If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
~Tom Stoppard
It was our annual summer road trip and my two brothers and I were stowed away in the third seat of the station wagon. Our various pieces of luggage, fishing poles and blankets were stuffed strategically between my parents and us. It made the perfect buffer zone. The only way this seating arrangement changed was if one of us acted up. The culprit would be summoned to the front of the car with little chance of parole until the next gas station.
As we drove through Michigan, it started to pour. I was sitting up front, having been given a time-out for less than illustrious behavior. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up and my father was having trouble seeing. “I think we made a wrong turn,” he said. We had not seen a single car in almost an hour. Looking out the rain-splattered windows, all we could see were miles and miles of old barbed-wire fences and posts that surrounded tiny dots of farms and houses off in the distance. Spotting a farmer up ahead, Dad pulled over and asked for directions.
“Follow this all the way to the fork, go left and drive to the end. You’ll see the signs back to the highway,” he assured us. The rain continued, but I could feel my parents’ relief at knowing we were no longer lost in the middle of nowhere.
“Stop the car! Stop the car!” my mom shouted suddenly. Dad pulled over, and he and my mom, with umbrellas in hand, stepped down into the gutter and up onto the edge of a farmer’s field by the fence.
They talked beside a tall fencepost for a few minutes, and then came back to the car. Shaking off their umbrellas, Dad said, “Well, all they can say is ‘no.’ ” Then we drove to the first farm lane and turned in.
The lane was solid mud from the rain, with huge potholes. Nearby branches slapped each side of the car hard, like thick chamois cloths in an automatic car wash. We stopped at the top of the hill by an old redbrick farmhouse and big barn. Dad walked to the front door and knocked. An older man in dark pants, white shirt and suspenders opened the door. The man listened as Dad talked and pointed to something way down the lane. After a few minutes, the man scratched his head, looked down the lane and then back at my dad. Bursting into a big grin, he shook Dad’s hand vigorously.
“Good show,” whispered my mom. Dad got back in the car with a pleased smile and said, “Let’s just hope it fits.”
We heard a horn toot beside us. The man and his two sons pulled up beside us in an old blue pickup truck. “Follow me,” he said. Back down the lane we went. When we reached the fence line, his sons jumped out of the truck and grabbed a couple of shovels from the back. My brothers and I watched them dig out what we thought was an old fencepost. Curiosity overcame us. We all got out of the car and ran over to take a look. This was no ordinary fencepost. It was a lot taller and wider. The colours were faint, and the wood post was cracked and weather-beaten. But when we looked really close, we could see three faint carved-out faces atop strange animal-like bodies.
This was not a fencepost. It was a totem pole, a real totem pole.
With one final pull, the farmer’s sons and my dad managed to wrestle the totem pole from the ground. The farmer and my mom wrapped it up in an old blanket, and we all helped carry it to our car. Dad and the farmer carefully navigated this long, heavy wood pole through the back window, over the luggage and into the front seat. It touched the radio at one end, with about one foot hanging out the back window.
We waved goodbye to the farmer and his sons, and off we went. I was still up front with my parents in the penalty box, but I didn’t mind. Miraculously, the rain rolled back into the sky, and the sun came out about a mile later, which no doubt pleased my brothers. With the tail end of the totem pole sticking out the back window, I’m sure it was a little wet and windy back there.
“It’ll make a great conversation piece,” Dad said.
“What a wonderful memory from our trip,” Mom added.
Squished between my parents and the totem pole, I noticed one of the faces peeking out from a gap in the blanket. Reaching over, I smiled and gave it a hug. Like a rescue dog, these three faint totem characters had no clue where they were going or what lay ahead. But one thing was for sure: They never had to sit out in the rain again. We’d seen to that.
“I bet that farmer thinks we’re out of our minds,” Dad laughed. “He’ll be telling that story for years to come, about that crazy Canadian family who knocked on his door in the middle of a rainstorm to buy that old, beat-up fencepost with all the faces.”
Over fifty years later, it’s a story I still love to tell. And every time I walk past those three faces stacked one upon another in our home, it always makes me smile.
~Cheryl E. Uhrig
