Blogging My Autobiography - Chapter 8

My mother is English. She came to this country when she was 21 and married my father. I came along shortly thereafter. She had survived World War II in England, listening to the bombs at night, huddled in a shelter. 6 years after the war ended, she came to the US, got married and had a child all in the space of just over a year. A person in that situation would yearn for some familiarity, probably. Some connection to home, though home was difficult, even 6 years gone from the war.

One connection that my mother had was to a friend in England named Alice. My recollection of Alice is pretty sketchy, but I remember her as very upbeat and kind. She seemed to have a lot of energy and lifted my mother when she was near. So how do I know Alice if she lived in England? Well she came to visit one year and spent the entire summer with us. The Summer of Alice was a summer of travel. My father was working as a civil engineer down in the southern part of our state and so, of course we had to drive down and visit him. That was not the only place we went, though. We went to Yellowstone as well, driving our 1953 Chevy the length and breadth of the Intermountain West. The Chevy was cool because my grandfather had built a bed for us in the back. He took a piece of plywood and made removable legs for it. This was placed in the back seat, the legs on the floorboards, creating a large flat surface that a mattress could be laid on. My two brothers and I could then either sleep or look out the window as we chose. It was quite comfortable. No seat belts or car seats for us!


It was on a dirt road near Moab where the seat belt issue was tested for us on this trip. We were headed out to see my father in a remote area. The only way in was on a dirt road that wound around the side of the mountain, up canyons and down until we got to the camp where my father was working on a huge pipeline to bring water to this arid area. Similar, I suppose to his great grandfather working on the Canal 80 years before. Dirt roads out here need to be able to deal with the sudden thunderstorms that are prevalent in the summer months. They can drop 3-5“ of water in 15 minutes. It’s basically like God emptied a big bucket over your head. That amount of water will wash away almost anything in it’s path unless it’s channeled. So, every road has a barrow pit or deep ditch on the uphill side to keep the water from washing away the road itself. These ditches can be up to 3 feet deep and 4-5 feet wide. If you don’t pay attention to them, they can pull the car right off the road. My mother was never the greatest driver. In England, you just got on the bus or train or walked wherever you needed to go. She was not well equipped to handle a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. We were driving along and she was nervous. Alice was trying to talk and stay calm herself. We were somewhat lost as well and that added to the pressure. She was driving along, looking for landmarks and the right front tire slid into the ditch. The car jerked right and smacked into the mountain which in turn generated a flurry of English epithets from the ladies in the front seat. Then the realization hit my mother, ”George is going to kill me.“ I knew she was right. I could see his face when we met him, all screwed up and asking what happened. Alice, though was starting to laugh at the predicament and soon my mother was also. We were able to back the car out of the ditch and finally found my father. When he was told what happened and Alice started to laugh again, he had to laugh also. The car was not hurt (they were really tough in those days) and everyone was fine. It became the story of how Audrey Hit the Mountain.

Yellowstone, one of my favorite places on Earth to visit. Old Faithful, Big Thumb, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Mammoth Springs and the Handkerchief Pool these are all great to see, though the Handkerchief Pool is no longer called that. It was called the Handkerchief Pool because the rangers would demonstrate the convection currents in the pool by asking for a dirty handkerchief which everyone carried at that time. Kleenex was not that portable. They would drop the hankie into the pool and wait for a few minutes. The hankie would sink into the water and then reappear 5 minutes later, clean as a whistle! It was miraculous. Maybe they changed it because some hankies clogged the pool, I am not sure.

Bears were always a big thing in Yellowstone. I had a close encounter with a black bear on this trip. Back then, the bears would line up by the side of the road and people would feed them from their cars. My mother was leery of this and would not let us roll down the windows very far. Of course the bears came closer than they might have to get the goodies. I timidly held an Oreo cookie out of the window, which a bear promptly swiped away from the car, nearly taking my fingers with it. Well, that was the end of that and we rolled up the windows tight until the bears wandered back into the woods. Alice could not stop talking about the bears, she had never been so close to wildlife. My grandmother told me a bear story also. She went to Yellowstone every year for 50 years. She told me that they used to have an amphitheater where they would dump the leftovers and garbage in the center. At dusk, the bears would gather at the edge of the amphitheater. The rangers would tell everyone to remain very still and the bears would pad down to the garbage and start to forage. Of course there were fights among the bears, which was very exciting according to my grandmother. They would mark the trees around the amphitheater and if one marked above the other, there was a fight for dominance. Life was lived in those days, without seat belts on the edge of danger and no one thought it was a problem at all. I sure didn’t, I thought it was all very exciting.