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| December 20, 1969 |
As I wrote last week, we spent our first night at the Holiday Inn North in Columbus, Ohio, then headed out for our second stop, Memphis, Tennessee. We stayed there in another Holiday Inn, one near a Mississippi River bridge.
Why Holiday Inns?
Well, one of the two credit cards I had was for Gulf Oil, and that card was also good at Holiday Inns. So ... I had two gasoline credit cards then (Gulf and Sohio)--no other credit cards. Visa (originally Bank Americard), Master Charge (before it was Card), and Amex--these and others all lay in our future. We were traveling with a little cash, with Gulf and Sohio.
Somewhere that long day between Columbus and Memphis (nearly 600 miles away, says Google Maps) we realized we needed a camera, so we stopped at a drugstore in some small town and bought a little Kodak Instamatic and took pictures all along the way. Those pictures are now ... somewhere. Perhaps I'll find them before I finish this little series.
I remember clearly a few of them: Joyce attached to her portable hair-dryer (plastic cap over her hair, machine churning away, Joyce reading), Joyce dragging a suitcase out of our Memphis hotel room the next morning.
We had so much fun on the trip (when she wasn't sleeping in the car!)--talking about books, our classes, our hopes, our families, the things we were seeing for the first time ...
Oh, and I had to do all the driving. She had a license, of course, but I had a stick-shift, and she did not yet know how to use a manual transmission. (The glories of teaching her that lay in our new future, though.)
I can't remember where we'd planned to stay our third night (New Orleans was still nearly 1000 miles away), but Old Man Winter had other ideas. We encountered freezing rain--an ice storm--the next afternoon; cars were sliding off the road. I was creeping along, terrified that we'd join them.
I'd already had a major epiphany, by the way. Pre-marriage, I had not been the most ... judicious ... of drivers. But now--with Joyce in the car--I realized that her life was quite actually in my hands. I became a much more prudent, circumspect driver--and immediately so. And I remain one (I hope). We've had a couple of minor accidents (none our fault), but I've never had a speeding ticket. Love taught me caution--merely one of its many lessons.
We found a little roadside motel somewhere in Mississippi--wish I could remember the tiny town where it was. 'Twas an old-fashioned motel: close to the road, one storey, park in front of your room, listen to other guests all night--that sort of place. We were lucky to find it.
In the morning--late morning--we departed to safer roads, though the landscape remained dazzling: ice on all the trees and buildings. Later, I would be constantly reminded of this whenever I read Frost's "Birches." Remember the lines?
… Often you must
have seen them
Loaded with ice a
sunny winter morning
After a rain. They
click upon themselves
As the breeze rises,
and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks
and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's
warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and
avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken
glass to sweep away
You'd think the
inner dome of heaven had fallen.
We had a long drive before us that sunnier morning, and we would not arrive in New Orleans until around midnight. Where, greeting us, was Trouble ...
TO BE CONTINUED
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