All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [11]
When I was five, Mom sat me down on the lawn and told me that she wanted me to be “more independent” than my three older sisters. When she explained what that big word meant, I was all for the idea. As part of this new independence deal, she said she would not be my room mother in kindergarten, as she had for my sisters, bringing cookies and supervising crafts in class. The trade-off was that I got to go along with Mom when she was out finding interesting pursuits closer to home. When she heard that Realtors in our neighborhood wouldn’t sell houses to African American families, for instance, she got involved in the fair housing movement and took me to demonstrations, meetings, and trials. I missed some school, but our outings are the only memories I can call up from my year in kindergarten. On one occasion, I’m told, we met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., though all I remember is being downtown, holding hands, and singing “Kumbaya” in a circle with a great number of people, many of whom, unlike the people in Littleton, were black. That was a thrilling alternative to a day at South Elementary School, and it became clear early on that going places away from home was far more interesting than staying put, which was my mom’s view of things, too.
That’s why, not long after, Mom decided to hop a freight train across Colorado. As a physician’s wife and stay-at-home mother, she said she needed more excitement in her forties and vowed to take more risks in her life. When a couple of younger, footloose friends called with this zany idea, she couldn’t refuse. I begged her to go along, probably reminding her that she hadn’t been my room mother in kindergarten and that I was doing a very good job of being independent, but she said riding freight trains was only for big girls. Secretly, she remembers, she hoped my father would insist that no wife of his was going to hop a damned freight train. Instead, appreciating the romance and outdoorsy spirit of it all, he offered to drive her to the station.
At the freight yards, my mother, who hadn’t grasped the nuances of hobo behavior, politely asked a railroad man which train was bound for Grand Junction, as if she had a first-class ticket tucked inside her purse. “That one,” he snarled at her, “and don’t let me see you.” She and the others jumped aboard and watched miles of wide-open western landscape roll by. After a few days, my mother hitchhiked home, but her appetite for adventure hadn’t been satisfied, only whetted. She signed up for graduate school, went to Vietnam War protests, took a horseback trek through the Wyoming Tetons, rode bicycles in Europe, and took us all to Mexico for the summer. The Outward Bound trip seemed to be just another of her many excursions out of the house and into the world. Sometimes my sisters wondered why she wouldn’t just play tennis or join the garden club like the other mothers.
But she couldn’t help it; she got her restless spirit from my grandmother, who had an adventurous streak of her own. Grandma’s husband left her when she was pregnant with my mother—running off to Mexico with a redhead for a quickie divorce—and she raised her child alone, on a teacher’s salary, during the Great Depression. But in the summer she’d pack up the two of them and explore the West,