Station Wagon Generation...

I had a moment of nostalgic inspiration...

When I was a kid, everywhere we went we drove in the family station wagon. Now, I understand that some of you have no idea what I’m talking about here. We didn’t have minivans in those days. SUVs were called Jeeps, and I mean real Jeeps—unless you count the old Jeep Wagoneer, which was just an overblown station wagon.

No, station wagons were these long, barge-like vehicles into which whole families could fit, somewhat comfortably. My family got a Ford with the optional swing-door tailgate; a fabulous feature when it first came out, the way those wagons sold you might have thought NASA had developed the apparatus. But, after a few years, every manufacturer offered one.

We got our wagon when my father was drafted by the Air Force. He had just finished his surgical internship at Georgia, and as soon as the US Armed Forces found out he was no longer in school, they plucked him up and put him to work as a flight surgeon.

Now, it terrified me that my father had been drafted. I knew a lot of other kids from school whose fathers had gone off to Vietnam, and never came back. The war was on our TVs every night, and the very idea of my father being sent off to someplace that kills Americans had me losing sleep.

Even more to my own horror, my father actually wanted to go there: “Best place on the planet to get real-time experience…” I heard him tell my mother. That makes sense to me now, but at the time, I dug my heels in, cried till I was blue in the face, and refused to allow this to happen. The Air Force held more sway than I did, but as a consolation, instead of Vietnam, Daddy was sent to serve his country in Amarillo, Texas, treating sun-strokes and homesickness. The base there held hundreds of families, and we moved into a duplex next to another family with a station wagon like ours.

Once I heard we were headed to Texas, I began to like the whole idea. After all, most of the really great cowboy movies I loved took place there; if they didn’t, they sure should have, in my humble opinion.

The interstate highway system was still under construction in those days, we used every little bit of it we could, but ended up riding down two-lane blacktop most of the way from Augusta to Amarillo. I saw a lot of countryside from the back windows of that purple/maroon Ford.

Those old wagons were big inside. The dash was entirely metal, with lots of pointed, gleaming knobs to impale yourself on, but that only happened when one of your parents had to slam on the brakes. There were seat belts; Ralph Nader had already gotten his way over automobile safety by then; but, we never used them. The belts remained tucked into the cracks between the seats, since the big old buckles were so uncomfortable to sit on.

The very back, which we called the ‘Way Back’, had opposing bench seats into which you could wedge your children. We found that we could shove our little brother Johnny down into the compartment and lock his ass in there when he got too antsy to sit still.

But, at night, you could lay down next to the spare tire well and look straight up through those big back windows and see stars. It was also where I learned that if I stared out too long at the rows of corn and wheat that were all over the Great Plains, it made me sick as hell.

Jockeying for position was a full time endeavor within the family life of station wagon travel. No one wanted to get stuck in the middle. Our dog didn’t mind much, but then she was just happy we never left her behind anywhere. When it was just the six of us, we each had our own window on the world. But, on those long summer vacations, what the British call ‘holiday’, we would drive out into the great expanses of the American West with grand parents and aunts and uncles stuffed in there with us, luggage rack crammed full and tied down. Those were the times when being a kid just sucked like a big ole orange.

The Way Back became a very cramped, metallic space on those trips. We had to play ‘egg’ a lot: the favorite game of parents in the station wagon world; that’s when you had to stay quiet, the first one to talk was a rotten egg. We hated that one. There was cow-poker, which was simply counting cows on one side of the road or the other. Usually we would split up into teams, but you always had to have someone on your team help the other team count, just to keep the count accurate. There was also license plate bingo, or in a pinch you could play alphabet sign tag, in which you had to find a letter on a billboard in the order they appear in the alphabet. Of course, you always sighed when you drew the ‘x’, ‘q’, or ‘z’, and generally had to wait for a town with a zoo to roll through, or if you were near a bit of interstate highway, you could simply use an exit sign. But, as I said, those spurts of interstate were still few and far between back then.

Yet, in the back of that big old beast we saw a lot of America. Gas was so cheap you hardly had to think about it. Around the next bend in the road was the world’s largest ball of aluminum foil, or a reptile farm, or even a souvenir stand (see Stuckey’s) where you could get ash trays with rebel flags and peanut clusters that could pull loose teeth from your jaws.

We drove over Pike’s Peak in July of ’67 and as we crossed the continental divide, it started to snow. The highway had just turned to gravel, since asphalt evidently will not set at that altitude. We stared out the huge side windows at the West below us, our father pointing out things to look at, all the while scaring the shit out of us because he was also enjoying the vistas while driving us at breakneck speeds, careening much too close to the sheer drop-off sides of the mountain.

Station wagons hung around for a lot of years. As the nation enjoyed its most prominent growth, those old gas-suckers chugged families like ours all over the continuous forty-eight. When I turned sixteen, I took my driver’s test and got my license in our third Ford wagon and went on dates and to drive inn movies. My buddies all drove one as well and we could pool our money and nearly fill those old cars up with four dollars and some change before we drove around town all night.

My kids grew up with minivans and imports and now drive SUVs. Gas prices have become so that you have to actually budget for driving. And those long driving summers of our nation have drifted off into memory, memories of when we were once a station wagon generation.