John Denver, Colorado Springs, and Shark Attacks

Ok, I’m going to try to write about something not depressing for once! I’ve been a major drag for over a year and you’ve put up with it long enough. Oh, for the record, my chest x-ray came back normal from what I can tell and my cough finally went away. I still have breathing issues but they could be allergies or asthma. My doctor will do more testing. 

Anywho, enough about all that shit. 

Today, I shall regale you with tales of my yearly summer trips to see my grandparents in Colorado. 

They sucked. The trips, not my grandparents. 

The Skinny on My Grandparents

So, here’s a quick run down on my family history. To make it less boring, I’ll bullet point it. Bullet points make things seem at least 3.5 times as exciting as un-bullet-pointed anecdotes. 

• My mom was born in the mid 1940s. Her dad was an asshat who gambled away my grandmother’s savings
• He was supposed to pick my 8 year old mother up from school and never showed. Why? Because the fucker just up and left the family. My grandma had 2 kids and was now a single mother
• A year or two later, living in a boarding house with my mom and uncle, my grandma met another resident. A handsome, John Wayne looking type. There was a community bathroom and he kept leaving his socks in there so she sewed them together and left them on the doorknob of his room
• He decided he liked how feisty she was and they dated
• They got married at the courthouse while my mom and uncle were seeing a movie. Didn’t even tell them beforehand. My mom got back from the movies and suddenly had a new dad
• My grandpa (technically step grandpa) was awesome and treated those kids like his own. He’s a really interesting man who deserves a blog post all his own
• Years go by. My grandma goes through cancer in the middle of all this. Some kind of “feminine” cancer that they never specified because such talk was unseemly back then. She actually grew up downwind from a nuclear testing facility so pretty much her entire family died of various cancers
• More years go by and she gets colon cancer and dies. She was 62. I never met her. In fact, my twin and I were born on the 2 year anniversary of her death
• My grandpa remarried to a woman who had also lost her spouse. They moved to Colorado Springs

Bam. You now have context.

Colorado Springs

So, every year as long as I can remember, my family made the hellish journey to Colorado Springs to visit my grandparents for a week. Technically they were both step-grandparents, neither related by blood, but that didn’t matter at all. We lived in Washington state, so Colorado wasn’t tooooooo far, but it wasn’t exactly close. 

Now, if you recall, we were fairly poor, growing up, so flying was absolutely out of the question. My grandparents would send us gas money and away we’d go every summer. 

I hated it. 

The journey was long, hot, dry, and boring as fuck. We drove old school shit cars so we did NOT have air conditioning. It was dead ass summer, driving through places like Wyoming and Idaho and Utah. Just beige wasteland as far as the eye could see. There were 5 of us making these trips most of the time, so there was no personal space on top of all this. Add to that the fact that my mom brought only Neil Diamond and John Denver tapes? God. It was so freeing when I finally got old enough to make mixed tapes (yes, I’m old) and I was given a few turns to play my music. My twin was always asking if we could listen to one of my tapes. You can only listen to Neil Diamond so much without getting desperate. 

Perfume-y Ford Falcon from Hell

One year my older sister came along and brought her baby. I had to sit up front in the middle between my parents in our old school 1960s Ford Falcon. There’s no other pure trauma than having to be squished between your parents with no air conditioning in the middle of the desert. Add to that my twin’s dumbass friend had spilled a bottle of perfume in the back seat a few months earlier meant a sickening smell of old lady perfume permeated the already stuffy hell-mobile. It was truly, truly torture. 

Some years we had enough money to stop at a hotel for the night. My mother snores so incessantly that I would sleep in the bathroom with the fan on. We were all crammed into one room, you see, and there was no peace to be had, nevermind that I’m a huge hypocrite and also snore like a demon with sleep apnea. It’s different when it’s your parent, you know? There’s just something extra annoying about it. 

Often, we couldn’t afford the hotel. We would drive straight through, only stopping to get gas or eat cheap ass diner food and then be on our way again. The whole drive took almost exactly 24 hours. There’s a special kind of disgusting you feel when it’s three in the morning and you’re at a gas station peeing, feeling like you desperately need a shower and wishing you had real nutrients in your body instead of off-brand Ritz crackers and twinkies. 

Hell. I really can’t use that word enough. 

7 People in 600 Square Feet

Eventually, blessedly, we would finally arrive. Everything between Washington and Colorado is brown, dead, and hideous. Colorado, however, is gorgeous. Lots of pine trees and red cliffs and the Rocky Mountains in the distance. The altitude was a bitch though.

My grandparents lived in a house built in the 50s and, I kid you not, the whole fucking thing was about 600 square feet. It was a teeny tiny living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and two bedrooms. 7 of us squished there. 

Hell again.

Every single summer, for 7-10 days straight, it was the hell of having no personal space, no breathing room, no privacy, and someone else’s nasty body heat way too close to you. If current me had to go through this again, I swear somebody would die. I’d see to it. 

Besides this lack of personal space, that one single bathroom was very near the living room. No real privacy even when you were in there because everyone could hear everything you were doing. Consequently, my body decided that just wasn’t going to cut it and closed my bowels for business out of protest. 

Yup. I know this is TMI, but I would barely be able to poo the entire time. It was extremely uncomfortable and I felt like shit, ironically, every summer. 

My grandparents were lovely people, but we were kids and didn’t have much to say to each other. So we just sat out on the porch (the only place someone wasn’t breathing on you) and read for hours while they played Yahtzee with my parents, hoping to God it was time to go home again. We did hit up the occasional tourist trap, or went on hikes to the Garden of the Gods, but it never lasted long enough before we were back in that tiny hell hole again. 

The Tunnel of Death

Some summers their neighbors would take pity on us and let my brother, myself, and my twin stay in their basement. Glory! Finally not to be sweaty and hot and crowded! Miracle! They don’t make neighbors like that anymore. 

One neighbor, Leila was her name, took my sister and I out on a car ride to some huge canyon place when we were 13 or so. I remember her driving and I looked down from the passenger seat to see about three inches of gravel road and nothing but sheer cliff-ish death below. She was in her 80s at the time, so you can imagine how comforting of a driver she was (note the sarcasm). There was no guard rail or anything, just those three inches of grace. I thought I was going to die. 

Then, we come to this long black tunnel, dug into the mountain we were driving through. It was one of those tunnels that was only big enough for one car so if someone were coming from the other direction you were pretty fucked. 

“Ok girls!” Leila said in her cheery voice. “Get out and run!” 

She made my twin and I get out of the car and run into the pure darkness of the tunnel while she drove slowly behind. I, once again, seriously thought we were gonna die. She was far enough behind that her headlights did nothing. It was just pitch black and the other end was out a bit around a bend so you couldn’t see if someone else was coming or not and there wasn’t room for all of us. It’s just luck we didn’t get run over by someone. We both screamed and ran for our fucking lives as our voices echoed through this death chamber. 

Panting, we finally got out safely on the other side and she let us back in. 

“Wasn’t that fun?” she bubbled. 

It was not. 

The Soothing Sounds of Danny Boy

Another summer we went, teenagers by now. One of my older sisters had tagged along again and the neighbors’ basements were already spoken for, so T (my twin) and I got to sleep in our old 1970s Ford van. It was nice to have some privacy, of sorts, and the seats folded down so you could use them like a bed. It worked. 

Until there was a manhunt. You see, I can’t remember if it was a prison escapee or if it was someone the cops were chasing. All I do remember is that there were helicopters and searchlights and a manhunt. Not a great time to be in a van in the middle of the night with a creepy alley right next to you. We were trying to sleep, and something from the front seat of the van suddenly fell off by itself, jolting us both. 

“T…was that you?” I quivered. A long pause. 

“Yes!” Came the obvious lie. She was trying to keep me from freaking out. In the end she made me sing her Danny Boy until she fell asleep. It was every bit as corny as you can imagine. 

Baby Shark, This Was Not

Another summer, when we were only about 10 or so, my grandma wanted to show us a movie she’d rented about the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Now, if you don’t know what that is, it’s an old WW2 warship that transported the parts of the atomic bomb that was later dropped on Hiroshima. If you’ve ever seen Jaws and you remember that scene Quint describes where the ship was sunk from a Japanese submarine and the survivors were afloat for days, getting horribly eaten by sharks and going insane from drinking seawater? Yeah, that’s the same ship. 

My step-grandma’s first husband actually died on that ship. He worked in the boiler room and was probably one of the first to die, drowned and trapped. Those who did survive had to face dehydration, hunger, and shark attacks. The most shark attacks at one time in history, in fact. They were drawn by the blood and dozens of men were killed, floating there like sitting ducks as they were violently, gruesomely eaten in front of the other survivors. 

She made us fucking watch this movie. We were 10. 

Now, it was a 90s movie, so how gory can it be by today’s standards, really? But to us at the time, it was a bloodbath. There were characters drinking seawater and stabbing each other. There were people getting their legs eaten off. There were sharks and blood and screaming and dying and my step-grandma sat on the couch and watched it with a nightmarishly creepy smile on her face. 

What. The. Fuck. 

It was the only time I’ve ever been afraid of her. I’ll never forget that expression.

Obviously my twin and I freaked the fuck out. We ran into the kitchen sobbing and my dad had to console us, only getting us to shut up with promises of oreos, the only cookie that can stop trauma in its tracks. My grandma didn’t come to see if we were alright. Didn’t apologize for showing us something so horrifying. Didn’t even get off the damn couch. She just sat there and finished the movie with that same, terrifying smile. 

Shit. 

TV Dinners and Warm Milk

Other than that incident, she was a wonderful woman. Except she did not know how to feed houseguests. My God. She was 89 pounds, I do not exaggerate. A tiny little thing, and apparently she thought we all ate like she did. She’d make three tv dinners, put them into serving bowls, and call that dinner. Three tv dinners for seven people. 

Lunches were bologna sandwiches with butter instead of mayo. Disgusting. We were given warm powdered milk to drink and the salt was so old it was more dust than salt. For water, we were given tiny little juice cups that you’d have to keep getting up and refilling. No easy task with the crowded, microscopic dining room. We were constantly thirsty too, it was so damn hot and muggy all the time. I suppose, considering my constipation issues (which happened every fucking year), it was good that we didn’t get much to eat. Still, it was ridiculous. Always hungry, always hot, always crowded. Sheesh. 

In spite of my whining, I did have some good times. Sometimes they’d take us to the Mason Jar, a buffet restaurant where we finally got a full meal! What a concept! The tourist shops were fun and I did get a lot of reading done. Overall, though? I really can’t say the good outweighed the bad. I love my grandparents so I guess it was worth it, but I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t some of the most torturous experiences I’ve had to go through. 

Never Again

We went every summer of my life until I hit 22 years old. My parents invited us along but we politely declined, free for the first time in my existence. My parents went by themselves and my twin and I had free reign of the house for a week. We went to Olive Garden, had pizza, and binged watched the original animated Avatar The Last Airbender series. 

It was pure heaven. 

I love my parents, but you could not pay me enough money to go on a road trip with them again. Not in a million years. If there really is a hell, I will find myself in that muggy, smelly, blazing hot falcon, sandwiched between my sweaty parents, my mom’s sticky elbow pressed against my arm because there was no space, and John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High playing in the background.

Oh, if you’re curious, here’s that Indianapolis movie, by the way. It’s probably nothing like I remember, but my trauma would beg to differ.