An American road trip

A 'guest post' from my brother

While you are reading this, I am (hopefully!) in the USA, watching my son set off on his solo Route 66 drive, from Santa Monica to Chicago. I admire his bravery and his self-confidence, it is certainly not something I would have attempted, even at his advanced age of 30. (I know, how can I possibly have children in their 30s? how did that happen?) But the night before he set off from England, I thought I would cheer him on his way by reading to him from my beloved brother Geoff’s autobiography, about his US road trip in 1965, when he was a 19-year old student. And it is such a good story, that I am going to share it with you now, as a guest post. At the time he was a Cambridge undergraduate studying Chemistry at St John’s College.

My brother Geoff, dreaming of American road trips

My first memory of the trip is wrestling the car up the West Side Highway.  It was the first time I had driven an automatic; and more importantly, the first time I had driven a car with power steering. The car was a full  size station wagon, old, dark green, with actual wood stuck on the sides.  It was the widest car I had ever driven, and it completely filled the lane,  with no margin of error on either side. As I breathed in, the car drifted left; and as I breathed out, back it came, drifting right. It was pretty frightening. I could see the George Washington Bridge up ahead on the left, spanning the Hudson River next to me. It was a mile or so away, and I wondered if we would make it. Then I thought: after the bridge, only another two thousand miles or so to Colorado. The whole idea seemed absurd.

Until today, it had seemed unreal; maybe absurd was a step forward? There were five of us in the car, three English and two Americans; only  two of us could drive at all. We didn't have much money; I had a little  over $100 in my back pocket. None of us had credit cards, or checkbooks, or cell phones, or any of the backup systems of modern life.

I was one of the two drivers; Anne, the other driver, was sitting next  to me. A tall, slender, quiet and bespectacled 22-year-old, short dusty  blonde hair in a bob, wearing tee shirt and blue jeans, Anne was in the  car - and actually it was her car - to please George. She had driven us all  down to New York yesterday from Boston, and we had spent the night sleeping on the floor of a loft belonging to an artist friend of George's.  George was behind me in the car. Like Anne, but a year junior, he  was a student in Boston, though I found it hard to visualize this solidly  built hockey-loving rowdy - seldom far from a beer can, and frequently  with beer foam in his moustache - as a student of anything very  intellectual. It had been George's idea, this whole trip; a sudden desire to  get out of the city, and "See some mountains, man” before term started again. 

Looking out of the other window in the back was Jenny, Keith's girl  friend. Eighteen, and about to start teacher training college in England,  Jenny was lively, talkative, enthusiastic, self-confident, artistic. Her thick  brown hair was parted in the center, and fell straight down and over her shoulders. Her body was strong; later in life she might struggle with her  weight, but right now she filled out her tee shirt and jeans much better  than Anne.

Between them was Keith. He and I, both 19 now, were assigned as roommates when we took the scholarship exams in a sub-zero college room some eighteen months ago. Keith lived within ten miles of  Cambridge and was familiar with the town before he started at the university; his father was a local schoolteacher, while his mother worked in the College office. If Keith looked like anyone, it was Mick Jagger: same hair, same strong-featured face, same mouth. Endlessly curious, well read, creative and artistic, Keith was the first person I ever met who was accomplished and enthusiastic in both art and science. He could spend the day reading a book; write a science essay after dinner; and then paint into the midnight hours. I learnt something from him every day.

And me? Well, if Keith was Mick Jagger, I was Bob Dylan - a mop of wiry brown hair over a nothing special face. And I guess I would have to say I was the most responsible person in the  car - or at least the biggest worrier. 

Geoff in Cambridge, looking so smart!

After we crossed the GW Bridge, we headed straight for Denver, rolling  west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and then Interstate 70. Our plan was  to get there as fast as we could, since we had less than two weeks before our plane left from Kennedy. Anne and I drove alternately for a couple of hours at a time; the other slept in the back, where we had put the back seat down and spread out a mattress on which three people could lie  down, just about. We stopped only for fast food and occasional stretch  breaks. 

It was at one of these stretch breaks, in Ohio, that we hit our first  problem. We sat at a picnic table for maybe an hour, and smoked, and drank Coke, while Keith burned off energy by, well, basically, showing  off. Two hours later, and a hundred miles down the road, we stopped to get gas; and Keith announced that he no longer had his wallet. "It must  have fallen out of my jeans pocket when I was doing all those handstands  and stuff’, he said. 

Wordlessly, I like to think, we got back in the car and drove back the  hundred miles to look for the wallet. No luck of course. We sat down at the same picnic table and held a council of war. Keith had not only lost  his wallet, and almost all his money; he had also been holding Jenny's money, so we were down forty percent. We all put our money literally  on the table. I didn't have much, but I seemed to have more than anyone  else. We decided that we could keep going; there was enough for the gas,  and for food, and for cigarettes and beer. What else did we really need?  We got back on the road. 

Two days later we pulled into Denver. We spent that night on the floor of another friend of George's, but since we hadn't come to check out the city, the next morning we drove south, looking for country scenery and  mountain greenery. We climbed high in the Rocky Mountains: I  remember a competition - men only of course, Anne and Jenny watched  us tolerantly - to see who could hold their hand the longest in a freezing  cold mountain stream.

If our trip had a "destination", as they call it these days, perhaps it was the Pueblo Indian cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park. We  crawled around the sandstone caves in the hot sun, up and down little  wood ladders, marveling at how all the individual caves and excavations  were linked into a single extended village.

Close to Mesa Verde and our actual furthest point, was Four Corners,  the only place in America where four states - Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah - meet. And the nearby town was Durango where we  shopped wistfully since we had no money for Western souvenirs. At some point in the Colorado back country, Keith and Ceorge fell sick. As high as we were the nights were cold, so we decided we would sleep in the car rather than outside on the ground, as we usually did. I will always remember that night; the heat that five of us, two with fevers,  threw off in the car's confined space. We sweated, and sweated. We  opened the window a crack, and froze: we shut it again, and five minutes  later the car was burning hot again. I thought morning would never come. The car never smelled the same again.

And somewhere in Colorado, Keith lost his shoes. 

From Durango we began our return, journey by heading north since we thought we would drive back east on a different highway, Interstate 80.  Eleven hundred miles later, I was driving when I heard the car make a new noise, a faint knocking noise. It grew rapidly louder, and I took the next exit beeause we needed to get off the freeway and find out what it was.  It is only two miles from Interstate 80 to the center of lowa City but by the time we got there, the knocking drowned out the regular engine  noise. Worse, the car was reduced to a crawl. 

With its dying breath, I pulled the car onto the forecourt of a corner service station that didn’t look too expensive, and asked a mechanic to look under the hood. After no more than ten minutes, and  a consultation with the other mechanics - they had all come out to hear the engine knock - he told Anne and me that the engine was finished. "I can help you for ten dollars," he shrugged.  "Ten dollars? We have that, but what can you do for ten dollars?"  "I can take the car off your hands and dump it." Anne and I looked at  each other. She was close to tears, but what other choice did we have?

Half an hour later, we sat at a table in a hamburger joint across the  road and took stock. We had about twenty dollars between us. Keith had  no shoes. Three of us needed to be in New York, almost exactly a thousand  miles away, in less than a week, to catch our charter plane. If we missed  it, we would not be able to get back to England at all. Looking back, I  don't know why one of the five of us didn't call our parents and ask them  to wire us money. But none of us did. This was 1965; we didn't use the  phone and we didn't ask our parents, or anyone else, for help. But what  we were going to do defeated us. Keith, George and I looked at each other dumbly and miserably. It had never occurred to us how critical the  car was.  I suggested that we hitchhike, but George shook his head "No-one is  going to take five of us, and the cops pick up hitchhikers all the time on  the Interstate. And we don't have the time to go on local roads. And  Keith doesn’t have any shoes.' 

Just then, the girls joined us with the food and they were all smiles. "Hey, the people here are just so nice!" They smiled and waved to the boys at the tills up front, who waved back.  "They’re students, and apparently this town is full of students; it's the  University of Iowa. So they can put us up for the night, they have a house  they share. It’s not far away. And then one of the boys, his name is Rick,  well Rick says he knows some guys who work on old cars, to fix them up,  and maybe we could find an old car... and buy it! He says he'll drive us  around tonight after he gets off here.  While I could not imagine what sort of car we could buy for the money  we had, no-one had a better plan, so that night we guys drove around with Rick to a succession of suburban houses and looked at a lot of half-restored wrecks, mostly in the front yards. But no luck; none were  sufficiently restored to run, so by midnight we were back. The girls  meanwhile were singing for our suppers by cooking them, and we all ate  and drank well that night. 

Next morning, we had nothing better to do than go back to the burger  joint with the guys, ready for their shift. We were lost and hopeless. I had no better plan than to get jobs and make some money, to buy some sort  of used car. But we couldn't do that in a week, and I couldn't get my  head past missing the plane. I had already been in America almost three  months - in three more I could be drafted. I saw myself on a Hercules  airplane to Vietnam, an utterly disastrous end to what had started out as  a fun trip to America. What a mess!  But, as we pulled up to the diner, one of the boys rushed out, very  excited. "You're going to be all right! Go over to the service station and  ask for Ted!"  "Which service station?" I asked, thinking perhaps our car had  miraculously recovered  "No, no the Texaco station." He pointed to the third corner of this four-way stop where our lives had seemingly halted.  "So, here's the deal," Ted told us. None of us had ever seen him before,  so it seemed amazing that he would be our salvation. ‘I know a guy who  just finished doing up a car, and he'll sell it to you for thirty dollars. Now the car is fine, except the  transmission is shot. It will run OK, but it won’t do more than about forty-five, it just slips too much after that. That’s why he can't get much for the car.

"Where is it?"  "Right over there, behind the shop. He pointed to a late Forties, maybe early Fifties, car, all swooping curves and  little windows. But shiny, ready for at least one more trip, I hoped.  “That's wonderful, but we just don't have thirty dollars to buy the  car. So near, and yet so far”, I groaned  "That's OK," Ted said "We heard you didn't have any money, so we  raised a collection for you. The other station put in ten, and the diner put in ten, and a Coca-Cola truck driver who went through in the night  put in ten. And I’ve checked the car over and filled it with gas for you.”  We all gaped at him. That he had gone to all this trouble, for five  ragged-looking students, three of them English, none of whom he had even met. And these people who had given us money: the people in the  diner, who had already put us up for the night, and fed us, and driven us  around for two hours. And the other service station, where they hadn't  even seemed friendly to us yesterday. And a truck driver, passing through.  It was unbelievable.

To this day I have never forgotten their generosity. To me, they stand  for the streak of good-heartedness that runs through the American  character.  Jenny burst into tears, loud racking sobs, and in a few seconds, she and Anne were crying together. George and Keith comforted them, while  I concentrated on consummating this deal from Heaven before something  went wrong  Within an hour, our goodbyes all said, addresses, handshakes, hugs  and kisses exchanged all around the three corners, we were off. I drove  and soon decided that Ted had told us the truth - the car wouldn't do  more than forty-five, but otherwise it was fine. And so we drove at the legal minimum, hugging the inside lane, while truck after truck shouldered past us.

My brother did make it back to England, and to Cambridge, but a career in IT meant that he eventually moved to the States and lived the rest of his life there. He died suddenly just over ten years ago, at the tragically early age of 67, and I still miss him terribly. I was always his little kid sister, 17 years younger…in this photo, I am the dark haired toddler and I imagine he is scratching his head at our very existence!

My final thought is that I will be following my son’s trip across America with bated breath, and can only hope that he finds the same kindness and generosity that my brother did if things go wrong. And if you are reading this in the States, do look out for him!