🎧 390: They spent . . .

     They spent the next two weeks stocking the trailer. Herb had, of course, outfitted the trailer with gadgets of many sorts. Some were practical, like the two refrigerators. A larger one held their stores, and a smaller one held things needed every day, like cream for coffee, and food for the day, transferred from the larger. With careful planning — and Lorna provided the careful planning — there would be no need to open the larger one more than once every other day. Others were romantic, like the record player. Herb bought and restored a portable windup-record player, not just because it wouldn’t require electricity, but because he and Lorna could carry it away from the trailer, to have “Lake Serenity Serenade” with them if they walked off into a grove of trees to find a pretty spot to eat lunch and field-test any animation ideas that might come to them on the road.
     Toward the end of the two weeks, late enough so that people wouldn’t be able to make a fuss over them, they said their good-byes. That was that. They put their furniture and furnishings in storage in the Hapgood Brothers’ warehouse, left the selling of their house to Bert and Ella and told them to keep whatever money it brought them, and left. They got out of Babbington with shocking speed; at least, it shocked me. It seemed as if, once they had decided to go, none of what they would have to leave behind mattered to them any longer. I couldn’t understand how they could sell that house; it was so full of Herb’s gadgets — disappearing bookshelves, clattering dumbwaiters, the cooling system that pumped groundwater through salvaged Studebaker radiators, the weather station on the garage roof, the mailbox on a rope and pulley so that Herb could reel the mail in from the breakfast table. How could they let all of that go, how could they leave their friends, leave Ella, leave me? They did, and they made it look easy. Now, I think that, subconsciously, they were in search of something that they knew they couldn’t get in Babbington. They would never have put it this way — I doubt that they would ever have even thought to put it this way — but I think it was artistic freedom.
     They followed a zigzag route that took them through a number of small towns that Lorna chose for their names: Candor, New York; Freedom, Independence, and Paradise, Pennsylvania; Leroy and Huber Heights, Ohio; Pershing, Indiana; Piper City and Lovejoy, Illinois; Baring, Amoret, and Peculiar, Missouri; Hope and Paradise, Kansas; Ovid, Loveland, and Model, Colorado; Story and Paradise Valley, Wyoming; Epiphany and Eureka, South Dakota; Twin Bridges and Paradise, Montana; Bliss and Deary, Idaho; Opportunity and Paradise Inn, Washington; Zigzag, Carver, and Sisters, Oregon; Fortuna, Enterprise, Commerce, and Paradise, California; Inspiration and Paradise Valley, Arizona; Loving, New Mexico; Happy and Goodnight, Texas; Plain Dealing, Eros, and Darlington, Louisiana; Castleberry, Alabama; Climax, Georgia; and, finally, Punta Cachazuda, Florida.
     While they were traveling, they wrote little. All I got was a postcard now and then:

Breathtaking scenery. Weather VERY HOT. Yesterday caught in blizzard of tumbleweed. Scratches all over Avanti.

“Guppa” and “Gumma”

     The trip was, they told everyone, meant to be a long vacation. Their announced intention was to return and find a smaller house in Babbington, nearer the water, maybe even a little place at the beach, near May’s. I was impatient for their return. I wanted them to return so that things would be restored to their most stable state: the state at which I had perceived them to be when I was a child, the steady state. (How upsetting it is when people demonstrate their independence of our steady-state notion of them: when people go away, when friends we’d thought of as a happy couple surprise us with a divorce, when our parents call one evening and tell us that they’ve put up for sale the house we think of as home, even if we haven’t visited it in a couple of years and haven’t slept in it in a decade.) Shortly after Herb and Lorna reached Punta Cachazuda, the Hapgood Brothers’ warehouse burned to the ground, and nothing of theirs was saved. When they heard the news, they felt that they’d been released by the fire from any obligation to return. Said Lorna, in a postcard from Punta Cachazuda, “It may not be Paradise, but I think we’ll stay.”

Sunset over the Gulf of Mexico, seen from Punta Cachazuda, from a postcard that Lorna sent to Ella, 1963.

In Topical Guide 390, Mark Dorset considers Travel: Road Trip USA  from this episode.

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