Secret Georgia Trips

It was 5 a.m. when my alarm went off.  The usual place of my alarm clock was beside my bed, and it had been moved so I was incapable of simply hitting snooze—in fact the alarm was not by my bed at all, it was across the room on my desk.  

In the summer when I was growing up , my father used to come into my room and the crack of dawn and tell me to get dressed.  

My father had a planned a trip, and we both piled into his car and set out form some destination.  Those destinations were usually a day trip.  

We tore across the countryside in his station wagon.  Our destination was some obscure place, an animal show, a fortune teller, or maybe a dilapidated faire that hadn’t run sine the 1950’s,  We bonded a lot in those days.

The noise was incessant and though my bed was comfortable, the alarm’s shrill cry pierced the walls of my brain and it forced me to get up.  With as much speed as possible I stumbled across the floor—barefooted to reach the alarm on the other side of my room.

That was when I met my mother, who had take her position next to my door.  Her eyes met mine—she was already in business mode—she was already ready to lay down the law this morning.  

“You’re gonna look for a job today, right?”  she asked but her tone was not that of a question.  It was more of  command anc I nodded mostly out of fear and less out of desire.

“Good,” she said in her own way which was more, “You will do this,” than “please do this.”  

She pressed a mug of coffee into my hand.  “I’m leaving in 15 minutes, and I’m taking your key from you.” She added, noting I would be pounding pavement today in search of something. 

That 15 minutes was spent in a frenzy, trying to put on a passable suit, and meeting her downstairs.  

In a record time even for me, I showered, shaved and got ready—I was downstairs just as we both left the house and she locked the door behind me.

On Sunday My father wakes me up about 6 am as usual.  He has already mapped out for us our day while I was sleeping—and he pushes a bagel and a coffee into my hand.  The car is filled with a few "things:”  a picnic bag, a first aid kit, a road map and a cooler full of sodas, water and packed "lunches."     

My father plans our trips to the letter, and right now, he seems to be perusing a travel brochure for a place called Oconee, Georgia.  “This will be our best trip yet,” he says and eagerly backs the station wagon out of the driveway.

At 16 this is my first time drinking coffee.  My father goes down to a place called Katz bakery and has the bagels made fresh—these are his gift to me since I am no longer eight or even twelve.  

This is the 7^th year since we started taking small trips together, and I have basically resigned myself to not wanting to see the rarest parts of Georgia…  I was able to sleep when I was younger, my face pressed against the vinyl seat, but now, I sit and drink the warm coffee from the thermos—there are few cups that can handle the weight of coffee in 88.  We drink from plastic—we drive in the early morning before traffic becomes hectic—before it will be too late to drive together anymore.

A few cars drive the road at this time—all of them have one driver—all of them are slower than before.. 

Our car seems to be slowing down more than speeding up.  My father hands me the road map, and I try to make sense of the squiggles and road signs.  I am already sick of this trick.  

We will probably eat bologna sandwiches and drive home disappointed—but I am already disappointed—partially because I am not eight anymore.

I hold that in and refrain from telling my father.  That’s when we approach a roadblock and a county Sheriff asks us to stop.

  

In my earliest memory my father had given me a red plastic mug with a symbol for He-man on it.  It had come from a metallic He-man lunch box which had a distinctive drawing of He man fighting Beast Man.  Skeletor was not in the fight except to point and say hey, "He-Man my stupid troglodyte bitch Beastman will fight you--not me."  

Skeletor always ran away "waah waahing"--even in the cartoons,  but the thermos which despite having He-Man on the cover is very effective at carrying coffee.

So, without to much further in formation, we both would drink coffee in the morning when we went on our trips.  I was no longer eight, but I also needed my mother’s special coffee to stay awake.  So when I went with my father in later years—I drank from my He-Man thermos and helped him navigate the back woods of Georgia’s highway system.  Sometimes I felt a little like He-Man riding along with my adult coffee and navigating. Later I felt more like a schmuck with a He-Man Thermos, but I hadn’t had the nerve to tell my dad I was tired of the secret summer trips.

In one of the last years we made these trips, I can remember an urgency in my Dad’s driving.  It was not enough to just go and see the world’s giant Peanut farm or pick blueberries from some secret grove—he worried that I was enjoying myself—the truth is I had started to hate these trips.  The Truth was hard to say—but all of this became truest the day my father was pulled over by some low-level-Barney-Fife-deputy trying to make his ticket quota.  

The truth happened on a lonely stretch of road called 76.

The first half of my journey