This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [87]
“If Boots won’t get modern conveniences, we’ll bring them ourselves,” Skates quipped, radiating pleased-ness with herself for having overcome the obstacles of our remote lifestyle by bringing what we lacked—generator, bathroom, kitchen sink, stove, and comfortable beds—all coupled with the ultimate in mobility and modern style. They established the motor home in the customer parking lot, generating much amusement and joking at Papa’s expense by the apprentices in the campground.
“You sure you don’t want to get one of those for yourself?” they teased. “Or how about one for us?”
Skates brought gifts to appease us, chilled brown bottles of Guinness beer for the apprentices and Papa, and for me and Heidi a stuffed beaver and a Fisher Price farm set with animals and a barn door that mooed. It was better than Christmas. “Plaaastic,” Papa commented out of Skates’s earshot, with a half-joking, half-derogatory nasal accent, but we didn’t care, mooing the barn door endlessly until its batteries were stolen in a pinch for a flashlight and not immediately replaced.
Skates also brought Papa the infamous red Mustang convertible that fall, driven up by Lucky in tandem with the motor home. Skates had recently purchased herself a shiny new Pontiac and decided to donate the Mustang to the cause of her penniless son, as she generally did with her cast-off vehicles. It was a bright red 1963 convertible with leather seats, reminding Papa of a sweet little MG he had back in his school days.
“A car is the biggest expense of homesteading,” Papa always said, referring to the constant repairs our old vehicles required, not to mention the pricey state registration we were always late to renew and the insurance that was generally beside the point. Our history with the automobile had certainly been an eclectic one, from the white VW truck Mama and Papa had in Franconia, with its built-in camper on the back, to the old army jeep of Skipper’s.
The problem for me was that I’d always been particularly prone to car sickness, especially on those curvy hilly roads of the cape. Once Papa let me drive in his lap, hoping it would build my resistance, but instead I caused the jeep to go off the road into a ditch and dinged the fender. After years of such mishaps and the work of pulling out tree trunks and hauling trailers full of seaweed and other creative loads, as well as serving as our only form of transportation, Good Ole Jeepie was starting to fail us, so Skates had volunteered the Mustang. It wouldn’t last the winter. On the winding road to Harborside, Papa hit a patch of ice going around a ninety-degree turn, and the car slid into the tree at the corner.
“Wrapped the car around a tree,” he said to Mama, after walking the two miles home. Papa was unscathed, but the car sat there for a few days before he could get it towed into a garage in Bangor. When it turned out Skates hadn’t kept up the insurance, Papa, lacking the money for repairs, quietly disappeared from the garage, leaving the mechanic an unexpected, and rather valuable, gift. Only the mark in the tree remained as a memento of the car’s short life with us.
Sometime after that, Skates gave us the silver Pontiac station wagon that Papa dubbed the “Silver Bullet,” back in the quiet days before its muffler fell off, never to be found again. He said it drove like a dream, but my sensitive stomach didn’t agree. We had to roll all the windows down, summer and winter, to prevent vomiting. Once Heidi and I were on an errand with Mama that took us over the Waldo-Hancock, a long-span suspension bridge passing 135 feet above the Penobscot River narrows near Bucksport. Mama’s hair flipped wildly in the front seat, windows wide open, wind rushing in, as Heidi and I, carseatless as always in the back, hung out the windows to see the river far below. Heidi had her little hand-knit brown