Stories About Traveling West

A couple of months ago I had a brief email from my cousin Dave out in Ohio.  He wanted a mailing address because he had a book he wanted to send me to share with the family out here on the East Coast.  I sent him my address and waited.  I wasn’t sure what book he wanted to send or when it might arrive.  Of course, the current state of the world being upside down might slow things down a little.

About a week ago, the book arrived and I was so pleased.  Dave has written a small book of the stories and the old-school social networking that he heard and learned in his parents’ farm implement dealership in Wakeman, Ohio.  It is full of people and events and lessons learned, and a little philosophy.  Reading it, I see at least one source of his daughters’ writing ability.  Cousin Dave combines two of the notable traits of the Denman family that have been passed down through generations:  the mechanical abiity to see how something works, to take it apart and put it back together; and the urge to and ability to write about life’s happenings.

One of the first little vignettes that caught my attention was his brief mentioning of his mother’s (my great aunt Doris) driving trip to the West Coast as a young woman (in perhaps 1928 or so) long before a national highway system or the ubiquitous Howard Johnson Motels.  Dave noted it as an example of her capability to take on and handle almost anything.  As soon as I read it, however, my immediate connection was that my mother had talked about this same trip and told a specific story about it.  I wanted to find that story so I could share it with Dave and with my siblings.  The only problem was that I couldn’t find it.  I could almost hear my mother’s voice telling it, and was pretty sure it was written somewhere.  But where?

My sister, when asked, didn’t remember it; so it hadn’t been a conversation with our mother that we shared.  What else could it be and where was it?  Maybe in the piece Mom wrote about her own road trip West with her friend Dean.  No.  Although I had a memory that the two were somehow connected.  I combed through my transcriptions of various interviews my mother had done, with no luck.  Finally today (the end of May) I found it by looking for the interview about F.A. Denman’s trip West in the late 1930s.  At the very end of Grandpa Lyle’s description of that trip, my mother added her own short story about Aunt Doris’s trip.  This is what she said:

“Dean and I were so interested when we were with Doris on our trip.  Doris was telling us a little about the trip the four girls had made some 60 years before.  That summer they all drove west and she was telling us how they got across the desert.  They — I guess they went across Death Valley.  I don’t know exactly where they crossed the desert.  But they pulled into this little town late in the afternoon and had something to eat and they waited at the train station because that was, there was some shade there.  And after dark they wet towels and hung the towels in the car windows and wrapped wet towels around their legs.  And then, in the dark, they started across the desert.  And that was their air conditioning. [laugh] So Dean and I were just fascinated with that, thinking of those four girls and how they giggled their way across the desert wrapped in towels.  And we were crossing in great comfort with air conditioning” [laughter].