Travels with my Family Read online

  “See,” my father said cheerfully, and a little too loudly, “I told you we’d have a real-life alligator adventure, with real alligators. No Disneyland for us, no, sir!”

  Then he started paddling fast — very fast — away from the alligator. We headed for a big island, and solid ground.

  And what was basking in the sun on the shore of that island? You guessed it. An alligator as big as our car.

  My mother gasped.

  We made a quick U-turn. And started paddling like the wind.

  I wasn’t too surprised when, a few minutes later, a few scary silent minutes, my father looked at his watch and decided it was time to head back to the dock.

  “Let’s go for barbecue,” he said brightly. “I’m still hungry. These sandwiches aren’t enough for me.”

  But I knew better. And so did my little brother.

  My mother just smiled and started whistling a tune.

  By the way, I had a fried alligator tail sandwich for lunch. It was pretty good! And my dad was right. They weren’t plastic alligators at all.

  FOUR

  We are nearly trampled and eaten

  by a herd of farm animals

  on Salt Spring Island

  If you ever want to do something really boring, try sitting in a room watching grownups listening to other grownups reading stories from a book. I know, I’ve tried it.

  You see, my brother and I had to go all the way to British Columbia, on the Pacific Ocean, on the other side of the continent, to listen to my parents read their stories to crowds of people. That’s part of their job, or so they say. If you ask me, I’d rather read a book by myself.

  The place was so far we had to take an airplane.

  “I’m afraid we can’t bring Miro,” my father explained. “He wouldn’t like it, being locked up in a cage in the baggage compartment.”

  “Besides,” my mother added, “afterwards we’re going to a farm to see some friends. You’ll like them very much, I’m sure. But I’m afraid Miro might not get along with the other animals.”

  Maybe it was better that way. I’m sure Miro would have been bored silly listening to grownups reading stories to each other. Just the way my brother and I were. There was one cool part, though. We got to take a float plane.

  A float plane can take off and land on water. Instead of wheels, it lands on something called pontoons. The plane was so small that our family filled it up completely. Just us and the pilot.

  My brother and I drew straws to see who would sit in front with the pilot. I won!

  The plane flew low over the water. We were so close we could almost see the fish in the ocean. The engine made so much noise we had to wear big earmuffs to protect our ears.

  “Hey, isn’t that a whale down there?” I shouted.

  I pointed down to the water. But my brother ignored me. He was still mad that he had to sit in back with my parents.

  We circled over an island and landed on the water. Then we floated over to the dock. We stepped out of the plane and pulled off our earmuffs. There we were, on Salt Spring Island.

  “It will be great to be on a farm,” my mother said happily. “We’ll have some peace and quiet in the country. It’s really beautiful there.”

  My brother and I couldn’t believe it. Were we really going to have a quiet, ordinary vacation for once?

  “A farm? Like Old McDonald’s? With horses and cows and stuff?” my brother asked.

  “This farm is a little different,” my father said.

  Uh-oh! My little brother and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. But we didn’t say anything. If it wasn’t going to be a normal farm with cows and chickens and a farmer in overalls with a pitchfork, what was it going to be?

  We found out soon enough.

  Our very first morning on the farm, we were woken up by gunshot blasts. Bang! Bang! Bang! just outside our bedroom window.

  My brother and I jumped out of bed and ran to look. Bang! We crouched down and peered over the windowsill. There was George, our parents’ friend, shooting at the sky with a big shotgun.

  “Blasted ravens!” he said. “I won’t have you hurting my lambs, you varmints.”

  He fired another couple of shots at a big pine tree. Bang! Bang! Then he looked up at us and winked.

  “Those blasted ravens try and peck my poor lambs’ eyes out. They’re absolute pests. You’ve gotta scare them off!”

  Then he shouldered his shotgun and walked away, chuckling to himself.

  My brother and I looked at each other. This was definitely not Old McDonald’s Farm. It was going to be different.

  Later, we were having breakfast when something bit my elbow. Ouch! I dropped my spoon. Whatever it was bit my other elbow, twice as hard.

  I looked around. There were peacocks in the kitchen. I know what you’re thinking. How magnificent, all those feathers, all those colors, peacocks are so beautiful — you sound just like my mother. But let me tell you, peacocks are about as friendly as rattlesnakes.

  I jumped up, and some of my cereal ended up on the floor.

  “You don’t have to feed the peacocks, kids. All that granola’s not good for them anyway! Ajax, Olive, get out of there!” George laughed.

  I never knew that farmers kept their livestock in the kitchen.

  There was an uproar under the table as the peacocks fought over the granola. My little brother sat stiffly on his chair, with both legs folded tightly underneath him, trying to stay out of the battle. Now if only Miro were there. He would have protected us from the birds. At least I think so.

  Just then, the phone rang.

  “George, it’s for you!” yelled a shrill voice.

  George went to answer the phone.

  “Hello? Hello?” he shouted into the phone. Then he slammed it down.

  A minute later he returned with a large gray parrot perched on his shoulder. He looked more like a pirate than a farmer.

  “Confounded bird!” he mumbled to himself. The peacocks looked offended and walked out of the room. Maybe they thought he was talking about them.

  But George was talking about Tuco — that was the parrot’s name. Tuco could imitate ringing telephones and voices. He loved playing tricks, and George fell for them every time.

  “Confounded bird!” squawked Tuco.

  “Does he repeat everything?” my brother asked.

  “Does he repeat everything?” squawked Tuco.

  My brother gave the parrot a nasty look, because nobody likes being imitated. We soon learned that Tuco knew a lot of words. But I can’t repeat them here.

  In the country, there’s supposed to be peace and quiet. Well, the peace and quiet lasted another minute or two, until George looked out the front window.

  “Jackson!” he shouted.

  Then he ran out the door with Tuco clinging to his shoulder, squawking, “Jackson! Jackson! Jackson!”

  “Who’s Jackson?” my little brother asked.

  “I don’t know.” I took a quick look under the table. The coast was clear. “So far, we’ve seen a raven, a parrot and some peacocks. Maybe Jackson is a penguin. Let’s go see.”

  My brother jumped up and ran outside, a big smile on his face. Penguins, as you know, are his favorite birds.

  We made it outside without being attacked by the peacocks. We passed the garden, then went along the driveway. I saw something large and black galloping down the middle of the dirt road that ran in front of the farm.

  So that was Jackson — he was a horse. And George was running after him, waving his arms.

  Jackson the horse liked to play games, just like Tuco did. He pretended to be very interested in eating the grass by the side of the road. But every time George got close, and tried to grab him to take him back to the meadow on the other side of the fence, he galloped three or four steps farther on, an
d went back to eating some more grass.

  Little by little, we were exploring the whole island, in slow motion, with Jackson leading the way, and George, Tuco, my brother and I following in single file.

  “He was a circus horse,” George told us. “When he retired, we took him in.”

  “What did he do in the circus?” asked my brother.

  “He was a clown,” George answered. “He still thinks he’s pretty funny.”

  I wondered how George knew what his horse was thinking. Maybe you learned that in farm school.

  “Maybe he thinks he’s still in the circus,” my brother suggested.

  “This is a circus,” George declared. “The whole farm is a circus, starring Jackson the Horse.”

  “And Tuco!” the parrot added loudly.

  After a while, Jackson decided it was time to be caught. He probably wanted to eat something else, like oats, or apples. Grass must get pretty boring after a while. George took his bridle and we all walked down the dirt road, back to the farm.

  There, we saw another strange sight.

  “What on earth is your mother doing?”

  We all stopped and stared. My mother was standing in the middle of the pen, surrounded by sheep. She was holding her drawing pad up in the air.

  “She’s drawing sheep, I guess.”

  My mother draws all the time. She’ll draw anything, even smelly, wooly sheep.

  My mother pushed the sheep away, walked to the other end of the meadow and started drawing. The sheep followed her, baa-ing loudly. They were playing the opposite game from Jackson the horse. Every time my mother moved away to get the right perspective to draw them, the sheep crowded closer to her. Maybe they wanted to learn how to be artists.

  They were watching her from very close up, as if they needed glasses. One of them put his nose right on her drawing pad, as if he wanted to help out.

  “That’s Velcro for you! He wants to be part of everything,” George snorted. “We call him that because he sticks to you like a burr on a dog. Come on, boys, let’s save your mother from being trampled to death!”

  George opened the gate, and we went into the sheep pen with Jackson.

  “Give the lady some room, you incorrigible lot of fleabags!” George told them. And he gave them a few taps on their wooly rear ends.

  “Thanks, George,” my mother said. I looked at her pad. She hadn’t gotten very far, and there was sheep drool on the paper. “You should really brush their teeth once in a while. Whew!”

  George laughed and patted Velcro. “I’ll keep that in mind. I’m sure Velcro would love having his teeth brushed.”

  My mother sat down to draw again. We were enjoying the peace and quiet when, thirty seconds later, I heard my little brother cry for help.

  How did he do it? I’ll never know. But he managed to get his head stuck in the fence. And you know by now how curious sheep are, and how when one sheep does something, they all want to do it. Velcro came over to see what the problem was, followed by Einstein, Cleopatra, Sneaker and Rocky 4, and pretty soon my brother had a couple dozen sheep around him, all trying to figure out what this new animal was doing in their meadow, and did he want to eat their grass, and was it really greener on the other side of the fence?

  Velcro started to lick my brother’s left ear.

  “Help!”

  “Don’t panic there, lad. You’re getting your ears cleaned for free.”

  George was as strong as a farmer is supposed to be. Still, I helped him lift the top log of the wood fence, and my little brother squirmed free.

  “I hate sheep!”

  “They were just being friendly,” my mother said.

  But I wasn’t so sure. My friends don’t lick my ears.

  Just then my father showed up. He had been upstairs in the house, in George’s office, checking his e-mail messages. He looked at us standing around my brother, who still had tears in his eyes. Jackson the horse was munching on George’s straw hat. The sheep had surrounded us again, and were baa-ing as loudly as ever. The peacocks screeched from their perch on the fence.

  Just then, Tuco started imitating a phone ringing.

  “Did I miss anything?” my father asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “But maybe you should go answer the phone.”

  “Okay,” he agreed, and ran back into the house.

  I think even the sheep were laughing.

  FIVE

  Our parents nearly abandon us on a

  beach in California, where my brother is nearly

  swept out to sea by a sneaker wave

  There’s one good thing about having strange parents like mine. You get to travel a lot. You never have any trouble writing the “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essay that you have to write every September in school. Sometimes the teachers tell me I must be making this stuff up, and I can’t really blame them.

  My mother was still laughing at my father over the trick Tuco played on him when we reached California, a few days after we left George’s farm. The first thing you need to know about California is that the whole state is about to fall into the ocean. It really is true. We went to a place north of San Francisco to see a big crack in the ground, where a shaker — that’s what they call earthquakes out there — split the earth in two about a hundred years ago. We also saw a set of railroad tracks that swerve like a snake, as if a giant had picked them up with his bare hands and twisted them. Those are the kinds of things an earthquake can do.

  “What’ll we do if California falls into the ocean when we’re on it?” my brother asked.

  “It won’t happen,” I told him.

  We all peered into the giant crack in the ground. You couldn’t even see the bottom. My mother held my brother’s hand very tightly. As if anyone would want to jump in!

  “I wonder what fell into that crack?” my brother asked, trying to lean over.

  “Horses,” said my father. “Trees, houses, people, anything that was near.”

  “It’s really dark in there,” my brother said, worried. “I wouldn’t want to get swallowed up.”

  My brother worries a lot. I think he takes after my mother.

  But he was right. It was pretty dark in that crack.

  “Animals know there’s going to be an earthquake before humans do,” I told him. “So if you see some animals acting strange, you know you have to be careful.”

  My brother looked very hard at a cow that was grazing in the next field. “Is that cow acting strange?” he asked.

  “It’s acting perfectly normal,” I said. “For a cow.”

  After we visited the crack in the ground and the swervy railroad tracks, our parents decided we should go to the seaside. The second thing you need to know about California is that it’s not always warm and sunny. You’ve seen those television shows, right, with all the palm trees and the sunshine? Well, there’s not a single palm tree around Punta Reyes, near the big crack in the ground. That’s because there’s too much fog, and you need lots of sunshine for palm trees.

  I suppose that if you asked my parents, they’d say that fog is much more interesting than sunshine. “More mysterious,” my father would say. “More romantic,” my mother would add.

  It was chilly and foggy, and we had to put sweaters on. But I have to admit, there were plenty of cool things to see. Every time the tide goes out, it leaves behind all kinds of starfish and mussels and sea cucumbers in the pools in between the rocks.

  “We’re going exploring, too,” my father said. “Have fun, we’ll be back soon!”

  Then he and my mother walked away.

  But we were too busy watching a starfish drill a hole in a mussel shell to pay much attention.

  “Hey, look!” my brother shouted. “That starfish has only four arms.”

  “Don’t worry, it’ll grow a new one back.”
r />   “Starfish can grow arms? How do they do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “It must be all the vitamins in the seaweed.”

  My brother started squeezing the little bubbles of air that seaweed uses to stay on top of the water. No matter how hard he squeezed, the bubbles wouldn’t burst. They were as tough as old leather boots.

  The rocks were covered with greenish-black plants. And when those plants got wet, they were as slippery as ice. And sure enough, my brother slipped and landed on his seat in the slimy seaweed. I helped him up.

  “Hey, where are Mom and Dad?” he asked.

  We both looked around. The beach was deserted for as far as we could see. Long curls of fog were rolling in from the sea and reaching onto the land. They looked like witches’ fingers that had come to grab us. We jumped off the rocks and ran back towards the beach. No one was there, either. Just great piles of rocks and the waves coming in underneath the fog.

  “I don’t see them,” I told my brother.

  “I think they ran away.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I think they abandoned us,” he said. “You know, like in Hansel and Gretel.”

  Then my brother panicked. He started running down the beach, between the giant rocks, jumping over the tide pools. He didn’t really know where he was going. He was too scared to think. I was scared, too, but not so scared that I didn’t keep my eyes open.

  That’s why I saw it before my brother did. The wave.

  A wave that was much bigger than all the others came out of nowhere and crashed right into him, like a football player tackling someone. My brother fell onto the rocks and the water rushed over him.

  Oh, boy, I said to myself. This is going from bad to worse.

  I grabbed his dripping sweater just in time, as the wave was dragging him out to sea. I pulled him out of the water, farther up on the shore. I was worried about another wave. But the sea was calm again, as if it had only one big wave in it, and that wave had gone after my brother, on purpose.

  My brother looked as if he were half-drowned. He had seaweed in his hair, and he was shivering.