more travel tales

You will recall the scene surrounding the untimely demise of H. Hound. We six were loaded every summer into the back of our Ford Falcon Station Wagon, and transported at breakneck speed across the two-lane state routes of the time, in fifteen hour marathons to either Buffalo or southern Illinois, to visit the grandparents. You will recall the ground rules of all such travel—we stop only when about to run out of gas. You do your business there, or hold it. Well, kids being kids, and bladders being bladders, we suffered from the fact that our bladders were not as capacious as the gas tank of a '60 Ford Falcon, and the soda pop and salty snacks we wheedled out of our parents at the Stuckey's back there in Washington Court House, OH, ran through our little systems like a greased weasel. The inevitable requests for potty breaks were referred forward from the 'way-back' to Mom and Dad in the front seat, and generally met first with stony silence, and pained 'significant looks' between the parents. More urgent subsequent requests took on the regrettable tone of whining and crying, but no change, alas, in our trajectory. Dad would continue to wrestle with the big red steering wheel, and fire spent Camel butts out the side window into the superheated, shimmering highway air, and Mom would chew her cheek in vexation and figure out how to resolve this dilemma before one of the littles urinated all over herself and soaked the nest in the back, rendering it uninhabitable, and requiring more than a brief stop to deal with it. The solution was a pitcher. A clear plastic pitcher with a handle and a wide mouth, and a friendly Kool-Aid smiley-face molded into its side. It had held our Kool-Aid, to give us little drinks in small Dixie cups, and thus avoid buying soda-pop in the first place, and to reduce demands for stops in the second place. But in a flash of practical maternal inspiration, the pitcher's days as a Kool-Aid transporter were over, and it became the porta-pottie. Now there was some resistance from the troops at first, to baring their little bums in the back of the car, lest siblings see, or even worse, a truck driver, but that was the true test of will defined. If you had to pee that bad, you peed in the plastic Kool-Aid pitcher, or you waited until that seemed a more plausible compromise, and your modesty was thus overcome by sheer hydraulic pressure. The procedure, then, was that NOBODY PEEKED, and the unfortunate wriggled out of her underclothes, squatted, swaying and wailing over the pitcher, and unloaded the contents of her bladder into the pitcher. It was then passed forward with all due care, like miners passing the nitroglycerine forward to the front of the tunnel. Mom would roll her window down, and dump it into the slipstream, taking care to get it out there far enough not to completely douse the side of the car in urine. This became as routine and normal as any other family travel tradition, and kept us on the road, overcoming the varying bladder capacities of a car full of bored, Kool-Aid sipping kids. Well on one of these epic journeys, one of the littles did her thing in the pitcher, and it was duly passed forward, and Mom did her part to dispose of it. Unfortunately, Karen, seated in the right window seat directly behind Mom, was not attentive, perhaps dozing in her seat. In any case, she failed to take the required precaution of cranking the chrome-plated window crank and rolling the window up, and so that the entire contents of the pitcher went into the superheated slipstream, and was borne into the window behind, dousing Karen completely. She spluttered and screamed, wiping warm pee out of her eyes, nose and mouth, and was nearly as inconsolable as when she lost her Huckleberry Hound, but we DID NOT STOP. That was normal enough. Kids are supposed to smell like pee. Fifteen minutes more in that same superheated air and she was dry as a bone anyway, and only offensive if you insisted on breathing through your nose. But it took a lot longer than that to get her to stop wailing, and for us to stop wetting ourselves from laughing at her misfortune. The LEFT passenger seat became the desired seat after that, and even 'the hump' didn't seem so bad. Those were the days…