Category: Memoir

Runaway teen – my first travel adventure

Posted in Memoir, Story, Travel, UncategorizedTagged , , 5 Comments

“We’ll let you know when we get to Mexico!”

With that, Dick and I walked away from our girlfriends and our high school picnic and onto two lanes of blacktop just outside of Lakeville, Minnesota.  We were 14 years old, had about $50 between us, and were leaving our boring lives attending a Lutheran high school in St. Paul, Minnesota, for the open road and eventually Mexico.  We were running away.

We made a clean getaway.  No one knew our plans except our girlfriends, Bonnie and Donna.  They’d been sworn to secrecy.  As the busses loaded to take the school’s students back to campus after the yearend picnic, the teachers neglected to take a head count.  So it wasn’t until the busses arrived back at the school a couple hours later that they found out we were missing.

By then, Dick and I had hitched rides down miles of country roads, and the scent was dead.  We were getting close to Northfield, Minnesota, following our plans to take the back roads south, staying off Interstate 35, but crisscrossing it so we’d stay headed the right direction.  Our backpacks held a map of the United States, a compass, and copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road that I’d checked out from my hometown public library in Stillwater, Minnesota, with no intention of returning it.

What turned a farm kid from a small town – me – and a city kid from a big city – Dick – into cohorts on a teen runaway adventure?  I had my reasons.  I’d been bounced around schools for the past three years as my parents tried to find a place where my attraction to turmoil, truancy, and trouble might be mitigated.  I insisted that I didn’t go looking for trouble, but trouble always found me.  They didn’t buy it.

First stop after eighth grade at Stillwater Junior High was ninth grade at a Lutheran school in Maplewood, Minnesota.  Going from a class of hundreds to a ninth grade class of 20 was a jolt.  Though hardly a religious soul, I found new comfort in the daily meditations, studying biblical history, and the ubiquitous Lutheran fellowship that included hayrides, roller skating parties, and music.  Lutherans I grew up with were always singing and playing instruments.  I played piano for the choir and trumpet in the small, but award-winning school band.  If Garrison Keillor and Lake Wobegon comes to mind, you’re not far off.

As this school only went to ninth grade, however, my parents arranged for me to attend tenth grade with our pastor’s son and daughter at a Lutheran high school in St. Paul, a rather long daily commute from our farm in Stillwater.  My 14-year-old persona turned going from the top of the pile in ninth grade to bottom of the heap in the tenth into a provocation.  I discovered that many of the students at this small school were there for the same reason I was: they had a penchant for insubordination, incorrigibility, and disdain for authority.  We troublemakers found each other immediately.  To boot, this Lutheran school was part of an evangelical synod, which just begged resistance and rebellion.

I was in trouble from my first day, when a teacher pulled me aside in the hallway and told me to go immediately to the bathroom and tuck in my shirt.  I had the audacity to ask “why.”  It was downhill from there, and the stage was set for another trouble maker, Dick, and me to thumb our noses and go on the run.  The final straw was when the school principal called me into his office and slapped me across the face because I wouldn’t “wipe that smile off your face.”

Now here we were, on the road, and committed to the run.  As night was falling, we were getting hungry and thinking about where we were going to sleep.  Hadn’t really factored that into our planning, but runaways are resourceful.  Our last ride of the day dropped us in the small town of Cannon City, just outside Faribault, Minnesota.  It was early June, so the days were long and the weather was fine.  We stopped at a small grocery store and bought a loaf of bread and some summer sausage for dinner.  We dined en plein air in a park by the side of the town’s lake, then walked to the edge of town where under cover of darkness, we appropriated the front and back seats of a large old car in the back row of a used car lot.  We slept well, in spacious comfort, and woke early.  We finished the last of the bread and sausage for breakfast and put our feet on the road once again.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.” – Robert Frost.

Our first ride was with a farmer in a beat-up pickup truck.

“Where you boys headed?”

We smiled at each other.  Now began the fun.  We had just been given license to lie through our teeth!  We couldn’t let on what our plans really were, so we lied, and lied, and lied.  We made up everything.  We made up our names.  We made up where we were from.  We made up where we were going.  We made up why we had left where we were from and why we were going to our fictitious destination, always just beyond where our driver would drop us off.  We told each of our rides completely different stories.  Sickly aunts, uncles who’d just died, parents who’d dropped us off and were meeting us later, life stories that were pure fantasy, stories of lost family wealth, stories of heartache and sorrow.  We faked our accents.  Dick could do a great British accent, so he was from London.  Or Ireland.  Thanks to my aunt and uncle, I did a mean Texas drawl.  We really were incredible liars.

I don’t know if anyone believed us.  It didn’t matter.  That day one of our rides shared his lunch with us, and another bought us more bread and sausage for supper at a small store.  We’d bypassed Faribault and Owatonna on the back roads, and we were now just north of Albert Lea.  Our last ride dropped us near a freeway entrance.  There was no town nearby, so we started walking down an adjacent country road.  It was getting dark, and there were no towns, or even houses or farms.  We came across a deserted portion of the freeway that was under construction and decided to take shelter for the night under a partially completed overpass.

As we settled into our concrete cave, it grew increasingly colder.  We curled up in our jackets and pulled some of the few clothes we brought along for warmth and insulation from the ground.  We had packed our bags for Mexico, not Minnesota.

Eventually, we both fell into a troubled sleep.  Then we woke to a sound.  It seemed to be coming from directly over us on the overpass bridge.  Then we heard it again.  Could it be someone walking around up there?  Was it the police?  Had they found us?  Or was it…what?  A criminal escaped from prison?  A wild animal?  A werewolf?  An ax murderer?

We froze in stillness, afraid to move lest we give away our position.  We conversed in whispers.  We remained wide awake until morning.  The sound was still there.  Summoning up courage from the depth of our souls and using extreme stealth, we crawled on our bellies to gain a vantage point and see what the hell was up there.  As we slowly, slowly peered over the side of the bridge we saw it.

An empty paper concrete bag flapping in the breeze.

We smiled, then we started laughing.  We laughed so hard tears were running down our grimy faces.  We had been held down all night by a paper bag!

We got back on the road and started walking, thumbs out.  Almost immediately a car stopped to pick us up.  The driver opened the door and took a long look at us.

“What on earth are you boys doing out in the middle of nowhere this morning?”

Now we woke up.  Time to do our best improv duo for the nice man in the car.  We did “lost boys.”

“We’re on our way to visit our grandparents in Albert Lea.  I’m Bob and this is my brother Brian.  Our parents let us off just down the road because mom felt sick so dad was going to bring her to the doctor.  We didn’t want to wait, so dad said we could go ahead.  Well, we musta’ took a wrong turn back there, but if you could drop us off at the next town, we’ll call our grandparents and they can come pick us up.”

“Why sure, boys, there’s a little town just ahead.  Do you want me to call your grandparents for you from the pay phone there?”

“Oh, no sir.  I have a dime for the phone.  We’ll be just fine.”

We washed up at a gas station and bought more bread and sausage at the grocery store.  A loaf of Wonder Bread was about 20 cents, so our meals were costing us about a dollar a day.  We put a couple candy bars in our pockets as we walked out the door.  We figured we’d be good until we got to Mexico, where we could just eat the fruit off the trees.  That afternoon we crossed into Iowa at Emmons.  Our last ride brought us into the sleepy little town of Lake Mills.  Just four states to go.

It was still early in the evening, so we decided to see if we could get one more ride.  We were getting pretty crafty.  We watched to see if oncoming cars might be police cars.  We hadn’t seen any so far.  But when we looked closer, we could see a car with those bubblegum machines on top coming down the road.  We jumped off the shoulder and ran into the bushes.  As soon as the police car passed, we got back on the road.

Well, two boys jumping into the bushes at the sight of a police car roused the officer’s curiosity, so he’d turned around and come up from the other side when our backs were turned.

“Hello, boys.  You’re not from here.  What are you doing in Lake Mills today?  Come on over and hop in the car so we can talk.”

I was pretty sure we weren’t going to be able to lie our way out of this, but that didn’t prevent us from giving our best effort.  We started with false names, relatives in the next town, etc.  The officer wasn’t having any of it.

“Let’s see.  Those names don’t ring a bell.  How about these names?”

He already had our names.  Should have known.

If there was a flaw in our plan, it was that Dick’s father was the chief of detectives at the St. Paul Police Department.  So when our little adventure was discovered, every police department in the five-state area was notified.  If you remember Car 54, it was an APB – an All-Points Bulletin.  Two runaway boys.  One’s dad is a St. Paul police detective.  Find them.

“We’re notifying your father, Dick, and he’s going to come down to pick you up.  He’s been expecting the call.  Congratulations!  You made it quite a ways.  As you are both a flight risk, we’re going bring you to our  jail and lock you up.  We don’t have anyone in jail right now except Carl, our town drunk, so you’ll have the place to yourself.  We’ll get you supper, and there’s a shower.  Then you’re going home.”

My first thought: please leave us in jail.  When we get home we are going to be in so much trouble.  When we get back to school, we are going to be in so much trouble.  We are in trouble, right now.

It was a comfortable jail.  There were two officers on duty.  They brought us a hot Midwestern supper with generous portions from a local restaurant – thankfully, not sausage – and they sent Carl out to buy us a six-pack of Coca-Cola.  It was about midnight when Dick’s parents arrived.  They were very calm.  I’m sure they were mad, but they were more relieved than anything.  They’d brought snacks for the long drive back to St. Paul.  Dick’s dad drove a big white Chrysler Imperial sedan, so we were both asleep in the back seat almost instantly.  We woke up at Dick’s house, where they fed us breakfast and we all had a little, ahem, talk.  My parents arrived an hour or so later.  I could tell my mother was seething, but my Dad just smiled and said, “Well, Steven, how was your little journey.”  My little journey.  As I was likely to be grounded for the next year, it was going to be my last one for a while.

We were back at school the next day.  More long conversations.  The teachers stared daggers into our hearts.  The principal of the school asked me if I was planning on attending this school the next year.  Nope.  No way.  He said that would make it simple because he would not then have to go to the trouble of denying a request for my return.

When they let us lose into the halls for our classes, we found that we had become legends in our own time.  Upper classmen came up to us and said: You two have balls of steel! Our girlfriends hung on our arms, and the other girls were all smiles, with come hither looks.  We retold our story over and over, enhancing it as we went.  We got a ride with a race car driver who was going 100 mph, the bag flapping on the bridge became an old man with a shotgun firing at us as we ran away in the dark of night, and the police officers in that little town in Iowa told us they were locking us up for good and throwing away the keys.  Or something like that.

The next year I was back at Stillwater High School, as a junior.  Four schools in four years.  I was on a first name basis with every school counselor.

That would be the end of the story, but several years later when I was attending the University of Minnesota, I ran into Dick on campus.  He looked exactly the same.  He was majoring in criminal justice – going to be a detective just like his dad.  We went out for beers several times and remained good friends until our paths once again parted.

One of the last times I saw him, Dick said, “Hey, Steve – let’s run away again.  I’ve never had so much fun!”

Jag Lovers

Posted in Cars, Memoir, StoryTagged , , , 3 Comments

This is the name of an Internet group made up of Jaguar enthusiasts from all over the world: Jag Lovers.  By and large, the name is an accurate representation of the membership.  I’m in.  A Jag lover and a Jag Lover.  For over 20 years, I’ve had the Jag pictured – a 1956 Jaguar 2.4 saloon, otherwise known as a Mark I.  It was my father’s car before me.  It’s been in the family now over 50 years.  That is my cherished German Shepherd “Nikki” alongside me, now passed on after 13 years.

I can’t say I really knew my father well.  Not that we didn’t get along.  We did, but more or less by virtue of both coming under the iron fist with which my mother ruled the household.  We could sympathize and, certainly, empathize, with each other.  The oldest born, my mother would berate me: You’re just like your father.  It was not meant as a compliment.

No, we just didn’t know each other very well, in most respects.  We didn’t do the sports, hunting, or fishing thing together.  By the time I was coming into the age when a father would have been handy to have available, to talk about those confusing issues that the early teen years bring to the forefront, he was working two jobs and took about any excuse he could to get away from the house and the wife.  He moved into a space in the basement and came and went with the shadows.  I ran into him in the basement stair well one morning about 4 a.m. I was sneaking in late as he was heading out to work.  He put his finger to his lips beseeching me to keep quiet for fear of awakening the dragon who lay snoring fitfully above.  Some years later, to the great relief of all concerned, my parents divorced, and I didn’t see him for a very long time.

My father loved cars.  He loved the B-24’s that he’d worked on during the war.  He loved clocks and guns and all mechanical mechanisms with machined surfaces and gears and bearings.  But he loved cars most of all.  I guess I learned to love cars from him.  Or maybe it’s in my genetic code.  His best stories, the ones I remember, were about his cars.  His first car – a Model T Ford with a hot magneto, shaved head, and high-speed rear end that would let it approach speeds of over 70 mph.  The time he broke his wrist when he forgot to retard the spark before hand cranking it to start.  His 1932 Model B roadster with the rumble seat, fitted with Ford’s first flathead V8.  His 1938 straight-eight Buick that would top 100 miles an hour.  His 1936 Chevy Master Deluxe with the worn-out knee-action front suspension that made the front end of the car bob up and down as he drove down the road.  His 1949 flathead Ford Coupe that ran for a year with absolutely no oil pressure.  And many more.  His cars were alive to him, each with its own personality and distinguishing traits.

When I was very young – four or five – he had a Ford Model A Tudor.  As first-born, I was the only child at that point – pure bliss.  He let me climb into and through the car as he worked on this and that.  I sat in the driver’s seat, trying to peer between the spokes of the steering wheel and the dash, imaging what it must be like to drive.  I had no idea what he was working on.  Sometimes he’d be under the car, other times he was leaning into the engine compartment, the hood folded over.  Then he’d fold the hood back, latch it down, smile, and we’d take the Model A for a drive, up the country road onto the highway to stretch her legs, or back down the dirt road where the crazy old bachelor lived in a hut with bizarre yard ornaments.  Then back.  Sometimes I sat in his lap, with my hands on the steering wheel, just below his, feeling the road, feeling the strength and power that came from driving, driving, driving.  He pushed the clutch in and I shifted from second to third, which involved taking both my hands off the steering wheel.  But Dad had the wheel so we stayed between the ditches.

So while we weren’t close in the sharing of words, we shared cars.  He taught me how to drive at 10 years old, propping me on a cushion on the seat of the 1951 Dodge Coronet, telling me that as long as I kept the leaping ram ornament on the hood lined up with the right side of the road, I’d always be exactly in my lane.  It worked.  He helped me buy my first car when I was 12, a 1952 Chevy Deluxe sedan for $12, to drive around the yard and work on.  With his help, I took that car apart and put it back together.  Later, when my mother’s car broke, she drove that old Chevy for about a year.

Dad never did mention anything about Jaguars.  He seemed to basically cherish American cars – straight eight Pontiacs, Buicks, and Packards were his favorites.  He liked the odd-balls and unique marques, too, like Kaisers, Studebakers and Hudsons.  If there was something unusual about a car, that recommended it to him.  But he never talked about any foreign manufactured car.  He said the best car in the world was the Duesenberg, a name he revered.

He basically left town after the divorce, and I didn’t see him for about 15 years.  I more or less left the family, as well, except for my grandparents, who were my rock.  Dad didn’t try to get hold of any of us kids, and we didn’t try to get hold of him.  No communication, don’t know why.  I guess we all just wanted to let it all go.  I suppose I thought he was just tired of the whole thing.  I heard of him through my uncle a couple times.  He retired from the Minneapolis Post Office garage, collected cars, opened an antique store in Minneapolis, and traveled to San Diego where he’d worked on B-24’s during the war, and to Mexico to buy antiques.

One summer day, he returned.  There was a note pinned to my door when I returned to my rural home: “Your father has returned.  You weren’t home.  I’ll stop back later.”  And he did.  He came up the driveway in a right-hand drive early 60’s Rambler that had been a postal vehicle, still painted the postal color scheme – that unusual characteristic that he favored.  He got out of the car, shook my hand, and asked me how things were going.  I made some coffee, then we sat and talked all afternoon and into the evening.  He wouldn’t stay for supper.  As he was getting up to leave, he asked if any of the other kids might like to see him.  I said, yes, I’d imagine so.  I think it took a lot of guts to do what he did.  He was our father, and he wanted to make right those years of absence.  He’d had a calling.

We saw him fairly frequently after that.  I went to his house, which was stacked to the ceiling with antique clocks and collectible firearms of all sorts.  He showed me his collection of cars.  He had about a dozen at that time.  Among them, a 1951 Studebaker Commander, 1954 Hudson Hornet, 1949 and 1954 Packards, a 1956 Cadillac that had been converted into a large camper, and a 1956 Jaguar 2.4 saloon.

I’d owned many British cars by this time, including a 1959 Jaguar XK150 drophead.  So I took an immediate shine to the Jaguar.  It was in very nice condition, a California car with low mileage.  He rarely drove it.  He rarely drove any of his cars.  He kept them in garages all over town, going to work on them, clean them, run them, drive them around a bit, park them, and go on to the next.  He had a couple cars he drove regularly – a behemoth of a 1983 Chevy Caprice wagon with the entire rear end loaded with stuff, and a pristine 1963 Chrysler New Yorker 4-door hardtop with a white leather interior and white exterior.

Then I moved.  To California, then to Europe for 10 years.  We kept in touch with the very occasional letter.  He was busy with his antique business and old cars, buying and selling, buying and selling.  On one visit, we went to look at Jaguar again.  He’d just had it repainted in the original Burgundy paint it had come with from the factory. He noted my admiration and told me that the Jaguar would be mine when he passed on.  He said he’d keep it for me.  And he did.

We moved back to the US, first to Monterrey, then to Seattle.  I invited him to visit, but he never did – too busy, he said.  Didn’t like plane travel, either.  He saw his granddaughter once, when we went back to Minnesota for a visit.  A couple pictures are all we have.

Then his health started to deteriorate rapidly.  All of a sudden, he didn’t care about his cars, his guns, or his antiques anymore.  He started to give them away.  My sister called and said that I’d better contact him about the Jaguar.  I did.  He said that now was the time to get it, as he didn’t think he’d live much longer.  I tried to reassure him, but he knew better than I.  He thought about committing suicide, and almost was successful at doing so.  Maybe it would have been better, because a few months later he was in the nursing home, and then a month after that, dead.  The autopsy showed that he had cancer throughout his body.

Before he went into the nursing home, he helped make arrangements to have the car shipped to me on the island I live on in the Puget Sound.  It was a cold November night after midnight when it arrived.  The driver had been stuck in a snow storm in the Cascades, and when the passes opened, he drove straight through until he got to my house.   We unloaded the Jag from the enclosed car carrier.  I watched as the driver backed it down.  I’d never heard it run – it sounded beautiful, the throaty song of the legendary twin cam XK engine.  The car looked just as I’d seen it many years ago right after the restoration.  New paint, new chrome, and interior of burled walnut and bisque leather.

As the transport driver and I completed the paperwork, the car warmed up in the chilly Pacific Northwest fog, and I told him the story of how this pretty red Jaguar sedan happened to be sitting by the side of a wooded road on an island in the Puget Sound.  I eased off on the choke to bring the idle down from a growl to a pulsating purr, like the cat the car is named for.

“That’s one beautiful old Jaguar you’ve got there.  Your Dad must have been a real Jaguar lover,” he said.

“Yes,” I replied, “We both are.”