This series is a little bit biographical and a little
bit imaginary about my dad and a road trip he took in the summer of 1946, when
he turned fifteen. He and a friend hitchhiked from Loring Park to Duluth, into
Canada and back again. He was gone from home for a month. I was astonished and
fascinated by the tale. So, I added some speculation about things I've always
wondered about and this series is the result. To read earlier SHORT LONG
JOURNEY NORTH clips, click on the label to the right, scroll down to and click
OLDER ENTRIES seven or eight times. The FIRST entry is on the bottom of the
last page.
There was a long silence,
then Edwina Olds, most lately Lieutenant, WACS (ret.) back from the war, settled
down and with a huge grinding of gears, backed the truck up slowly until the
creamery sign with an arrow pointing right, shone bright in the headlights. She
turned to Tommy Hastings, “You positive about this?”
“Absolutely!”
“Well then, let’s see if we
can fill-er-up!” The truck lurched forward down the dark road, off the beaten
track, gravel snapping from the rubber tires, shooting up and into the metal
floor of the logging trailer.
Freddie Merrill crushed his
ears under his hands and shouted, “I’ll be deaf before we get there!” The growl
of the truck’s engine smoothed out even though the sound of rocks hailing the
underside of the truck. “It wasn’t this loud when we went here the first time!”
“We were walking!” Tommy
shouted.
“Quiet, boys!” Ed shouted
over them. All three fell silent as they drove on for half an hour. “You sure
this place really exists?”
“It was here…uh…” Tommy
stopped. How long had they been gone? A week? Two? “What’s today?” he shouted.
“Wednesday,” she shouted
back.
“No! What…like…day number is
it?”
Even in the dim light of the
instrument panel, he could see her shoot him a look before she said, “July
thirty-first!”
Tommy sat back, his mouth
open. Freddie shouted, “What’s wrong?”
“We’ve been gone for almost a
month!”
“What?”
Just then, a cow stepped onto
the side of the road. Ed cursed like the sailor she was, pressed down on the
brakes, not panicking, but slowing the truck enough to make the wheels judder
and the truck’s trailer swerve wildly, the cab tilting toward the ditch. The
boys screamed – and kept screaming even when the truck came to a stop.
Silence blanketed the truck
the moment they realized they were screaming. Ed said, “You’ll have to pardon
me for the blue language, boys.”
Tommy was the first to
recover his voice and started to say, “We’ll…” his voice cracked. He coughed,
cleared his throat, and tried again. “We’ll pardon you if you forget that we
screamed like a couple of Girl Scouts.”
Freddie tried to talk, but
his voice came out, cracking even higher than Tommy’s voice. He coughed for several
moments, then managed, “Yep. Me, too.”
Ed nodded then looked out the
window. The cow stood in the middle of the road and behind it loomed a sign
that read, FAIRELANE CREAMERY.
The boys exclaimed, “This is
it!”
Just then an old man and a
young man, both with shotguns, stepped into the road and the headlights. The
older man shouted, “Come on out with your hands up!”
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