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Barf, Bears, and Boulders

According to auto manufacturers and oil companies, the sheer pleasure of shoehorning everyone into the car for a family vacation ranks as the number one reason for having children. They also claim that inhaling directly from your vehicle's tailpipe is good for you.

Precautions must be taken to avoid the natural enemy of family travel: motion sickness, the perils of which are well known to me. As a child I got queasy when the car was still backing out of the driveway. Any trip longer than ten minutes was touch-and-go, and winding roads spelled the beginning of the end. Car-sickness was a central theme of childhood; my Hot Wheels set even had a little pull-out area where you could stop the toy car and heave till you saw stars while siblings laughed themselves into next week.

Last weekend we hit the road for Yosemite National Park, a mere jaunt at five hours. The laboratory-tested "bedtime departure" technique worked rather well initially but then failed during the final hour of twisting mountain road, at which point Emma snapped awake and demanded that books be read to her. Motion-sensitivity is exacerbated by riding in the back seat or by reading; to attempt both at once is asking for trouble. Factor in the thousandth reading of "The Runaway Bunny" and you have a procedure NASA could use to test prospective astronauts.

Once within the park boundaries we were subjected to anti-bear propaganda, since bears are apparently a very real hazard. We saw a poster with a photograph that looks like the "after" shot of a highway wreck pried open with the Jaws Of Life, but which was actually a parked car casually swatted open by a condominium-sized bear who happened to spy an ice chest on the seat.

Thusly terrified, I set out to clean our car's interior for the first time in years, but I got discouraged and gave up when I realized there are enough goldfish cracker crumbs in the carpets and upholstery to sustain a family of bears for an entire summer.

The concern over bears confused Emma, who still knows them as fuzzy, cuddly Stewards of Dreamland, rather than gigantic, thundering killing machines that would just as soon disembowel you as look at you. They say that in case of a bear "encounter" you are supposed to play dead, but I figure this is only because you might as well get used to the idea.

In Yosemite Valley you still stand a better chance of being run over by a tour bus than ever seeing a bear, which is another reason to take a hike besides to impress your children. In her developing capacity for understatement, Emma gazed up at the sheer 3000-foot granite rise of El Capitan and muttered "Big rock."

Overall, she took a liking to the place. Between the spectacular sights and our constant repetition of the name "Yosemite," she seems to have assumed a measure of ownership, and, for the time being, refers to it as MY-semite.

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© Todd Pinsky 1998-2002. All rights reserved.