Traveling with Grandma

Sally Thomas

TRAVELING WITH GRANDMA

“You know Matthew Barrows.”

“I don’t know him, Grandma.”

“Well, he owned a saloon in Apache Pass. His nickname was Dead…” We hit another rut, and the van swerved across the road. I wrestled it back into our lane. My arm muscles were screaming, and I wasn’t sure how much longer I would be able to keep the van on the pavement.

“Johnny,” I shouted to my brother over Grandma and the hot wind flowing through the open windows, “it’s your turn at the wheel. I’ve been driving for four hours, and the steering is so loose that I can’t feel my fingers anymore.”

Our grandmother continued uninterrupted. “Anyway, Deadshot spotted Jim Barrick, a ne’er-do-well who owed him money. An argument led to a pistol fight and…”

I had survived my first year of college, and my brother was out of high school for the summer. At my mother’s suggestion --“This will be a great bonding experience,” she said -- we were taking our grandmother to Puerto Penasco, or Rocky Point in English, Mexico for a week of camping on Sandy Beach. I pictured putting final exams behind me, relaxing and tanning on a pristine beach, and learning more about our grandmother’s life and the grandfather we had never known. In the sweltering Phoenix heat Johnny and I stuffed vacation necessities into our mother’s sedan: swimsuits, folding chairs, and sleeping bags, along with gallon milk jugs filled with water and my handwritten list of questions for Grandma. We drove south to our grandmother’s ranch, located twelve miles north of the Arizona/Mexico border. By the time we negotiated the last few miles of dirt road, the sun had set over the Huachuca Mountains in the west and the coyotes were beginning to howl at the stars.

We spent the night in the ranch house basement, falling asleep to the soothing sound of the resident bull snake slithering between the floorboards above us in his quest to rid the house of tasty mice and plump desert pack rats. The next morning the birds were chittering and the guinea hens were cackling. And our grandmother was calling out, “Get up. It’s 5:30. No time to waste.”

Yawning and stumbling about in the gray pre-dawn, my brother and I transferred our bags to Grandma’s faded blue Ford passenger van, added her old canvas tent, a cot, and her gunnysack “suitcase” of supplies. And the three of us were off on our adventure.

The van’s radio was broken, so Grandma’s droning voice relating her interpretation of the shoot-out at the OK Corral in Tombstone provided background noise as Johnny and I took turns muscling the vehicle through a desert devoid of people, traffic, and vegetation. Loose steering and worn-out shocks slowed our progress, but we gradually bumped our way through the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. ”Ooh,” I uttered open-mouthed, “those spindly cacti really do look like organ pipes!”

“And those saguaros kind of look like giant sentinels,” Johnny pointed out.

“What do you think, Grandma?” No response.

The droning continued. “You remember the 1917 Bisbee deportation of …” We passed the Mexico border checkpoint at Lukeville, Arizona with a wave of the officer’s hand and headed onward to the Gulf of California.

The odor of salty sea air permeated the interior of the van before we reached Puerto Penasco, a small coastal town of sunbaked adobe buildings. We stopped at a local market for directions to the beach. “Playa, camping?” I inquired of the proprietor, feeling proud of my command of Gringo Spanish. His Spanish flowed too rapidly for me to follow, but Johnny understood the dramatic hand gestures.

“This way, Sis,” my brother interpreted.

Back in the vehicle, I turned right at the next dusty intersection and drove toward the sea on pot-holed, hard-packed sand, which our grandmother’s trusty vehicle handled in style. Soon Sandy Beach spread out before us, blindingly white against the boiling blue ocean and stretching as far as we could see. There were no high-rise resorts lining the shore, no brightly signed snack bars, and no designated camping sites. I desperately needed a bathroom break after hours on the road, but the rickety building housing the toilets was leaning at a precarious angle and the stench emanating from inside was, well, uninviting. Sal, I thought, this is certainly rustic.

We arrived just in time to set up Grandma’s tent and start preparing dinner before the sun slipped over the ocean horizon. “This tent must weigh at least fifty pounds,” Johnny grunted as we dragged it to the spot we had selected a few feet from the jumbled line of shells, rounded stones, and drying sea grass at the high tide mark. We unzipped the bag and unloaded the contents, but there were no assembly instructions to be found.

Our grandmother was of no help when we quizzed her. “Your cousin Mike always set it up for me,” she remarked. “HE never had an issue, and HE didn’t need instructions.”

“Well, we do, Grandma.”

An hour later it was erected, but questionably secure on the thick sand as there were no tent stakes in the bag, either. “Don’t worry. It’s too heavy for the wind to be an issue. Plus, our sleeping bags will weigh it down,” my brother promised. “And our books.”

Now for dinner. That’s when we discovered we had no food. Other than five Granny Smith apples our mother had thoughtfully tucked into my duffle bag. Somehow, Johnny and I understood our grandmother would be bringing the groceries and cooking utensils. And she had been under the impression that we would provide all the essentials. Her gunnysack, we learned, contained a pillow, a blanket, a swimsuit, and not one scrap of food. What money we had would barely cover the fuel to get us home, with nothing left over.

Our little group must have been looking desperate as we faced the possibility of starvation, because a tanned and smiling American couple leaving their campsite offered us an unopened ten-pound bag of potatoes and a bundle of firewood. “They will be confiscated at the border if you don’t take them.” We took them.

In the gathering dusk my brother scoured deserted campfire sites and found an empty thirty-six-ounce coffee can, perfect for boiling water. We were good to go. Grandma declared, with a hint of relief in her voice, “That many potatoes can easily feed all three of us for a week.”

During the week I chose to embrace the unrelenting sunshine hatless and without sunscreen, hoping to return with a golden tan. Johnny, though, had the perfect brimmed sun hat. When our Uncle Page, one of Grandma’s sons, returned from fighting in World War II, he brought with him a rifle, which was now hanging above our grandmother’s fireplace, and a Marine-issued pressed-fiber pith helmet. My brother loved that helmet and got our grandmother’s permission to bring it along.

Every day of our vacation began with Grandma waking us just as shafts of sunlight were beginning to warm the beach. “Get up. It’s 5:30.”

My brother started a fire and nestled the coffee can filled with water and three potatoes among the smoldering logs before we strolled through the soft powdery sand barefoot, exploring tide pools teaming with marine life. I verbalized what all of us were thinking. “Keep moving and we can ignore our grumbling empty stomachs.”

“Don’t be peckish, Sally. Think of the people who have nothing to eat all day,” Grandma said.

“I’m still hungry.”

Then we returned to our camp to have lunch – one-third of an apple each as the potatoes were only half cooked – take a swim, relax and read until the potatoes were soft enough to chew.

Johnny wore the helmet the entire time, his long, black hair cascading down his back. “Grandma, it’s perfect for shading my face.” More importantly for a teenager, I thought, it looked very cool.

We each had a different take on the definition of swimming. I loved to float in the ocean in my bikini, letting the saltwater flow over my sunburned body and my short brown curls ripple around my face. My brother was more adventurous, exploring further out to sea with his snorkel and flippers. Grandma donned a black, one-piece swimsuit dress complete with a skirt, circa 1930, which now hung loosely on her bony frame, and clutched a large rock at the water’s edge, letting herself be battered about by the breaking waves. Her swimsuit expanded and deflated with each swell as her body was thrown violently up and down and white foam sprayed sand over her head. “This is better than any massage,” she explained when we questioned her sanity.

Which is what we told the concerned campers who approached our campsite asking, “Is that old lady in danger? Should we rescue her?”

“No. She’s just enjoying a free massage.”

Our grandmother was always Ranch Grandma to her more than thirty grandchildren. She acquired that title by owning a large cattle ranch, the beginning of which involved her claiming a homestead of 640 acres in 1933. Through the years she expanded her holdings with purchased and federally leased land. Grandma was tough and determined. The sight of Mexican Federales patrolling Sandy Beach armed with rifles, complete with bayonets and ammunition belts crisscrossing their chests, did not deter her from greeting them each morning. Nor did their dark, unsmiling eyes and lack of response.

“Good morning, officers,” she said cheerfully. “How are you on this beautiful day? Have you checked the tide pools yet?”

I am not proud to admit Johnny and I hid in our tent during such encounters.

Grandma was also opinionated. The reading material she brought for relaxation consisted of non-fiction accounts of life in southeastern Arizona. I packed mystery thrillers and a variety of fashion magazines, which I carefully stowed out of her sight beneath my sleeping bag. Grandma slept on her cot under the stars for the week, the rhythm of the sea lulling her to sleep. She only entered the tent to change into her swim outfit. I thought I was safe until she spied the corner of a Vogue magazine peeking out from under the blankets during one such clothing change.

“Grandma, I have some questions I would like to ask you about your youth,” I shouted from a safe distance.

“Sally,” she called from inside the tent, ignoring me. “Why are you reading this ridiculous fluff? I thought you were intelligent. Do you want your brain to stagnate?”

My brother was more careful in hiding his science fiction novels.

As we counted down the days left of vacation, looming in our minds was the US/Mexico border crossing on our return journey. US Customs agents had gained a reputation in the 1970s for being willing to tear apart the interior of any vehicle in their search for drugs and then leave the mess for the occupants to clean up. Johnny and I were tired, our skin crisped to a lovely nutmeg tint, and very hungry. We did not want to spend an hour repacking the van in the searing heat of the midday sun. Saturday morning, as I inched forward in the line of cars at the checkpoint, my brother tucked his hair up into the pith helmet in an effort to appear clean cut. I begged Grandma to remain silent when we were questioned about our trip. “Grandma, don’t say a word. I’ll take care of it.”

“Ma’am,” asked the agent at the booth when we stopped, “how long were you in Mexico?”

“One week,” I replied. “We were camping with our grandmother at Puerto Penasco.”

“Sir,” came the voice from the passenger seat, “do you happen to know my son, James Bakarich? He works for the Border Patrol in Washington state.”

“I’m afraid not,” said the agent.

“Well, he is my oldest boy. I have a little ranch near Bisbee. I raised all my children there. My name is Grace McCool. Another of my sons, Michael Bakarich, is a Colonel in the Army. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. And do you know anything about the history of Cochise County?”

From behind me an audible groan escaped my brother’s lips. “Here we go,” he whispered.

“Maybe you’ve met my daughter, Guenn, who teaches in Sierra Vista,” she continued.

“Can’t say I have.”

“Have you by chance read Gunsmoke? I’m the author. Or maybe So Said the…”

“That’s interesting, Ma’am,” the agent interrupted. “You’re free to go.”

As I depressed the clutch and shifted into first gear, Grandma gave a subtle wink. “Now, that’s how you prevent a vehicle search,” she declared.

We had a glorious week. The water was warm, the weather was perfect, and we got along well. The tent even remained upright in the stiff coastal breeze. If nothing else, those mystery novels were good for anchoring the tent. We also each lost approximately ten pounds. It wasn’t until I was daydreaming when Johnny took over driving duties that I realized Grandma, despite my prompting questions, never talked about her youth or mentioned our grandfather. What a secretive woman she was.