A Blast from the Past

So, I was cleaning out my email, trying to save some memories before I shut it down, and I came across this hilariously awful memory that I just felt the need to revisit. Sent May 26, 2006, entitled "Let Me Tell You a Little About Texas":


"I don't like it! Except for the fact that a few wonderful people I know grew up there and the fact that they have a city named Celeste, there are no redeeming qualities to Texas. And there are even fewer saving graces to relay about our trip down there (and even less about the trip back!). Here's the reader's digest version of our trip:

1) Traveling with an 18-month-old is not as awful as everyone else says it is, except in extreme heat, which Arkansas and Texas just happen to have ample amounts of this time of year. With our air conditioner in a funk, and it being 97 degrees outside nearly always, we were miserable! Hot, sweaty, stinky, tired, miserable. Especially Caida. Which meant, especially us.

2) Texas is an insanely long state. It should be its own little country. It only took us 18 hours to get to Dallas that first day...it took us another 12 to get to Mission. And the roads down there were somewhat confusing, especially near the border, and no one understood our questions because pretty much no one spoke English as their first language. Compound that WITH the heat, and, well, you can imagine. No. No, you can't. But try. :)

3) I almost died on the side of the road. We were driving around one of the major cities in Texas when we drove through some sort of chemical cloud, and since our vent was on it blew the chemicals right into our faces. Cerene wasn't too affected, just coughed a little bit, but it got into my eyes and stung SO BADLY that I just teared up like crazy and could barely keep my eyes open. Mind you, I was the one driving the car, and at 80 miles an hour in the second lane on the left of four-lane traffic. Then, the tears dislodged some sinuses that had been built up from my recent sickness, and I started choking on it. Gross, I know. And dangerous. And then I started feeling like I was going to pass out. So Cerene had to navigate me through traffic and tell me when I was getting too close to the cement median and all that until I could pull over to a somewhat safe stop and put on my hazard lights and wipe my face with a clean napkin and wait for it all to pass and settle. It was scary.

4) When we got to the impound lot, the guys there almost didn't let us have the car. They kept asking all sorts of questions since apparently they didn't understand the affadavit we had legally allowing us to pick the car up in our mom's name. And then some guy had come in that morning, tall and thin with dark hair, to pick up the car and my brother's personal belongings (they didn't give 'em to him, since he had no proof of ownership, but still...). We were afraid it was Seth coming to get his car. It turned out to be this employee of the place that claimed he was Seth's cousin sent by the family to get his personal belongings. We have no cousins down there. We had to verify his signature, which we'd never seen before, and the guy acted really mad like he was going to fire him if he ever saw him again. Yeah. Craziness. But we DID eventually get the car and they were nice enough to put on the temporary license plate and check the oil for us.

5) Driving back all day the next day was even harder, because we couldn't switch off. But we didn't have enough money to just chill in a hotel every night for a week and take our time, we had a budget and a schedule, so we drove until we could barely drive anymore. Oh yeah, and our phones and walkie-talkies both died this day. So the only communication we had was visual. We created a honking system for certain messages, but other than that, we just drove really close to each other. We got about 4 hours away from my grandparents' house in Carbondale, Illinois (somewhere around Heth, Arkansas), and just got done debating whether or not we should stop for the night or keep going (it was about nine o'clock). We decided to keep going, save ourselves $50. Right then, I saw a car swerve really fast between my sister's and my car, and flashing lights in my rear-view mirror, and since we had been going about ten over the speed limit, I thought, "Great. My first speeding ticket, and I don't even know where the paperwork is for this car that isn't in my name...I hope Cerene sees that it's me and pulls over!" I pulled over, the cop tapped on my window, and informed me that my temporary license plate wasn't displaying the name of the state of Indiana very clearly (like I had anything to do with it!), and he was very sorry but he was going to have to issue me a warning. He started asking questions, and I was answering them but he couldn't hear the answers because of the traffic so he had me come back to his car and started asking all these questions, and I'm totally freaked out so I'm just rambling off pretty much our entire life story and the whole situation and everything, babbling on like an idiot so I don't cry. I was REALLY tired. After hearing the whole story, shaking his head the whole time, he asked, "Well, are you sure there's no drugs in the car anymore?" I told him we passed through border patrol with the dogs and everything and they didn't bark at me, and he asked if they checked the car good, and I thought he said hood, so I said, "No, they just sniffed at the trunk." So he asked if he could check the car for illegal drugs, and I said, "Sure!" He was poking around for about ten minutes. Then another cop pulled up behind him and started poking around, too.

6) I went up to see Cerene to let her know about what's going on, and she's crying hysterically, afraid that I got a speeding ticket that none of us can afford right now, tired from driving for 16 hours that day, mostly with a crying 18-month-old. I'm trying to comfort her, which is mostly working, when the cops come up to us and tell us that there is marijuana all over the car, homemade pipe joints, the works, plus empty alcohol bottles, and then they proceed to interrogate me about whose car is it really?, am I really just helping my brother out?, where did I get the temporary license plate?, how old am I?, blah blah blah, and then going to question Cerene to verify my answers, and ask a few of their own, like how is this car and the other car your mom's?, is there any marijuana in this car, too?, are you intoxicated, ma'am?, then why are you crying and hyperventilating so much?, and could you please step out of the car? Which, of course, we're parked on this ledge thing so she trips off that and they're even more suspicious about her drinking. Which, of course, she hadn't been. Then the nice cop that had pulled me over started to show me all the marijuana in there and how to make a homemade pipe joint, and said, "You have to admit, the story is pretty wild," to which I could only reply, "I know, if I didn't know my family, I probably wouldn't believe it either, but it's all true." He said, "Technically, I'm supposed to arrest you, because you are in posession of an illegal drug, but hearing your story and talking with you, you don't seem like the kind of person that has the demeaner of someone that does these things, and I don't think you could make up that wild story on the spot, so I'm going to let you go." Then, he gives me BACK the marijuana and tells me "You really should get rid of that, though, if you get pulled over by another cop for that license plate he might not be so nice, just tell him you have all the papers and marijuana and stuff in the trunk, have a nice night," and then he drove off. I was stunned and shaking and confused. Why did they let me take it? Why wasn't I in prison? Should we still try to get to my grandparents' house that night or spend yet more money to get a hotel? Why didn't I think to check the car beforehand? But Cerene was still shaken up even more than me and Caida was nearly dead to the world at this point, so we decided to get a cheap motel, the first we came across, and get some sleep and finish the short drive in the morning.

7) So we drive for about seven miles or so and we see a single sign for lodging, a motel 8, and just about start crying for sheer relief and exhaustion (being nearly arrested in a marijuana bust really takes it out of you), so we pull over to that exit, and lo and behold, it was a stop we just happened to stop at on our way down to Texas. We saw that as a sign. My sister goes to check us in, and the only guy there was a MAJOR jerk-wad, wouldn't let us use our mom's credit card, wouldn't let us pay with out-of-state checks, wouldn't let us make a long-distance phone call even if we paid him, and it didn't matter, anyway, since he couldn't take any payments over the phone, which I understand is all probably company policy but he could've been nicer about it, he didn't offer any suggestions or expressions of sympathy or pity or anything, didn't direct us to an ATM (we drove around until we found one on our own), then as I was walking up and he looked right at me he locked the door and put up a sign that said "Please use the night entrance at the side door" and pointed at me to his right while smiling this smug little smile I just wanted to slap off his face into next Thursday, I was SO mad. I got us a room, finally, over-priced for the craphole it was, and we just sank onto the floor and the beds and slept. We woke up the next morning, and Cerene had a mutant cockroach in her shirt and flipped out and beat it down. I took off the license plate and cut off the bottom of it and fixed it so that "Indiana" was clearly displayed, we cleaned out the car from top to bottom, throwing away everything my brother had in there except a white t-shirt I used as a rag and some CD's, and we drove to my grandparent's house. After that is all a blur, because it was so good to be with people we knew who had the means and the know-how to take care of us for a while, we just slept through the afternoon, played with Caida (who has never been so happy in her entire life), ate TONS of food (a ritual at my grandpa's), went shopping, let my grandpa clean and check out and fill up both cars, ate some more, went back to sleep, and woke up, spent the morning with them again, and drove home in just enough time to go to "The Thing" that night (Sunday) at the branch president's house and fall down nearly dead with stories and exhaustion.


It was crazy. It was the kind of trip that only a Darland could stumble into. It was the kind of trip that sours you on people and road trips and heat and entire states until you just want to crawl into a hole and hibernate for about a year while the crazy events untangle themselves and disintegrate and get blown away in the winds of time. But we start work officially this week, and Caida can't feed herself, and my mom's work goes on strike next week and she's going to be locked up in ALCOA until it's over, so there's just no rest for any of us. Oh well. Life goes on, the world keeps spinning, little miracles sprout up now and again, and the whole thing is already beginning to fade into a distant memory. We didn't get arrested. I got off that whole ordeal with a license plate warning. We didn't have any car problems. We had enough money to keep ourselves pretty well-hydrated. We didn't get lost enough we couldn't be found. We survived. And that, my friends, is the whole story. It is good to be home."