American Anthropologies, Part I (or, How the Materialist Spent Her Summer Vacation)

Well, another summer is--thank god--coming to its end, and so the Materialist feels it appropriate to share details of her two meager vacations, both of which involved road trips and both of which, combined, cost less than $300.

These trips, in their conveyance and budget, reminded the Materialist of her childhood, every summer of which was marked by some crappy road trip in the Americas. Unlike the Materialist's colleagues (or their children, for that matter), who spent their summers in Cairo or London or the south of France, the Materialist spent hers on the road, which was, admittedly, a slight improvement over where she spent the winters and falls of her developmental years, namely, eastern Texas. For this rigorously un-cosmopolitan childhood, the Materialist blames her parents, who spent their twenties living out their ersatz-hippie fantasies (the Materialist's father painted, wove baskets from pussywillow branches, and dreamed of being a German literature professor; the Materialist's mother spelled her name "Sioux," majored in ceramics, and was one half of a folk duo), being perpetual students, and not devoting any time to family planning, much less thinking of ways to make money as adults. Consequently, most of the Materialist's adolescence was spent hanging around the house, reading and dreaming about escaping East Texas, which is something like hell's waiting room, completely populated by Klan members, up-and-coming Klan members, and people who enjoy waiting under bridges to beat up gay people after a long night of getting drunk in parking lots and throwing watermelons off rooftops. Every summer, the Materialist's parents would stuff her and her brother into the car for a two-week car trip, the scope of which grew more ambitious by the year (the Materialist's family had by that time a long history with road trips; when the Materialist was eight, her family drove from Baltimore to Irvine, where the Materialist's father was to begin a new job, in two VW Rabbits, only one of which had air-conditioning. Every night, the Materialist's mother would go foraging for food in 7-11s, while the Materialist's maternal grandparents, who were traveling with them, would cook hamburgers on a hot plate in their motel room. This enraged the Materialist's father, who found such behavior unacceptably FOB). One year, the family drove from East Texas to Madison, to visit an uncle. Another year, it was East Texas to Wood's Hole, to visit another uncle. There was also East Texas to Mexico City, East Texas to Frederick, MD, East Texas to Toronto, East Texas to the Asian-American Promised Land, Cambridge, MA (there is a picture of the Materialist sitting unconvincingly on the steps of some library on the Harvard campus that she would never again see), and, best of all, East Texas to Saxon River, VT, where the Materialist remembers frolicking through country stores and eating candy while her father attended some conference.