Issue date:
May 16, 1997

Road Trip

By Jamey Bradbury
Bunker Hill (Ill. ) High School

My father never turned on the radio when I was around.

I know he listened to the radio when I wasn't there; I could hear it through the door of his room, most often tuned to the classical station, never to the country station, and most definitely never to the classic rock station, which is what I always listened to. Once, I made the mistake of turning the radio on while we drove to who-knows-where in the battered Ford pickup he'd been driving since I was a little squirt with soggy diapers and corrective shoes. It had been too quiet in the truck for my tastes, neither of us talking (as was usually the case), and I had leaned over, twisted the dial, and found some Rolling Stones belting out "Painted Black" like there was no tomorrow. I settled back in my seat, jiving to the music, and my father had leaned over, just as I had, and snapped the radio off.

I knew better now. We trundled down the interstate at a good 60 mph (same old battered pickup, same nonexistent conversation), the scenery blurring past us, on the fourth day of our cross-country pilgrimage. I sat on the passenger side, erratically drumming my fingers on the dash, singing in a high falsetto: "Papa was a rollin' stone ... wherever he laid his hat was his home . . ." I couldn't remember the rest, so I wiggled in my seat and pounded the dash, punctuating the frenzied tattoo with an occasional "Ow! Ohhh, baaaaaybeeee! Whoo, yeah."

My father's eyes slipped to me, and he muttered, "Fool."

I smiled secretly. I think that every great once in a while, I amused him. He would look at me, just as he had now, and the corners of his mouth would turn down, but there would be a tentative smile in his eyes.

We didn't talk. Ever. There was nothing for us to talk about -- I was a 17-year-old boy with a smart mouth and an off-the-wall sense of humor; he was an old man of nearly 68 who had already been old when I was born and who had probably taken one look at me through the nursery window and said, "What do I do with it?" I guess he knew my name, considering he'd given it to me, but he'd called me "boy" ever since I could remember -- "boy," as if it were a tickle in the back of his throat that he'd like to get rid of, one that was annoying, but maybe a little pleasant, too. Maybe.

I prodded him from time to time. I'd slap on my strange version of charm and try to make him tell me something, anything -- my father, in truth, was a mystery. I'd ask him everything, where had he been born, did he like animals, when did he think he would retire, who was his favorite composer, if he could be any vegetable, which would he be? He would grudgingly grunt his answers: "Harlowe, Ohio; yes, never, Chopin; cauliflower." Then he would give me that sidelong glance that told me to shut up before I drove him beyond the point of sanity.

I could never ask the right questions.

We pulled off the interstate at 4:15 that day, after a 10-hour drive that had been interrupted only by stops for lunch at an Arby's and gas at a nearly defunct Stuckey's. My father maneuvered the pickup through the congested streets of Cincinnati, then we left the city behind and found ourselves in hilly country that looked like the edge of the world.

Half an hour out of Cincinnati, my father hit the brakes of the truck so hard that I almost flew through the windshield. He pulled the truck to the side of the dirt-and-gravel road, dodging a pothole the size of a Winnebago.

He got out, slamming the door behind him, and started toward the patch of woods that edged the road.

"What are you doing?" I yelled after him as I exited the Ford.

As usual, he only grunted. I ran to catch up with him. "Where are we going?"

Nothing. I followed him.

We entered the woods, which were populated by scraggly pines that looked like uncomfortable old women in the summer heat. I followed him, and everything was preternaturally silent. At the foot of a hill so steep it seemed like a visual illusion, we paused; then he began to climb. The thought that the day might end with my trying to flag down an ambulance after he'd given himself a heart attack crossed my mind, then I climbed after him.

When we reached the top of the hill, he stood there, not even breathing heavily, and looked at the small valley below us.

I caught up with him and followed his gaze. In truth, I don't know exactly what we were looking at. Set in the floor of the valley was a small, clear lake, surrounded by a thin grove of trees; everything was green and quiet. Miles and miles away from California, where we'd left our little stucco house behind to travel across more than half the country, was this place, a place I'd never seen in my life, one that held absolutely no importance to me. Whatever it was -- a favorite spot from my father's boyhood, a good fishing hole, the place where he'd made out for the first time, whatever -- I may never know. It didn't matter, though, because while he was looking at it, I was looking at him.

He was 67, at an age where he should have been all brittle bones and cracking joints, but he had somehow been able to defy time, with his broad back, his barrel chest, his thick hands. He had always had few lines in his face, no crow's-feet at his eyes, no laugh lines about his mouth. But we stood there at the top of the hill, and, as he gazed at the place below us and saw something I couldn't see, I watched him age: The few lines of his face deepened; his shoulders seemed to lose their strength, and they trembled slightly; and a sigh that sounded suspiciously like a final breath escaped his lips.

My mouth dropped open as if I was going to say something, and if I had, maybe nothing would have happened. But for once in my life, I snapped my mouth shut before any words could escape, and I listened. Because there was something whispering -- not exactly a voice in my head, but something, and what it said was this: This part is important.

I peered at the place where my father had played as a child, where he had done his quiet thinking as a young man, and I listened -- and I could almost see him down there, a kid my age, with plans and dreams and his whole life ahead of him. I looked at my father again, and the slight breeze picked up, lifting the thin white hair from his forehead. His eyes widened -- they were brown and moist, and filled with some strange emotion I'd never seen in them. He seemed young and old at the same time. He was real, he was no longer my father, but a real person, someone separate from me, someone who had lived and seen and done a million things, someone I could never fully know no matter how many questions I asked -- a real person, and I was scared.

I was scared, and I didn't know why. I felt as if I was directly on the edge of what we were here for, but whatever I was supposed to discover was just out of my grasp. I wouldn't figure it out that evening, either, or the next morning, or the next morning; it would only be a week later that it would begin to come to me as I lay awake in an unfamiliar bed in a Best Western hotel room, waiting for sleep to come. I would near the edge of darkness, and just as I was about to fall, it would occur to me that I was afraid because I had seen my father as a real person, and I would never see him the same way again.

The breeze died, and the lines fell from my father's face; the small smile that had almost touched his lips died, too. He turned to me, that strange look gone from his eyes, and we turned from the valley and started down the hill.

We climbed into the truck and slammed the doors behind us. He turned the key, the engine grumbled, and we U-turned, facing California now, and got moving once again.

Two miles down the road, my father leaned over in the silence and turned the radio on.

Each of these students receives a $75 gift certificate for books or software. Sponsoring teachers get $50 gift certificates.