LITMIR.BIZ

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       The Memory Well

      IN THE SUMMER of 1973, my parents announced our family was going to take a trip. A trip, mind you. They didn’t use the word vacation because, I suspect, it implied things they weren’t willing to commit to, such as our safety and comfort. The plan was that in mid-December eight of us—mother, father, and six children aged three to thirteen, five boys and one girl—were going to pile in our faux-wood-panelled Ford Country Squire station wagon and drive through the middle of the continent from Calgary to Mexico City, then turn around and come back along the west coast. Six weeks. Eight thousand kilometres. Through the high snowy passes of Montana and Utah. The emptiness of Arizona. The heat of the central Mexican desert. I still find this next fact hard to square with a memory of sane and loving parents, but once we got past Utah we were going to camp. Every night in a three-room eighty-pole oilskin canvas cave that when rolled up was roughly the size and weight of a small refrigerator. It took four of us two hours to put up and almost as long to take down, and had once caused my father to suffer a perforated hernia. I loved that tent, but I hated it, too.

      We set off on a cold and gloomy December morning. The canvas tent and most of our luggage was roped to the roof of the car and covered with a tarp. The trip started as every trip did, whether it was to the local mall or Mexico City—a jostling for seats, superior position, bragging rights. No single seat was really that much better than any other, but we fought over them because they were something to fight over; usually the fighting was nothing but shoving and pushing, though often it escalated into rabbit punches, eye pokes, head butts, and nut chops. The monarch’s throne was the space between the middle row of forward-facing seats and the set of facing jump seats at the back; the throne wasn’t very comfortable, but there was room enough for just one child, which made it the only spot really worth having (and this was long before the days when seat belts were mandatory; in fact, I don’t remember if that old wagon even had seat belts). At thirteen, as the oldest child, I believed myself entitled to the throne, but I was slow getting to the car and when I tried to rough up my brother Keith for the spot, he and my brother

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