A Mother's Nature
by Gillian Yassim

We always left in the predawn morning. My father was at peace in those early hours. He felt a connection to the road. I can remember being too excited to fall asleep the night before we left. My brother would sneak into my room with his blanket, hover over my bed, and whisper, "Gillian, Gillian. You're not sleeping, are you?" The anticipation would fuel our late night conversation. We never really understood where we were headed. The notion of another state was beyond the conceptualization of our minds. For all we knew we could be taking a trip around the block or entering another country. It didn't matter either way. North, south, east, and west were words we were familiar with, but we couldn't apply them to our world. They were just part of the jargon of the road. My father was fluent in the language, so we just dabbled in the words that sounded important. We didn't want to seem uneducated.

The car rides were harrowing, but I never minded. I could spend hours watching the road whiz by. I believed if I looked at the right spot on the road I could see the dividing line stand still. In the dark of our departure, I could smell the slumber of the animals. The air was sharp with dew in the morning, but I could sense the advancement of the oppressing heat that would stall the air in a matter of hours. There was a spice of electricity in the breeze. It made the world dance in the moonlight in such a reassuring fashion, that I was sure nothing could be wrong in the world. I would snuggle into my blanket, the one commodity we were allowed to wrestle free from the tightly bound wad of supplies, and yawn. I was content. As we would pull forward from the driveway I would scrunch my blanket into a haphazard pillow, intertwining myself beneath its protective folds, and finally drift off to sleep.

Throughout the trip all my mother could remember was that there would be no toilets when we arrived. That and there was no rail on the road we were traversing. What I remember most was the purr of the altitude in my ears and the sight of the gum we smeared into sticky sweet spider webs along the back seat of the van. I remember the raw taste of the thin air and the leaves, the millions of leaves that glittered beside us like coins in the sun.

The aspen trees lined open bank of the Million-Dollar Highway . I thought its name came from its exorbitant cost, but I couldn't understand why a dirt road, with no barrier would cost a million dollars. It curved around clinging to the side of the mountain. I remember looking back at the road we passed and staring at the slight brown ribbon the road made, like a bear had run his nail down the side of the cliffs, leaving its scar in the skin. I was sure the mountain was alive. It was that thought that kept my smile strong as we listened to the noise of my mother shrieking at my father and the shutter of my father's antique camera snap. His hair looked dark next to the trees and the sky as he leaned far out the window, collecting the sight of our journey with his hands and maneuvering the twists with his knee. He could not resist taking pictures while he drove; "photography of the journey," he called it, because everyone had pictures of where they were, but no one took pictures of all the places they had traveled through. I didn't mind the photography as long as we reached our destination.

Our arrival at the campsite took me back in time. The campsite was beautiful. It didn't even look like a campsite, at least not any of the campsites I had ever seen. There were no cleared away spots to place a tent, no picnic tables, no food lockers, and much like my mother has predicted, no bathrooms, not even an outhouse. I guess there was no cheap way to bring plumbing into the middle of a mountain range. It made me reconsider the advancement of our entire nation. How did technology spread to such unreachable places? At the age of eight I didn't have the capacity for understanding technology so I preoccupied my mind pondering the other wonders around me. All I really knew was that our trip had taken us back into time when people staked out their own site, slept along the side a meandering river, with spots too shallow to have color, areas that caught speed in the rocks, and housed fish in the dark cool pools, was a necessity for living. I was amazed to learn that living next to such simple organic beauty was a necessity in any life.

Gillian Yassim is a sophomore at Pitzer College, majoring in neuroscience and creative writing.