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TwitThisThe Standard Road Trip
My daughter, Sidney, and I were in a rental car the size of a Pepsi can heading from Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon when it happened.We had driven nearly eight hours without incident. The night was foggy, misty and still -- beautiful. It was just as I had imagined Arizona nights to be when I originally planned the trip. We were only 20 minutes from our hotel when I hit the deer.
Like a phantom in the moonlight it appeared, bounding away from the safety of a hillside thicket and aimed at my headlights.
After a brake-locked skid of about 30 yards -- and after I began breathing again -- from the back seat I heard Sidney ask, "What happened?" Those were the first words I'd heard her speak in about four hours.
Our trip took place at the end of Sidney's winter break, which marks the halfway point of sixth grade. We hadn't taken a road trip like this for over two years, and it would probably be our final vacation together -- just papa and daughter -- before I got remarried.
The last time we hit the open road, Sidney was 9 and chirped on mile after mile about school, movies and books. Now she was almost 12 and hesitant about divulging her thoughts. She still talks for hours -- but not to me. To friends, and mostly on the Internet.
So after loading up the car, she jumped in the back seat, put on her headphones and buried her head in a book about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So much for those long conversations about her future that I had envisioned.
"Here we go," I said, but she didn't hear a word from her nest in the back seat. Her cache of CDs held her attention.
Even when we stopped for lunch at Lake Havasu to see the London Bridge, she was quiet. I explained how the magnificent stone bridge that used to span London's Thames River had made its way to western Arizona, but her eyes were glued to a group of teenagers dancing and screaming. She would have walked right out of her skin just to be with them.
Back on the road, I often glanced in my rearview mirror to steal a look at her silently singing or pondering her book. When she caught me looking, she'd mouth, "What?" The chasm separating the front and back seats of the car seemed as broad as the Grand Canyon.
I turned onto Arizona 64, a smooth stretch of highway leading straight to the hotel. The ponderosa pines of the Kaibab National Forest lined the road like quiet sentinels. Occasionally, the moon and a handful of stars shone through the clouds. My senses felt heightened with the surrounding beauty. I slowed the car.
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