Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 25
I WOKE up quietly excited. It was a bright clear morning and in an hour or two I was going
togotoSequoiaNationalParkanddrivethroughatree.Thisexcitedme,inacalm,unshowy
sort of way. When I was five, my Uncle Frank and Aunt Fern from Winfield went to Cali-
fornia onvacation-this was, ofcourse, before it turned outthat Frank was a homosexual, the
old devil, and ran off to Key West, Florida, with his barber, which rather shocked and up-
set a lot of people in Winfield, especially when they realized that from now on they would
have to drive all the way to Mount Pleasant to get their hair cut-and they sent us a postcard
showing a redwood tree of such enormous girth that a road had been cut right through the
base of it. The postcard pictured a handsome young couple in a green Studebaker convert-
ible driving through the tree and looking as if they were having something approximating a
wholesome orgasm. It made an immediate impression on me. I went to my dad and asked
himifwecouldgotoCaliforniaonournextvacationanddrivethroughatreeandhelooked
at the card and said, “Well … maybe one day,” and I knew then that I had about as much
chance of seeing the road through the tree as I had of sprouting pubic hair.
Every year my father would call a family powwow (can you believe this?) to discuss where
we were going on vacation and every year I would push for going to California and the tree
with a road through it, and my brother and sister would sneer cruelly and say that that was a
really mega-dumb idea. My brother always wanted to go to the Rocky Mountains, my sister
toFloridaandmymothersaidshedidn'tcarewherewewentaslongaswewerealltogether.
And then my dad would pull out some brochures with titles like “Arkansas-Land of Several
Lakes”and“Arkansas-theSho'NuffState”and“ImportantVacationFactsAboutArkansas”
(with a foreword by Governor Luther T. Smiley), and suddenly it would seem altogether
possible that we might be going to Arkansas that year, whatever our collective views on the
matter might be.
When I was eleven, we went to California, the very state that housed my dream tree, but
we only went to places like Disneyland and Hollywood Boulevard and Beverly Hills. (Dad
was too cheap to buy a map showing the homes of the movie stars, so we just drove around
and speculated.) A couple of times at breakfast I asked if we could drive up and see the tree
with a road through it, but everybody was so dismissive-it was too far away, it would be too
stupendously boring for words, it would probably cost a lot of money-that I lost heart and
stoppedasking.AndinfactIneveraskedagain.Butitstayedatthebackofmymind,oneof
my five great unfulfilled dreams from childhood. (The others, it goes without saying, were
to have the ability to stop time, to possess the gift of X-ray vision, to be able to hypnotize
