My dad taught me.
After he died, I came across a list in his handwriting, titled "Valerie's Trip to England." This trip happened in 1971, around my fourth birthday, and it was epic in every sense, including the current one.
We started in Scotland, and traveled all over the UK by rail. We were three plus my Snoopy, carried everywhere in the crook of my arm and dropped in enough train stations to be mostly grey by the end of the trip. My parents had packed two identical and rather remarkable bags for the month-long journey, and they had written a guide to the ingeniously pocketed contents.
We went to a butterfly festival in Bath, climbed around Stonehenge (no fence in those days), boated on the Thames and rolled down soft green hills in a park. We saw all the places they had imagined in their English literature teaching careers. We went everywhere. My lip was burned accidentally by my father's cigarette one day; a woman ran across the street to pacify me with a toffee from her purse. People were lovely to us. It felt like the beginning of a great adventure.
Our next journey was the one from Georgia to California by car, with our dog, of course. And then so many camping trips, trips with my mother to visit her parents, a trip alone with my dad to visit Steinbeck's Central Coast, December drives to Lake Arrowhead with a Christmas tree tied to the top of our Volkswagen Beetle. We drove all over California.
Meanwhile, my father was also doing a fair amount of travelling with the Air Force Reserve as a photojournalist: Greece, back to England, South Korea. He often travelled on Air Force planes and had his own flight suit with COULTON printed on a canvas strip over the breast pocket.
He was a genius packer. He loved to make a cozy space for me. He always put something special into my bag: a game, a chocolate bar.
I don't want to make him sound too wonderful. He could lead you into the wilderness. He would get lost and refuse to ask for directions. He was stubborn and childish sometimes, and he put others at risk. We made the trip back to Georgia when I was twenty, and it had some very low points in it, nights when we stayed in unsafe places, a day when we drove for hours on a broken clutch. I would never take the risks he took.
But still I often think of him when I go somewhere, and in the last months before he died I would often call him from the road. From the Oslo airport train, to tell him of the landscape of farmhouses and snow. I would always try to thank him for teaching me to want to go somewhere, to pack lightly, but with a little chocolate tucked away. I wanted him to see what I was seeing, but it was too late by then. As he wrote in his cancer memoir, the wind is not for me anymore.
Lately I've developed the sense that he'll be back again sometime, that we'll be able to sort things out, that the end of our story will be different. He used to meet me at the airport, at the top of the escalator, always proud of having a close parking space, always insisting on carrying my bag.
After he died, I came across a list in his handwriting, titled "Valerie's Trip to England." This trip happened in 1971, around my fourth birthday, and it was epic in every sense, including the current one.
We started in Scotland, and traveled all over the UK by rail. We were three plus my Snoopy, carried everywhere in the crook of my arm and dropped in enough train stations to be mostly grey by the end of the trip. My parents had packed two identical and rather remarkable bags for the month-long journey, and they had written a guide to the ingeniously pocketed contents.
We went to a butterfly festival in Bath, climbed around Stonehenge (no fence in those days), boated on the Thames and rolled down soft green hills in a park. We saw all the places they had imagined in their English literature teaching careers. We went everywhere. My lip was burned accidentally by my father's cigarette one day; a woman ran across the street to pacify me with a toffee from her purse. People were lovely to us. It felt like the beginning of a great adventure.
Our next journey was the one from Georgia to California by car, with our dog, of course. And then so many camping trips, trips with my mother to visit her parents, a trip alone with my dad to visit Steinbeck's Central Coast, December drives to Lake Arrowhead with a Christmas tree tied to the top of our Volkswagen Beetle. We drove all over California.
Meanwhile, my father was also doing a fair amount of travelling with the Air Force Reserve as a photojournalist: Greece, back to England, South Korea. He often travelled on Air Force planes and had his own flight suit with COULTON printed on a canvas strip over the breast pocket.
He was a genius packer. He loved to make a cozy space for me. He always put something special into my bag: a game, a chocolate bar.
I don't want to make him sound too wonderful. He could lead you into the wilderness. He would get lost and refuse to ask for directions. He was stubborn and childish sometimes, and he put others at risk. We made the trip back to Georgia when I was twenty, and it had some very low points in it, nights when we stayed in unsafe places, a day when we drove for hours on a broken clutch. I would never take the risks he took.
But still I often think of him when I go somewhere, and in the last months before he died I would often call him from the road. From the Oslo airport train, to tell him of the landscape of farmhouses and snow. I would always try to thank him for teaching me to want to go somewhere, to pack lightly, but with a little chocolate tucked away. I wanted him to see what I was seeing, but it was too late by then. As he wrote in his cancer memoir, the wind is not for me anymore.
Lately I've developed the sense that he'll be back again sometime, that we'll be able to sort things out, that the end of our story will be different. He used to meet me at the airport, at the top of the escalator, always proud of having a close parking space, always insisting on carrying my bag.
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