Road Trips With My Father
A version of this appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on August 9, 2009, at a time when then-Gov. Tim Kaine had closed most of Virginia’s rest areas to save money. Gov. Bob McDonnell was elected a few months later, partly on a promise to reopen the restrooms within 90 days.
Soft.
There was no worse epithet my father could throw at a kid.
He regularly railed against me and my friends, born as we were into unimaginable wealth. Our un-air-conditioned brick ranch and split-level houses, for instance. Our black-and-white Zeniths. Our family cars in the driveway.
He worried that growing up enveloped in this sort of opulence risked making my brother and me spoiled. And soft.
Since we were born too late for that character builder, the Great Depression, my dad seemed determined to recreate it for us. He turned our summer road trip into a grueling endurance contest.
Together, the Dougherty family set out to see America, while facing their fears and growing stronger.
Think Outward Bound in a battered station wagon.
To toughen us up, my father borrowed a pop-up trailer, hitched it to the bumper of our car and set off to remote, bear-infested parks from Maine to West Virginia to North Dakota.
The first thing that needed toughening, apparently, was our bladders.
My father seemed to think that we'd been pampered by living in places with indoor plumbing. So he searched out campgrounds from coast to coast that lacked running water and flush toilets.
Once under way, he stopped the car only if we were running out of gas.
He had an odd and unscientific theory about the need to strengthen young kidneys, lest they fail later in life.
Rest areas were something we blew past on the highway. From the backseat I looked longingly at smiling families skipping toward the facilities. And picnicking at the little sawbuck tables.
Please, oh please, let us stop, we begged from our outposts in the way back.
The answer was always the same.
Negative.
If memory serves, we made it from Dubuque to Denver once without a stop. And in a particularly painful marathon, we drove from somewhere in Wyoming to the Mitchell Corn Palace in South Dakota.
I wept as we whizzed by the Badlands. Even my mother begged him to let us out. But Dad was determined to see this marvelous edifice - made almost entirely of corn - before it closed for the day.
"We're almost there," he muttered as the whining reached a crescendo.
All these years later, I remember just one thing about this Western weirdity: its lavatory.
Why do I tell you this? To prove that I'm ready for this week's almost-thousand-mile road trip with my daughter.
Yep, just the two of us in an SUV packed to the roof with college gear.
Our route will take us through several states - including Virginia, of course - with boarded-up rest areas.
Let others gnash their teeth about this development. I'm ready. It's clear to me now that those childhood road trips were the perfect preparation for Tim Kaine’s Virginia.
