The motel room was dimly lit by a blinking neon vacancy sign on the roof over the entrance just outside my window. Wakefulness had long overstayed its welcome.
Oh, the day began well enough.
We left our previous destination at first light. Protocol was to drive hard, see as many sites as we could and then look for somewhere to sleep once it got dark. It would not be unusual to average 300 to 500 miles a day. On the road, we might play word or number games, color, or just try to sleep. Usually, we would stop for a picnic lunch and for dinner. We might, if pressed, stop for a bathroom break.
It was always a treat to get out of the car for any reason. Sites might include suspension bridges, Indian ruins, and mountain tops. Gift shops were special but the best sites were opportunities to climb, run around and play. Inside the car could get crowded, especially when my grandmother came along. On occasion, my younger brother would go to sleep on the ledge beneath the rear window.
I don’t know when the day began to go wrong. The only outing I remember on this particular day was climbing with my father to the top of a hill. But that adequately satisfied my own need for warmth, connection and human activity. Perhaps it was my grandmother’s request to stop to go to the bathroom. Perhaps my mother had seen too many sites. But silence erupted into angry words toward night fall as we passed the third or fourth motel with a no vacancy sign.
The rooms we found were small but would have to do.
Anxious and overly tired, unable to repair the breach between my mother and father, I tried to sleep – a capital day spun out of control. Waking, some time after midnight, I was told that I had been sleepwalking, opening the window to reach the neon light.
George Loper, January 23, 2008
* In the 1950′s, my family was the beneficiary of cheap oil, good roads, big cars, mass marketing and motel chains, which allowed us to travel to national parks, if not back to nature.