When I first learned that we’d be reading Bryson’s Lost Continent, I was particularly excited having been aware of his popularity yet not having read his work. I’m Kathleen Holt in Cimarron – a small southwest Kansas in which I grew up and from which I took numerous family vacations during the 1950s.
I’ve read Lost Continent, and while I shared Bryson’s love of that little tin cup of vanilla ice cream at some Howard Johnson’s, I’m also astounded at Bryson’s lack of sensitivity, his crude mocking of people he seems not only unable to, but also uninterested in understanding, in meeting.
My paternal grandparents lived a couple of blocks from my childhood home. They came from families of 13 and 11 respectively. With four siblings marrying four siblings from the two families, we had a whole raft of greats and seconds or something like that. Many of our Oklahoma family had worked their way westward during the Great Depression building sections of Route 66 and eventually settling along the way, making a living building roads into the scenic mountains and hills of coastal California. We travelled those roads every three years.
It was a custom in our family if, during one’s travels, he/she happened to be within 100 miles of any relative at the end of a driving day, that we stayed with them, kids on pallets on the floor or on one of my great grandmother Nancy Jane Flowers Roberson featherbeds. I remember an aunt nurse who put a cool cloth on my forehead when my mother worried that I might have polio, Jonas Salk scar still in my future at the time.
One relative had both a pool table and a ping pong table. Did you know you could scratch that green felt, that ping pong balls break when you step on them, and that you can’t go bowling – a ploy to get us out of the house – on league night even in the 1950s? We kids thought that stop was fabulously fun, but happy waves goodbye turned first into confusion and then into tears when my dad pulled around the corner, past some tall evergreens and advised my mother, “You take the two little ones and I’ll take the two older ones.” It was still okay to swat kids on their behinds in those days. I just remember being shocked at the differing perceptions of a successful visit.
There were what were either routines or traditions. Hamburger and French Fries or Hamburger and a salad, but not all three and my brother had to be watched so he wouldn’t sneak the tip off the table as we left. Three girls and one boy, a tease still today. Whether it was my mother or my dad driving, we stopped every hundred miles and rotated kids. The worst spot, of course, was in the front with mom and dad, but the middle spot in the back next to my brother wasn’t so fine either.
Imagine 2-4-6- and 8-year-old kids arguing over coloring books or who spied a sign with an “X.” Oh yes, and since my family were Chevy dealers, we happily counted the various makes and models of Chevrolets and Oldsmobiles.
We paid attention as we drove. We looked outside, stopped by rivers and cooked on a Coleman stove. And we certainly worried about such things as survival driving across the desert. My dad once devised a canvas bag filled with a block of ice that hung on the outside window of the car against an attached vent pushed into the top of the wind-up window – a contrived version of air conditioning to come. We cried about having to take a nap before we could go to Disneyland, and we could SEE it right outside the window.
We worried about my brother falling into Colorado roaring rivers or off the top of Hoover Dam and to this day, we remember the kids we met, the family we felt, the stories and the honor of having seen the ocean before we left home to pursue our own dreams and family vacations.
I don’t know about you, but I imagine I’m not alone in smiling over these memories. That’s just my sense of humor.
I’m Kathleen Holt in Cimarron, Kansas, for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club.
