"24 on 95"
We recently took a summer trip from Bethesda to Maine. I like to say it is a 10-hour drive, and this is the way I can talk myself into doing it again and again. But really, facing facts, it is twelve. Twelve there and twelve back--a commitment to take a full day out of one’s life and spend nearly every minute of it on our nation’s loveliest highway, Interstate 95.
Franky spent the drive up in some form of sleeping sickness. Having just returned from a so-called “sleep-away camp,” he was quite exhausted, and devoted the trip to sleeping through hundreds of miles and several states. But once he woke up, his bladder was in overdrive and we had to make several stops for him to pee. I guess the 10 hour itinerary could be achievable if we were to own the proverbial Piss Pot. As my son asked, when we couldn’t stop the car soon enough for his liking: “Can I just pee in a jar?” We considered the modern day solution while browsing at a Wal-Mart --Depends undergarments. But I would like to research the availability of authentic piss pots, perhaps tracking them down at Ye Olde Antique Shoppes filled with wares from the Middle Ages. We spent quite a bit of time discussing the piss pot with friends who had bested our torturous journey by driving all the way from Tucson to Maine, and they too had identified the tremendous need for this type of product. Piss pots play prominent film roles and are oft fetched by boys in The Madness of King George and by various Month Python characters. Where are they now when we need them? May I propose the introduction of a newly branded product-- The EZPiss©, an EZ pass for the bladder, eliminating, if you will, the need to stop the car or even slow down.
Speaking of the EZ Pass, this tiny white cube of plastic affixed to the windshield has to be one of the best new innovative technologies ever invented. How many precious moments we saved by being able to whiz through the toll booths while a satellite magically recorded our every move and automatically billed the tolls to our credit card. How retro to have to slow down and talk to one of those poor toll booth workers (whose jobs are always featured among the occupations-most-likely-to-lead-to-suicide), to scrounge around in your pocket, or paw through the now antiquated “ash tray” for change. And whiz we did…until we needed to whiz.
Each of the rest stops had its own local color. The New Jersey Turnpike even names their rest stops after famous locals, dead of course, because what living soul would want this honor? Only Howard Stern craves such a distinction. My older son was quite horrified to see a rest stop named after his high school, Walt Whitman. By the time I got to the Molly Pilcher Rest Area, I was so punch drunk that I fell into an infantile form of humor. When someone stepped ahead of a woman in a sari and said “I’m sorry.” I told Franky I thought the woman should have said, “No, I’m sari.” He told me it was the worst he has ever heard from me. That’s saying something.
There are many ways passengers can entertain themselves on a long drive in this day and age. One can read if one has the proper vestibular constitution, and the whole family is blessed with it. One can do puzzles, one can watch movies, one can listen to music or talk shows or comedians (the second prize in road trip technology, after the EZ Pass, goes to satellite radio). Peter devoted himself to watching the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, figuring this would bite into a good nine hours’ worth of the trip. The boys read, watched movies, did not complain of ass pain. I was quite amazed at everyone’s ability to do so very little for so very long. I told the boys about the sad old days of yore when my parents and I were on long car trips and I would be set up with one of those count-the-license-plate books. Despite the DVD player, IPods, a DS Nintendo game, CD’s and 240 satellite radio stations, my younger son longed for one of the activity books. Instead we instructed him to see how many pick-up drivers had mustaches. It was 100 percent. As a child, I also used to devise bizarre self-entertainments like making the sign of the cross every time we passed a church (most puzzling to my two agnostic parents), a variation of holding your breath when you go past a cemetery, which the boys do to the point of hyperventilation.
I think that travel calories don’t count, so I always treat myself to an extravagance on the road, a king sized bag of Cheetos. Fellow travelers we observed seemed have no problem with year round high caloric intake, and we witnessed a great deal of what a doctor in South Carolina calls “biscuit toxicity.”
The states largely flew with the exception of the New York City metropolitan area; it demanded to be observed in all its glory by deliberately bringing traffic to a standstill. A well-timed one hour special by Bruce Coburn on Sirius intervened on the way up, but going back we just had to grimace and endure it.
Maine’s state motto is The Way Life Should Be. By the time you get there and see that “Welcome to Maine” sign, you believe with all your heart that getting off 95 is the way life should be. But when you arrive, after 12 hours on the road, with leg cramps, white knuckles, and headlights and red lights seared into your retina, you really feel like it’s the way life could have been and should have been had you been there. But that day you missed it.
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