FOND MEMORIES OF DAD’S RAMBLER,
Memories of Dad’s Rambler come with me
My dad was a ramblin’ man. To this day, I can’t see a picture of a 1966 AMC Rambler wagon without thinking about Saskatchewan, a red-on-red patterned interior, a Styrofoam cooler, and the top of my sister’s head in the front seat.
She got carsick, you see. So the rest of us had to make do in the back as we hurtled past endless stretches of northern Ontario forest as it carved around Lake Superior — “That’s the deepest of the Great Lakes, kids. Lots of ships went down in there.” — and then across the Prairies on our way to visit two very old, very small, people who didn’t like a cluster of noisy little girls all that much, to be honest. My grandparents tried, but from the moment we tumbled out of the car like a bunch of dusty puppies that had been penned up far too long, you could see them counting down the days until we did the whole thing in reverse.
Every other year or so, that black Rambler would be stuffed full of everything we would need to make sure we could drive 3,000 kilometres without spending money on anything but fuel. I swear my father would have driven straight through if my mother hadn’t begged and badgered him to stop somewhere, anywhere. We’d usually cram into some foul little motel room at the edge of some anonymous town, the swing set in the parking lot long rusted in place, the swimming pool, though advertised, never more than a dried out concrete basin. It was never hard to leave these places, even at 5 a.m., which I’m sure was part of the plan all along.
My mother had the unenviable task of mothers throughout history: Keep the kids quiet so Dad could concentrate on the driving. He’d stuff a piece of Wrigley’s spearmint gum into his cheek (we only liked Juicy Fruit, so he’d buy spearmint), prop his already deeply tanned left arm out the window, and yank the stick down into first gear.
“Three on the tree,” I’d announce, though nobody cared. My Dad’s best friend had called it that one time, a man who got a new car every couple of years and was probably making fun of my father for milking every mile he could out of his Betsy. I liked the sound of it, and to this day wish I could have driven that three-on-the-tree. I’d try to put my arm out the window, too, but as one of the youngest, I rarely got the window, and when I did, I had to sit on my folded legs to reach, and they eventually got numb and I knew better than to ask to stop to stretch them out. This is why kids kick each other in the back of the car.
Instead, my mother would make nests in the rear of the car and we’d take turns tucking in like snails. Seatbelts? Those were for the front seat. I’d rock to sleep with the sound of the Styrofoam cooler beside me, the incessant squeak was enough to set your teeth on edge if it hadn’t already been keeping you company for hour after hour. Sometimes, I’d curl up in the footwell instead, imagining my head just inches from the tires that roared and vibrated as we made our way west.
Rain was the best, of course. To break the relentless heat on a black car that had nothing but the relief of wind rushing into open windows, and to give a bunch of sticky little girls something
SEATBELTS? THOSE WERE FOR THE FRONT SEAT.
else to look at. The water would nicker under the tires like we were driving on glue, and we’d trace the jagged path of water drops on windows until Dad told us to stop fogging them up. We’d roll down the windows an inch at a time, trying to capture both the moisture and the cleared air, until Dad would yell, “buffeting!” to warn us his window wasn’t down and we thought for sure the change in air pressure would blow our eardrums, or something even worse.
Children are very good at imagining things that are even worse, little inventors of every worst-case scenario. But on those long rides west, nestled somewhere in that Rambler with the distant hum of my parents talking and my sisters bickering and the endless miles unfurling beneath the tires, my love of road trips was born. I’ll never do one in a Rambler again, but part of that Rambler comes with me on every trip I take.