Rock On
Some holidaymakers never knowwhen
to give up—and that can be a good thing
On the way home from one of our less successful
family vacations—awet, ill-tempered camping trip to
upstateNewYork—my dadmade an announcement.
“
Guess what? Your mom and I thought we might
check out Plymouth Rock while we were nearby.”
“
Nearby,” in this instance, was being used loosely: This
meant a detour of several hours each way.
We arrived at the rock, piled out and looked at it
for about 15 seconds, then le . Symbolic though it
may be, large though itmay loom inAmericanhistory,
Plymouth Rock is a
rock
.
We resumed our journey
feeling even more gloomy, if such a thing were pos-
sible, than we had before.
But maybe we were missing the point. Maybe
whatma ers, in the end, is not somuch
what a rock is but what it stands for:
the human urge to
embark on pilgrimages,
the search for a be er
life, the determina-
tiontomakeithome
with something
more than
the mem-
o r y o f a
damp tent.
—
ANDR EW
JENNER
BURNNOTICE
There’s nothing like a night stroll through a
magma field to bring a family closer
Though it’s a parent’s job to keep kids out of harm’s
way, sometimes he or she can take the job too seriously.
I’ve never had that trouble with my mother. She’s the kind of
person who, on a family trip to Hawaii, will insist we all hike up a
volcano in the middle of the night (precisely what the guidebooks say
not
to do). ¶We were on Kilauea, in the Big Island’s Volcanoes National
Park. With Mom in the lead, my dad, sister and aunt and I trudged across a
lava field lit only by the moon and our two tiny flashlights. Glowing lava flowed
nearby. Bursts of steam shot up around us. With each step, it began to feel less
like an adventure and more like a disaster movie. ¶ Five hours later, it was clear
we were lost. My sister and I muttered expletives under our breath as Mom sang
jaunty little songs. “The parking lot’s just over the next ridge!” she kept shouting. At
hour six, my aunt realized she needed her medication. Our shoes had been shredded by sharp rocks,
but our mother MacGyvered them back together and we pressed on. ¶ Eight hours after setting out
on our one-hour trip, we found the car again, all of us except Mom practically weeping with relief. Nobody
suffered any burns—unless you count Dad, who, in his castaway shorts and ratty T-shirt, looked like a boiled,
poorly dressed lobster thanks to a kayaking outing earlier that day. That’s what happens, my mother reminded him,
when you spend an entire day without sunscreen.
—
LESLIE PATRICK
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
•
MAY 2013
89
SAFE AND SAND
Here’s the guy to know if you’re
venturing into the desert … but not if
you plan to venture out again
Having spent three decades living in
theMiddle East, my dad always liked
to think of himself as a transplanted
nomad.Soonweekendshe’dload
the family into our old Land
Cruiser and head out into
the deserts of the U.A.E.
If Dad had a flawas a des-
ert guide, itwas that he tended
to overlook the fact that not everyone was as equipped to deal with
this environment as he was. Our trips often took on an edge of added
excitement when a human or a dogwould gomissing. One time, Dad let
mybrother andme take the jeepona joyride—which taught us important
lessons about the relationship between velocity, gravity and pain.
I get the feeling now that these trips might have had an element of
danger about them, but at the time we felt perfectly safe. A military
helicopter pilot, Dad handled every emerging crisis with reassuring
efficiency. On one of our apparently aimless afternoon desert strolls, a
helicopter landed just aheadof us. “I recognizedyour baldhead,” thepilot
said to Dad. So even if we had gotten lost, there would have been hope.
Even after I grew out of childhood, I loved going into the desert with
Dad. In the evenings, we’d find ourselves a
wadi
,
or dry riverbed, where
we’d have a few drinks and sleep under the stars. One night, we stayed
awake to watch for Halley’s Comet, but the sky clouded over and we
missed the show. Although Dad grumbled in those low, gravelly tones
of his, there was a sense that it didn’t really matter whether we saw the
comet. We had everything we needed right there.
—
HELEN ROSS
