“Look at that barreler!” my mom exclaimed, craning her neck to watch a fast-moving sports car whiz by my dad’s packed Cadillac. My sister kept her eyes closed and her two daughters remained occupied, one with a book and the other with a hand-held video game. Not even my dad reacted to my mom’s observation as we cruised along the Beltway toward my brother’s house outside Baltimore. But I knew what my mom was talking about, and I smiled to myself.
“Barreler” was a term she and I had coined the previous summer, driving cross-country together from San Francisco to Northern Virginia. It was how we referred to any unwieldy vehicle barreling down on our car from behind. “Barreler!” we’d holler at each other, serious for a moment and then reduced to a series of girlish giggles as we changed lanes and watched the culprit speed past.
Traveling for 10 days in an overstuffed Saturn station wagon with your 69-year-old mother may sound like a nightmare for some, or just another summer excursion for others, but for me it was a particularly special journey, a type of trip unprecedented in my family.
I thought it was a long shot when I called to see if Mom would be interested in driving back East with me. Although she’s traveled throughout the world, she’d never been on an airplane without my dad, or spent more than a week apart from him in 50-plus years of marriage.
But when I asked, she didn’t hesitate, and a few months later I picked her up at San Francisco International Airport. She was holding only a soft-sided carry-on duffel bag. “You told me to pack light!” she chirped. After cramming the duffel and the last of my possessions into the car, we were off.
When we weren’t dodging barrelers on the road, Mom and I did the simple things many cross-country travelers do—we passed the time playing word games and singing songs, we missed a rest stop and then debated turning back for gas until we were halfway to the next stop some 40 miles away, we drove through a horrible thunderstorm and a minitwister of dust that aggressively shook our little car. And in our 10 days together, we got to know each other again in the way that can only be done when you don’t have anywhere to sit but a couple of bucket seats or anyplace to turn to but the open road.
My mom’s energy and enthusiasm were inspiring. Ten hours into the trip, she hopped out of the car and posed for a photo with a large green roadside sign marking the Nevada town of Jean, her name and my middle name. In Zion National Park, it was my mom who insisted we complete the extra half-mile climb to see the uppermost Emerald Pool—with cups of ice cream in hand, no less. And although I’m the one with the journalism degree, it was my mom who stayed awake every night to chronicle our travels in her journal while I dozed off into dreamland.
Whether we were sharing a pitcher of frozen margaritas in a Las Vegas restaurant or playing miniature golf along the highway in Oklahoma City, we had great fun—the same kind of fun I had had three years earlier traveling across the country, in the opposite direction, with my best friend from college.
And that’s what I found most refreshing and enjoyable about our trip: we were conversationalists, companions and equals. There wasn’t much traditional mothering that took place, unless you count my mom’s constant worrying over the comfort and safety of my goldfish, Lazarus, who was wedged between the front seats in a repurposed marinara jar.
Every couple of days, we’d make back-to-back phone calls, mine to my boyfriend awaiting my arrival back East, and my mom’s to my dad, who was anticipating her return. When we pulled into the driveway at my parents’ Virginia home, Dad met us at the door and gave Mom the biggest hug I’ve ever seen him give. Although I realized this was the end of our summer journey together, I also knew it was the beginning of another: a lifetime of adventures we’d share, as friends.
SARAH J. HEIM, MA ’00, is the managing editor at the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University in Boston.
