The Road Back Home
Hayden, Kit, Cathy and Heidi at the end of our 1978 cross-country road trip.
In everyone’s life, there should be at least one family road trip across America that shines in the collective memory of all who were along for the ride. In the summer of 1978, Kit and I decided it was time for just such a journey. He had a shiny new school bus yellow, Westphalia Volkswagen pop-top camper van and two elementary aged children—Hayden (11) and Heidi (9). I was the newest addition to the family, having met and fallen head over heels in love with their father the prior summer. Over the course of the year, we’d been getting to know each other and had begun to consider moving into a small canyon cottage together at the end of that summer. To test ourselves as a newly blended family, we planned an extended 6,000-mile road trip from the Pacific to the Atlantic and back.
Kit’s VW camper van was akin to a jolly little yellow submarine on wheels. There was bunk space for the kids below and when the top was popped, a bunk for the two adults up above. It had a sink behind the driver’s seat, and a small table that could be affixed to the floor behind the front passenger seat. Four cubicles in the back held the very modest selection of stuff we packed along. Three of the four cubbies were filled with the kids’ tee shirts, shorts, swimsuits, books, and cards they’d brought along for entertainment. For the life of me, I can’t remember what Kit and I took in the way of clothes, only that we kept it light and simple.
From day one, a routine fell into place. We sang a daily repertoire of Salter family oldies but goodies. They were lively, sing-along songs that every Salter seems to know from birth, songs passed down from when Kit and his sisters were children--“Ragtime Cowboy Joe,” “By the Sea,” and “It’s Only a Little Shanty.” And on it went, mile after mile, state after state, from the west coast to New England and back through the American Heartland, the Southwest and home to Los Angeles. I would never be a Salter unless I could belt them out along the road with the best and the rest of them.
Kit was our able pilot, and I was the navigator—mapping our way whenever I wasn’t sharing the driving. This navigation required foldout state road maps and a voluminous Rand McNally Road Atlas long before GPS and cellphones did the navigation work for you. I plotted each day’s route, selecting campsites by rivers or hot springs where we were able to park our little yellow VW out in the open air and under the stars. If there wasn’t a river or stream option, the edge of a cornfield would do for the night.
Once parked after a full day of driving, we unloaded four collapsible chairs and set up camp. I’d gather wildflowers for a bouquet in an old Mason jar, Hayden and Heidi took a swim in whatever river or stream we’d found to stop at for the night. Kit set up the Coleman stove and hauled a bucket of water to our impromptu outdoor kitchen for washing up after dinner. Dishwashing was never a chore, but rather another opportunity for a chorus of singing that before long included entire Broadway musical scores—especially when we were crossing Oklahoma on the return leg of the journey.
When the light finally faded and we did as well, Hayden and Heidi got into their sleeping bags spread across the lower bunk space. Kit and I then put a foot on the sink and hoisted ourselves aloft and into the upper bunk. Once we were all snug in our sleeping beds, we’d read our novels by flashlight until exactly 10 p.m.—the magic hour when we all turned our flashlights off and listened as Kit invented nighttime stories in the fashion of Radio Mystery Theater. Like magic, he spun a new tale every night as we lay in the dark. Never telling the same story twice, he was a master at inventing new characters and plots with just enough of an edge to keep the kids hanging on his every word without scaring the heck out of me.
While going through my journals recently, I found a collage Heidi created for Kit on his 60thbirthday. A la John Denver, it read, “Back in 1978, we drove a chrome yellow VW bus…we didn’t know who we were. We didn’t know what we did. We were just on the road. I asked my Daddy, ‘Where are we goin’?’ He said, ‘We’ll just follow our nose.’ So, I looked out the window and dreamed I was a cowboy as we crossed the wide-open sky country of Montana.”
When Heidi and Hayden visited last month in honor of my 75thbirthday, we went out into the meadow and stared up at a dazzling night sky filled with a roadmap of constellations and a Hunter’s full moon. At that moment, the man in the moon whispered “Go home. Because it’s sort of late, and I’ll soon turn out my light. Go home.”
And so, come spring, we will follow our noses along blue highways from Missouri back to California, where our story began all those years ago.