The Field Trip

Despite my father’s penchant for personal independence and a stress-free home life, my parents chose the less traditional method of home schooling to educate the lot of us. The idea being that one-on-one instruction and the absence of the evil that runs rampant in public school hallways would transform us into solid Republican citizens who also happened to be quite knowledgeable in reading, writing, and arithmetic- if not quite so informed on the social graces of our peers.

My father was an advocate of home schooling in a political sense, as an active board member for local and statewide organizations that promoted this “do-it-yourself” method for teaching your dependents. However, he was conspicuously absent in our own little classroom.

He did, however, made a few memorable attempts to incorporate himself into our academics throughout the years. The first was a weekly lesson over ancient history. At the age of nine, I probably benefited the most from these collegiate-like lessons in which he would sit us down in a row and begin explaining Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire with the aid of carefully constructed maps and very old, complicated texts. As the eldest, I was manufactured with an innate responsibility to set a good example and diligently tried to sit at attention and feign exuberance during these lecture-style lessons, while my siblings managed little more than keeping their eyes open and mouths shut.

We soon developed an enormous appreciation for my mother’s method of tutelage, most of which was conducted via written communication as our home-based elementary school curriculum was structured very much like a long-distance correspondence course.  Each day we reported to the “school room” (i.e. what normal people would have called a den) and found on our desks a Post-It note with a list of assignments neatly written in my mother’s careful handwriting. What we may have lost in actual instruction, we more than made up for in self-advocacy and a deep sense of autonomy.

We soon appealed to our more compassionate parent to protest the cruel and unusual treatment that filled our Monday mornings, but to no avail. My father could have been teaching us finger painting or witchcraft for all she knew, but I really don’t think she could have cared less. As the mother of four children all with ages in the single digits, she was thrilled to have some precious time away from us.

After a few lessons, my father caught on that his students were in elementary school and not college students, and though we knew enough to keep our pediatric traps shut, he realized his words were bouncing off unyielding ears. The weekly lectures slowly stretched to every other week, to once a month, to nothing at all.

Deeply relieved that our history-loving father was now safely back at the office, we enjoyed a few months of bliss before the next educational onslaught began.

When I was eleven, my father decided it was high time that our home school education be supplemented with a field trip to retrace the battlefields of the Civil War. The fact that our home in Midland, Texas was approximately 1,500 miles away from most of the major action was only a trifling inconvenience.

I was more than slightly nonplussed by the idea that a good portion of my summer holiday was about to be spent being force-fed facts about the War Between the States while normal people went to swim parties and took family vacations to Disney World.  However, I was a rather philosophical child, having come to the realization that resistance was futile at approximately the age of two upon the arrival of the first of four unsolicited siblings, and accepted these unfortunate circumstances in stride.

In retrospect, there were several valid arguments I could have presented against this Civil War “vacation.” The first being the fact that despite the time and resources of my loving mother and against all odds, I had actually managed to fail sixth grade math and would probably benefit more from a pack of multiplication flashcards than a road trip to Gettysburg.

The second and more pressing point was that I looked ridiculous and should have been quarantined to my bedroom sentenced to reading stacks of Teen Vogue until I gained some much needed fashion sense. At the very least, I ought to have been protected from prying eyes until I had outgrown the awful hairstyle my mother had recklessly allowed. My golden hair was cut to eyebrow level in a perfect circle around my little head and with the aid of a curling iron and vast quantities of Rave hairspray, was curled, parted, and finished with a generous swoop to one side which gave me a rather androgynous appearance that looked very much like Charlie Bucket in the 1971 film, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Due to the fact that we could not possibly shove both our persons and our possessions into a normal-sized sports utility vehicle, my father rented a rather unbecoming 15-passenger van.  The van possessed severe shortcomings in terms of style and comfort which my father attributed to the vehicle’s age, but I was reasonably sure that nobody was ever that excited about this particular model when it rolled off the conveyer belt at some Dodge plant in Detroit. Like a baby rat, hairless and squirming, it was repulsive even in its infancy. I almost felt sorry for it.

That van may have always been ugly, but after several hard years as the carthorse for fellow vacationers at the local Enterprise, it matured into a truly magnificent automotive dinosaur while also developing the inconvenient ability to consume large amounts of gasoline without achieving significant distance or speed.

My siblings and I were elated when my mother acquired a rather bulky travel television complete with built-in VCR to entertain her brood on the road to knowledge. Weighing in at approximately 45 pounds, it was a solid black brick of revolutionary technology and we thanked God that at least one our parents understood the basic needs of children. We propped the precious machine up on a small suitcase between the captain chairs at the front of the vehicle and secured it by means of elastic bands from armrest to armrest so that our box-o-fun did not turn into a weapon of death when my father put a little too much pressure on the van’s rather unpredictable brake pedal.

However, my father, teetering dangerously between opportunist and sadist, purchased an enormous quantity of educational videos in the form of low-quality reenactments of Civil War battles and documentaries on all generals and heroes of the era to ensure that our hours in transit would be edifying as well as fun-filled. We managed to sneak aboard a few videocassettes of our favorite cartoons, but my father was always quick to remonstrate, “why don’t you kids put on that one about Grant? We’re almost to Shiloh and you’re going to want to know about that!”

 We knew enough not to argue, and also that the TV we were so excited about was now rendered useless.

While mercifully much of the trip now blurs together, I do know much of each day was spent cramped together in our noble chariot as we journeyed from battlefield to monument to fort to cemetery. My siblings and I fought our own daily civil war as we struggled for breathing room and battled for AA batteries to power our personal cassette players in an effort to drown out whatever documentary was blaring on that damn TV we had come to hate.

Occasionally the car would stop, and a couple of us would be forced out of the comforts of air conditioning to have our photograph taken next to the grave of one general or another. I often wonder what became of those snap shots. Perhaps my mother should have had them framed and displayed them in the living room as a kind of unique conversation piece: And here’s one of the girls next to Robert E. Lee’s tombstone...

A full three weeks later, our heads now crowded with our newfound knowledge and a renewed appreciation not only for the sacrifices of our forefathers, but for enough personal space to fully extend our limbs, we rolled back in to Midland.  As we jumped out of that damn van, I knew exactly how Neil Armstrong must have felt when he made it back to earth.

The field trip continued to haunt us months later when we discovered our father had sabotaged Christmas with the Civil War paraphernalia he had garnered from the many gift shops we visited on our journey. We hunted through the history books, miniature cannons, and post-cards in our stockings in search for toys, candy, and a normal childhood.

(My father is currently planning another educational jaunt to Plymouth Rock).