Las Vegas
My mother, Dana, Kelly and I, and our two boxer dogs, Swizzle and Bowzer, were
all loaded into the car for our move across the country. Every day before I started
driving, I gave Dana and one of the dogs a Dramamine because they both would get
carsick. About an hour after giving them both the pill, I would look in the rear view
mirror and see the two of them leaning against each other, propping each other up,
their heads nodding and their eyes fluttering slowly shut.
My car was an older Mercury Monarch and I was towing a 1958 MG that I was
attempting to restore. On top of the car was a container holding our luggage for the
trip. It was quite the adventure driving across the country. It was funny because I
thought it would be educational and a great learning experience for Dana and his
sister, but it’s a long trip, and soon after our trip began, all I really wanted to do was
get there — never mind all the places we could stop along the way and play tourist.
The weather was not about to co-operate with my idea of a pleasant cross-country
drive either. In Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois we ran into severe weather, including
tornadoes. The rain was coming down so hard and fast at one point the motor for the
windshield wipers burned out. We had to pull off the highway and spend the night and
much of the next day in a motel next to the highway while a local garage ordered and
replaced the windshield wiper motor. A tractor-trailer truck traveling in front of us on
the highway was blown off the road by strong winds and rolled over into a ditch. In
Texas, an emergency alert interrupted the radio station I was listening to telling
people to take cover because sand and flying rock storm was moving quickly toward
some road. I didn’t even know what highway we were on, but of course, it was
heading towards us. As I looked to the south, all I could see was this wall of dark
brown that was easily seventy-five to eighty feet high and stretched as far as the eye
could see and it was moving in our direction. There was nothing but open space all
around us and no place to take cover. We had to out run the sand storm, which looked
like something out of the movie The Mummy. I had the gas pedal floored until I finally
thought we were safe from the elements as we drove up into the mountains of