The World According to Chuck

This is not going to be a parental rite of passage. It’s going to be a road trip with my adult child and possibly an ice chest. I’m not ruling out misadventures, sore backs and arguments about baseball being a way better game than basketball, but it doesn’t feel like a daddy thing. It feels like fun.

The following is a daddy thing, by which I mean it involved stress and sweat and worry and wondering when my wife will get home to take care of it, which in this case was after it was all over. Still, it involved driving and a road trip and my daughter, thus meeting my imaginary criteria, and mostly involved the

Blind Leading the Blind
(Originally published 12/1/2004)

I don’t care for stereotypes, particularly when it comes to men and women. Oh, sure, it’s okay to make a joke occasionally, and there are certainly differences between the sexes, but we’re complex creatures, individuals and unique, and broad generalizations do us all an injustice.

So I’ll just say that some men — SOME men — marry their navigators.

This would be me.

It’s not that I can’t read a map, although, on the other hand, it might be exactly that. Mostly, though, I lack a spatial sense, I think. I’m pretty good with up and down, and I’m working on left and right, but give me directions and tell me to head east and I’ve pretty much got a 25% chance of getting where I need to go. So I rely on my wife.

Now, in order to understand what happened last Tuesday, there are several things you need to know.

I live in Western Washington. But you probably figured that out.

My daughter lives in Texas. I may have mentioned that once or twice.

On Tuesday nights, my wife teaches a class at Seattle Pacific University, which apparently is in Seattle. Which is south of my house, according to her. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that she wasn’t here.

On Tuesday night, my daughter decided to make a trip. She’d been planning this, actually. She lives in Denton, Texas, which is a little north of Dallas and a little south of Oklahoma. From what I hear. Her trip was to her grandparents’ house, which is in Gun Barrel City, southeast of Dallas, about 100 miles away. An easy trip. A couple of hours.

Which is, I believe, what the Skipper told Gilligan as they left that tropic port aboard that tiny ship.

The weather in Texas has been rough lately. In fact, on Tuesday her grandparents reported that they were under a tornado watch, and that it was hailing. They advised my daughter to wait until the next day to drive down. Her parents also advised this.

So she went anyway. Because she’s invincible.

As we neared the two-hour mark, I finally decided to call her cell phone and see how she was doing.

”Guess where I am,” she said.

“Um…in Gun Barrel?”

“In DALLAS.”

She seemed a little bemused that she’d hit rush hour traffic at 5 in the afternoon. Me, I was not so amused, but maybe she at least learned a lesson. Anyway, she was close to her exit, where she’d pick up another highway, much less congested.

I should also note that my daughter is a registered Democrat. Kids. What are you gonna do? But she’s passionate, and was excited about voting in her first presidential election. So excited, in fact, that apparently she plastered her car with bumper stickers. Not just Kerry-Edwards ones. Sarcastic ones. “Send Bush Back to the Ranch,” that sort of thing.

Did I mention that she lives in Texas?

So not only was she making a trip, driving it alone for the first time, in questionable weather, but I figured it was possible she might encounter a few drivers along the way who didn’t share her political persuasion and possibly were carrying firearms. I was a little nervous.

And then she hit the fog. And got lost.

So I sat there, wifeless, headset plugged into my phone, desperately pulling up maps on my computer that told me nothing, trying to stay calm and speak softly, looking for all the world like an air traffic controller who forgot to tell his boss that he was, you know, blind.

Meanwhile, my 19-year-old daughter was 2000 miles away, careening down I-175 in the dark, in the fog, lost in the middle of boonieville, surrounded by nothing but ranches and broken pick-ups and cows, probably Republican cows, and my wife was gone and I was attempting to give her directions and not start screaming. I could imagine how scared she must have been, all alone, not knowing where she was, not being able to see, probably trembling and terrified and…

“Are you SINGING?” I asked.

“Relax, Dad.”

Somehow, though, we got her to Seven Points, which is close enough to Gun Barrel City that you could spit and hit a redneck (sorry; I’m still a little traumatized), so she pulled into a gas station and asked for directions, not being a man. A few minutes later, and some more not really helpful suggestions from me, she was in her grandparents’ driveway, low on fuel and hungry but home. And it only took four hours.

The next morning, while she was still asleep, her grandfather took her car up to Wal-Mart and got the oil changed, put air in the tires, and filled up the tank. He’s a good grandfather.

It wasn’t until he got home that he noticed the bumper stickers.

“I hope nobody saw me,” is all he said, but I think that’s probably just wishful thinking.