We are two days out. Having gotten an early start from Cheyenne, we will make nearly 800 miles this day before being run to ground in Davenport, Iowa by a pounding rainstorm. But now we are heading into Nebraska, paralleling the lowlands of the Platte River at 75 miles an hour. Chuck Berry is blasting “bye bye New Jersey, I’ve become airborne” through the car speakers.

This is one of those perfects pieces of time one eventually encounters on a road trip. I am alone with my thoughts at dawn, rolling along the interstate with the person I love most in the world next to me, a thousand miles away in dreams of her own. And I am lost in the sights and sounds and stories of 50, 80, a 100 years ago and more, thinking about the character of the men and women of my father’s family. For they farmed these lands long ago, between and around the towns of Ogallala and North Platte, as far South as Wilcox in Kearny County, where my father was raised. This is the land that helped shape the character of so many of my relatives. And I ponder the question of how much of them lives on in me, and how much exists only as fading memories.

The names run through my head like music. I have always loved the names of my father’s older relatives. The names are strong, stolid, improbable, ancient. I met all of them at one time or another, and spent a good deal of time with a few of them. My grandfather William, his older sister Ella who played the piano for me when she was 102 years old, and his brothers Chester, Tillman, and Millard. My Grandmother Stena (pronounced with a long “e”). And there was Roma, Orem, Zona, Cleatus, Alda, K. Guy, Arrol, Arrol J, and Marell, which is my own middle name and that of my father, given in remembrance of my father’s maternal Grandfather.

What strikes me most forcefully when I think about these people, my immediate ancestors, is the similarity of character among the many of them I was fortunate enough to get to know.  It is not that they weren’t individuals with distinct personalities and histories. Some were god-fearing tee-totallers, one or two drank too much, a few were fairly successful, while some failed in life or had tragedy derail their lives. One was murdered and his murder avenged. But most were simple Nebraska farm folk, which in itself stamped them with a character that has largely disappeared from today’s culture. They were almost all very intelligent. But they were also largely uneducated or were self-taught. The drama of their lives revolved around the common cycles of everyday existence – births, deaths, marriages and hopefully love, and, most important to their character, the expectation and acceptance of the fact that life consisted of primarily of long hours of hard work everyday, work that would only really end at death.

They worked hard to stay even with the local bank that each year lent them seed money  and the cash to repair or replace their tools and farm implements. They lived with the knowledge that it only took two or three bad years to transform them from free-holding farmers to sharecroppers or worse.  They didn’t worry about nuclear war or global warming. They worried about whether the rain and sun would come in the right combinations and proportions to provide a sufficient harvest to allow them sign another note next year at the bank.

I used to think of them as men and women of few words, for whom “yep,” “nope,” and “maybe” nearly constituted a working vocabulary. In some ways it did. But actually they loved to talk, particularly when in the company of family and close friends. Deprived by the isolation of the farm of the daily social exchanges with strangers that we take for granted, they were not as comfortable passing the time with people who were not well known to them. But that same isolation created in most of them a strong need to talk enthusiastically whenever they gathered together with family or friends, whether for harvesting “bees” or family get-togethers.

During harvest time, relatives and neighboring farmers got together to help harvest the crop, generally corn. The men moved along side of husking wagons, which had one high sideboard. Wearing special husking gloves, they would strip the husk from an ear of corn, then throw it sideways against the high board to fall into the wagon. The women exchanged information and mutual confidences as they quilted together. And groaning boards of fried chicken, ham, potatoes, cornbread, sweet potatoes, vegetables, and pies fed the groups in the late afternoon. These were scenes of animated talk between mouthfuls. They talked mostly about the immediate events of their lives –  “farm talk” about planting, crop yields, the market for corn, and the problems one or more of them might be facing in the struggle to stay ahead of the bank.

As I drive I think that I commonly see those earlier times as “old fashioned,” as if the people who lived through them were as old then as when I met them as a child decades later. But surely many of them, especially those who left the farm for other opportunities, did not see themselves that way. My grandfather William, for example, fought in Europe in WWI. He and his cousin Dale both were assigned as aviation mechanics in France, maintaining and repairing the bi-planes that were being used in combat for the first time. Considering the Wright brothers first got off the ground in 1909, my grandfather’s knowledge of aviation and combustible engines in 1918 made him in some ways a very modern man. At the age of 26 he and the same cousin built and opened a service station and garage for automobiles. In Wilcox, Nebraska, where horse-drawn wagons were still a common site, this was like opening the first computer repair shop in a small town in the 1980’s.    

I was a young child two of the three times I drove with my parents from California to the Midwest for a family visit, but I still have memories of the those trips. The one when I was a little less than five was particularly memorable because it was while making the trip out that I conducted my first science experiment from the back seat of the family Chevrolet. Without going into detail, it involved the related questions of whether my father’s cherished cashmere sweater really could fly as I dangled it out the window and watched with intense curiosity as it flapped horizontally in the wind, and if not, would the world continue to exist when my father found out about the first part of the experiment. Suffice to say that I proved to my own satisfaction that indeed cashmere sweaters can not fly. I found out the answer to the second question when I screwed up the courage about 50 miles later to tell my father about the first part of the experiment.

As I suppose is true of the childhood memories of any adult, what I am left with after 45 years are individual scenes that have remained in my mind like snapshots of that world of Nebraska farmers. Adult memories of childhood experiences seem to me to be particularly rich, complete with sounds, smells, and a sense of atmosphere that are less a part of the remembrance of things we have experienced as adults. As we grow older, our experiences are filtered through a complex maze of prior experience, expectations and assumptions that simply have not had time to develop in the mind of a five-year-old. So childhood experiences are written on a relatively fresh slate, uncolored by past experience. They lack intellectual nuance but they have sensory power and detail, which is perhaps a partial explanation of why as we lose our memories in old age, the memories of our experiences as children seem to be the last to go. They are vivid and simple and very much like photographs.

The first and one of the most vivid memories I have of my father’s relatives is of a weekend breakfast at my Grandparents. My grandmother Stena was a woman who loved youngsters. She was as short at just under five feet as my grandfather was tall at 6’1”. She had snow white hair by the time she was thirty – it was her most unusual and beautiful physical attribute. I remember a long plain table (probably a few tables pushed together) with a yellow cotton flowered tablecloth shining brightly where the morning sun, framed by the kitchen window, lit and warmed the material. I remember my grandmother and a few other women with their backs to me preparing an enormous farm breakfast of meats, fried eggs, biscuits, grits, toast, preserves, and condiments of various description.

Around me at the table (my younger brother was still in a high chair) were most of the Nebraska Wassons, here to visit with my mother and father and with each other. It was early for a Saturday morning breakfast, but these were people accustomed to getting up and going to sleep on an early schedule. Most wore overalls or “can’t bust ‘em” pants and work shirts.  They fussed over the youngest Wasson in his high chair. They asked me questions that were partly grownup and partly the questions you ask any young boy or girl. It created a mix of both embarrassment and excitement at the same time as these grownups looked at me and waited with patient smiles for me to stammer out an answer.             

The end of the breakfast, at least my part in it since I was more than ready to go outside and play, provided a highpoint of drama. Conversation stopped and I became the focus of the interested attention of my newly met relatives. I had a big fried egg on my plate, untouched, when I asked to be excused from the table. When the egg was pointed out to me, I explained that I didn’t want to eat it. “Why not,” asked my Grandmother, in a voice both interested and friendly. “I don’t like the yellow part,” was my somewhat whining reply. My mother, a young woman of 23 and new to most of these people herself, tried to convince and cajole me into eating the egg. I will always remember my grandmother’s intervention. “Is it that yellow color and the taste?” she asked, as if for the moment she was a kid herself again. “Uh-huh,” I said, thinking that I was insulting my Grandmother’s cooking. “Well, what about the white part – do you like that part?” That part was ok. “Well, why don’t you eat the white part until it gets too close to the yellow part, and then you can go play. How about that?” I will never forget the sweet nature that was reflected in her smile as a compromise was reached and a potentially pouty boy got off the hook.

My Grandmother Stena died of breast cancer in 1965, the occasion of our last visit to the Nebraska Wassons. Again, we drove across country, this time to Colorado where my Granparents had moved. Stena was 64, while my grandfather was 68. My Grandmother lay in her sick bed, having been brought home from the hospital to die. The Wassons gathered in the living room and talked, keeping up one another’s spirits but expressing  very little emotion, and talking  even less, about the purpose of their visit. The death watch was a ritual they knew, and they accepted it as they did work.  My Grandmother remained out of sight in the bedroom as my brother and I played “Clue” on the floor for several days, half-listening but mostly trying to pass our precious time in the company of adults. We didn’t really even understand that my Grandmother was dying. She was “very sick” and we were visiting her. Actually, she was near death and we saw her only twice – once when we arrived, and once to say goodbye before heading back to California.

The highlight of that trip was when my Uncle Dale, who had had all of his teeth removed in favor of a full set of choppers, laughed so hard that his teeth flew out of his mouth and landed in his lap. Without so much as a break in the conversation, he scooped them up and stuffed them back in his mouth. Nobody said a word. It was as if it hadn’t happened. My brother and I looked at one another, amazed that this extraordinary event could go unremarked on by adults. I asked to be excused, and barely contained my impulse to scream out loud with laughter. We barely made it through the door before we fell to the ground howling with delight until our stomachs were sore. One look at each other and another round would begin.

When our visit was over, my brother and I were ushered into Grandma Stena’s room to say goodbye. It was then that I realized at the age of 12 how terribly sick she was. But she smiled at us with the same look of love and tenderness that I will always associate with her. It was only after we were in the car and had said our goodbyes to my grandfather that I knew my Grandma was dying. We were the last of the relatives to leave, and my grandfather smiled and waved goodbye from behind a big picture window, half sitting on a couch set in front of the window. We had all turned forward to start the journey home when something led me to look back once more to see if my Grandpa was still there. His head lay buried in his crossed arms on the back of the couch, as great heaving sobs moved his shoulders up and down. He was alone with his dying wife. I knew for the first that the world of adults was more complex and hard and painful than I had imagined. I didn’t tell anyone else what I had seen.

Two weeks later we got the call that my Grandmother had died. My father had come home early from work after getting the news. He sat in his customary chair in the family room as I walked in from school. My mom took me aside and explained, and asked me  to leave him to himself for while. He stared into the middle distance, lost in his feelings and thoughts of his mother. I never saw him shed a tear, although he was very close to his mom. He too must have wept bitterly in his grief over her death. I simply never was allowed to see it. Very much the son of his father, emotions were expressed privately and not in front of anyone but his wife. He was and is a loving man, but he will carry to his own grave an expectation and acceptance that life is hard, that one accepts that as they do the rising of the sun, and that one has an obligation to bear up under tragedy and hardship without the undue expression of emotion. Just as one does not gloat over personal triumphs, one is stoic when life fails them. It is a view of life that I do not share much of. But after 50 years, I think I understand it.

And so, over time, the generation of my grandfather and those who had come before him slowly died off. My grandfather, as sweet a soul as you can imagine, who liked nothing better than snuffling our ears with his moustache when my brother and I were young boys, lived on to marry twice more, the third marriage lasting until his death 22 years later at the age of 93. By that time he had moved close to me in Santa Rosa. Our last big project together was re-roofing his house when he was 87. Although his balance was going by then, he was up on that roof hammering nails with me with a practiced eye. In a box on my dresser are his bolo tie, worn on special occasions, and a pair of prized cufflinks, probably seldom worn.

The last of my grandfather’s generation, his brother Tilman, died two years ago in Oregon.

My own father, who nows lives in Florida with my mom, underwent triple by-pass surgery last year. Although now completely recovered, the experience has subtly changed him. As he was recuperating in the hospital, aj and I visited him one last time before heading for the airport and to California. Although well on the road to recovery, he was untypically frail looking. As we were preparing to leave, the physical therapist arrived and suggested that I help my father take a turn around the hospital floor. As he hung onto the railing for support he took my hand for balance. This must have seemed as odd to him as it did to me. He held on though, and we chatted about nothing in particular as a partial reversal of roles between father and son completed itself. Yesterday as aj and I were about to leave Kentucky for Chillicothe, Ill., he told me over the phone something I have always known but which he has a tough time saying. He told me to be careful and that he loved me. By the time he passes, hopefully many years from now, he may actually feel comfortable saying it. It’s a long way from “yep,” “nope,” and “maybe.”