Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [110]
Sam Myers, a Missourian who had been making trips like this longer than anyone, had the best voice on the bus—no surprise, as his parents were music teachers. Most of the time he didn’t need the songbook; he already knew the words. Although Sam had made lots of bus trips, he might not have been on one like this before. When Jack got on the bus for the first time, he gave Sam the once-over—checking out his hunting vest, the pockets filled with all the items Sam had needed in emergencies on previous trips, asking what the hair was that was growing under his nose—until he noticed Sam’s woven sandals and asked, “Why are you wearing girls’ shoes?” From that point on, Sam and Jack were a reliable comedy routine on the bus. Sam would be pointing out the route to Johnny, the driver, and Jack would be in his lap and in his way the whole time.
When James Galvin, Randy’s husband, brought his guitar out, he controlled the song list, which meant that the songs were keyed to a younger generation. Cate and Josh and Hunter and Aaron knew all the words, and by and large, I knew none. But that didn’t matter. I liked the great sense of fun that music brings, creating a community chorus that crisscrossed Iowa between oceans of cornfields and then navigated the narrow roads and sharp turns in the mountains of New Hampshire.
Colin Van Ostern, the New Hampshire press secretary, calculated that, during the one-week New Hampshire bus tour, we drove 1,757 miles, went to twenty-six towns for house parties and other events, had ten town hall meetings, had forty stops, 168 cans of Diet Coke, and 245 bottles of water. And through it we sang. Colin took Kim Rubey’s place. Meghan replaced Brad—and was a more agreeable singer. Some of the people who came on the bus for a day, such as Sharon Nordgren and Lou D’Allesandro, never got handed a songbook, because we were trying to get their support and someone thought when we had the songbooks in our hands we looked less like a campaign than a family on vacation. Exactly, I thought. It was that feeling of being a real part of something, something the candidate himself was a part of, not remote from, not smiling down from the mezzanine boxes, that constituted part of the campaign’s magic.
The bus was a moving G-rated pleasure palace. Emma Claire and Jack each had someone to watch them at events—Randy and Elizabeth Nicholas most of the time—so that John and I could talk and meet caucus-goers. They claimed the back of the bus, with the long benches on which to take naps and watch DVDs. Many a time John would have three or four reporters on a leg of the trip with us, but he would give separate interviews. The reporters-in-waiting would be banished to the back of the bus, where they would watch Kipper, the most civilized dog in the cartoon world, with the children. When John gave his first speeches, the children watched from that rear perch, opening the back windows. Having the children with us—which we did on weekends and when school was out—was good for all of us. And it was best for John. The family feeling was not one we lost because, well, we were a family. So sometimes the children would invite other children onto the bus during an event, as they did in Tama, Iowa, and sometimes when the children would tire of events, we would give them time away from the bus. Meghan, Randy, and I took the children to the Lost River Gorge caves in New Hampshire. With the steep drop-offs and bridges over gorges, I spent an entire day nervous. We thought there would be a lot of hiking, but we were wrong. There was a lot of crawling. Emma Claire and Jack gleefully climbed through caves and around rocks on their hands and knees—followed, I have to admit, by Randy and Meghan, whose combined ages didn’t add up to mine. I got good at saying,