Travels with my Family Read online

  I guess a hurricane isn’t so bad, as long as the trees don’t fall on you. It helps to have good luck if you want to have adventures — that’s what I learned that night.

  TWO

  My brother nearly drowns

  off Tybee Island

  I liked Maine, Hurricane Bob and all, but there was only one problem. The water was so cold there were practically icebergs floating in it. We decided to drive south, where the water is as warm as a bathtub, and where we could go swimming every day.

  “I don’t think Miro could take the trip,” my father said. “Going to Maine was bad enough.”

  “He can stay at your grandmother’s,” my mother told my brother and me. “You’ll see, he’ll love it there. He can chase the squirrels around the backyard.”

  So Miro would have his own vacation, without us. We drove him back to my grandmother’s house. We promised to send him lots of postcards, and my brother nearly hugged him to death. But when we left, Miro was already sniffing around my grandmother’s kitchen, with a smile on his face.

  I wondered what my parents were going to dream up for this trip. You have to admit, a front-row seat at a hurricane is pretty hard to beat. But when we left the land behind and started driving across the water, I knew we were in for something special.

  The road went on for miles and miles with nothing but the sea on all sides, and just a few lonely telephone poles stringing electrical wires over the water.

  “This has got to be the longest bridge in the world!” my little brother said.

  “It’s called a causeway,” my father told us.

  My brother crossed his arms and sat back on the seat. “It looks like a bridge to me.”

  “It looks like a silver ribbon floating on the ocean,” my mother sighed happily. “It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s a bridge,” said my brother, sticking his lower lip out.

  That’s the way we are in my family sometimes. Everybody has to be right.

  The sky was bright blue, and the water was as calm as Miro when he’s asleep. Then I remembered Hurricane Bob. If ever a few strong waves rose up, the road would disappear in no time.

  But that was the chance we had to take to get to the house we had rented on Tybee Island, in the state of Georgia. A wooden house that stood on stilts with a few palm trees around it, and miles and miles of beaches.

  It turned out to be a great summer for needlefish ice cream cones. They’re real easy to make. You need a sandy beach, and a lot of those tiny fish with sharp, pointy noses like miniature swordfish. You grab a fish by its tail, stick its nose into a mudball and — presto! — you have a needlefish ice-cream cone.

  Then, of course, you walk around and pretend to lick it. You should see the looks you get from grownups!

  And it doesn’t hurt the fish because they’re already dead, caught in the fishermen’s nets along with the mudballs.

  We also made jellyfish porcupines. You need one dead jellyfish lying on the beach, and a handful of sticks.

  We had lots of work that summer, my little brother and I, taking the needlefish out of the fishermen’s nets.

  “You got them itty-bitty fingers,” the fishermen told us. “You kids can slip them fingers of yours right in between the loops of them nets and pull them critters right out.”

  My brother stared at the fishermen with their big blunt fingers and their sunburnt faces and their tattoos. He didn’t know what to think. But I did. I knew that a critter was an animal, and that we had just gotten ourselves a vacation job. We got paid a nickel a needlefish, and pretty soon my brother and I had enough to buy real ice cream cones. Pecan was my favorite flavor.

  One day my father went fishing for crabs with some men he had met on the beach. I wanted to go, too, but he said there was no room in the boat for me. But how much room do I take up? I guess he wanted to have his own adventure without me. So I was left behind with my brother and my mother.

  I was pretty mad, and pretty bored. I went down to the beach by myself. I wished Miro was there. He could have kept me entertained by chasing the little transparent crabs that disappeared into holes in the sand when I got too close to them. I read all the notices on the notice board at the edge of the beach. There were ads for nature walks at sunset with a guide. Who needed a guide just to walk along the beach? Then there was a notice for a lost dog. “Lost: one fat beagle,” it said. “Name: Ninny. Place: Oceanville Cemetery.” I couldn’t believe that anyone would name his dog Ninny, and admit in public that it was fat. And anyway, how does a dog get lost in a cemetery? Unless it got kidnapped by a ghost?

  I saw dolphins jumping out of the water, so close to the shore that you could hear the noises they made. People say that dolphins sing beautiful songs, but they sounded more like old men blowing their noses to me. But maybe they sounded that way because I was mad about not being able to go fishing.

  Then I saw Mr. Sandcastle at his usual spot. Not too many grownups build sandcastles unless they have kids, but Mr. Sandcastle was different. He was a very big man with small, delicate hands, and he was famous for his castles. They were huge, with turrets, drawbridges and moats. You could almost picture the tiny sand-colored knights riding out of the castle, off on a quest. Mr. Sandcastle even spray-painted the walls and turrets with colors from aerosol cans, and he didn’t seem to care that the waves swept the castles away after he’d finished building them.

  I was poking at a washed-up jellyfish with a piece of driftwood when suddenly I heard my mother screaming all the way from the porch of our house. She was standing on a chair and slapping at her hair and arms and legs. That was nothing special. She screamed every time a palmetto bug fell off the roof and landed on her.

  I think palmetto bugs are cool. They look like gigantic cockroaches wearing black, shiny helmets. My brother and I were always trying to catch one. We built traps with driftwood and seaweed. We wanted to train them to do tricks, like jumping through hoops or tightrope-walking. But the bugs were much too fast.

  After she calmed down, my mother told my brother and me that we were going to go on a sand-dollar hunt. My brother was excited. Maybe he thought that sand dollars were real money. But I knew better.

  Pretty soon we were wading through the warm water over to Little Tybee Island. It’s the kind of island that disappears when the tide is high. But when the tide is low, it comes back out of the water, like magic. Actually, Little Tybee Island is the bottom of the sea when the tide goes out.

  If my father had been there, he would have explained all about how the tides worked. But not my mother. She wandered around the island, daydreaming and looking at the pelicans flying low over the water, collecting shells and bits of driftwood, and probably getting ideas for the drawings she does. Meanwhile, I was working hard as usual, gathering up sand dollars and putting them in a plastic bag with holes in it for the water to run out, My brother splashed in the warm tidal pools like a baby seal.

  A little while later, I looked up. All around us, Little Tybee Island was starting to shrink. The water was gobbling up the sand. We were the only ones out there now. Meanwhile, my mother was still daydreaming.

  But I saw what was happening. Our little island of sand was being cut off from the beach by a deep channel of rushing water, and it was growing deeper by the minute. Soon the whole Atlantic Ocean would separate us from our house. And my little brother didn’t know how to swim.

  “Hey, Mom,” I called, and I pointed to the water all around us.

  Her dreamy face changed in a hurry. She dropped all her shells.

  “Everybody stay calm!” she screamed. “We have to head back — right now!”

  We had to get back across the channel. Quickly, my mother decided that she would hold my brother under one arm and swim with the other. I was supposed to hang on to her back and kick my legs as hard as I could.

  First, I stuffed my bag of sand dollars into
my bathing suit. Then I grabbed her shoulder. The next thing I knew, we were fighting our way through the rushing current of the channel. Soon, the water was way over our heads.

  For every stroke we took to move forward, the current pushed us two strokes to the side. At that rate, I figured we’d end up in South America. Silver mullets flew past us, chased by the dolphins. My brother’s eyes were wide as saucers and luckily, for once, he kept his mouth shut. I pumped my legs up and down, and held on tight to my mother. The ferocious current crashed around our ears. But inch by inch, we moved closer to the shore.

  Finally, we made it. All three of us flopped on the beach, panting like exhausted starfish. I shook the water out of my eyes and looked up. There was my father. On the sand next to him was a big basket of blue, crawly crabs.

  “You look like something the cat dragged in!” he said.

  My father’s really clueless sometimes.

  “While you three were relaxing on the beach, I was working hard for our supper,” he added with a proud smile.

  My mother and I just rolled our eyes.

  “Not crabs again,” my brother said. “I want hot dogs!”

  I wanted to show my father my sand dollar collection. I fished in my bathing suit, but the current had swept them away, bag and all.

  Oh, well. At least I’d saved my mother and my brother. And I’d had a real adventure of my own, too.

  THREE

  Alligators nearly devour us

  in the swamps of Florida

  After we had to swim for our lives that day, we were more careful with the ocean. My mother cut a page out of the newspaper that gave the times for the tides, high tide and low, for the rest of the month. The water wasn’t going to sneak up on us again.

  After a while, my father started saying that he had itchy feet. Which means he was thinking about going somewhere new. So instead of scratching his feet, he did what he always does at a time like that. He took out his road map.

  “Look, Florida’s not far at all. It’s almost next door. And I’ve never been there.”

  Florida? My brother and I looked at each other. We couldn’t believe our ears!

  “Disneyland!” we shouted.

  You see, we were normal, my brother and I, even if our parents weren’t.

  But Disneyland was too normal for my parents. Too much like everybody else, too ordinary. Not original enough. Somehow I wasn’t surprised.

  “Why would you want to have a fake adventure in a theme park with plastic alligators?” my father wanted to know. “I’ll show you real alligators. And they won’t be made out of plastic, no, sir!”

  So it was off to Okefenokee Swamp, to go canoeing. The little bit of the swamp that hangs down into the state of Florida.

  I don’t think anyone else has ever even heard of Okefenokee Swamp. I don’t think anyone can even say it. Except for my mother, who told us about a comic strip called Pogo that had possums and alligators and skunks that could talk. They all lived in the Okefenokee Swamp.

  “We have met the enemy, and he is us! That’s what Pogo used to say,” my mother told us.

  My brother and I laughed, even if we weren’t quite sure what Pogo meant. Or my mother, either.

  There we were in our boiling-hot car, with the windows rolled down, heading to Florida. I thought of Miro. He was probably relaxing under a tree in my grandmother’s cool backyard. He was lucky.

  Not like us. We were the only ones on the road. Everyone else was sleeping off the heat on their front-porch swings, or in hammocks under the trees, waiting for the sun to go down and things to cool off.

  Meanwhile, we were in a big hurry to get to a swamp.

  The problem with traveling in a car is that there’s nothing to do. At first my mother played Twenty Questions with us. But my brother got mad because I guessed his animal too quickly. It was a penguin. It was too easy. There he was, sitting with his stuffed penguin on his lap. Category: animal. Color: black and white. Anyone could have guessed that, since penguins are his all-time favorite animal.

  To calm him down, my mother said we would play the Alphabet Game. We had to look out the window and spot things that started with the different letters of the alphabet. A was for airplane, B was for billboard, C was for cow, D was for… We got stuck at D. When my brother pointed at me and said, “I see a dummy!” it was my turn to get mad. “E!” I shouted. “I see an egghead.” I elbowed him. He elbowed me back.

  “F!” yelled my father. “F is for finished. The game is finished!”

  That put an end to the game.

  “I’m hungry,” my brother complained after we’d stopped yelling at each other.

  “We’re almost there,” my father told him. “Can’t you wait?”

  “I’m hungry, too,” I said.

  “The next time we stop for gas,” my father promised.

  He found a baseball game on the radio. The Atlanta Braves were playing the Chicago Cubs, and nothing else mattered. When my father wants to get somewhere, he won’t stop for anything, unless it’s a full-blown emergency. We could starve to death and he wouldn’t notice. On we drove.

  The next day, bright and early, there we were, all four of us in a canoe with our lunch in a cooler, and a park ranger looking at us as if we were about to become some alligator’s dessert.

  “Whatever you do, don’t put your hands in the water,” he said.

  He wore a Smokey the Bear hat and mirrored sunglasses, like a bad guy in the movies. Except he was supposed to be a good guy.

  “And if you don’t like your sandwich, kids, eat it anyway, because if you throw it over the edge, it’ll attract them gators something fierce. And you don’t want that!”

  My mother was looking pretty nervous. When she gets nervous, she goes completely quiet. She even forgets to point out all the beautiful things around us. My father, who wanted us to have an authentic adventure with real live alligators, was smiling happily. He slung his binoculars around his neck and checked the film in his camera. I wondered whether my little brother was going to throw his sandwich overboard anyway, just to see if what the ranger said was true, and if I was going to have to save him again.

  The thing you need to know about Okefenokee Swamp is that everything is always moving. The islands aren’t nailed down. They turn around and around in circles, floating in the water. That’s what Okefenokee means: the trembling land. I read that in the little pamphlet we got from the park ranger. I was reading to keep from thinking about what was going to happen on our authentic adventure. To keep from trembling, like the islands turning circles around us.

  Which would be worse: getting lost forever among the floating islands, or getting eaten by alligators? And would we even have a choice?

  We started paddling into the swamp. We were the only canoe on the water. That couldn’t be a good sign.

  Suddenly my mother, who was paddling in the front of the canoe, started waving her hands in the air and pointing. Something was in the water, dead ahead of us.

  “An alligator!” she whispered, as if she were afraid it would hear. I don’t even know if alligators have ears.

  “Nonsense,” my father told her. “That’s just a log.”

  He couldn’t see it from where he was, at the back of the canoe. “You’re the navigator, we’re counting on you to guide us,” he’d told my mother when we left the dock. But I guess she wasn’t the navigator when it came to spotting alligators.

  We kept on paddling, right over the top of the alligator. A second later, it popped up again, behind us, bobbing in the water. Sure enough, it was a log. Score one for my father.

  Once the alligator turned out to be a log, I relaxed a little bit. Big water lilies floated by, with yellow and pink and white flowers. There were rows of painted turtles on the logs, all lined up, from big to little. When we came near, they splashed into the water in the same order,
from biggest to littlest. My mother must have relaxed, too. She started saying how beautiful everything was. Standing in the swamp, white egrets stared at us with their strange yellow eyes. My father was taking pictures of everything.

  I watched the islands floating past. Looking at them, you couldn’t tell they were moving. In the Okefenokee Swamp, there were at least twenty-five different plants that you could eat if you got lost — I read that in the pamphlet the park ranger gave me. I wondered how lily pad sandwiches would taste.

  Suddenly, my mother turned to me again and pointed at something.

  “I suppose that’s a log, too?” she whispered.

  Right in front of us, lolling in the water, was something long and brown, with ridges on its back, its snout just out of the water, and two cold beady eyes.

  “Dad,” I said as calmly as I could. And I pointed straight ahead, too.

  “That’s just another log,” he said. “Keep paddling, nice and easy.”

  “If it’s just a log, then why does it have two…”

  That’s when our authentic alligator adventure began.

  Just before we reached it, the “log,” if you believe my father, sank down into the water. But not all the way down. We paddled right over the top of it.

  Scritchhhh — right over the razor-sharp scales on its back. My brother heard the sound, and he stared down at the floor of the canoe, his eyes bulging and his face very pale. We rose out of the water, ever so slightly — I swear we did.

  My little brother started to stand up, as if he wanted to start running. Never stand in a canoe. Everybody knows that. Just in time, I grabbed him and sat him down again, and we both looked behind the canoe.

  The alligator bobbed up again in the water, right where he had been. He had this look in his eye, as if he was just a little bit irritated. And a little bit hungry, too.