This is me with my parents' trailer at my Rich Uncle Ray's* house in Garden Grove, California. It is 1965. My dad bought the 13' foot Shasta used, last year, when I was two. My dad teaches American History and is passionate about the Wild West. He says the Shasta is his Calistoga wagon and our big, white Oldsmobile is his trusty steed.
"Saddle up, Pidge," he says when we get in the car. Pidge is what he calls me. For pigeon. The homing kind. Nobody else can call me Pidge, though. Just him.
This is our first trip out from our Midwestern home, but my dad will take our little family, (I'm an only child), on many summer-long adventures through his beloved cowboys and Indians territory, snaking along Route 66, eventually making camp at his brother's door, in what seems to me a movie star and swimming pool studded Wonderland named Orange County.
We drive out here because my dad loves everything about the West. He loves the shadowy purple mountains, the light symphony sunsets, the piney smells, the rusty dirt, the stories and peoples and everything California at the end of it all. California, where people are so different from people back home. People in California dance in the park, laugh louder and are so much more colorful, like the gypsies in my Madeleine book. My dad says we get to be gypsies for the summer. "Real gypsies?" I ask. "We're real gypsies, Pidge." he points at the Shasta, "We live in a traveling wagon, don't we?"
Our home is always right behind us, we are never far from it or each other. Every day is some place new, every night is, too. From the back seat, I watch the changing scenery roll over the terra firma of his forearm, resting on the open window's edge. Every few days, I compare his left arm to my right and his gets darker and darker until it looks just like cinnamon toast and he tells me it's because way back in our family somewhere somebody married an Indian, so there's real live American Indian blood running through us both and I ought never to forget that. He says we have pirate blood, too, but I forget how come.
Once we get to California, in the evenings, we build warm driftwood fires that match the colors of the sunset. We go to Long Beach or Santa Monica Beach, Huntington or Newport. My Dad plays his guitar and sings, "Trailer for Sale or Rent," and we chant, "No, no, it's not for sale or rent!"
My dad is passionate about sunsets. He says the sunsets in the West are the best of any place in the whole world and he knows because he is a sunset expert. He knows all the best places between Oconomowoc, Wisconsin and Garden Grove, California to see one. Ask him the exact time the sun will set and he'll know. Even at home, we make special trips at just the right time to somewhere with a view so we can see the 'show' and then grade it. "That was a 10, Pidge!" he might say. He puts me on his shoulders or he hugs me tight if I'm cold, and then we're really quiet, just whispers no louder than prayers, and we watch the sun slip, slow at first and then fast when it's rolling off the edge. After the last glowing sliver goes, we clap our hands like people do after a really great magic trick. Watching the sunset is my favorite thing to do with him, and we get to do it most every night when we're with our trailer.
This is the summer of 1965 and there will be others like it. My childhood memories are a continuous loop of the West rushing toward me, around me, and by, the back of my parents' heads in the foregound. But this is what I am going to remember best about those trips: The occasional sighting of a shimmering silver mirage, so unlike all of the other flat painted things on the road, so unearthly, they are more phenomenon than thing. The sun flashes off of them with blinding accuracy, but we stare right at them anyway, as if we're seeing a spaceship, an unphathomable mystery. They are 100% solid silver, the envy of every trailer-loving soul. They are Airstreams. Every time we see one there is a pointing finger and a rush to call it first, like a shooting star: "An Airstream!" And every time, my father reaches his strong, deeply tanned arm across the wide blue bench and rests his hand my mother's knee. "Some day, Mother, that is going to be us. When our ship comes in, and it will. It will. We'll have a Land Yacht. You'll see."
Afterward: My father died 23 years later at the age of 54, never having owned an Airstream. He would have loved my '64 Caravel. I love it for him.
*People ask me why I call him my Rich Uncle Ray. It is because Uncle Ray and his wife, Aunt Bonnie, or Bon Bon as my dad calls her, and my cousins, Sue and Tom, live so close to Disneyland. It takes about one minute to get there from their house. I figure you have to be rich to live in the same neighborhood as Cinderella with that big castle where they have huge, sparkly fireworks every single night, not just on the Fourth of July. Last year, Sue, (who is just as pretty as Gidget and should be on TV, too), graduated from Garden Grove High School, where she dated a boy named Steve Martin. She said he was the class clown and that he works at Disneyland now but he wants to be famous some day and he's so funny he probably will be.
