The Long Road

Alchemy and Algorithms

By John McFetrick

It’s late August 1977, and the humidity is as thick as hot grease. Dad’s Town and Country station wagon is packed with suitcases, deflated water-wings, snorkels, kid-sized frog-feet flippers, damp towels, sleeping bags, my bug-bitten and sunburned brother and I, and whatever was left of our parent’s patience. Melting popsicle sticky on my hands, and my t-shirt is a purple Rorschach stain attracting bees or wasps or whatever stingy things flew in through the open window, and now it’s causing a minor panic. There was a bee sting earlier in the summer, and the target swelled up like an overstuffed frankfurter. No one needs that again. Not now. We have a six hour drive in front of us.

We haven’t pulled out of the driveway, and the mood has already soured. We’re late leaving on account of a minor tantrum about leaving too early, a game of find-me executed by everyone under age 11, much to the consternation of everyone over age 12; so that’s me, a couple of cousins and one brother against two sets of parents and one somewhat aggravated grandmother, the matriarch who has made clear that I must change my shirt.

Dad shoves an 8-track of Alfred Hitchcock ghost stories into the car stereo and turns up the volume and soon everyone is calm, I’ve peeled out of my shirt and into something resembling clean, and my brother, four years my junior, no longer seems bothered that his orange popsicle is now in drink form in a paper cup smelling faintly of coffee.

Turning onto Cedar Avenue from the house where my father and his siblings grew up, the house his father built sixty years earlier, the house of all my early childhood memories, the ol’ sport says, “Off we goooo.”

I can hear shouting in the coming from the house where we left my cousin and aunt and uncle waving at us as we pulled away, and dad hoots the horn twice as is his custom whenever we leave good old 91.

Soon, we make the loop onto Autoroute 20, and it’s at that point when the whole adventure becomes a frantic circus.

There’s an unfamiliar noise above our heads, something moving from one end of the car to the other, front to back, and then it’s gone. I turn to see what’s what, dad checks the rear view, and his wife shoulder-checks and now there’s interior noise. Dad is averse to swearing, but my step-mother isn’t, and bright flourishes light up her shock. The source of this mystery now revealed, lies split open and gutted, its innards flapping in the rush as cars and trucks and motorcycles flash by at speeds likely above the limit. There’s something about Montreal drivers and pedestrians on busy roadways.

Dad pulls to the shoulder and hits the hazard lights and my parents bolt onto the highway and horns doppler as cars whip by.

Two adults rushing to collect the contents of the suitcase that was left on the roof of the car. A puce nightgown flutters across lanes like a wounded ghost. I’ll never forget that sight as long as I live, seared into my memory like a hot brand on damp flesh. Dad’s slacks stagger across lanes in a whirlwind dance. He collects the burst suitcase and gathers the contents and puts it all together and tucks under his arm and runs like a linebacker to the car and I’m sure I heard him issue mild profanity.

Something must have crossed the barrier separating east-bound and west-bound traffic, and my step mother stands there deciding whether to retrieve that something or leave it behind. After what seemed like forever, she abandons the something and gets back into the car and doesn’t hold back. A florid and emotional reaction. I may have learned new words. The entire episode was dramatic.

This month’s photograph was taken in L’Île Perrot, a wee town just off the Island of Montreal. What we’re seeing is a family-owned and operated Dairy Queen, and it’s been there since my dad was a teenager. It was and is still a landmark that signals our proximity to the house where he and his siblings grew up, and when I see it from the east-bound lane, I know we’re close. Seeing it cued our excitement that a long drive was coming to a close, and when I saw it last (when I took this photograph), I still got that sense of thrill.

Of course, seeing it from the west-bound lane confirmed that whatever occasion warranted a family visit was concluded. In the case of 1977 me during that sticky late August, it was the end of summer, that the school year was about to start, and that whatever fun and mischief the kids got into was behind us.

On the day the photograph was taken, I’m filled with nostalgia and a minor sense of loss. Earlier that day, my dad and brother and I passed through the old neighbourhood, past the house we still call 91, and discovered that the huge lot four generations knew as home had been carved into smaller lots. There’s a new house where there was once a garage, stable, tool shed and raccoon-claimed attic filled with dog sleds and horse tack, a headless mannequin draped in canvas that to the family weans was surely a ghost trapped in the shadows of time. The house my grandfather built seems tiny, average, stripped of whatever magic swirled during boisterous family occasions that brought us all together in celebration. Not only that, but by carving up that lot, the municipality of Point Claire determined that the house numbers needed an upgrade: street number 91 was re-designated as 93. The family home is at this moment known as #93, and we are scandalized. Everyone had something to say about it (recall last month’s article: dad’s 90^th birthday and his complete and utter astonishment that his sons flew out from the west coast to come home to celebrate his milestone birthday), gathered as we were around the family dining table where wine flowed and old stories we told, embellished and exaggerated and made legend, my aunt proclaimed, “I almost fell out of my chair when I drove by and saw that outrage.”

All that said and done, 91 assumes a mythological stature within family lore. 91 might have changed, but that doesn’t mean that 91 isn’t still, now and forever, the center of the McFetrick universe, a reference point for all my childhood memories, just as that Dairy Queen aside Highway 20 signaled either the beginning or the end of holiday glory.