Sunday, 21 June, Chapter Four, “The Big Trip,” 1975-1976 >>>>> >A Teacher’s Journey from Southern Methodist University to North Minneapolis: Foundations for Overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools< >>>>> A Memoir >>>>> Gary Marvin Davison

Roy Rogers was not sitting well with Barbara as we road southward in Maryland toward Washington, D. C.


My Love remembered fondly having seen Roy Rogers, with his famous horse, Trigger, in a big arena in Albuquerque when she was about ten years old;  but at this juncture in our trip, a roast beef sandwich from one of his national chain of restaurants was giving her a seriously upset stomach. 

 

Our daily routine in the Big Trip in terms of meals was to arise for granola bars, breakfast bars, and Tang at breakfast;  eat a meal out, generally fast food, at lunchtime;  then pull out our Coleman grill to make supper wherever we lay our heads on any given night.

 

So it was that we stopped at a Roy Rogers Roast Beef restaurant in Maryland at noon one day in late October 1975.  We were just about to pull into a campground for the evening, approximately 6:30 PM, when the messages from Barbara’s stomach issued forth ever more persistently.  To paraphrase a much-ridiculed line from a 19^th century Gothic novel, for Barbara,

 

“it was an intestinally dark and stormy night.”

 

I took care of her all night long, then, just as she was settling into a sleep and feeling easier at dawn, for me in turn

 

“it was a digestively turbulent morning.”

 

But I tend just to move into a psycho-emotional mode somewhere between stoicism and denial, so by late morning I climbed into the driver’s seat with Barbara, now doing much better, at front passenger, and we drove to a motel on the outskirts of the capital;  this was a rare residential occurrence for us in our year with the van as our home, but we decided we had better settle into full recovery mode, with ready access to a very hot shower and a very convenient bathroom.

 

We went that whole day, a Saturday, without food, until about 8:00 PM that same day our stomachs signaled that the intestinal coast was clear.  I took Barbara’s order, went across to a Wendy’s across the street, and returned to the room.  We proceeded to have a very good time, munching the welcome hamburgers, meat ordered well done---  that's, make sure now, very well done---  as we hoped for the best and watched the then-very-new Saturday Night Live. 

 

We had hoped for the best, our stomachs cooperated, we were cheered by the usual skits and in this edition of the now iconic show the jokes of guest host Robert Kline.

 

We were on to Washington for the addition of more material to our bulging mental files.

 

…………………………………………………………………………………….

 

From Acadia National Park we had continued our trek through New England, viewing the Vanderbilt and other rich-folk homes in Providence, Rhode Island;  visiting a wealth of historical sites in Massachusetts:  Pilgrim-arriving Plymouth, witch-burning Salem, and Puritan-symbolizing churches.  We thoroughly investigated Thoreau-Emerson-haunted Concord, with storied Unitarian church and Pond of some note.  We had spent two days in the Boston area, canvassing Harvard and MIT and the multiple historical and cultural sites in Boston, resting at a hillside park, discussing the conventional tale told of the American Revolution along with the virulent anti-busing demonstrations that had recently taken place in the city. 

 

We had swung over to Pennsylvania, where in Philadelphia the tale is also told, and where so much of the cognitively dissonant history of the United States is revealed, demonstrated starkly in a Constitution that sought to secure the blessings of liberty and to maintain slavery.  We had roamed the University of Pennsylvania, added Harrisburg to our list of state capitals visited, and took the little train touring through a Disney-like presentation of the Hershey plant in the town of the same name, where chocolate-loving Barbara delighted in her free Coca-Cola filled with the sweetened confection. We had witnessed the urban revival of Pittsburgh, rising from its status as a pit of a city toward a renewal symbolized by the spruced-up confluence of Three Rivers.   We had visited another capital at Delaware’s Dover and continued our investigation of a story mingling myth, legend, and history at Baltimore, so that thereafter we would be able to

 

oh, say, that we had seen

Fort McKinley

at the dawn’s early light,

then later,

at the twilight’s last gleaming,

the urban blight

daily growing worse

in the slums

at the city’s urban core.