Summer 2023

Going to Brevard

The first time I went to Brevard, North Carolina, was the summer before COVID shut down travel. It was summer vacation. Wally and I had driven from our home in Kingsville, Texas to Baton Rouge to see Mother and Daddy, and then had gone on to the north Atlanta area for some time with the kids. My sister Carol had recently remarried, retired, and moved to Brevard, an adorable town nestled in the North Carolina hills, a mecca for retirees, vacationers, and artists, famous for its white squirrels. We spent the night with Carol and Richard, visiting and catching up, looking at the house that had been bought in anticipation of Mother and Daddy moving to Brevard where they could be closer to Carol and then to me when I retired to north Atlanta. We drove leisurely back to Baton Rouge, stopping at the Delta Museum of the Blues, Bayou Sarah where James Audubon had spent months drawing birds. And then home. Little did we know what would come when COVID closed the nation and travel, when Dad’s increasing dementia and my parents’ stubborn insistence in staying in their home in Baton Rouge would isolate them for two years.

Besides a quick visit with Cameron the next summer to poke around the downtown shops, the next time I went to Brevard, it was to help move Mother and Daddy. The stroke that Mother had, with only Dad around to comfort her—the best he could do was get her a pillow and blanket—when she had to call the ambulance to take her to the hospital— finally convinced Mom that she could not do this by herself anymore. Taking care of Daddy on her own had taken a toll on her own health. So, my sisters made the arrangements with movers and rented a 25-foot RV to transport the parents from Baton Rouge to their house in Brevard. Our task was to do the driving. Actually, Wally did all of the driving, from Baton Rouge to Brevard in one very long day. Thank goodness he likes to drive. My job was to assist the parents, to act as flight attendant, to deal with Daddy if he got difficult, something that could happen anyway but with dementia was even more likely.

The day began around 5 am—wake up and get over to parents from our motel room, get the RV loaded, and parents settled in and ready for the trip. Sounds easy, but my sister Jan kept finding things, like a box of seashells, that she thought just had to go immediately with Mom, Mom fidgeting and worrying about their medicines and keys to lock boxes, what papers and files to take and where to put Dad’s wheelchair. Then, the call to EMS to load Dad in the RV, hefting him over the steep steps and into the bed at the back. And we were off by about 6:30, in the dark humid June morning, the city just beginning to awake to its usual business as we drove out. Leaving Baton Rouge must have been hard for my parents, but by the time we got out of the city, they were so exhausted that they curled up on the bed in the RV, pulled the covers around them, and slept for several hours, their fetal positions betraying the exhaustion of two years alone. Good for them.

Walking along the beach at Mustang Island near Kingsville, Wally and I had daydreamed about our future retirement and the travels we would take, possibly in an RV. But after driving all day in one, its lumbering groans and box metal awkwardness, the noise of the road rumbling up from the pavement, we decided that RV travel was not for us. Maybe it is not just the structure of the vehicle but the mission we were on, our weary passengers that makes us loath to travel that way.

The way out of Baton Rouge going east is familiar to us. Having lived in Auburn, Alabama for 15 years and going to Baton Rouge to visit for summers, spring breaks, Christmases, we knew the route well and the places to stop for gas, food, restrooms. That was before Buc-ee’s stretched its arms into Alabama.

Buc-ee’s, a Texas road tradition since 1982, boasts the largest gas station/convenience store in the nation (in New Braunfels, TX) and is known for its beaver mascot, rows of gas pumps, clean bathrooms, and just about anything you think you could want on a road trip, many branded with the familiar beaver logo. I often stopped at the Buc-ee’s in Wharton, Texas, just southwest of Houston, when I drove to Baton Rouge and back from Kingsville. At the Alabama stop, I ran in and bought some BBQ sandwiches, hoping to keep the parents fed and happy. I was delighted that my dad, who had become a picky eater, slowly chewing a few bites of food with his remaining teeth and moving the rest around on his plate, ate most of his sandwich. By this time, they had migrated from the bed in the back, to the little fold-out table, strapping themselves to the bench seats, looking out the window and seeming to enjoy the road trip, the outing. We had had quite a time convincing Dad that he and Mom needed to move to Brevard to be closer to family. Sometimes that notion “took” and at other times Dad resisted. But during the drive, he seemed content to enjoy the adventure. Did he really understand what was happening? I don’t know. But he ate well, for him—the Buc-ee’s BBQ sandwich and later a hamburger from McDonald’s.

Driving into Brevard at the end of a long day, in the misty dark, on narrow, winding mountain roads with little in the way of signage, shoulders, or lighting. I put my sister’s address into my phone GPS, but not knowing there was a difference between “Road” and “Drive,” I sent us to the wrong one. Just what you do not need when you’ve been driving all day. Once we got that straightened out and on the right road (or drive), the next challenge was getting the RV down the steep, curving driveway to Carol’s house. There was a point when the RV hovered suspended in air, the driveway down to the house lost from view for a moment before the vehicle found its footing and plunged to a neat stop.

Then, a call to the local EMS team to unload Dad and get him into the house. He was very nervous about losing his footing or falling as he got out of the RV. It is hard to see your father who had led you along mountain trails and through cold Idaho streams frightened, whimpering, unsure of his footing and balance. Dad had spent a lifetime solving problems, solving technical challenges in his career as a chemical engineer and as patriarch of the family, thinking through moves he deemed best. I remember him advising me to make a list of the pros and cons when sorting out a decision, of thinking through the processes of decision making and leadership when I became a department chair. While I may not have agreed with some of the things that Dad did, I always respected his ability to look at an issue, to dig in and do the research. Now, he couldn’t make logical decisions; as much as he tried, his brain just couldn’t do the work. Or his brain would get stuck on an idea, an old story about growing up during the Depression or a wacky solution, like how to recycle flood-damaged baseboards, and play it over and over in a repeating loop for hours. Or he would sit in his leather chair, feet propped on the matching ottoman, staring blankly at—what? Memories from the past? or nothing? It must have been immensely frustrating for him to try to think and to know he couldn’t, to have been the head of the family and now unable to lead and care.

Now, frail and feeble, he was being taken to a new home, what would be his last home. It is hard to count how many homes he lived in during his lifetime. There was the stone house in Loving that he and his dad had built from stones gathered from the Guadalupe Mountains in New Mexico. The white plank house on the farm his parents finally acquired outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico, where I spent summer weeks with grandparents and bunches of cousins. There was student housing at New Mexico A&M (New Mexico State U) for which he built a back laundry porch and the housing at MIT where he earned a master’s degree, Mother typing his thesis by candlelight reflected in mirrors positioned around the room as a hurricane roared through Cambridge. There was the first house he and mother had built and owned before picking up stakes after a year of living in it to follow a new career opportunity. How many times did he live in Baton Rouge and California as he stitched together a career that would take him to the Virgin Islands and then to Jamaica, twice, and its bauxite-heavy soil that would be transformed to alumina? The longest stay--at the Baton Rouge house he made his own by putting in a bay window to let in the light, a swimming pool to cool off after mowing the yard, a place where grandchildren gathered to swim and splash in its clear waters. This is the home he would leave for Brevard, the house he clung to until it was really too late.

During my childhood we moved about every two years; I remember counting 13 schools before I went to college the same year that the rest of the family moved to Jamaica. Much of my life was transient and homes were places I would leave until I took some control over my own relocations. Ours is a nation notoriously on the move. In 1839 the French visitor to the new nation, Michele Chevalier, had declared that “all is here circulation, motion, and boiling agitation” (309).  At mid-twentieth century George Pierson trying to account for the American character came up with the M-factor: “movement, migration, mobility” (121). In our country a person moves an average of 11.7 times during their lifetime and moves every 5 years. My family clearly fits, or excels at, the profile.

But now, Dad would go settle into his last home, in Brevard, a place he never visited and never would get to know.

After situating the parents temporarily at Carol’s home while their belongings were being transported to Brevard, Wally and I left, jamming the gas petal to heft the RV up and over that steep incline, and on to Atlanta where we returned it and rented a car for a week of visiting with the kids and doing some house hunting of our own. Then we flew home to Kingsville to begin the work of packing up our household in anticipation of moving to the north Atlanta region sometime during the summer. We had both just retired and were ready to make our own move to be closer to family.

Then the phone call—Dad had a stroke and is in hospice care. He has anywhere between two weeks and two months. Was the journey in the RV too much for him or was it inevitable that he would decline at this juncture? After all, he was 95.

So, I packed up as many boxes of household goods and books at the Kingsville house in anticipation of selling our home and moving sometime during the summer, leaving Wally to finish up. I loaded my car with clothes, my computer, and a crate of books for the writing projects I was working on, a piece on animals in Emily Dickinson’s poetry and finishing touches for the essay on Henry David Thoreau’s travels. I did not know how long I would be gone. As it turned out, I only got back to Kingsville in late September to load the U-Haul (actually, two U-Hauls) for our final departure from Kingsville, a hard drive that left my knuckles sore from gripping the steering wheel of my truck and my jaw sore from clenching my teeth.

In just two weeks I was headed back to Brevard. Cameron flew to Houston to help me with the drive. I picked her up at her best friend’s house and we drove east. When we got to Baton Rouge near the end of the day, we got off the freeway to drive past my parents’ home, just to see it one more time, to make sure it looked okay after the tumult of moving. It was surreal to approach the familiar home, now empty, no one to say welcome welcome come on in what can I get you to eat do you need something to drink. No mother standing in the driveway to wave us on our way. It was too much. Even now I am about to tear up thinking about the two of them and then just mother, the lone figure, flanked by the lushness of the southern verdure, alone and now absent waving goodbye after a visit.

Back on the freeway, we made it another two hours and finally needed to find a motel room. Cam used her app to locate a motel with a room available, but when we arrived the receptionist said, no, they were all full. But seeing our desperation, exhaustion, she looked one more time and found a room that just needed to be put in order. We took it. Then, drinks and dinner. The motel advertised a little bistro bar, but only the bar was open; the kitchen had been closed for some time. We got some wines, found some comfy seats in the lobby/bar area, and Cam ordered a pizza from Door Dash. It was the last day of the month, Wally’s birthday, and we had missed it. So, Cameron ordered an ice cream blizzard from the Kingsville Dairy Queen to be delivered to him back in Kingsville. Happy Birthday. Meanwhile, we were in the lobby sipping our wine, when another woman enjoying her drink joined us and proceeded to chatter and drink pretty much non-stop for over an hour. She was from the area, for some reason staying at the motel, and she told us all about her kids and their sports. When she got up, perhaps to order more drinks, one of the beefy young men attending some sort of fire prevention conference decided to try to make a move on Cameron, but that did not go far when the Door Dash guy showed up with the gluten-free pizza and some tampons for Cameron. LOL. The next morning, a drive through Starbucks and then back on the highway to Atlanta, a stop at a gas station BBQ mom-and-pop shack somewhere in the middle of Alabama, and on to the Atlanta airport to get Cam’s car from the parking lot, and finally to her place for a rest before going up to Brevard.

Road travel has changed since the days when my mother in her nonchalant bravery, gumption, loaded the station wagon with five kids, enlisted an aunt or a friend to drive with her while Dad stayed home and worked, and hit the road for summer trips to see grandparents in New Mexico and Minnesota. No air-conditioning, no radio, just my sister Jan endlessly singing “It was sad, so sad when the gray ship went down,” no seat belts, just the back of the station wagon lined with stiff suitcases and padded with blankets and a baby mattress, no GPS or cell phones, no apps, just a fold-out paper road map. The closest to drive-through fast food was A&W Root Beer or other drive-in joints and the motels were often motor motels where you park your car next to your room and your mom goes in to check out the room’s cleanliness before deciding to stay there. I feel like William Bradford complaining when the Puritans landed at Cape Cod that there were no inns to shelter them on that November landing in 1620. But even with the conveniences we now have, traveling long distances is still trying, especially when you are called like we were.

When we got to Brevard, mom and dad had moved into their own home, their furniture had finally arrived, and my brothers came in to help, James from Japan and John from Maryland. The hospice workers were taking shifts attending to dad, feeding, and watching him. It had been over two years since James had been in the States because of COVID travel shutdowns from Japan, and then to be here to witness the end, to help put together a household that Dad would not enjoy. For the next several days we hung pictures, sorted through boxes, and tried to bring order to their new home. Four of the five siblings were there, so it was like a family reunion, cooking, chatting, sharing stories, being together, but with a pall over hanging it all.

Then, the evening we were sitting around the dinner table, chatting and laughing, Sam, the wonderful hospice worker, called us back to Dad’s room to witness the end. He told us that in his tradition, when a person passed, they opened the window to let the spirit pass on. And then Sam left us standing around Dad who was lying on his side, staring blankly, mom patting him and telling him it was alright, tears coming down our faces, me running for a box of tissues, and then he was gone, quietly, gently, without obvious change. Just gone. Gone home—not to Baton Rouge but to the Carlsbad of his memory, to his momma. We opened the window to let him go on his last journey. Jan says that she saw him standing in a field as she was driving up from Florida, a tennis racket in hand waving to her, his best tennis player. The night of his passing I saw a moth in the house and about freaked out. Though I am not generally superstitious I imagined for a wild moment it was Daddy’s spirit escaping, like the moths that magically flew out from the mouth of the dead abuela, grandmother, at the end of Helena Maria Viramontes’s short story, “The Moths.”

Later, sitting around that same dinner table reminiscing about Dad and making notes to give the minister who did not know him or Mom for the memorial service, one of the themes that came coming up was Dad’s travels and his curiosity. We saw the world because of Daddy. He took us places, like Mexico, the Caribbean, and Europe, and on our cross-country drives and many moves we saw such places as the Grand Canyon, the Golden Gate Bridge, Yosemite, the Carlsbad Caverns. He had a great curiosity for the world and wanted to get to know “the people” of places he and Mom visited.  They toured Chile by bus, working on his Spanish so he could talk to locals; he was curious about farm equipment in Japan; and poked around the neighborhoods in Hawaii. They went to Mongolia, Russia, and to China, twice—once just after 9/11 and visited the Uyghurs, Chinese Muslims, who are now being persecuted. They were in France when Cameron was born, staying in a quaint hotel, The Esmerelda, across from Notre Dame and around the corner from the Shakespeare Book Company, the same hotel Cameron and I would stay in when we visited in 2010.  He made numerous trips to Mexico, often to go deep sea fishing, as he did when we took the “long cut” through Mexico when we moved from Baton Rouge to northern California. He and my elementary school-aged brothers went out on the sea of western Mexico in an open boat, returning with three sailfish they had caught. The Amazon, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Haiti, Australia, these are some of the other places they visited. And when folks visited Baton Rouge, he liked to show visitors around Louisiana bayou country, taking them to eat at Hemil’s, a Cajun restaurant on the levee around St. Gabriel in Louisiana and order the seafood platter, which by his mind was the most cost-effective dish because it could be shared.

Now that Mother is settled in her new home, and I am in my new Atlanta abode, I make frequent trips to visit her in Brevard. I am learning the route and the places to stop, the rest stop just as you enter South Carolina off I-85, and the McDonald’s in Walhalla. The way is easy, the GPS reliable, the leaves and the rolling mountain vistas that open around a curve embrace you in their green-blue fold.  I am learning my way around Brevard, how to get to the Pisgah National Forest, Looking Glass Falls, Silvermont Park and Mansion which has a short, easy paved path for Mom’s walks, and places to eat, Cardinal Drive-In a favorite for Mom who likes their hamburgers.