The island was ceded to the United States by the British after the American Revolution, but they reclaimed the fort and occupied the island during the War of 1812.) Riding through the battlefield, fort, and cemetery and exploring the woods and waterfronts of the island was like jumping into the story.

The island’s whole named used to be Michilimackinac, which means “great turtle”. The island has that shape, and there’s a legend about the island being built on the shell of a turtle with a runaway appetite.

Sipping tea as he bikes

Inside the crack in the island

Evidence of fairies and elves in this wood

Tandem bike was so popular, we had to ride it in shifts.

We were still pink-cheeked and bubbling with uncapped energy following a day outdoors and in-motion when we loaded up in a shuttle to catch a ride back to our campground. A worn, but sturdy-looking older woman sat behind the wheel. We sat in silence for awhile waiting for other campers as the ferry emptied. The younger kids couldn’t stand the sudden stillness and began reporting on their day. When they finally quieted she answered, “Huh. I haven’t been out there in thirty years.” That should have killed the conversation, but they blithely moved on, finding out what she had been doing (overland truck driving), and before we knew it, she’d warmed up and started playing a “mind-reading” game with the children. They were still debating how she did it when we disembarked at the campground. We could hear her throaty laughter as she drove off.

We almost skipped Detroit. A lot of the news from there is discouraging. A few days into our trip, a friend texted to see if we’d reached Michigan yet. “Don’t miss Detroit!” she exhorted. (There are a bunch of Michiganders in Lubbock, and they have an enthusiasm for their home state akin to Texans.) I’m so glad we visited. Every person we met, even the server at a tiny restaurant in a distressed neighborhood where we dined, expressed enthusiastically that Detroit is a city focused on comeback. I loved the cheerful energy of all the folks we encountered.

First, we visited the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn. What I thought would be a two-hour visit stretched to four, and we had to run to catch the bus to the Rouge Factory, or we’d have stayed longer. The museum is a shining monument to planes, trains, automobiles, and all the big machines that fueled the industrial revolution. I’m not very mechanically minded, and I often wonder at the things Brandon and his brother, Jason, can figure out by tinkering. They get it from their granddad by way of their mama. She can tinker, too.

Steam locomotive, in use until the 1950s.

Model T, in parts

I graduated from highschool in Fort Valley, GA where the first school bus was constructed by Albert L. Luce, a Ford dealer.  In Peach County if your parents didn’t farm, there’s a good chance they worked at Bluebird.

Rosa Park’s bus

The kids spent a long time building Lego cars and making paper airplanes to test.

We couldn’t take any pictures at the Rouge Factory, where thousands of workers were assembling Ford F-150s, but the sight left indelible images on our brains.  We’d already tried out a mini-assembly line at the museum. (We were pretty good; there was only one recall, and we were faster than average in assembly time.) But to see something of that scale in action! Wow. Now our conversation about labor, which started back in OK with Woody Guthrie, was fully fleshed as we learned about Ford’s $5-work-week and his evolving response to unions.

I can show you Diego Rivera’s pictures of the Rouge from the 1930s. They stretch up and down the grand entry of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Most of Rivera’s work is in Mexico. It’s on the exterior of buildings, so the public has easy access to it. Given that Nelson D. Rockefeller fired Rivera from a similar job in New York and famously destroyed the work because Rivera included a portrait of Lenin in the mural, it’s surprising this project didn’t meet more resistance. Depicted is a cautionary tale of the blessings and curses of industrialization, and it makes some pointed statements about labor and management. The morphed portrait of Ford and Edison is positioned on the same level as a laborer, and right behind management is a piece of machinery shaped like a huge ear. I could go on and on about these murals! The docent for the Rivera Court chatted away for at least thirty minutes, pointing out little details that emerge from the murals if you look long enough. Riveria painted frescos, like he’d seen in public buildings in Italy, and he worried the workers who prepared the plaster by breezing in at the last possible moment. He completed the murals in just eleven months.

I found a painting of Tobias and the Archangel!

We couldn’t leave town without a visit to the Motown Museum. The entertaining tour guides, alone, are worth the ticket! We visited two of the eight homes on West Grand Boulevard that originally housed Berry Gordy’s 24-hr-a-day, 7-day-a-week hit factory. Gordy’s parents moved to Detroit from Sandersville, GA during the Great Migration, and they immediately excelled in multiple business ventures. A defining characteristic of the whole family was their commitment to excellent, energetic work. We saw the desk where Diana Ross worked as a secretary and the candy machine where someone always left a dime on top for Stevie Wonder, who loved the Baby Ruth candy bars that were always kept in the fourth slot from the right. At the end of our tour we got to sing “My Girl” in Studio A. In the old days, artists and producers met to evaluate new songs. To test for “hit” quality, they were asked if they had one dollar left, would they buy that song or a sandwich. We thought we sounded pretty good, but maybe not better than a sandwich on an empty belly.

After watching the Thompsons working so hard on their farm, Brandon decided he needed to devote some time to his own business. We found a campground on a little lake where the kids could play while he worked. The afternoon was cool for the first time in our travels, and we saw lots of Canada geese overhead. We all needed to take a deep breath.

Earlier, as we’d driven down a rural road thickly lined with trees and bushes, we’d had a scare. We were approaching an intersection, but there was no visible signage ahead. I felt a warning in my stomach, but it would not talk to my brain fast enough to waggle words out of my mouth. I caught a glimpse of a red, flashing light in the low branches, and then Brandon saw the stop sign as we were almost on top of it. He glanced at me in horror as he stamped the breaks. We knew the RV couldn’t stop until the middle of the intersection, at least, and it was impossible to see what might be barreling down the road we were about to cross. Miraculously, it did stop, with just the nose poking out into traffic. Nothing was coming.

But Peter, who’d unbuckled to get a drink of water at the back of the RV sailed past the seated kids, still gripping the three-gallon water jug, and crashed into the bench seat of the dinette. After a moment of shocked silence, we began to survey each other for damages. Peter was growing a large whelp on one arm, and the bench, which halted his flight, was broken. A full bag of dog food had been left out, and its contents carpeted the floor. Several of us began to cry. Needless to say, we are more careful now about leaving our seats when the vehicle is in motion.

Quarters are precious on this trip. We need them for road tolls, which we aren’t used to back home, and we need them for laundry. I had a nice stash saved for a big wash-up at the campground. Unfortunately, there was an arcade next to the washers and dryers. When the boys descended on it, salivating over the worn game machines, I warned them to stay away from my quarters; I had just enough. Once my washers were swirling industriously, I walked back to the RV on some other errand. That same little signal in my belly told me not to leave my dear quarters on the counter, but I foolishly dismissed it.

When I returned from walking the dog and reached for my quarters, they were gone. I resisted the urge to launch an immediate attack and walked calmly back to the laundry room, where I was sure I would find them. Instead, I found two little girls in the arcade. They grinned at me with gopher cheeks full of candy they’d liberated from a glass box with flashing lights and a mechanical arm.

“Did you take my laundry quarters?” I demanded, trying not to shriek. “I had JUST enough.”

“No, ma’am,” assured Nan. “We found them in the RV.”

I marched back to the RV in a fury, and Brandon confirmed their story. In fact, they’d asked for permission to take them, and he’d granted it.

Now ensued a lengthy and harried search of every crevice of the RV for quarters. It was dark, and the camp office was closed. The change machine took ones and fives. We couldn’t find any of those, either. I sat on the toilet (lid-closed) and glowered at the rest of the family as they opened drawers, removed cushions, and searched the pockets of their backpacks for change. At last, Jacob went to the arcade and felt around under the machines for abandoned coins. He came back with just enough. I don’t think I even thanked him. I just stalked back to the mildewing clothes while everyone else exhaled in relief.

There’s a certain promise in the idea of running away from home on an adventure. I’m sure I’ll be so relaxed and unencumbered that I will no longer be my warty, old self. I’ll be fun and friendly and patient and sweet. How disappointing to find that the same rottenness that plagues me at home tagged along on this trip. I pondered the problem as I lay awake at three in the morning, wishing I hadn’t been so mean about the quarters.

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From Chicago, we briefly traveled through both Indiana and Ohio to reach a friend’s farm in Blissfield, Michigan. Why can’t every town be named something like Blissfield? The transition from urban to rural was gradual, but eventually we found ourselves bumping down narrow roads surrounded by miles of tall, dry cornstalks on either side. We wondered what would happen if we met a car coming the other direction. Blissfield is in Riga township, and it was settled by Germans and Scandinavians. Land was originally sold in 40 acre plots, but the Thompson farm has grown much larger over generations. It’s been a farm since the 1880’s, but it has belonged to the Thompsons since the late 1920’s. It will be designated a Centennial Farm soon.

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