Often times the girls I teach ask me why I took the job.  They expect the stock answers: that I enjoy working with children and that my love of the subject compels me to pass on my knowledge and create the next generation of physicists.  I'd tell them that, but I don't like to lie to my girls.

They get truth: I'm a teacher for the holidays.

At the time of this writing, plastered all over London are advertisements trying to recruit science and math teachers. These ads show children enthralled by watching a feather fall in a vacuum, mixing two identical white chemicals or solving the quadratic equation.  Despite this campaign, the rate of science teacher enrollment is still declining.  If it was my job to recruit science teachers this would be my ad:

The end.  Far more honest and recruitment rates would soar.

But when the seven weeks of my first summer holiday loomed near, I began to dread them.  Seven weeks?  What could I do for seven whole weeks?  I'd learned from experience that I have a tendency to become slightly unhinged without structure in my life.  I needed a project.

To fill the time I eventually settled on the idea of a Great American Road Trip.  I'd circumnavigate the nation starting from my native New York, go across the Northern States, down the California coast, then drive back via the Southern Desert.  Noelani would accompany me during California.  I wanted to see her as distance and time had made our always ambiguous relations particularly unclear and they needed sorting.  Luckily she could get time off, as her occupation as a part-time heiress leaves her with a flexible schedule.

I wanted to set out on a long stretch of aimless road, and relax behind the wheel.  I wanted to see more of America.  Living in a foreign land makes me a constant, unwilling representative of my country.  No matter how tiny or remote, foreigners still expect me to know all parts of America, and their many questions I couldn't answer highlighted the magnitude of my ignorance.  Never mind that the distance from London to Istanbul is less than that from New York to Miami, I am still responsible for it all.

My knowledge of the country was vague at best.  Before the trip, when someone asked me about America, I'd draw this map:


And give them the following explanation: ``OK, so, the top of America is covered in trees, the bottom left is desert, and the bottom right is a no-man's land of inbred rednecks who'll kill you, rape you, tie you up and drag you behind a truck if you're different from them.  Don't go there.  Thirteen of the forty-two presidents grew up there.''

``Most of the place is empty.  Think Australia.  But there are two shining points of civilizations, the rival coastal cities: New York with it's skyscrapers and L.A. with it's smog.  New Yorkers and Los Angeleans are raised to hate each other.  But really, they fight because when compared to the rest of America, they're closely related.  It's a family fight.''

``Florida stands somewhat outside of America -- an elephant graveyard of sorts -- where we send our old people to die.  Disney World is an island of happiness among the suffering sea of the elderly.  You'll have a great time in Disney as long as you hand The Mouse your wallet when you walk in the gate.''

``And that's all you need to know, really.''




Now that I had a project, all I need do was plan it.  But how to prepare for a journey around the world's third largest country?  Despite what my ex-patriot status might imply, I'm not one for travel.  The only trip I ever planned was in my role of physics club president in college.  As alpha geek, it was my responsibility to heard a group of wan club members to Toronto.  We chose the Canadian city as it allowed our those of us who were still underage to legally partake in alcohol and visit the Toronto Science Museum (though sadly, not at the same time).

Before setting out on my trip I bought a travel book on the US and assumed that was the end of my preparations.  What else needed to be done?

My parents had other ideas.

In trying to help me prepare for the trip, my parents took different approaches.  My father gave me things.  As soon as I was in the door from London, he offered me any item he could think of that might prove remotely useful.  He tried to give me a large portion of his wardrobe, including a waterproof jacket and pants (he seemed surprised that if the weather called for waterproof pants, I'd be staying in) a compass, a little hammer for smashing the open car window if case I drove into a lake, a five-million candle power flashlight, a pocket knife from his boyhood in the 1950s (which peeled back my fingernails trying to open it for the first time in decades) a special whistle for calling for help and, ultimately, his new car.

My father also wanted to give me his bib -- a hideous yellow, white and green affair with a lobster in the center he uses whenever eating on the road.  While I can't deny the bib's practicality, I also can't help but cringe at the sight of him driving to an important real estate closing in it.  I turned down this item of convenience, and the travel gods punished me by spilling my first meal on the road down my shirt.

Oddly, of all the things he gave me, his shiny new car was the object he expressed the least concern about, never commenting on the wear and tear it would accrue over the long journey or about the possibility of me crashing it.  However, when he saw me pack an unwrapped toothbrush he advised, with great concern in his voice: ``make sure you try that out before you go.''

``Jesus, Bobby,'' said my mother, having listened to enough of my father's ridiculousness, ``He's driving across America, not the Sahara.  He can buy another toothbrush if this one is too hard for his gums.''

My mother also insisted on giving me something: endless warnings of improbable danger.  While her advice began with sensible items like `don't pick up hitchhikers' it quickly degraded into a kind of paranoid-madness that strained my polite, I'm-listening-but-not-going-to-say-anything smile to its maximum.

For example, she warned me not to get on elevators with suspicious people.  I could see the mental image in her head: her son, looking as he did at 12 years of age, stepping into a dusty hotel in Cherokee land.  The elevator doors open, revealing a 7-foot warrior with ripped shirt and a bloody battle axe in his hand.  The innocent boy gets on the elevator.  If only his mother had advised against it.

``A young man like you on your own in unfamiliar places...'' my mother left the sentence unfinished to fill the room with potential dark tragedy.  ``People will sense that.''

I then made the mistake of mentioning that I'd use my laptop while at diners she warned, ``If you use the laptop don't go to the bathroom at that dinner.  Men will follow you in and beat you up to take it.  Go to the bathroom at the next dinner where they won't know you have something valuable.''

I rolled my eyes.

``You don't think that some poor trucker out in the middle of nowhere might want to take it?''

I didn't point out that the brand new hybrid car I would be driving would telegraph rich, vulnerable nerd much better than the laptop ever could.  Or that driving is the 7th largest cause of death in the United States, preceded entirely by natural causes.  Anywhere in the country is safer than being on the road.

``Couldn't you just read a book instead?'' She asked.

Realizing that her son might strike up conversation with the locals she continued with ``If someone recommends a nearby place to go, don't let them in the car to take you.  Don't even follow them in their car, or even go to the spot later on your own.  People set up traps for tourists like that, I've seen it.''

Her natural tendency towards these thoughts is not helped by the television shows she and my father watch.  An evening in the house is guaranteed to include at least one of the following: The Amazing Race, which highlights everything that could possibly go wrong in travel, Survivor Man, a reality show that strands a survivalist in a hostile environment for a week and I Shouldn't be Alive, a program whose title tells you all you need to know.  Every night my parents watch as boats are capsized and the sailors eaten by sharks, people flung off motorcycles, left stranded in the jungle by their tour guide, bitten by exotic and deadly insects, or kidnaped by paramilitary groups.  Repeated viewings of such events did not put my mother's mind at rest when imagining what her son's trip might be like.

The ultimate piece of advice derived from these shows was `Don't drive behind loaded trucks.'

``This man was driving on a mountain road behind an 18-wheeler loaded with 2x4s,'' my mother told me.  ``One of them came loose, bounced off the road and crashed in the man's windshield and went through his chest.  His car swerved off the road and over the edge.''

Her eyes grew wider.  ``But he wasn't dead!  The 2x4 speared him to the car seat, but it missed all his vital organs and held back the bleeding.  He was there for three days before someone found him.  So please, don't drive behind trucks.''

``OK, Mom.''

But at least, in a motherly protective way, she was preparing for the trip, which was vastly more than I was doing.

For me, time passed and my father gave me more things and my mother came up with new worries as I did almost nothing to prepare.  Then, without my realizing it, the day of departure was upon me.  I threw a change of clothes, my laptop, my camera and some books and a map on the back seat.  Then, with no clear idea what I was in for, set out on the road.

 

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Copyright © 2006 Wellington Grey


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