Road Tripping With Mom

This issue doesn’t have a theme, but stories of relationships predominate. A man takes his girlfriend, a relative newcomer to climbing, on a two-week big-wall ascent of El Cap. A woman wrestles with saying goodbye to her dog. A son takes his seventy-nine-year-old father on a twenty-eight-day trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. In each, adventure is both a mirror and a prism, reflecting and refracting relationships in unexpected ways.

When my mom was seventy-seven, she boarded a plane in Northern Virginia, flew west to Las Vegas, scrambled into a white camper van of uncertain dependability, and entrusted me to be her guide for the next seven days, during which we’d spend far more time on Utah dirt than county pavement. The last time she’d slept outside had been twenty years before, when I thought it would be a good idea to introduce my parents to my wife-to-be by taking them all camping in Baja. After dinner that first night on a Mexican beach, when my mom asked where the bathrooms were, I handed her a shovel and roll of TP.

But she rolled with it. Because that’s what she always does, my mom. In the last few years, she’s been through two rounds of breast cancer, lost my dad to cancer, and struggled with such pain in her legs that she couldn’t walk more than a hundred feet at a time. Many people would have given up, but not Arlene. She continued to be active in her church, volunteered at a thrift store, and scurried from one social engagement to another. And she thought it would be a capital idea to spend a week camping in Utah, leg pain or not.

Our first night on Gooseberry Mesa set a rhythm for the evenings: I lit a little fire, poured her a glass of red wine, and cooked dinner while she sat and watched the day ebb away and the stars bud out. I wanted to take care of her, and for everything to go right. I wanted to understand her better, and to ease the long complications of our tangled relationship.

In the mid-1970s, when I was in my early teens, my mom and my best friend Robert and Robert’s mom Mrs. Christopher and I concocted the idea that we would hike the Appalachian Trail from end to end. That we never actually did it seemed less important than having the dream itself, but as I got older and my parents did, too, I thought often about lost opportunities, about the we should do thats that we never get around to doing. Adventurous people rarely need motivation to get up and go, but the relationships that are easiest to take for granted are the last ones we should. Sometimes we need a nudge.

I took my mom through the Zion tunnel, past Checkerboard Mesa, to the lingering snow in Bryce, to meet my friend Ace and have dinner at Hell’s Backbone, down the Shafer Trail, up Robber’s Roost, down into Moab, out to the Green River Overlook, then Comb Ridge, and Cedar Mesa. She held potsherds and saw Anasazi ruins. She mostly talked, and I mostly listened, and I heard stories I’d never heard, about the family farm and my dad the young Marine who asked her to marry him and simple little details of her life hidden in the folds of time. She shared her joys, her fears, the intrigues of the thrift shop, the mundanities of daily life. I realized how rarely we were alone, how we’d never shared a campfire, just the two of us, until now. I realized that what our relationship needed wasn’t some big epiphany, or cathartic moment, but just this: time, together.

Eventually, we made our way back to Gooseberry, accompanied by a dust devil spinning down the Arizona Strip, and enjoyed another cool spring night among the piñon and juniper. We woke to a cloudless May morning. I brewed some java, and we sat and watched the sun climb above Smithsonian Butte. Neither of us had much to say. We just sipped our coffee and enjoyed the start of Mother’s Day.