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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
December 24, 2006
Published as Family History
in a Gramma Letter dated December 23, 1997.
© 1997 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Leaf in Fir, 1979
© 1979 by Bud Grossmann
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TICKETLESS TRAVEL
Wilsonville, Oregon
Tuesday, December 23, 1997
Dear Gramma,
“What are your plans for the holidays?” asked my friend Diane, earlier this month.
“Well,” I said, “we will spend Christmas with friends in Oregon.” “But...,” I joked, “I don’t have any plans. I’m just tagging along. My wife, though ... well, she has plans. Fran has plans aplenty.”
Diane laughed—she knows Frances. She knows the thoroughness with which my beloved spouse prepares for any vacation trip: the lists and brochures, the reservations made many months ahead. Fran frets. Fran plans. Now she does, but it wasn’t always so.
In December of 1974 we were living in Los Angeles, where I was doing photo work—not quite enough of it to make a living—and Frances was attending law school. She had been so busy studying for exams, she’d given little thought to how we would spend our holidays. Then, the Friday before Christmas, Fran arrived home at midday and announced with a joyful grin, “First semester is over at last! Pack your knapsack, Bud. Let’s go to San Francisco.”
We had friends up that way, so we would have places we could stay, but we owned no car and had very little money for a four-hundred-mile journey. “How will we get there?” I asked. “By magic carpet?”
“Good guess!” said my ever-surprising bride. She held out her right arm and raised her thumb like someone seeking a ride by a roadside. I couldn’t believe she wanted to hitchhike, but we were soon out the door and walking determinedly toward a nearby on-ramp of the Harbor Freeway. We brought along a stack of hastily lettered cardboard signs, each as wide as my chest, to encourage drivers to stop: I-5 NORTH; SALINAS; SAN JOSE; and THE CITY. We waved the first sign and displayed big smiles. Within minutes someone stopped, and we were on our way.
The first ride took us maybe ten miles, but the second one brought us a hundred miles more, all the way to Santa Barbara. There we got stuck. As the sun went down, we stood with half-a-dozen other would-be travelers, shivering on the shoulder of an on-ramp. Car after car accelerated by. Eventually, Fran proposed we walk back to a gas station to use the restroom and put on our winter underwear.
As I was changing, a bushy-bearded man stepped up to the urinal, looked over his shoulder at me and my thermal long johns, and said with a cheerful chuckle, “Cold out there!”
“Sure is!” I agreed. “You wouldn’t happen to be going north, and have room for me and my wife, would you?”
“I would, and I do. That is...,” he said, “...if you don’t mind riding in the back of a camper truck with no heat and two big dogs.”
“Sounds good to me!” I said.
Such a lucky break! With our canine companions we departed from the gas station. But before the truck reached highway speed, it coasted to a stop. The back door swung open, and there stood the big-bearded man. He glanced in and then turned away. “All aboard!” he sang. And every last one of those other thumb riders climbed up into the camper.
Through the night, the truck gently jounced and softly hummed across the many miles. Fran and I slept. When we woke—to the sound of someone’s calling “End of the line!”—we discovered we were within a stone’s throw of where we hoped to be.
Today, many Christmases later, I no longer recall a single thing about December the 25th of 1974. I can’t bring up the names or the faces of the friends who welcomed us to their table on that day. The journey north, though, is as fresh in my mind as this morning’s frost on an Oregon fence rail. As often as not, when I travel about, the getting to where I am going, is fully half the fun.
Gramma, I love you.
Love,
Buddy
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