Road Trip

After that vacation, I never wanted to let go of my mother again.

Before we left, I was so excited, I didn't know what to do with myself.  I was nine years old and my mother's boyfriend was going to take us all to Yellowstone Park in Wyoming.  We were going to take the big family van (after all, my mother has three children and her husband has two) and pull a trailer behind us.  It would be a very long trip from New Jersey to Wyoming, he said, but it was all about the adventure, after all.  

After breaking down in Nebraska somewhere on the side of I-95, standing there looking out over wide expanses of corn in the middle of a state we'd never even considered visiting before, we finally made it to Yellowstone.  And somewhere around the third day of our stay, after horseflies and swiss-army-knife-cuts and geysers that would spit and explode with the force of the whole universe and all of its planets, I lost my way and I found the scariest, smelliest beasts I would ever encounter.  

We were spending the afternoon at a large stream where the guys were fishing with rubber waders on over their blue jeans.  I was standing at the edge with my junior fishing pole, watching the wet pebbles sink into the stream mud instead of watching my slack fishing line.  I didn't know how to fly-fish and my line was loose and flowing freely with the water as it slid past me in a hurry.  Every once in awhile, I would tug on my line just to check, and then I would look toward the reeds that my mother had disapeared through to get lunch and wonder when she was coming back.