Family Vacation

Family Vacation

By my fathers definition the term family vacation is like military intelligence or jumbo shrimp. The first word is not relevant to the second word. You can have a military, but not with any intelligence. You can have shrimp, but they won't be jumbo. And you can have a family, or you could have a vacation, but you can't have a family vacation.
Still, every July for many years my dad loaded the old Volkswagen with enough food, water and clothing for six people on a two week trek into the vast Canadian Prairie. He then shoehorned in the aforementioned six that ate and wore all that cargo, put the car in drive, and the house in the rear view mirror.
Now had we been traveling a few hundred kilometers hip to hip, elbow to elbow in our red German body suit it would have been not a bad little trip. Had my mom and dad packed the bare essentials, realizing the interior of a Volkswagen is smaller than our split-level home and that water can be found in other parts of Canada, it would have been not a bad little trip. And had my dad had a keen sense of direction and not needed my mom to play navigator, who got car sick every time she looked at a map in a moving car, it might not have been a bad little trip. But we lived in Vancouver, they packed everything we owned, and mom threw-up every time dad asked for directions.
Yes we were quite a sight. Maybe you remember seeing us? We were always in the slow lane making sure the long-haul semi-trailers were doing no more than 50 Km. an hour, or broken down by the side of the road. Or you might remember seeing a crazed man chasing kids around a German Import with a flat tire, swinging a belt. Caring through on a threat he had made some miles back. You know the threat "If I have to stop this car!" But my dad, once the car was in gear in a forward motion didn't want to stop, so he would have mom write down the appropriate childs name because his memory was so bad, and then when he needed gas or a roadside repair he'd check the list, beat the required amount of children, tend to the car, and then back on the road. Most of our stops were for beatings and repairs, not beatings and gas because of the Volkswagens great gas mileage.
Eating, bathroom breaks and the viewing of majestic panoramic vistas were all done with the car in third gear, which was fine for us kids as we preferred to go as long as possibles between stop-n-spanks. All our home movies of this countries majestic mountains to it's wide open prairie all have a rear view mirror in them. In grade school when asked to draw a picture of our Summer Vacation, in the top center of every picture of all the memories I had that summer was a rear view mirror.
Breakfast, lunch and dinner had a common theme. Two pieces of white bread encasing some sort of warm mystery filling, might of been meat, but it shouldn't have been green. This was all chased down with a tartan thermos of instant coffee, so thick that you couldn't drink it through a straw. And for the children, a red drink served above body temperature that had a ratio of three parts sugar to one part water. There was no flavour to our red drink, just the taste of pure white sugar, turned into a syrup that we became dependent on. Like some drug dealer my mom injected a glass at a time to her four sugar junkies. We all shared from the same glass. Sometimes using a dirty glass, no care was taken, we just needed another fix.
After injecting her four boys with the red syrup the car now took on an almost church like atmosphere as we all sat quietly as the sugar started to corse through our veins. Then the smallest one would start to vibrate, and one by one from the smallest to the biggest the sugar took hold.. Four boys jammed into the back of a Volkswagen, leg to leg vibrating in unison with enough lateral motion that the car would fish tail from side to side on the road. This erratic driving caused my dad to be pulled over several times for drunk driving on our quest East.
With Dads no stop policy, bathroom breaks of the No. 1 kind were also done on the go. A glass jar with a leak-proof lid (very important) was the latrine of choice. A latrine that went up and down, side to side and back and forth with every bump and pothole and twist and turn. Made all the more complicated by my dads heavy foot on the gas and brake pedal. A skill that one would soon have to master or the next flat tire or gas station stop, not only dad had a swing at you, you also had a brother with a wet pant leg going at you.
So in the interest of family unity I practiced my moving latrine skills before we left home, while jumping on my bed becoming one with the Rodgers Syrup bottle. But when mom walked in my room to yell at me for jumping on the bed and caught me in my practice regime.........in hindsight, it would have been better to have my older brother with a wet leg go at me.
On our mid-country trek many layers of clothing were worn to save space for packing important things like the bath mat. The first layer was at least one tee-shirt and then as many underwear as was possible. Then swim trunks, church clothes for Sunday, ("God doesn't go on vacation") two pairs of shorts, one short sleeve shirt, one long sleeve shirt and one pair of dress pants in case we went out for dinner. Convicts in prison for life had a better chance going out for dinner than we did.
We would sweat so much that the windows would steam up. In July! Here my mom was of no help, she didn't want to open the windows because it would mess her hair. A mis-aligned hair-doo, my brothers and I thought, would be the least of the visual curiosities a stranger would bestow on our family at the next gas and beatings stop. Four boys, thick with clothing, three with wet legs (remember I practiced), all having a good measure of discipline laid up on their back-sides by a somewhat crazed man, who by this point in the trip took a strange delight (a cackle or almost crazed laugh) in completing his threat.
As well as the heat issue we had to deal with, Dad also added nicotine smoke to our living hell sauna. To try to get breathable air we would pull our many shirts over our nose and mouth to filter out the blue atmosphere. My older brother once cut the ends off dads used cigarette butts for the filter, thinking he could purify his air that way. One in each nostril and two in his mouth. When the air got clear enough for my mom to see us in the back seat, she just shook her head and wrote his name down for the next stop.
Spending as many hours as we did in the car, in tight quarters, you get to know your family. Back at home I never knew my brother bit his toenails, or that dad snored when he drove. The later part of that last sentence is why I think my mom was so religious. On our car trips we didn't play a license plate game or I Spy With my Little Eye or 20 Questions, we had church (we had the clothes on,..somewhere).
We would sing gospel songs and read the Bible, then dad would pass the collection plate to raise money for gas, for a poor family heading to Manitoba
"If I have to" Dad would start, "stop the car" we in unison would finish, was a phrase we heard all to often. And rightly so, we were little terrors in the back of that car. But in our defense, it was because we were bored out of our minds crammed in the back of that Volkswagen for two days. Shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, hour after hour moving as one up and down side to side with every bump and twist in the road. It's then when ones mind starts to invent ways to somehow sanely perverse the tedium to stay mentally strong. At your apex of brilliance you realize what's needed is a lively game of tag. Each in turn you'd tag the brother on the left, then the one on the end would reach across the car and tag his brother on the opposite side. Harder and harder we'd tag until it became a slug-fest, then some sissy would start to cry. "If I have to" Dad shouted "stop the car!" we'd finish.
Some of our games we played just weren't practical. Hide-and-seek proved to be a little dangerous. My younger brother curled up in a fetal position at dads feet to try and hide from us in the back. He got in the way of the brake pedal while leaning on the gas pedal. We almost met an Ontario family on their way to the West Coast. In my brothers defense, Dad should have noticed that Trevor had squeezed between the front seats then across his legs and hidden at his feet. Here again is why my Mother was always in prayer. But with Dads foot stomping on Trevors head, and Trevors head on the brake pedal they brought the car to a screeching halt just a breath away from an insurance claim, had we of had insurance. That was the first and only time one of us stopped the car for his own beating.
Night was a welcome relief as darkness brought on time consuming sleep. Sleep that ate away hours of tedious travel. Sleep that transported you magically across hundreds of miles of wide open prairie. Sleep that eased the grip on the steering wheel all the while adding foot pressure to the gas pedal that raced the engine that woke my Mom that made her scream which jolted my Dad awake to save us all from a fiery crash. Ah yes restful sleep. Mom made Dad pull over to the side of the road and grab a few hours of sleep after that. It seemed strange to us kids to stop the car and not get a beating. Maybe after he rested he'd check the list. Now in fear we couldn't sleep so to pass the time we started a quiet game of night tag. In hindsight we should have tried harder to sleep.
After one more sunrise and one more sunset, two car repairs and three beatings (we just never learned) we reached our destination. Our Uncle Alberts farm. The same farm my dad had grown up on. A world away, it seemed from our life in the city. A world of strange farm machines, cows, pigs, horses and chickens, all accompanied with their own unique smells. A wide open expanse of sky and land that held an ever present danger of stepping into some kind of poo. A place where the future came a little slower. A place where you got to go to the bathroom outside, down a deep hole dug in a tiny shed. A place where the water had to be earned by physical force on the end of a pump handle. A place where a child risks a digit to collect eggs for breakfast. A place where there was no one to play with but my crazy brothers. But it was the best of times. It was a place where my Dad knew everything. A place where my Dads face changed, where the corners of his mouth didn't turn down quite as much. A place where his body posture seemed less rigid and he laughed with Mom and us kids. It was a place, and time, where my Dad was king. The perfect place for a family vacation.

Bob Niles