We didn’t travel much when I was a kid. We were not a family to climb into the
station wagon and drive off to Disneyland.
My parents never hauled us kids off to see the ocean.
No such thing as a family vacation.
The other day, while talking with my sister, it struck me that we
did all “enjoy” a few drives through disaster.
For some reason, my father could not resist seeing the aftermath
of a natural disaster. If one occurred
within a half-day’s drive of us, Dad piled the lot of us into a car and off we
flew to see the mess.
One of my firmest early childhood memories is that of looking out
the window of our station wagon when dad drove us down to see what became known
as Quake Lake following an earthquake and massive landslide in the Madison
River Canyon in August of 1959. I was
only three at the time.
I recall a drive to Great Falls in June of 1964 following epic
flooding that year.
I recall somewhere in the mid-1960s a slow drive through roads in
the Clancy area following a wildfire that swept all the way down to the edge of
town.
Ambrose Bierce famously said: “War is God’s way of teaching Americans
geography.”
For the Hegman family, disasters led us as close to a vacation as
we ever got.
—Mitchell Hegman
My family was very much the same, we were not the vacationing sort. But a disaster, absolutely yes, let's go see THAT. My earliest memory is of epic flooding in Valley City, ND in the late 70s. We also once detoured to see what remained of a town in Minnesota that was nearly wiped off the map thanks to an F3 tornado. A 2x4 driven into the side of a brick Coast to Coast hardware store was quite something to see.
ReplyDeleteSeems more than a few of us had the same upbringing. Those trips definitely left impressions on us!
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