Road of Her Own: Women's Journeys in the West

by Marlene Blessing

Overview

Women's true stories of discovery, loss, adventure, and more—all played out in the vast reaches of the American West.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555913076
Publisher:	Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/01/2002
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	9 Years

About the Author

A lifelong westerner, Marlene Blessing is a published poet, essayist, and cookbook author with a love of travel.

Read an Excerpt

Since childhood, when they were next-door neighbors and best friends, my
mother and Aunt Helen plotted a girls' road trip. Now in their seventies,
knees in need of replacement, many dreams deferred by wifely duties and
mothering, both women at last hit the road west on their first road trip
together.

Mother and Aunt Helen packed up Helen's beloved black 1992 Mazda, a car that
was to be my family's gift to me. We all met midcontinent in Denver,
Colorado.

"It looks just like a Jaguar," my Aunt Helen had told me on the phone when I
was debating whether or not to accept my parents' unexpected gift. "Sleek
and elegant. And safe."

"You'll love it," my mother took up the car cause. When she talks on the
phone cross-country to me in Seattle, she always shouts exuberantly, as if
to make up for the distance. "It's so much better than that old rattletrap
you're driving."

Mother had bought the Mazda from Aunt Helen with a modest inheritance from
her cousin Martha, a woman who worked for TWA and had jetted around the
globe, never married.
I was a devoted old-model-Saab girl, happily hugging countless Wild West
back roads and switchbacks with a car that had sensual curves of her own-and
front-wheel drive. More than my hesitation about taking this mobile family
inheritance, I struggled over the self-image that might be imposed on me, as
if my mother were once again insisting I buy a purple prom dress, a
polyester first interview outfit, or a chiffon formal gown for their
fiftieth anniversary. Purple is Mother's favorite color. Mine is gray. In a
flamboyant family, I've learned to be subversive. My secret plan for the
family Mazda was to sell it as soon as I got to Seattle and buy a Saab newer
than my 1986 hatchback.

It is telling that my family's idea of a present would also involve a road
trip to receive it. We are nomadic. A soundtrack to my childhood was the old
white spiritual, "This world is not my home, I'm just a'passing through'
Until I finally clung for four years to the same University of California
college- against my parents' wishes, I had attended fourteen different
schools in sixteen years. I am the only one in my immediate family who has
continued to claim the West. They are all finally settled in the south of
Florida and northern Virginia.

But the West is where I was born and where my mother, at seventy-two, dreams
of returning-at least to summer in a Colorado family cabin-if my
seventy-five-year-old father ever does make good on his promise of retiring.
My mother always says that her year of college at University of Colorado,
Boulder in 1948, where she boldly majored in journalism and minored in
theater, was one of the most wonderful years of her life. The other
memorable years were 1945-1948, when at sixteen she lied about her age and
ran off to work as a telegrapher for the Wabash Cannonball in Iowa.

"The good old Wabash was desperate for station agents because of the war."
Mother tells the story with pleasure and conscious pride. "I'd 'decorate the
platform," watching as those trains roared by at eighty miles per hour. I'd
look for smoking journals on the train wheels. If I saw smoke, I'd hold my
nose and point so the engineer could stop the train and check for fire." She
laughs, "Mostly I just got a lot of burns on my hands from smoking cinders
while I held up the trains' orders on a wooden V-stick so the engineer and
conductor could snatch the orders as they passed the station. Not many women
working the rails in those days."

My mother's hands are still dotted with tiny white cinder-scars like
constellations. And she still rues the mistake of switching tracks on a
train in St. Louis. "You should have seen that engineer's face as he sailed
by the station on the wrong track!"

I wonder now whether my mother was on the right track when she married at
twenty-one, leaving the railroad for my forester father and, nine months
later, me. When my parents moved way out west to a remote national forest
lookout station in the High Sierras, Mother began writing her first novel,
All Aboard, about her girls' life running trains. She was pregnant with me.

Sometimes I imagine I can still hear the first sounds reaching me from
inside my whooshing watery womb. There is afternoon music, the Mills
Brothers, "Downtown Strutters' Ball" and "Mood Indigo"; there are elk bugles
and screech hawks at midnight around our forest cabin; and every morning
there is the rapid tap-tapping of my mother's fast, telegrapher-trained
fingers on the typewriter, as if still sending out code to save our country.
To keep trains on time. What she was trying to save was the writer in her
who would soon be swallowed up by family life. She would give birth to
"babies instead of books." as she told me all my childhood. Even now, after
years of writing my own books, I glance down at my agile fingers on the
keyboard and recognize my mother's hands.

******
When my Mother and Aunt Helen met me in Denver with their elegant car, the
Mazda looked as if it was packed for a 1940s prom. "Glenn Miller and Great
Hits of the 1940s" audiotapes all over the backseat, makeup cases as big as
suitcases, Coca Cola cans, paper towels for spills, and brightly colored
hair bonnets to keep their bouffants from blowing in the wind.

"Wait till you hear the sound system," Aunt Helen smiled. "Like being
surrounded by an entire orchestra."

I had to grin at stories of my mother and aunt driving over the speed limit,
sipping Coca Cola, singing "I'll be down to get you in a taxi, honey!" or
"Pack up all your cares and woe, here we go, singing low..." as they roared
across flatlands of green Kansas wheat and eastern Colorado plateau, where
prairie madness and dustbowls once drove women to the edge.

"So, how was your first road trip together?" I asked them as we all admired
the subtle and, yes, sleek lines of Aunt Helen's Mazda. Studying my aunt's
car, I abandoned my secret plan to sell it. I surrendered to their gift; in
fact, I was overwhelmed by it.

"I'll bet you two just wanted an excuse to finally take your road trip west
together," I said. I was so moved I did not know how to thank them.
"Ohhhhh... now..." Mother said with an expression of delight and mischief. I
knew that look well-it's how women of her generation kept any sense of self
in a "Father Know's Best" world. It is the same
"up-to-no-good-honey-can-I-still-please-you" comic grin of Lucille Ball
conniving with sidekick Ethel to outwit the dim, good-natured Fred and the
bewildered but still princely Ricky Ricardo. All their lives my mother and
aunt had longed for this trip; it still had to take the form of family
service. "We did get in a glorious day of shopping here in Denver before you
arrived," Mother grinned. "Got you a Rocky Mountain elk antler key chain for
the new car."

We ran our hands along the lustrous curves of the beautiful sedan. "Don't
you think it looks like a race car?" Aunt Helen giggled. I had imagined my
aunt driving a sensible luxury gas-guzzler, but I should have known better.
Like my mother, Aunt Helen was blessed with jet-black curly hair and wild
blue eyes as attentive and wary as any wolf's.

Neighbor girls growing up in a small Missouri town, they would marry
brothers from the backwoods, men keenly intelligent and eager to travel the
world with pretty girls as their wives. My mother and Aunt Helen have always
kept their looks. Aunt Helen took our reunion as an opportunity to advise me
on cosmetics and aging skin. She has the unwrinkled face of a much younger
woman.

"After a certain age, forget the dabbing," she said, politely noting my
fifty-year-old crow's-feet, "you just slather on face cream."

"We're having the time of our lives!" Mother enthused as we pulled into
Kittredge, Colorado, a mountain tourist trap of a town boasting a Wild West
cafe and tavern. "Can't believe we had to wait so long for our girls' road
trip."

"Just all our lives," Helen said. They exchanged a conspiratorial glance,
like escaped prisoners.
"You two are like Thelma and Louise," I teased, "if they'd lived to be
grandmothers."

"Didn't they have to drive off a cliff to escape their husbands?" Mother
asked.

I smiled. "Why did it take you two so long, anyway?"

"Well," Mother said, "there was always someone else who insisted on riding
along. You kids, or husbands, or you name it. We just never were free. Not
like you modern gals."

I remember the last road trip Mother had made with women friends. It was in
the '60s when she and several churchwomen crashed the Virginia State
Southern Baptist convention and took the floor to filibuster for a woman's
right to vote in Southern Baptist churches. They succeeded in their quest to
see a brief feminine flowering of women's rights in the church. Now forty
years later, the same Southern Baptist convention is dominated by far-right
fundamentalists, who command women to "submit themselves" to their husbands.

"Stealth-Southern-Baptists," Mother calls them. "Those right-wingers
railroaded the convention when the moderates weren't looking. Nothing we
could do to stop them."

I wondered about how people, passions, and belief get railroaded or
detoured. Certainly my mother and aunt had been "deflected" as the Russian
poet Anna Akmathova writes, from their "true course." How was it that a girl
who ran off to work underage at the Wabash Cannonball had so changed tracks
from wartime adventurer to stay-at-home wife and mother? Who or what had
switched the track? I pondered their lifelong wait-a girls' road trip that
after fifty years became a grandmothers' road trip.

I glanced around the Wild West cafe and faux gunslinger bar. It was
decorated with elk trophies and "Wanted" posters. Bar "girls" dressed in
miniskirts with sheriff's posse silver stars on their leather vests took our
tame orders. It occurred to me then that in another century, it was not only
risky, but rare for women to travel together. Mail-order brides,
prostitutes, schoolteachers, settlers were the roles allowed our foremothers
in the Western expansion. But before the European settlers, did women travel
alone or together in small bands? Were there Native women scouts,
geographers, warriors, and explorers before Lewis and Clark followed
Sacajawea, whom Western history records as an all-but-forgotten guide for
great men?

My Mother, Aunt Helen, and I visited my friend Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw
writer in the Rockies. After more tips on skin care, we fell into talking
about history and women traveling together. "Of course there were many
Native women explorers besides Sacajawea," Linda said. "And warriors like
Lozen, Geronimo's brilliant military strategist, scout, and diviner."

I wondered what the West would have become if more women had explored the
landscape, naming the rivers, valleys, and mountains, if we had made maps
with a feminine geography. Would we have given place-names to so many
soldiers or European royalty who had never even seen this New World? I like
to believe that women, like many Native people, would have named nature less
after great men of war or politics and more after the spirit of the place
itself. So instead of naming the great volcanic peaks of the Northwest after
Hood and Rainier, they might have called Mount Rainier Changer or Puget
Sound Whulge, its Salish name, which sounds so like the shushing waves of
this intimate, inland sea.

But the power of naming nature-like recording history itself-has long been
denied women's vision. Women traveling together and narrating the West is an
untold story, until very recently. This road trip by grandmothers to give a
beautiful vehicle to a daughter, who would then drive even farther, to the
Northwest, felt historic.

The first thing I had to do was name the new car. Jaguar. Or Jag, for short.
When I slipped behind the wheel, my mother and aunt turned up the stereo
six-CD player to "Ghost Riders in the Sky" as the car prowled around
mountain switchbacks through Bear Creek canyon. I marveled at its smooth
power and subtle steering.

"This is a race car, Aunt Helen!"

"Now you see why it's so hard for me to give it up for one of those sensible
four-wheel drives in the snow."

Aunt Helen had to part with her car to better navigate black-ice roads on
her almost daily trips to visit her 102-year-old father who still worked his
own farm. As I said good-bye to my mother and aunt, I felt a poignancy to
our parting. Wouldn't it be wonderful if they could both join me on my road
trip back to Seattle? We could harmonize to Gershwin songs and stop at
hole-in-the-road motels. They could tell me stories of growing up together
and how they dreamed of one day traveling out west together. But Mother had
to get home for a knee replacement surgery and Aunt Helen, who had already
had both her knees replaced, had an ailing husband who needed her care.

"Oh, honey, wish we could join you," Mom said. "But that would be some big
detour in our lives."
As I drove them to the airport, it struck me that my whole life, by their
terms, was a detour from the typical woman's road. Though I'd had long-term
partners, I'd always refused marriage, seeing how it had changed my mother-
as an end, not a beginning. I'd chosen not to have children, though I'd
helped raised stepchildren. This is my legacy, a mother who detoured from
her own writing road, who never took a road trip with her best childhood
girlfriend until she was in her seventh decade. A mother who even now still
longs to buy a modest mountain cabin in Colorado with her small inheritance.

My mother's road is not the same one I choose to travel. Perhaps those first
five years of my life in a Forest Service lookout cabin in the High Sierras,
watching my mother slowly put away her writing as she took on the mission of
motherhood, perhaps the memory of her typing endless Letters to the Editor,
instead of her own book, perhaps the longing in her voice when she told me
at the age of seventy-two, "Do you think I can go back to that book on a
girl working the Wabash Cannonball I wrote when I was pregnant with you in
the Sierras? Do you think at this late age I can still write?" Perhaps all
of this in my mother's journey has determined for me a different life's map.

I saw my Mother eagerly memorizing the Colorado red rocks, jagged peaks of
her Boulder college days, greening and fragile aspen, purple lupine, and red
Indian paintbrush blooming alongside the mountain roads. "0h" she murmured,
"I was so happy here once."
I wondered whether she had ever again been so happy. She would, of course,
assure me that she had. But something about that longing in her expression
as she breathed in the wild rampage of Bear Creek running springtime high
and the wide horizon of perfect blue and big clouds gave me pause. At the
Denver airport, Mother and I said good-bye to Aunt Helen, sending her back
to Missouri. Then Mother and I had tea while awaiting an editor and friend
Maureen, who was leaving husband and two daughters to come ride back home
with me in the new Jaguar-car.
"Western women's road trip?" Maureen had answered without a beat when I'd
proposed the journey. "Wahooo!" she said. "No stopping us!"

"I wish I could continue on with y'all," my mother said as we saw her to her
plane. "You modern women. You just go wherever you please."

"We stand on your shoulders, Mom," I told her as we embraced. "Thanks again
for the beautiful car."

"You take this trip for me," Mother said and held me tighter. "And you tell
me all about it. Promise?"

"I've got an assignment to write about," I said. "I'll tell you the story of
our trip," I promised.
But as I sat down to write what happened next after we left my mother and
aunt at the airport, I looked at my own hands and remembered my mother's
typing, her untold story, her unbought Colorado cabin, her inheritance given
to her children. I knew that the real story was not what Maureen and I,
modern women, did on our continued trip out west, over Rockies and Cascades,
through Wyoming high chaparral and Montana wildflower meadows, lingering at
the Little Big Horn where Native history was detoured and forced into a
footnote of the history of western Manifest Destiny.

The farther I drove west from having met my aunt and mother midcontinent,
the closer their own road trip seemed to me. I found evidence of them is,
everywhere, like ghost riders-from the neat Kleenex box in the backseat to
of the brightly colored afghan in the trunk knitted by my Grandmother
Virgie. These women in my family followed me west to a place they have
briefly lived at and rarely traveled, as if the West belongs to a feminine
future long denied in them. A future where women took to the road whenever
they liked.

I thought this road trip story would lead with Mother and Aunt and then the
real part would begin-when my friend and I hit the road. But as in
traveling, the real stories are often what we first believe are detours.

If my mother had not switched tracks from her own writing, would I have been
born? Would I have ecome a writer? If my mother had found her mountain cabin
when she was a college student in Boulder, would she have met and married my
father in Missouri? If she and Aunt Helen had taken that Wild West road trip
when they were young girls, would they ever have returned?

"We're going to do this again, Helen and I," my mother assures me still.
"We're going to travel out west and look at Colorado mountain property. Who
knows? One day we'll all have a family reunion way out there! Will you meet
us again, if we do?"

"Wahooo," I assured her. "No stopping us."

 

What People are Saying About This

Ann Zwinger

Take twenty skilled story tellers who are also marvelous writers, twenty different life views, combine them in a sentient and sensitive way, and you have a marvelous feast of a book of seasoned with wit and understanding. All the writers in A Road of Her Own, wise and canny women, bring their own unique point that enriches us all.
— author of Beyond the Aspen Grove and Run, River, Run

Pattiann Rogers

The stories in A Road of Her Own relate the odysseys of contemporary women in the West, their travels through country, real and spiritual. The West and its land in this book is an omnipresence more than merely background. Each of these stories is unique, each quest a revelation, each writer a commanding and singular voice. A Road of Her Own is a noteworthy contribution to our long literary history of journeys into adventure and awakening.
— author of Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981-2001

Editorial Reviews

...Women who stay home don't get into trouble, perhaps, but readers will be glad these modern girls got themselves out of the house and onto the road, where the world's riches await.

Seattle Times

Whether they travel by car, on foot or even by dog sled, the women who recount their Western sojourns here are all on the road to self-discovery. Adversity is opportunity. When tanks run out of gas, cars break down and hikers lose their paths, it's time to regard the landscape, pay attention to children who are along for the ride, reflect-and even take some risks.

Boston Herald