Are We There Yet?

The family car trip is an American tradition. But you havent really experienced it unless you
were packed up as a kid into the back of a classic woody station wagon.

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by JOAN LUEBERING

It wasnt the way back, way back then. We called it the tailgate, and it was
a space that was intimately familiar to my sisters and brother and me. Twice
a year, Christmas and August, bulky in our winter coats and bundled knee to
knee in tiny flip-up seats or else sizzling gently on diamond-plate metal
decking in our summer shorts, we traveled from Cincinnati to our
grandmothers house in Topeka, Kansas.
...
Of the long series of family station wagons in which we made that trip, the
car I remember best was our 1967 Ford Country Squire. It was a woody, a
descendant of the half-wooden station hacks that in the period before
World War II used to haul train passengers and their luggage from the
depots. After the war, those utilitarian vehicles evolved into aspirational
marvels of steel and chrome and sleek veneer, designed to carry large
suburban families in modern comfort.
Ours was a Crest-toothpaste-blue behemoth with inset wood panels, the
veneer and the paint chalky with the sun, dusty and bug-spattered from
those endless trips. Like most of our station wagons, it was rusted out,
regularly patched by my dad with fiberglass gauze and a smelly, two-part
resin.

Its most distinctive feature, apart from its sheer size, was that tailgate. The
door was a technological wonder in the 67 Country Squire: it could swing
either down or sideways, and it featured an electric (if somewhat jerky)
sliding window. The solid chunk with which it slammed told you all you
needed to know about American engineering.
The dual-facing tailgate seats were another touch of modern luxury in that
model, though no one bigger than an eight-year-old really fit in them. The
option for your kids to squabble over flipping the seats up or down was
undoubtedly worth a few extra dollars at the dealer.
Our 67 Country Squire had a red vinyl interior. My mom had always wanted
a red car, and this was as close as my dad could get in those money-tight
years of buying used cars and selling them on before the transmissions
dropped out. The bench seats had no headrests, convenient for the parental
swipe into the back seat to quell the chaos. The car had no seatbelts, either,
till my dad installed them, though of course we didnt use them. We slid icily
across the seats in the wintera sharp turn would set off a chorus of she
touched me! complaintsand adhered to them sweatily in the summertime.
There was no air conditioning, so in the summer, we barreled down the twolane highways with the windows wide, hands cupped in the slipstream. In the
winter, the puny heater never had a hope of warming the cars cavernous
interior.
...

Mark Twain once wrote, I have found out that there aint no surer way to
find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them. Its
a little more complicated on family trips.
All of our car trips started before dawn. We used get going about four
oclock in the morning so we could get as far as possible while you kids were
still asleep, my father, Jack Luebering, recalls. The trip from Cincinnati to
Topeka took about twelve hours in those pre-interstate days: Highway 52 to
Indianapolis, the famous Route 66 to Springfield, Illinois, and then Route 40
to St. Louis. Once we passed the Missouri state line, we stayed on 40 through
Columbia and Kansas City all the way to Topeka. The time change worked
with us, going, but against us on the way home.

My dad was the stereotypical male driver who would never stop for anything
short of bathroom emergencies and gas-station fill-ups. The fill-ups were the
priority, without question, but keeping the monstrous gas-tank full at twelve
highway miles to the gallon necessitated enough stops to take care of most
bathroom breaks, too.
My mom was the referee. When we were little, Mom used to sit in the back
seat so she could pass out the sandwiches, my sister Anne remembers. And
of course handle the crises. When we were a little older, Mom graduated to
the front seat with the grownups, and two of us siblings shared the middle
seat, arranging our feet around spare luggage and the Styrofoam cooler,
which squeaked unceasingly for six hundred miles.
It was also my moms job to attempt to distract us from our squabbles in the
cars overcrowded interior by frequently drawing attention to the attractions
of the passing landscape. Horses! Look, a cow! We saw so many cows on
the endless farmland of Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas, that we used
to play cow when we were tired, curling up together to sleep in the back
seat just like the resting cows we saw under the occasional shade tree.
We played the alphabet game, too, with license plates and billboards and
traffic signs. As we got older, we graduated to a version of the game where
the required letter had to be found as the first letter in a word. My dad used
to drive out of the way in the last, sleepy miles home to pass a roadside bar
whose name began with Z. I wish I could remember its name. Somehow, we
never guessed that he did that on purpose.
...
In the current economic climate, Americans are once more hitting the road
for vacation. Minivans and SUVs, with their DVD players and safety seats,
cupholders and crumple zones, make travel by car comfortable and safe for
the modern family.
But for the real American car trip experience, youve got to go way backall
the way back to the tailgate of a classic station wagon.