Memories of A Summer Vacation Long Ago

This piece was inspired by a friend who recently contacted me about some health challenges he's having. For whatever reason his news and contact stirred up memories of a vacation long ago. Perhaps its related to thoughts of my own mortality but it is funny how memories appear and sometimes disappear. File cabinets in our brains hold so much information, sorted and resorted to be reviewed every now and again.

My story starts with an explanation or two. My family, like most, has some, shall we say oddities here and there. They appear in our lineage and we have passed them down through the generations. My father had his set of oddities that revolved around family, success, and new gadgets. He had to get his hands on newly marketed items from cars to cameras to high fidelity radios. He had to be the first in his neighborhood, his circles or his family to have these things. He was a salesman and marketer at heart so it was easy for him to be sold too. In addition, he came through and from the depression and made a success of himself.

It was probably the late forties or early fifties when our entire family - four kids and mom and dad, took a trip out west by car. We would travel to Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma and God knows where else. As I remember, we had a new station wagon that made my father very proud. The back seat folded up and down and allowed us kids to sit looking out the back window seeing where we'd been rather than where we were going.

Somewhere along the way, my father realized there was a flaw in the plan for this trip. The heat in the west was brutal in the summer months. Even with windows rolled down nothing but warm, no hot, air blew through the car. My mother was cranky and hot, four kids were cranky and hot and my father was trying to keep everything in order but he was hot too.

My father made a great discovery in some hot and dusty place. Cars were obviously without what we know of as air conditioning today but there was a solution that had just come on the market - car air coolers - specifically, the Thermidor Swamp Cooler. The theory was simple. The cooler hung on the outside of the passenger window. It was filled with water. A fan in the front of the unit was turned by the air flow as the car moved, cooling and evaporating water that created a cool flow of moist air through louvers coming into the passenger window. Voila! Cool air floating through the car making everyone happy. Here is a picture of an actual Swamp Cooler lest you think I jest.

There it is in all of its glory - the Swamp Cooler - ready to do its job, taking the crankiness out of everyone. A few minor details: the cooler needed a somewhat consistent supply of water and the person sitting in the passenger seat (mother) may be a bit inconvenienced by the lack of a view while touring the wonderful landscape of the country. In addition, there would be a constant flow of moist air on the passenger's neck along with a constant whir that joined the rattle of the cooler on the window. The water problem was solved by the salesman adding four good sized water bags to the transaction. The others traveled with us on our tour of the western United States.

My father convinced my mother to give it a try. She could control the air flow with a string attached to the louvers and at least the kids would quiet down. He promised to stop at various sites so she could get out and see the beauty of the west. That would help us kids too since we were just seeing highway we had just traveled over from the back seat.

So we traveled through the Painted Dessert, the Petrified Forest and stopped at the Grand Canyon. Filling our water bags at every stop. We stopped at Rodeos and at roadside stands set up by Native Americans selling pottery and jewelry to us and other tourists. We yelled and screamed about the noise the cooler was making and that the salesman was "a no good lier because it was still hot".

At some point we noticed that my mother wasn't talking to my father anymore. Her head was being held up by her left hand and she was staring straight ahead into the dusty road ahead. There are a few pictures of that trip but oddly none of us. My father focused on the horses, steers and buffalo at the rodeos. No pictures of us all standing next to the wagon with the cooler on the side. No pictures of everyone hauling water for the cooler. No pictures of a smiling mother and four lovely children on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

In the end it all worked out but we never took a long trip like that again and nobody knows what happened to the Thermidor Swamp Cooler.

Memories - they're great things and can bring a smile to your face as they all get refiled and sorted out.