Yellow Truck Meets the Doppelganger

The whole thing started when I asked my father (at right, with Mom) to haul some of my stuff, stored in his home in Topeka, out to Denver. It was the late 1980s. I was getting ready to move from Colorado to the promised land (Oregon), where I'd taken a new job. Dad rented one of those big yellow Ryder trucks for the trip.

          My brother Steve, and his wife, Jane, and their three little kids would come along for the ride, reenacting, in effect, the wagon train experience, lumbering across the great flat, hot, dusty plains of Kansas and eastern Colorado, except that it would take only a day and a half instead of six months. My brother and father would drive the big yellow truck. My mother and Jane and the kids would follow them in Mom's motor home.

          The morning the trip began, Dad said over breakfast, "I've made reservations at the Ramada Inn in Goodland. If we get separated, that's where we'll meet." Everyone agreed. There was a plan.

          The way I understand it, things went pretty well for the first four hours, and at about 1 p.m., both vehicles--the yellow truck and the motor home--pulled off the Interstate to gas up in Russell, Bob Dole's hometown. Everybody got out to have burgers at the Dairy Queen.

          What a person needs to drive across Kansas isn't concentration. It's the ability not to concentrate. Concentration leads to fatigue, and fatigue is what causes mistakes. About 30 miles west of Russell, Mom, who'd been concentrating on the noisy kids, passed the yellow truck. She wasn't supposed to, but neither my brother nor my dad noticed because they weren't concentrating. 
       Maybe 15 minutes later my father realized the motor home was pulling off into the distance. He asked Steve, who was driving, "What's your mother doing?" At that moment they both realized something very odd: They seemed to be watching a movie of themselves in the distance. My mother was driving behind a yellow truck, as she should be, except it wasn't theirs.

          "Well, catch her," Dad said.

          Now, they were concentrating. Steve pushed the pedal to the floor, but the yellow truck wouldn't go any faster. Like all rental trucks, it was fitted with a governor to limit the top speed. The second yellow truck, already well in the lead, happened to have a governor set just a bit faster than theirs. Mile after mile they followed the motor home following the other yellow truck through western Kansas until finally the two vehicles in the lead reached the vanishing point, dropping over the horizon.

          Occasionally, over the next few hours, my father fumed, spouting a short monologue, half laughing, half in serious pain. Then he would curse. "How could she be so stupid?" Most people wouldn't have fretted about this turn of events at all. After all, they had a plan. Unfortunately, Dad's plan had been worthless from the start. Years ago, he'd proven himself capable of spontaneously jettisoning such executive orders, sans discussion. If the rest of us missed out on the critical moment, so be it: We'd be left behind. Accordingly, if the doppelganger truck changed routes, exited onto a side road, or kept going past Goodland, Mom would follow. (She'd been well trained over decades of marriage.) "She'll follow that truck clear to Wyoming," Dad said.

          About six hours later, when the doppelganger didn't turn off at Goodland, my mother didn't think much about it. She noted the Ramada Inn of the original plan, there on the north side of the Interstate. But she had anticipated all along that if they were making good time, he might press on into Colorado. Yet, she commented to Jane and the kids, "I wonder what on earth he's doing this for." Everybody had to go to the bathroom. As the doppelganger drove on and on, she followed. She followed 30 miles into Colorado, right into a gas station where the truck pulled in.

          Must have been about that time that Steve and Dad checked into the Ramada at Goodland. No sign of the motor home. Had to be lost, somewhere between Goodland and Denver, or worse, Nebraska. Steve and Dad went to one of the rooms to cool off and to think about what to do. Steve stretched out on one of the double beds, while Dad thrashed around the room cursing, and trying to figure out whether to launch a search party or stay put.

          "We're going after her," Dad said.

          "We can't," said Steve.

          "What if she calls, and we're not here? She's going to call sooner or later."

          "It won't happen. She'll stick to the main road. We're going after her."

          The sun was starting to set, and I suppose that if it hadn't been for the median strip that divided I-70, Dad's westbound yellow truck would have collided with the eastbound motor home when they finally caught up with each other, about 5 miles inside the Colorado border. Dad started flashing the headlights as soon as he recognized Mom. He pulled over onto the left shoulder and jumped out waving his arms at them. Mom pulled over to her left shoulder and rolled down the window. My brother says there was a lot of yelling. Separation panic is exponentially worse than simple separation anxiety, and by the time of the reunion, everybody was pretty mad at everybody else. Jane and the kids were crying. I'm really glad I wasn't there.

          My brother was driving the truck the next morning when they got to my apartment complex in Denver. He accidentally scraped the mirror off of an unfortunate Volkswagen Beetle parked too close to the security gate, but I told him not to sweat it. I was glad to see them all. A day later I was on my way to Oregon in the truck. Steve, Jane, and the kids had flown home. My folks were on their way back to Topeka in the motor home. Those two didn't take a road trip together again for a long time. --Charles Linn, New York City