Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip - Softcover

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Richard Ratay was the last of four kids raised by two mostly attentive parents in Elm Grove, Wisconsin. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in journalism and has worked as an award-winning advertising copywriter for twenty-five years. Ratay lives in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, with his wife, Terri, their two sons, and two very excitable rescue dogs.

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Don’t Make Me Pull Over!

CHAPTER 1

Swerving through the Seventies

A Family Boldly Leaves Its Driveway

One winter evening in 1976, when I was seven years old, I went to sleep in my bed in Wisconsin and woke up in a snowdrift in Indiana. I had little idea how I’d gotten there.

I dimly recall my father’s arms cradling me as I looked up through eyelids heavy with sleep. I watched the white ceiling of the hallway turn into the shadowy pine rafters of our garage, then the fuzzy tan fabric of our family car’s interior. I remember being tossed across the laps of my older brothers in the backseat, a pillow pushed under my head, and a blanket thrown over my body. Then I drifted off again into blackness.

Next came a startled yelp. I opened my eyes to find myself tumbling in a blur of stuffed animals, eight-track tape cartridges, Styrofoam coffee cups, and issues of Dynamite magazine. I landed on the car’s floor with a thud, the round hump of the transmission housing pressed into my belly, my chin burning from sliding on the shag carpet.

I had no idea where we were. But I knew where we weren’t—anywhere near the sunny beach in Florida that I’d been listening to my mom tell us about for weeks. All I could surmise was that I was in our car and it was cold and dark and eerily quiet. Even the engine was still. Finally, my dad’s voice cut the silence.

“Jeez, Louise! Everyone okay? Anyone hurt?” my dad asked, his head swiveling around from my mom and sister beside him in the front seat to my brothers and me in the rear.

“Wha-what happened?” my mom replied, dazed. Like me, she’d just been roused from a deep sleep to find herself on a whirling carnival ride.

“Whoa! We did at least three three-sixties!” gushed my thirteen-year-old brother, Bruce, a little too enthusiastically for the rest of us.

“The highway just became a hockey rink!” my dad explained. “Cars spinning everywhere! It’s a wonder we didn’t smack into anyone!”

My twelve-year-old sister, Leslie, who got motion sickness from riding escalators at the mall, didn’t say a word. She just stared straight ahead in her usual position between my parents in the front seat, trying not to barf all over the dashboard.

After counting heads to make sure none of us had been launched into orbit, my parents quickly assessed our situation. The car was upright, though pitched at an unnerving angle. Good. No one had any obvious fractures or gushing head wounds. Good. Not a single window showed a crack. Also good. The worst that could be said was that all of the loose contents inside our car—maps, Thermoses, shoes, me—were scattered about as though our vehicle had been picked up and shaken like a snow globe. But then that was how the inside of our car generally looked while on a road trip anyway. What was unusual was how dark it was. The only light inside our car streamed in shafts through gaps of thick snow caked on every window.

Dad turned the ignition key. To our surprise, the engine roared to life, pressing the windshield wipers suddenly back into action. As they labored to push the clumps of snow aside, we got a better view of our predicament. Our car had come to rest well off the interstate, halfway down a broad slope that served as one side of a wide V-shaped highway median. Since I was only seven years old, I didn’t dwell on the delicate nature of our predicament; instead, I thought about what a great sledding hill this would make—had we been on Dad’s prized wood toboggan and not inside our 1975 Lincoln Continental Town Car. We weren’t alone. As far as we could see, ahead of us and behind, vehicles were scattered about the interstate like toy cars dropped by a cranky toddler.

Dad pulled his door handle, allowing a ferocious blast of frigid air to swirl inside. The door barely budged, blocked by a mound of thigh-high snow outside. Dad’s blood pressure instantly redlined. “Cripes Jiminy!” It was one of many colorfully benign phrases he kept ready to avoid blurting out a real ear burner in front of us kids. Others included: “Gee willikers!” “For crying out loud!” and his ever reliable go-to nonexpletive, “Criminently!” That they made no sense wasn’t important. It was enough that they kept him out of the doghouse with my mom and the Catholic Church.

Dad slammed the door back and forth against the snowdrift like a battering ram. This took no small effort. The door of a mid-seventies Lincoln was only a slightly smaller version of the one guarding the entrance to a NORAD command bunker. Eventually he cleared enough space to slip outside, and my mom turned off the engine.

“There’s no sense wasting gas,” she said. “We may be here a while, and we’ll need the heater.” My mother was nothing if not practical. “Now did any of you happen to pack candy bars or anything else to eat?”

We hadn’t been stuck in the ditch five minutes, and my mom was already formulating a rationing scheme to improve our chances of survival. If raising four kids had taught her anything, it was to always prepare for the worst.

Mom and my brothers also began to piece together the morning’s events. As usual, we’d left our home in suburban Milwaukee hours before daybreak. Getting an early start was critical—we had to get through Chicago before rush hour or we’d lose two hours just crawling from one side of the city to the other. Dad’s strategy was to pack the car the day before our departure. Then, promptly at 3:00 a.m. the following morning, he’d storm through the house, flipping on lights and hollering orders like a drill sergeant at reveille. As the baby of the family, and the one most likely to cause a delay, I was simply scooped from my bed, still clutching my beloved blankey, and carried out. Dad would deposit me in the backseat, jump behind the wheel, and we’d be off in a cloud of leaded gas fumes. We’d be a hundred miles from home before any of us were really conscious enough to grasp what had happened.

However, that morning my oldest brother, fifteen-year-old Mark, had remained awake. He recounted for the rest of us how the miles had passed uneventfully at first and how we’d even made it through Chicago in record time. But as we crossed Illinois into Indiana, it had begun to snow, and the light flurry quickly whipped into a raging squall. As we reached an exposed stretch of interstate south of Gary, Indiana, whiteout conditions slowed traffic to a crawl—but not slow enough, it turned out. Whipping winds had polished the moist pavement into a sheet of black ice, and without warning, a car ahead of us went into a spin. Trying to avoid a collision, trailing drivers hit their brakes, sending them into swirls of their own. Almost miraculously, Mark continued, no vehicles collided. Instead, each found its way into the snowy sloping median on one side of the interstate or down the steep embankment on the other. Of course, he couldn’t be sure. We’d been busy spiraling into a ditch of our own.

The driver’s door popped open, and my dad clamored inside, his face red with cold. “I talked to a trucker with a CB down the road. He said a fleet of wreckers are on the way. With any luck, we’ll be back on the road in a couple hours!”

So we waited. Six of us huddled in a jumbo road...