The arrival of the storm front
epitomizes our trip home. Once again we are shrouded in a silver-gray mist that
clings to our skins like a damp spider’s web. It took two days to drive from
New York City to my hometown of Tarpon Springs an hour North-West of Tampa,
Florida. Two days of battling wind and rain and the idiocy of individuals who
thought speeding would allow them to outrun the storms. I shook my head and
maintained a steady 50 miles per hour. If you are used to it, the only rain that
bothers you is the kind that comes sideways, enveloping and pushing the car
into the next lane. At this point all native Floridians, to whom this weather
is a nothing but a nuisance, pull off the road, wait 20 minutes until it
passes, and then continue on as though nothing has happened.
We made
it to North Carolina the first day of driving. Nine am to eleven pm-that’s
fourteen hours of driving straight through for my husband. Growing up in a
family that always drove (I didn’t step foot on a plain until I was sixteen),
the long hours were nothing new to me. I enjoy driving-taking pictures, messing
about with the radio (cd player for us), and generally sitting back talking
about anything and everything that came to mind, but the hours are long for the
driver and fourteen feels like forty without a proper break every now and
again. Luckily my car only has so much room for gasoline, so our stops were
frequently in the form of the many BP and Exxon stations that dot the Atlantic
seaboard.
Being
from a travel-friendly family, I am also one of those individuals that likes to
over-pack for any contingency and that means food as well as entertainment. And
so the cooler filled with fried chicken, smoked salmon, dried fruit,
vegetables, dressing and peanut butter (and chocolate for those later hours)
kept us from stopping for food that first day. The entire drive was punctuated
with rolling walls of storm clouds and rain. The end of New Jersey gave us
showers and snack time at a rest stop and a rather nasty patch in Virginia gave
us pause at a gas station and provided the perfect opportunity for a late
lunch. North Carolina finally found us in a hotel room for the night, although
their towels were smaller than our bathmat at home and about twice as rough.
In the
morning Clint Eastwood in “A Fist Full of Dollars,” saw us back on the road
with sights set on the Florida Gulf Coast. More rain through Jacksonville and
Bushnell brought us to a standstill along I-75, the first time it actually
pushed us, and a dozen others, off the road to wait for a break in the weather.
It reminded me of years spent driving dark, two-lane back roads from University
home each night. The benefit of the South though is that if a storm does kick
up all you need to do is wait a half hour and it’ll probably blow over enough
for you to get on with your life. This held true for our trip as well. While it
didn’t stop completely, the rain let up enough to continue driving.
We made
it home in record time (for us); only eight hours the second day for a total of
twenty-two hours of ‘relaxed’ driving. The first thing I noticed after the
chaos of getting in and unpacking and getting the dogs and parents settled
again, was just how quiet it was. You forget, surrounded by the noise and sheer
volume of the city, that the rest of the world is pretty quiet. Ambulances and
police sirens, fire trucks and subways, car stereos and people yelling. The
most I heard was the dogs barking at a stray cat that wandered into the back
yard, or the wind chimes bonging together during a rain squall. If that’s
‘noise pollution’ then I’ll gladly take it.
With
the silence comes time to think and that can lead to trouble. Sometimes good,
sometimes bad, I found myself longing for the peace and tranquility of my
childhood. I also realized just how much of a precocious brat I was at times.
I’m honestly not sure how I survived certain years. As I do every trip, I
raided my mother’s photo boxes searching for missing memories. That year we
travelled to see my cousins in upstate New York and I got my ears pierced
against my mother’s wishes, performing in church productions, practically
falling into the zoo pen to feed the deer, petting stingrays at Seaworld. All
of the memories that were faded, tattered or torn in my mind’s eye I tried to
recapture; to reseed the garden of dreams and ideas that my past has
transplanted.
I
pestered my father to take my husband and I on a tour of our families myriad of
houses. The street we owned in Largo, where my cousins still live in my
Grandparent’s house, the old Cracker-shack by the salt flats along the train
lines my Great-Grandparents rented where my Great-Grandfather had his shoulder
backed over by one of the train wheels, their house on the canals of Holiday
ten years later where my father spent weekends crabbing with a tin can and
chicken necks, to the field where his siblings and cousins hunted for
arrowheads and flint napped hand tools. All these memories within two counties.
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