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.
When I got tired of waiting, I decided I could find her on my own. But as a child who had never been alone in the real wilderness before (not the woods where the teenagers used to drink in my neighborhood, but the real wilderness with wild animals and miles of plants you wouldn’t know the names of) I didn’t have the sense of direction or the intuition that I would need to get back to the family van where lunch was probably laid out among duffel bags and tackle boxes. I walked with my little fishing pole in my hand as far as my legs would take me, scared and wondering why it was taking me so long to reach my mother. When I finally realized I was lost, I was so panicked that I didn’t even notice the absence of road, or the abundance of large, hairy buffalo nestled around the tall grass like dumb, dangerous balls with hooves. Then, I tried to turn around.
As I turned, my eyes widened. They were everywhere, on every side of me, and I had been so scared and so preoccupied with crying that I had failed to notice the herd slowly engulfing me. Every few feet, there were piles of dung with colonies and galaxies of buzzing flies fighting over who would be king of the hill. The beasts would come as close as a foot away from my face, dustily snorting and grunting as they moved their large, bearded heads back and forth slight grazes over the grass. As far as I could see, humans didn’t exist in this world, the world of the buffalo beasts.
In the end, I kept walking, slowly, and somehow, the buffalo didn’t charge at me. They grunted every once in awhile, but I don’t think I got close enough, or posed enough of a threat to disturb their summer afternoons. But for years afterwards, I would wonder why they didn’t kill me, and I would be able to see their white horns perfectly in my mind, pointy with a hint of red at the ends, and somehow, not aimed at me. I walked until I reached a road, which to me seemed like fathoms but in reality, was only two and a half miles, and a family driving down that road stopped to ask me where my mother was. I wish I knew the woman’s name who coaxed me into that car when I hesitated, nine years old and not sure if I should get into a car with strangers, so I could send her flowers every August from that August on. As I drove down the road with this family (mother, father and two preteen sons with fishing poles), I looked out the minivan’s window, willing my mother to appear.
And somewhere within the first ten minutes of driving, I saw her. She was with my older sister, running through that same herd of buffalo, screaming like a banshee and not even noticing the grunts coming from the beasts, pulling my sister through by her arm like a rag doll. The minivan stopped and we ran to one another like in the movies, all three of us with our arms outstretched, the tears staining our faces like dye.
There were fifteen ranger cars and a helicopter looking for me that day, and I was on the local news. I don’t remember anything after except for holding my mother’s hand and re-entering New Jersey about a week later. But years later, as a college student, I returned to that spot in Wyoming when I was on a road trip with some friends. I stood there, at the same crossing where I had wandered off, in a void of tall grass, one lone buffalo grazing off in the distance, looking lonely among the few piles of dung surrounding him, and I remembered what it felt like to be nine years old and to think I would never see my mother again.
And then I got back into the car, and drove on.
