It won’t be long now. September’s weight presses in on my teacher bones, and there’s only one way to stave it off and prepare for the shock of going back to school: Take a road trip of several thousand miles with five kids. So here we are in Mackinaw City, Michigan, where sturdy-looking Midwestern families gather to enjoy the azure waters and soft sand beaches of Lake Michigan.
The sky above the straits of Mackinac spans clear and stunning, the same as it’s been since I first started traversing the Upper Peninsula with my sister and our Nana eighteen years ago. Back then, after we’d dropped off Nana at our aunt’s house in Detroit, we’d turn around and head back north on I-75 for a long car party of Doritos and cigs and Tab and music so loud that one state trooper had to use the bullhorn to catch our attention. Finally we noticed him and pulled over. A cloud of air-conditioned smoke emerged as my sister rolled down the car window. “Ladies,” the trooper said through tight but upturned lips, “I’ve been following you with the lights and siren for the last three miles. It’s time to fasten your seatbelts.”
This morning, a rainbow kite with six tails flies impossibly high, and another exactly like it lags at least a hundred feet below, trying hopelessly to catch up. On the ground, the thick smell of fudge coats my nostrils. I’m sitting alone in a coffee shop in the bustling town square—which is actually an outdoor mall — and I’m pretending to be a serious novelist at work on a great manuscript instead of a harried columnist trying to work on vacation. Tomorrow, we head for a friend’s private island in the Georgian Bay, a place so remote that there is neither phone service nor electricity nor flushing toilets. At the nearby arcade, Jon and the kids entertain themselves watching the teen locals show off on the Dance Dance Revolution Extreme machine. It’s so entrancing that I blurt out a promise to get the home version for our basement.
Later, I find myself wondering if promises made in the heat of vacation are binding. After all, do we really know what we’re saying or doing or even who we actually are when we’re on the road?
Think how many couples tie the knot while vacationing, only to come to their senses with a sickening shock once the trip is over. Of course, for Jon and me, such a jolly and spontaneous act would be different. Since we’ve been living together for so long, we are already balancing all of the responsibilities of marriage and family life, just without the paperwork. Plus, we’ve been planning to marry for quite a while. By now, the most frustrating aspect of being unwed is the inability to use the simple terms “husband” and “wife.” Can a “boyfriend” have a touch of gray? Does anyone especially care to be a fiancée more than once? Can a heterosexual have a “partner”? And no offense, but I’d rather lock myself in the bathroom than have a “significant other.”
Traveling as a blended family brings all this up, since we’re meeting people and introducing ourselves over and over again. We get a little loopy. This morning at the cabin, while Jon and I were still in bed, I heard my daughter Sophie say something to her stepbrother about “when my dad and your mom get up.” Silence. Laughter. Who’s who around here, anyway? Isn’t that part of why we travel — to get enough perspective on ourselves and our lives to figure it out?
These questions must have been nagging me the other day, when I surprised the Mackinac ferry driver (who looked about fifteen) by asking him if he was licensed to perform weddings “at sea.” Alas, he wasn’t. But no matter, because after the Georgian Bay we’re headed south, to Manhattan, where we will dodge terrorists before heading to the Jersey shore near Cape May, which is awfully close to Atlantic City, if you get my drift.
At the table next to me a grandmother is sharing a sandwich and orange juice with a little girl about eight. The child is wearing a red T-shirt with a white cat on it. She reminds me of my younger daughter, and of the wistfulness of teenage girls before they grow up, and of myself years ago.
All these young families walking by the window, and the childless couples, bronzed and urgent, they remind me of time passing. Revisiting these places I’ve been so many times before, it’s oddly disorienting and comforting at the same time. I see my past and my future, but it’s my world right now that comes into focus. These kids we adore, the chaos and the effort and the comedy, honestly, it aches in that way I love to feel, because I know it will never be like this again.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply