Las Cruces to Austin

I was relieved to vacate the vicious little motel in Las Cruces where I stayed last night. On checking in, the malformed clerk instructed me not to smoke or drink outside my room, nor to entertain visitors. It was the best I could do in a town seemingly without lodgings, as I discovered after a fruitless drive through town.

Frankly, the place wasn't different from the motels my father, sister and I stayed in on a trip in 1976 from the Mountain States to Hattiesburg. My sister was eight, and I was fourteen. Dad had a conference in New Orleans and took the opportunity to spend a cross-country road trip with his daughters in a small Toyota and introduce them to the South he knew. The song "Hotel California" played whenever we turned on the radio, and I think even Dad started secretly liking it a little. I spelled him occasionally as driver (in those days, you could get a driver's license at 14) but got caught speeding in Wyoming. After stopping us, the state trooper asked if we happened to be LDS (i.e. Mormon). Only after I got the ticket -- and drove into town to pay it, which I guess is how things were done in those days -- did Dad point out that the cop seemed poised to spare Mormon speeders. We spent each night in a cheap motel room, and dinner was Cup-A-Soup made with hot water from the motel tap. Whenever we passed a truck driver on the road, my sister pantomimed tugging an imaginary train whistle, which invariably prompted the trucker to blow his horn. Each time this happened left me bitterly annoyed with the most recent example of my sister's brilliance at manipulating men.

We stopped for gas in Trinidad, Colorado. I was experiencing stabbing menstrual pain and, worse, weakness, cold, sweating and a sense of dread. I got out of the car and walked to where Dad was pumping gas. Then I was hanging by the arms from Dad's giant,gripping hands, my knees buckled beneath me. I'd fainted, Dad told me, worry in his face and voice as I dangled in his solid grip. Somehow I slumped to the bathroom with my lower insides on fire. The feeling was of a stab wound inflicted by a rusty knife that had then been twisted clockwise and counter-clockwise many times before being yanked out again. For a long, long time I didn't have the strength to emerge, and I thought it likely that I was dying. Compounding my grief was that I could not satisfy my irrational compulsion to reassure my sister and Dad that all would be fine. Dad sent my sister to check on me and then even knocked on the door himself to make sure I was alive and responsive. Eventually the crisis abated. I managed to assemble enough of myself to return to the car, and we glided away from the gas station and onto the freeway again. Some time passed, and Dad said matter-of-factly that his idolized older half-brother Jimmie French Moore, the family's would-be savior, had killed himself in Trinidad after World War II.

Other memories of that trip: profoundly delicious dinner at a small roadhouse in New Mexico with fried chicken and corn bread followed by a completely blinding dust storm once we were back on the road; the heart-quickening torment of Louisiana, a gradual, thick sweetness filling the car as we drove through the night with our windows down.