Grandpa was a traveling man.
It wasn’t his business; he worked for the railroad, but he was a carman, a mechanic, working on the track and the big freight cars that traveled on it. Apart from frequent trips around the state to the site of various breakdowns and derailments, he spent all his working life around the big Burlington Northern shops in Spokane and, later, Wenatchee.
The job was a good, solid one of the sort that folks aspired to in the post-war years and I think he enjoyed it. But his heart seemed to be out on the road. Weekends, vacations, and sometimes even just after work, Grandpa was out driving. He had his favorite places, and he would return to them regularly, so regularly that, toward the end of his life, when he was starting to forget just about everything else, he could still accurately and cogently describe unmarked and un-named roads and routes in the remote parts of the West he had explored fifty years before.
By the time I came along, he liked to boast that he had been to forty-eight states; all of them except Alaska, and, he would reveal after a beat, New Jersey. Eventually he knocked those off the list as well.
It wasn’t long before I was going with him… since before my eyes had opened, he liked to tell people. Sitting in the passenger seat, I’d been to twenty-five of the fifty states before I was fourteen. I’d been to Wall Drug, the Corn Palace, saw Yellowstone any number of times before it burned, been to the Thousand Islands, toured Gettysburg, learned to see the stark and terrible beauty in Death Valley, bestrode the mighty Mississippi at its headwaters, watched the waves boil in off the Atlantic at Cape Cod.
People go cruising for different reasons. Some like the simplicity of life aboard, some love to sail, some like to go unusual places and see interesting things. I enjoy all of those, but for me I think most of it is the traveling. And I think I must have caught that bug from him.
He wasn’t a sailor, though he had been in the Navy during the war (firmly ashore at Pearl Harbor for the duration)–he got terribly seasick. But the country we are sailing through would have fascinated him. He was a rockhound, enjoyed mountains and geography, and would have found a million things to notice in the tale of geographic history writ large on the upthrust granite walls lining our route. He also liked meeting people (and they him) and he would have gotten a kick out of the various characters who occupy the wilderness here as well as those who are simply sailing through it.
Grandpa passed away in 2008, only days after we returned from our first extended sailing trip up the Inside Passage. My mother had called to let us know he was going downhill fast and we rushed over to Spokane almost as soon as we had the docklines tied off. That night, alone with him for a moment in his room at the VA, listening to the labored breathing, I told him it was okay to go; I’d see him again, and we’d take another trip sometime.
He passed away later that night.
So, this trip, I brought him along. We’re traveling with Grandpa once again.
My uncle divided up the ashes amongst a few of our clan who continue to trek along the backwoods and backroads of the world, with the stricture that, when we came to a place we thought he might like, we should leave a little bit of him there. It’s an elegant way to remember and honor a man who went all over, but still never had enough time to get everywhere he might have wanted to see. My uncle carries his share around in a salt shaker.
So Grandpa is still traveling, and now he’s been a whole raft of amazing new places he didn’t have a chance to see in life: Desolation Sound, Princess Louisa Inlet, the Klaskish Basin, Rugged Point, Hot Springs Cove, Barkley Sound.
At first, I was leaving behind a generous dollop. But the further I go, the less I have been scattering. There are so many more places to travel! I don’t want to run out; I’m still riding with Grandpa.