A few people waited in the chairs by the counter, a few others stood in line. The Arcata airport on a weekday afternoon is a desultory place. The travelers almost expect to be delayed, but I was too buoyed by the opportunity to take a trip. I was looking forward to going back to New Mexico. It had been over fifteen years since Mikey and I passed through Santa Fe and crashed at his uncle’s for a few days, barely noticing the charm of the city after a 14-hour drive from where we’d camped the night before in the middle of a Nebraska field. We were moving across the country, part of a crashing wave of early 2000’s Michigan Diaspora on the west coast. We had little more than a backpack’s load of stuff each and now here I was, heading back, waiting in line at the airport with a carseat on my back, a stroller and a playpen and a diaper bag scattered around me like the ramparts of parenthood.
At the ticket counter, everything went well. The great thing about traveling with toddlers is that they can’t charge you for all this extra crap somehow. One would think it would be in an airline’s best interest to charge double for toddler paraphernalia rather than to encourage these young and potentially obnoxious families to take flights. Imagine how much more crowded your flights are with tantruming two-year-olds because the parents realized they could get Jr. and all his crap on the plane for free. Even if he’s screaming the entire way, it’s still better than being in the car with the Raffi CD for 14 hours.
Of course, my daughter is nothing like this. I know every parent thinks this way, but really, she’s angelic, even on planes. We checked everything through at the counter and she was content to just hang out and patter around the airport while we waited to board. If anything, she helped me through the waiting. Normally, I’d’ve tried to read, but with a toddler you’ve got to be up and moving around, which, it turns out, is a much better way of dealing with the stress of travel (there’d been this whole thing about how we weren’t going to make our connecting flight—I’d briefly hallucinated the whole family bedding down at SFO for the night, all our oversized baby luggage spread out at the foot of an SFO escalator—and I was still a little shaky. Walking around with Esme was a hell of a lot more natural than sitting down and pretending to be entirely at ease. If only everyone had the means of wandering between the aisles of waiting passengers and not raised eyebrows. The only problem was that everyone else was trying to calm their anxiety—who knows maybe they’d all risked missed connections, too—with their various devices, which, to my daughter was like an invitation to pry into what was on each screen. Luckily, no one seemed too bothered by her tiny presence suddenly peeking over their knee, reading the contents of their texts, or tweets or whatever.
We landed in Albuquerque in the faded state of anyone who’s had to take more than one flight in the evening. There’s something disorienting about dropping into one city 100’s of miles away only to regard it from the windows of a sealed building briefly, like a painting in a museum and then jettison it a few moments later after takeoff, like it wasn’t the city you were looking for. I watched the familiar lights of San Fran, the city we’d rejected for our destination fade away after guessing at the bridges we were flying over and then we were out over the dark space of the Central Valley, the Sierras and the cold Nevada deserts.
Everything in the airport was closed, but we managed to make it out to the rental car place just before they closed for the night. We got some futuristic white SUV-thing— a “Diva” or a “Kivo” or something— no one wanted that made no sound when it started and seemed to burn gas in erratic bursts. The airport isn’t far outside Albuquerque and within an exit or two we were pulling off the sienna and turquoise-painted onramps, drifting into the garish glow of Route 66 neon and ornamental cactus beds. The motel, as I’d expected, was a dump—they always are, and we put the heater up so high in an effort to shut out the drafty desert night, I woke up around 3 feeling like someone had drained the rheum from my joints and the fluid from my eyes. It must’ve been over 100 with the thing set to high and the room sealed off like a bank vault. It took me a while to get back to sleep. The sheets were stretched too tight or something. I hate that about cheap motels. They pull the sheets tight to make them look crisp, when anyone can see they’ve got bleached blood stains and little cigarette pocks on them. The tightness does nothing but make them uncomfortable and unfamiliar.
In the morning, since we’d all slept so badly, we opened the door to the bright desert morning and coughed, yawned and shivered and all the other things one does when trying to shake the fatigue from themselves. My eyes were still sandy from the heater and Esme, who’d woken up three or four times during the night, was a little groggy, too. Gina, who’d been up more than either of us, was pulling the usual mom thing together and looking better than the rest of us.
When I checked out—I’d already paid online—the bastards charged me a five-dollar cleaning fee, maybe because they knew I’d left the heat up so high. I paid in cash and the three of us went scudding down the abandoned Sunday sidewalks in search of a place that sold darkroast coffee.
There was a rasp of sand under our feet and a turquoise sky overhead, but the sun was a cold, winter star, the color of a rain-soaked lemon growing on a stunted tree.
We found our café and tried to enjoy our coffee, but we’d forgotten Esme doesn’t think much of coffee or of enjoying things in the exasperating adult sense of just remaining still around them. Even the 3-dollar bagel we bought did little to assuage her from poking into everyone’s paper and netbook. In the airport, I’d enjoyed the chance to mingle, but so early in the day, after sleeping so poorly, I wasn’t in the mood to grin apologetically at strangers. We went outside so she could stretch her legs in a place where she couldn’t knock over anyone’s latte.
While there was a patio area, the coolness seemed to have taken it out of order. The chairs were stacked on top of each other and the tables were upside down. Esme and I went walking down the sidewalk. She, leading, shuffling her new fake Chuck Tailor’s with glitter on the toes engaged in her new favorite hobby, picking cigarette butts out for the sidewalk seams. I was a step behind, trying to drink my quickly cooling coffee from one of those café cups that’s always way too damn wide, like a soup bowl, or at least something that would comfortably accommodate several spoons. Why anyone would want to drink coffee out of anything with more than a 3-inch diameter is beyond me; I guess some people want to see their reflection in their coffee as they drink it. Maybe that’s what I was doing, checking out my coffee-gleam reflection, because I looked up to find my baby toppling ass-over-teakettle off the curb, which was one of the higher, squared-off city parking varieties. Shit.
I set the bowl of coffee down and jumped over, picking her up, thinking her fall hadn’t looked too bad, but she had a substantial scrape on her forehead and another on the side of her head. Understandably, she was crying her head off. I tried to comfort her, but out there in the cold, in a new place, away from mom, there was little I could do. I picked up my coffee—now ice cold from sitting on the sidewalk—and went back into the café to hand my tearful daughter off to her mother, who would take her into the bathroom and wash her cut out while I sat at the chair looking through the local paper like I was a regular customer whose daughter wasn’t the one screaming in the bathroom as a result of his negligence.
Luckily, Esme is resilient and within a few minutes, you could almost imagine there’d been no fall into the gutter, if it weren’t for the rapidly forming scab on her forehead. Later that day, while we were driving north into the mountains, she got to see snow and ice for the first time and while it doesn’t make up for my negligence, it at least made me feel better about dragging her 100s of miles away for no clear reason.
We’d only taken the trip because the flight had been cheap and because my brothers lived nearby, but after we’d arrived, and we’d all been through the stress of travel, I seemed like there was really very little benefit for Esme. Sure, she’d get to see her uncles in Colorado and her cousins, but the flights, the driving, the cold, the unfamiliar hotels, etc. etc. seemed like a lot to put her through for a visit. Maybe I just felt guilty about her fall, but I couldn’t help but to think that I was, once again, only doing what I’d wanted, chasing after the same intangible goal I’d come through here fifteen years before with Mikey looking to reach. If it wasn’t here then, what made me think I’d find it now, especially now that I had my life, my family and to some degree my future? Other than the cheap tickets, why had we really come?
We spent the rest of the trip going from place to place, eating lots of great food and having the short conversations you have with people when you’re traveling in a group, when all you really talk about are the other members of your family, saying things to strangers like ‘She’s 14 months’ or ‘yeah, she just started walking’ or ‘We know; she (pointing at my wife) used to live here’. But even that was over a decade ago and here we were, for no clear reason in this place, just sort of looking at it, smelling it, tasting it, like something one would expect a dog in a new place to do.
At last this was it, the vacation, in its purest form. After years and years of trying to inhabit the places I visited, to blend in and adapt, for once, I was just in a place by accident, telling everyone so, like I was trying to see if they thought it was as ridiculous as I did.
I knew that we’d succeeded in taking this idealized ‘vacation’ one morning in Santa Fe when an elderly man approached us while Esme was playing on the snow and asked where we were from. We answered with alacrity and talked with him about Santa Fe for a while to the point where I forgot his initial question, the weight of which didn’t sink in until he’d walked away and Gina asked “How the hell did he know we weren’t from here?” I guess it was obvious because we weren’t doing anything. If you live in a touristy place and you happen to look out your window and see this whole family just standing on the corner, playing in the snow, I guess most people who take one look and think ‘vacation’. It was something about all of us being together. Alone, excepting the people in the Hawaiian shirts or the people drinking umbrella’d daiquiris on the beach, no one looks like they’re vacationing
By the time we flew back home, I had adapted to the cold, faded lemon sun and the sandy grit under my shoes, but it wasn’t familiar. It was just a place to hold one unique set of experiences away from all the others, a new backdrop for the pictures, a impression to store away until another fifteen years should pass and I begin to wonder if it still matches my memory of it. Invariably, we’ll go back, have another look and decide, yes, it does. The only difference, is that I won’t have the dirty, post-collegiate backpack of possessions nor the car seat. Next time who knows what any of us will be. I can only hope that, when we do go back, no one falls off the curb.
