Book in Review: A Teaching Guide: Of Porcupines and Trusty Sidekicks and Road Trips to Infinity

Abstract

When I was a kid, my mother would send me or my younger brother to the attic—typically in late July or early August—to drag down the Samsonite suitcases to prepare for the annual family road trip to visit my father’s aunts, uncles, and cousins. In the late 1940s, my grandparents had plucked my father and his siblings from a backroad farm in the Tennessee hills and plunked them down on a similar backroad farm in Virginia. At the time, when telephones and car trips, even postage stamps, were luxuries, the comfort of family must have seemed a lifetime away. To maintain the bond, my grandfather’s nine sisters—none of whom ever moved more than 40 miles from the house they grew up in—hosted a summer family potluck. My grandfather always attended, even when he could not afford to take his family along. When my parents married, they made the trip to the reunion our annual “vacation.” The eight-hour road trip was a highlight of the year; it was essentially the only traveling my family did, and it required preparations. My mother spent the week prior to the trip choosing the clothes we would take, filling the toiletry case with small bottles of shampoo and new toothbrushes, and shopping for groceries for our in-route picnic lunch. My father disliked restaurants and air conditioning, so a shady picnic at a roadside table was a welcome relief from the sweaty backseat of our Chevrolet Impala. The hills of East Tennessee were dotted with “attractions”: air-brushed t-shirt shops, miniature golf greens, pancake houses, and steak-and-potato restaurants. After a few days, we would return home, mimicking the accents of our distant cousins and showing off our inexpensive souvenirs. Now, with the ubiquity of air travel, a journey of 350 miles seems inconsequential, but when I was young, the idea of a road trip possessed a sense of possibility. As the miles ticked by, moving me away from what I knew and understood best, the world across the state border shimmered with expectation.