All is Vanity

     I’m what they call a lapsed Catholic. Hyperbolically redundant, maybe, but when you’re an Irish Catholic preteen girl in mid-century New York City, and a Kelly green Dodge Sportsman van pulls up outside P.S. 66, horn honking and driver gesticulating in your direction, it’s not unusual for your first thoughts to tend towards the persecutory.

     OhmyGodJesusMaryandJosephwhatdidIdotodeservethis?

     It was 1972 P.M. (Pre-Minivan), at least a decade before Lee Iacocca developed what would become the catalyst of many a midlife crisis. My father was in the driver’s seat after picking up the green behemoth from the dealership earlier that day. We didn’t have a lot of money, my father was a lieutenant in the NYPD’s Tactical Patrol Unit and there were four of us Dowd kids, so the purchase of our first new car ever was understandably quite the event. Dad was very proud of his Irish heritage and that pride was reflected in his color selection for The Van. I, however, didn’t share in his belief that our County Sligo roots should be represented by what I thought looked like a big, rolling, ball of snot.

     As if The Van’s color wasn’t distinguishing enough, my father had thought it prudent to add our last name to the driver’s and passenger’s side doors, using those lovely gold and black stick-on letters, ubiquitous to rural neighborhood mailboxes, but not exactly common on motor vehicles in Queens. I’m still not sure why he did it. Maybe it was to make it easier to differentiate ours from all the other Kelly green Dodge Sportsman vans one found in Richmond Hill, Queens, in the early seventies, but as I stood outside my elementary school on the verge of entering junior high school and looking puberty square in the acne-prone face, I was sure it was to embarrass the hell out of me and make my life miserable.

     Much like me at that moment, The Van had no options, and my father had to reach across the passenger seat to roll down the window and call me over. Apparently, he thought I’d have trouble locating my ride home among the other sedately-hued sedans and station wagons that lined the curb. Head bowed, I made a run for it, and immediately ducked down below window level once I got in and slammed the door behind me. With no carpeting, floor mats, or interior coverage of any kind to absorb the resulting noise, my actions produced a wave of sound and self-consciousness within that steel cylinder that resonates to this day.

     Okay, maybe I’m being a little dramatic, but The Van made quite the impression. I couldn’t prove it, but for the longest time I was positive The Van was the reason I didn’t have a date until I was a senior in high school. We were the Richmond Hillbillies, sans moonshine still and rocking chair, both of which I’m sure my father would have loved to bring along on his ecto-urban excursions if he could have found the room.

     Eventually Dad “finished” the interior with lovely particle board paneling; the thin, faux wood-grained segments, screwed in place on The Van’s side and back doors, reminiscent of Mike Brady’s den. Afflicted with adult ADD, my father either lost interest in the project or couldn’t figure out how to attach said panels to the ceiling without piercing the roof and turning The Van into a colander, so that’s how the van’s interior remained: an ode to a campy 1970s sitcom.

     No amount of refinishing could alter the placement of the engine, though, which sat between the driver’s and front passenger’s seats like so much gas-powered headland. I guess the Dodge engineers had yet to figure out that whole “force versus object” thing, because any frontal collision could have sent the plastic-hooded peninsula hurtling backwards, through two bench seats and the four children occupying them. And since the use of seatbelts was mere suggestion, their buckles and straps eventually disappeared into the seats’ sticky depths.

     The Van played a major role in every Dowd vacation following its purchase, and would be part of our family until I was out of college. We traveled en masse, the six of us “making good time” as my dad would say, by rising before dawn and hitting the road with us kids in our pajamas until we reached the first roadside rest stop, where we would change and have breakfast. These stops weren’t the monuments to modernity you now find along the interstate, and often consisted of a group of weathered picnic tables decorated by the local avian contingent, an anorectic brochure rack, and an outbuilding with a few utilitarian restrooms.

     After an appetizing trip to the facilities it was time for dining van fresco. Funds were always tight and there weren’t many fast food drive-thrus in the 60s and 70s, so we carried all our food in coolers and boxes which my mom would replenish as needed. I don’t know how she did it. Two weeks, feeding six people, from a cooler on the side of the road or a camp stove in front of a tent sounds like the secular definition of Hell to me. My mother was a magician and The Van was the top hat from which she produced nightly dinner.

     Motel stays weren’t financially feasible and Google had yet to become a verb, so our sites were campsites and our vacations planned with the help of the annual Rand McNally Campground Guide. Fueled by self-preservation and flashbacks of noxious near-misses, my siblings and I quickly learned the lingo and steered our parents away from the campgrounds boasting pit toilets as an amenity or offering “environmentally-friendly” showers-- camping code for putting quarters in a slot for five minutes of hot water while standing in a cement-floored, cinder block shower stall. Dowd Family Fun at its best; a dubious tradition which had actually begun before The Van entered our lives.

     On one pre-Van summer trip to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, my father parked our battered Chevy station wagon, pitched our tent on the shores of beautiful Lake Winnipesaukee, and my mother set up her transient kitchen, cooked dinner, cleaned up, and got us kids ready to roast marshmallows. I was one of three Dowd kids, then, who were six, almost five, and three years old and not exactly adept at handling sticks attached to flaming confections, so it shouldn’t have surprised either of my parents when my brother turned around and had a smoldering compress of molten sugar affixed to his left cheek.

     A flurry of adrenaline- and fear-fueled activity ensued, culminating in my brother being dunked in the cold waters of the lake, followed by the elaborate post-panic application of just about everything that came in a Johnson and Johnson First Aid kit, circa 1965. To look at the pictures of his smiling, gauze-swathed face, you’d think my brother was practicing for a Halloween stint as a mummy, rather than recovering from a lakeside baptism due to marshmallow-related fire.

     My mother was seven months pregnant at the time. In a tent, in the woods, with three kids under the age of six and a husband who, despite his Brooklyn roots, yearned to be the original Urban Cowboy; with a dash of Jack Kerouac, a soupcon of Jacques Cousteau, and a touch of The Great Santini thrown in for good measure.

     Consistent with my father’s Mitty-esque fantasies, The Van sailed the Bay of Fundy from Maine to Nova Scotia aboard a ferry called The Bluenose, a trip forever ingrained in my memory as my first time using a travel sickness bag. As if eight hours bobbing like a titanic cork on rough northern Atlantic waters weren’t bad enough, the experience was exacerbated by a breakfast of fried eggs and tomato juice. I just wish my mother had told me to open the bag before using it. After getting a handful of breakfast I decided to just cut out the middle man and hung my head over the rail for the rest of the trip.

     On the opposite end of both the geographic and the meteorological spectrums, The Van traversed the country to The Badlands, The Black Hills, and Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota. This we did in August. On vinyl seats. Without air conditioning, and with two parents who smoked, in the back of a van with side windows that only pushed out at the bottom to form slender acute triangles of ventilation, perfect for a dog to stick its snout through, but problematic for human children at risk of suffocation and secondhand smoke.

     I saw most of Custer State Park’s buffalo, bison, and wild donkeys from a horizontal perspective, stuck to one of The Van’s bench seats in the fetal position, after developing a kidney infection that wouldn’t find relief until my parents finally took me to a clinic in the Wisconsin Dells, about 600 miles away. It was a week before the vinyl seat’s cross-hatch pattern finally faded from my pale, sweaty, gasping face. Add the heat from the omnipresent engine and an AM radio augmented with a CB (pervasive in the pre-cell phone era of The Convoy) and I think I’ve found the impetus behind my PTSD and the reason I avoid saunas and eschew trendy technology.

     By then we’d moved-up from the tent and were pulling a Coleman pop-up camper and sometimes had a rowboat perched on The Van’s roof. On our way out west, my father had a momentary lapse and forgot the financial ramifications of fast food, so we pulled into a Bob’s Big Boy somewhere in Iowa. Unfortunately, he also forgot about the boat.

The banshee-like sound of its fiberglass hull making contact with the large pendant light fixture which hung from the drive-in’s cantilevered roof was followed by a shower of milk-colored glass, reminding my father of the vessel’s existence. After paying for the damages we left without eating, and he used the incident for years as justification not to eat out on family trips; as if the episode was a Dickensian harbinger of Vacation Mishaps Yet-To-Come.

     There were many other trips in The Van that didn’t involve property damage. We negotiated the Great Smoky Mountains en route to pre-Dollywood Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, circumnavigated both sides of Niagara Falls, and explored Amish country—more for its proximity to Hershey and its chocolate than for the cultural and educational experiences.

     Somewhere along the way the DOWD kids grew up. The Van ran out of gas and usefulness sometime in the ‘80s and eventually became a permanent fixture on the side of my parents’ house once they moved to rural Connecticut. While in college, The Van was the first thing I saw whenever I pulled up the driveway for a visit. Melanomas of rust and Bondo dotted his exterior and a family of chipmunks had taken up residence inside. I asked my father why he didn’t just junk the thing and he said he would get around to it eventually, and he did. On my first trip home after The Van’s demise I found I was a little unsettled to see it gone, and stared at the loamy, naked patch of driveway edged with burnt grass and metal flakes. The Van hadn’t gone quietly and I admired its tenacity.

     I realize now that no matter how much The Van had been an incidental bane of my pubertal existence, it represented something much deeper to my dad. As a cop, he’d spent five nights a week on the streets for twenty-three years and had missed most of what happened at home after 4:30 P.M. When he looked at The Van he saw his family’s history. He saw scenes of our collective childhood that he could relate to, and in which he had played a major role. The Van was a souvenir of all those trips we took together, before life intervened and the four DOWD kids went on to travels of their own.