Growing up, I was always afraid of his anger. I grew up watching my dad suppress his rage. I figure those emotional tectonic plates move undetectably slowly, but over time the pressure builds up. I used to have this haunting fear that the anger somehow resides in me, as if I’ve always been living on a fault line.
When I was 19, we finally did the belated road trip that should’ve happened when I was 10, but better late than never. My dad was full of the romance of the road, fueled by travel books like Blue Highways and Steinbeck‘s: Travels with Charlie. So in the summer after my freshman year, we took off from Ohio in a rented van.
The excuse for our travel was to go visit my dad‘s childhood home in South Dakota, but what we found along the way is more important to the story. My dad had a curious love of crumbling greatness that drew us to visit obsolete industrial sites all through the midwestern rust belt.
We went out of our way to walk through closed steel mills and empty freight yards and abandoned factories. We did a lot of walking on broken glass. It was a perfect setting for my dad’s frustration with all that had gone wrong. My dad was angry about a lot of things.
That feeling of walking on broken glass was kinda familiar. My dad usually sputtered a steady stream of cynical blame - as if it was the steam releasing from a pressure cooker. The heat and pressure of all that tectonic force was deep underground.
But the emotional earthquake finally happened when we were visiting Duluth Minnesota.
He wanted to see the old shipping yard where all the Great Lakes cargo boats used to load and unload back in the heyday of American steel. Many of the tall cranes along the loading docks were still standing, but none of them had any work to do. We crossed over the liftbridge and out onto the Long Barrier Island there at the western edge of Lake Superior. We got to see what used to be a bustling bee hive of commerce. A proud livelihood for America’s union workers. Abandoned.
My dad was semi-retired and trying to keep himself busy with hobbies. He had some kites in the van, and the wind was pretty strong coming across the water, so while we were stopped, I took one of the kites out and I was assembling the sticks and attaching the bridal.
I had the kite resting on the pavement off to one side of the big empty parking lot, and as I was kneeling down to attach the string, a loud Ford pickup with those big tires accelerated toward me and then screeched to a stop. He quickly backed UP and sped off while laughing, but it drained the dignity out of what I was trying to do.
I was trying to honor my dad by flying one of the kites he had made. He took pride in how high those kites could soar out above our flat Ohio Prairie land. He made his own kite REELS too, out of old wire spools that were big enough to hold 3000 feet of hundred pound test. There were different colors of fishing line to mark how much string was out. Dad called it: Sky Fishing.
A kite could lift so high into the sky, it would become barely visible flying a half mile up, and that was a big Kite. When the wind got stronger at higher elevations, the string would howl with a strange vibration while the Kite strained to lift the weight of all that line.
It was a pretty good breeze, so I let the kite spin out line - using my thumb on the edge of the spool to create drag, just like my dad had taught me. But today we weren’t going for any records, and I had kinda lost heart because of the run-in with the pickup, so I just reeled the Kite back in after 20 minutes or so, and I disassembled the sticks, and slid the kite back into its long plastic tube.
We were planning on driving back over to the lift bridge when we saw that same Ford pickup, and I asked my dad to stop for a second because I wanted to try to clear the air. I didn’t want to carry that anger, and I thought if I could just talk to the guy, I would be able to let go of the lingering adrenaline.
So my dad stopped the van, and I walked over to the pickup and said: “Hey man, I don’t mean any trouble, but I’m the guy you buzzed in the parking lot back there, and it did give me a scare looking UP at that big grill.”
He apologized and offered me a beer, and we were just starting to ease the tension with a little small talk when I noticed that my dad had gotten out of the van and had walked over to where I was standing next to this guy’s pick up.
Before I knew what was happening, I heard the sound of hissing and saw my dad folding up his Swiss Army knife. My dad snarled to the man: “That’s what you get for Messing with my son.”
I looked at my dad and said: “Oh no, what - What did you do?”
As the front left corner of the pickup started to sink toward the ground, the driver jumped out of his truck and looked at his tire. Then he looked at me with fury, so I said: “Oh shit, I had NO idea he was going to do that!“
My dad had gotten back into the van - as if that would protect him. He had definitely not thought this through.
The Man grabbed a tire iron out of the back of his pickup and was pacing erratically and yelling that he did NOT have a spare and that those tires cost $200 EACH.
He dropped the tire iron and got out his jackknife instead. He walked quickly from one side to the other, and punctured BOTH front tires on our van. He knew we had a spare and he didn’t, so it would take TWO of our tires to make us even.
Then he yelled: “What the fuck you gonna do now?
You can’t get away! You’re going to pay me for that fucking tire. Right the fuck now!”
My dad‘s face went white. What, did he think this guy was going to cower in the face of parental authority? He was no kid. He was probably only a few years older than me, but I was no kid either. And we had no getaway. There’s only one road back to the mainland and we could all see that the lift bridge was UP. Nobody was going anywhere for a while.
I yelled: “Dad! Open the door. We gotta call a tow truck! We gotta pay for this man”s tire!”
And my dad was nodding and holding his hands up inside the van.
The angry man said: “That’s a fucking great idea! Call that tow truck NOW! And they better have one of these tires in stock!"
And my dad nodded some more, and I came to his side and said: “OK. So far, nobody’s hurt. Tell him you’re gonna make the call.“
Eventually, both our van and his pickup went back across that bridge with the front wheels up in the air - each behind a tow truck.
But that was after some scary negotiation. The hard part was the awkward conversation while we waited for the rescue to arrive. At first, I stood beside our van with my dad, talking him down.
It was a strange shift in our father-son relationship. I guess my dad had been trying to be the hero, battling the bad guys, using all that anger that he had been saving up his whole life. When he saw me trying to get all Gandhi with the bullies, he must have thought maybe Billy Jack was a better strategy. We had a lot to talk about on the rest of our long road trip.
He told me stories of the punishments his strict father had given him, and he showed me childhood scars. I wish we could’ve talked it all out, but my dad had a flask of rum that he kept refilling every day for the rest of the trip. So I did most of the driving. And there was a LOT of driving. We kept going all the way to South Dakota, his childhood home.
But Duluth really was the turning point.
I’m grateful for the whole mess. I got to be the grown-up. I found the words that got my dad out of trouble. One of my favorite memories of our whole trip was that awkward time waiting for the tow truck.
I took the kite out again to show the Man in the pickup. He was surprised to find out that my dad had built the kite. He said it looked like a pretty good kite. He saw our Ohio tags and asked what we were doing so far away from home. I told him about our road trip. He said he never did anything like that with his dad. I said we were just trying to make good on an old promise.
He asked about the huge kite reel, and I explained that my dad‘s goal was for his kite to soar as far up as possible.
He said to me: “You DO that - for your dad.“
I apologized again, and he apologized again, and when his tow truck came, and the front of his pickup had been hoisted up in the air ready to roll, he climbed into the cab of the tow truck and waved as they headed toward the liftbridge. My dad and I waved back.
David Wilcox is a singer-songwriter. Find him at www.davidwilcox.com
