John Wise

This series of 15 blog entries that will follow me and my mother on a cross-country road trip was long neglected and not published for too many years. My mother would have argued that this was my modus operandi regarding her. You see, she was aware that by 2005, my mother-in-law Jutta Engelhardt had been to America nearly half a dozen times and that on each visit, Caroline and I would take her out to see a new corner of the United States. Yet in the ten years since we’d moved from Frankfurt, Germany, to Phoenix, Arizona, we did very little with my own mother. The truth is she could be a difficult person to spend time with and was the reason we started traveling out of state every Thanksgiving to avoid the inevitable drama that would unfold at those dinners.

I’d carved time out to take Auntie and Grandpa to Florida back in March, and by mid-May, Jutta was returning to America for her longest visit yet of two months. With my mom strong-arming me into taking her to Buffalo, New York, for what she was telling me could be her last visit ever to the place of our birth, I reluctantly acquiesced. It turned out that the timing was going to work in Caroline’s and my favor as my mom wanted to leave before Caroline’s mom was set to return to Germany, and this would mean that Caroline wouldn’t have to be in a car with my mother and me for two weeks nor would she have to sacrifice any more valuable vacation time for a trip we both had reservations of making.

This would end up being the only vacation my mother and I would ever make together. In March 2018, my mother passed away after suffering a stroke in October 2017, and this trip to Buffalo was indeed her last time in New York. The difficult nature of our relationship will likely unfold over the course of these blog entries. I’m telling you this upfront as it is nearly 2020 now that I finally sit down to commit the two weeks on the road with her using the notes I took during that trip, which are far from comprehensive. I’ll be taking a look back with the help of the 11,585 words that I did write back during those days but there are giant gaps in the record that I’ll be trying to write to. It is due to my mother’s and my at times, cantankerous relationship that my focus on not wanting to remember what should have been important impressions were being intentionally neglected. So, through the filter of time and with no small amount of bias, I’ll do my best to convey my perspective, which will likely display a certain animus. I will chronicle the dysfunctional relationship between a mother and her firstborn because that’s the way it was. The following two paragraphs are from my original notes and are nearly verbatim; after this, that line will blur.

I depart once more as a guide across America, but this time it’s with my own mother, Karen Goff, formerly Wise, formerly Kurchoff. The absurdity that we might get through two weeks together is not lost on anyone who knows us. I’m starting to feel I should adopt the nom de guerre “road-sherpa.” Once out on the road, my mom remembers that she had forgotten a bag of food on the counter at home she wanted to bring along. An hour later, she’s thinking about lunch. Fifteen minutes later we are talking about what we’ll be eating in Buffalo. Moments later, the conversation turns to dreaming about eating Walleye. My mom thinks about food a lot, all the time, according to her. Besides our conversation about things gastronomical, the rest of the day is uneventful. By the time we are in Albuquerque, we call On-Star-O-Line (Caroline, who earned that title while helping me with online services back in March during the Florida trip) for help finding us some New Mexican cuisine. She directs us to Sadie’s – a winner.

Onwards, the road becomes our drive into a grim terror. Blue skies give way to heavy looming gloom that pushes Mom into hallucinating her worst fears. No, not a lack of restaurants on the road ahead. Not earthquakes, either. She thinks she is seeing three simultaneous tornados falling from the sky. Wake up, Chicken Little, they are clouds; that is Virga. Return to thinking about ice cream, Mom.

For a few hours, we drive through intermittent rain and lots of lightning before the real storm hits. Just outside of Dalhart, Texas, Mom accuses me of the impolite act pertaining to particular bowel issues. I insist that there’s no deluge in my pants and even demand of her, “How dare you accuse me of that?” To prove it to her, I roll down the windows, which overwhelms the interior of the car with a powerful stench that simultaneously temporarily blinds her and brings her to retching. These are the farmlands where America’s cattle are fattened up before slaughter. On nice warm and humid nights like tonight, the fog we were seeing is actually the visualized effluvium of beef fattening madness. Take a big lungful, Mom, and please don’t attribute that to your son again. Through tears of laughter, she says she’s certain she is gonna vomit if I don’t immediately put up the windows and leave this godforsaken corner of Texas. In Stratford, hopefully, far from the cow stink after having driven 765 miles, we grab a $38-a-night motel with an air conditioner mom wants to believe will mask my snoring. Get ready to feel the pain; your ears ain’t heard nothing yet.