Road Warriors Post Apocalypse

Double lane roads, behemoth automobiles, family packed shoulder to shoulder front seat and back on Sunday afternoons, life just too perfect back in the day. Remembering back when can certainly curl up the corners of my mouth. A tradition back in my day, Sunday afternoons after the usual Sunday spread at Granny Bowies and a quick nap by the men folk, Daddy would pile us into his car for that afternoon drive to destination unknown most of the time.

             In the late fifties to mid sixties the luxurious Chevy Impala had been our chariot and the best selling automobile in the United States; then in 1966 we graduated to the Chevy Caprice, it breaking onto the scene in 65 to replace the Impala at the top of the Chevy food chain. These classic vintage rides would have held their own against today’s family vans and SUVs. Make no mistake; we were strutting in high cotton. Calling shotgun when I was usually the only kid on board seldom guaranteed me a window seat. Often I’d settle for climbing over the backseat rest stretching out in the back window; no seatbelts were required to prevent me from becoming a human projectile. Bouncing from front to back seat, I could even sit in daddy’s lap while he drove and help him man the wheel without fear of incarceration by the police.

            To escape boredom on long drives we had to become creative. Counting cows served as one venue. Someone picked the right side of the road and the other inherited the left side; the game was simple, count cows in the pastures on your side of the road.       If they were a lot of cows, you had to count fast; guessing mostly at how many speckled the horizon. If you passed a cemetery on your side of the road you lost your cow count and had to start over. To this day I don’t understand the cemetery-cow correlation.

            Another deviation from cow counting was car counting. Pick a make and identify and count them as you met them on the highway. Makes and models were easy to identify back then. You could tell a Chevy from a Ford, an Oldsmobile from Pontiac or Buick. Today I can’t tell one from the other because everyone makes a knock off of everyone else. Even a Chevy and Ford don’t look like a Chevy or Ford. The Chevy and Ford got first dibs back in my simple world because more of them were on the highways. If you came to a garage on your side of the road, you lost your cars and had to start over. That made much better sense than the cow-cemetery rule. Who ever heard of burying cows in cemetery? On the old Tarzan movies, elephants had a graveyard but not milk cows!

              My grandson does a deviation on this with VW Bugs where you call it when you see a bug and keep a running tally on how many you identify first. Unlike ours, the rules tend to change every time it is played to sway the count in my grandson’s favor. If a dealership shows up on your side, say buy to your count. Plus, he can identify every make and model of any vehicle from ten car lengths away. I still don’t know how he does it. He can’t explain it to me either except he’s a car fanatic.

            The Pop Eye game left a sore spot I must say. This game could only be played at night. The first person to spot an automobile with a missing head light shouted Pop Eye and was granted an opportunity to punch his opponent in the shoulder. A deviation to this was when riding with female companions you could opt for a kiss instead of a punch. I liked that version much better. Sore puffy lips beat an aching shoulder every time.

            Sunday afternoon drives weren’t always preoccupied by fun and games. Often it included a drive out to Culbreth’s Garage to view wrecked vehicles, those often resulting in a fatality. I still don’t understand the fascination and lure to view a crashed up automobile that might have caused someone to die but it was sure a big deal back then. We might even ride to the accident scene if daddy knew the location. Local accidents, especially those that resulted in death, dismemberment, or near death were the talk of the town so first hand observations made for good conversation I suppose. Sirens and ambulance alarms always perked daddy’s interest. I’m certainly glad I didn’t inherent that trait.

            To continue the morbid trend, our afternoon drives might just include a ride to the local cemeteries; Long Cane or one of the others near by. The clan would wander through the grave sites identifying and visiting the dearly departed, some new, and others long gone from this world. Swapping old stories and fond memories ensued followed by tears and nose blowing. This exercise reminds me of another weird attraction; people visiting the funeral home and gazing into the coffin stating how the person doesn’t look like them. Of course they don’t; they’re dead. Dead doesn’t look like the living. My take away from the cemetery besides climbing on the stones and being yelled at was the seeing the gigantic yellow grasshoppers that seemed to reside there. These monsters were three or four inches long, red winged and formidable, and I so dubbed them cemetery grasshoppers because that was the only place I ever saw them. They were huge, winged and hissed when you grabbed them. I was fascinated by these marvelous creations. Maybe they were reincarnated lost souls.

            Sometimes we did actually have a predetermined destination like visiting the kin folks, most of them being brothers or sisters of my grandparents. We might end up in Iva, Anderson, Greenwood, Level Land, Due West or Ninety Six, all good old southern South Carolina small town venues. Running joke when mentioning Due West, an actual college town showcasing Erskine, was due west of what? They even have bumper stickers stating just that.

            Speaking of kin folk, going to see Granny Holmes was almost guaranteed at least once a month. Granny Holmes was actually the mama of my Granny Bowie, my mama’s mama. The stereotype unfortunately of an old southern woman, she was about five feet tall, extremely bell shaped, wore her hair in a little bun behind her head, sported an almost to her ankles dress accented by an apron that appeared to be tied under her arm pits and was toothless except for two upper canines ragged and off to one side of her mouth.  Like a nomad, she moved about living most of the time with one of her children, never ever working anywhere that I can remember. We’d always take her the Sunday newspaper and she’d read it out loud to us even though it had previously been read. Funny thing, she could read but neither of my grandparents could. In return we were usually served up a meal of hot cornbread and fresh buttermilk or biscuits and gravy, sometimes served with greens or butterbeans; good eating makes me want to slap my mouth. Granny Holmes lived into her 90’s.

            My particular favorite thing about those traditional Sunday afternoon rides had to be the pit stops at places like Cream Land, The Orange Spot, The Dixie, The Caravan, Mister Quick, Besto, the Come-Back, Bantam Chef or Pete’s Drive-In, all contingent on what area of the county or surrounding towns we ended up. I had to make choices. Did I want an ice cream, a root beer float, milk shake or boiled peanuts or maybe a comic book or toy if my parents would cough up the doe? And if I so chose an ice cream, would it be a soft swirl in a cone possibly with a hard layer of chocolate, a cream cycle, a banana pop or my favorite, a push-up. Unlike the cemetery, I had landed in heaven on earth. Being a kid was a wonderful thing just for those special perks.

            The afternoon concluded by us returning to granny and papa’s house and eating a supper’s portion of the Sunday meal. Back then almost all the fixings were left in the original cooking containers and stored back inside the oven. Lids were placed back on top of the assorted pots, tin foil protected everything else. Only the potato salad or left over freshly cut tomatoes and cucumbers were placed inside the refrigerator.  No one ever seemed to worry about food poisoning, salmonella or any of those dreaded inflictions that people worry about today. I don’t remember anyone ever becoming sick from eating food left out for half the day and my grand parents’ house was not air conditioned. A fan in the kitchen widow blowing outwards sucked in the outside air through other open windows supplying the ventilation for the entire four room mill house.

            Now on the backside of fifty, I’ve lost touch with those traditional Sunday afternoons. After early church and a sit down bought breakfast on the way home, my Sundays are typically spent dozing and watching sports on television in couch potato mode while my wife reads her book. Occasionally we’ll go out, mostly to shop or I might play around of golf. We never just hop in the car and ride destination unknown exploring roads we’ve never traveled or sites we’ve never seen.

            Living in a tourist town, Myrtle Beach, automobile accidents occur hourly so we’d never keep up with viewing the wrecked cars. Besides, with so many garages, we’d never know where to go to view the carnage. As for cemeteries, that one never caught on with me any way and today’s cemeteries are just flat acreage with no tomb stones and markers flush to the ground. They don’t hold the same charisma and bet they don’t have those gigantic grasshoppers. Quick stops are on every corner now and don’t hold that same appeal as visiting the Orange Spot open market or the old timey ice cream shop with the outside walk up window. Our ice cream comes from the grocery store and never in a cone.

            Man, I didn’t realize how badly I missed those days until writing this. When one gets old one tends to look back on stuff one took for granted. Simple was better. No hustle, no bustle, care free and loving it, too bad I don’t have a time machine. To my deceased mama and daddy, granny and papa, and great grand and all those kin folks alive and kicking or not, I wish you were here and we were there! Back when was a good then.