Ol’ Widder Woman

I am presently on a road trip in the wild west with my lovely adult daughter and yesterday Sadie reminded me of the “ol’ widder woman” we were lucky enough to cross paths with on a previous road trip from her childhood…..

In the summer of 1998, we drove from Seattle, Washington to Washington, DC in our ‘new to us’ Ford Taurus station wagon with Sadie, aged eight, and her big brother, Terry, aged ten at that time.

But back then it wasn’t just a road trip like I am enjoying now. Back then we were moving home from South Asia. My husband, Lew, had given up his job in Dhaka, Bangladesh because he wanted to return home to be nearer to his aging mother. (I too had given up my budding career, because he had promised his mother, who wouldn’t leave Florida, that we would come back to be near her soon). Lew had no job lined up yet in DC, but we had a house with a mortgage so with the courage of an unchecked youth (he had always succeeded at life) Lew knew he would find another job in a timely fashion. He was right of course! But it was only during our drive across the whole American Continent with two kids in tow, that the next job materialized.

After 18 months of living and working in Dhaka, Bangladesh, we had flown back to the USA to return him to his brilliant career in the US DOE policy office. Unfortunately, the job was no more waiting for him because of government had downsized while we were away. But Lew was looking to work with a government contractor, as did many people. These ‘contractors’ did much of the government’s work like research and policy analysis but often for higher salaries and without the claimed US Gov. job security. They were called Beltway Bandits at the time. Now that he had third world experience – Lew was in a good position to work at a global ‘think tank’.

We flew from Dhaka to Seoul to LA to Seattle in July of 1998 and then landed and spent a couple of weeks with my two sisters in Seattle. They, of course, welcomed us warmly and hospitably, and they helped us choose a good family car for our return to suburban life in the eastern USA. We started our ownership of the Ford Taurus by demanding a cross-country adventure of her, and we expected it to be fun. We would have a cultural experience for our newly returning American kids.

Sure, enough our new car faced some trouble in a mountain range whose altitude hadn’t impressed us enough somewhere in central Montana. The car got ‘an air lock’ (if memory serves me). So maybe we stayed for an extra day on that mountain side.  We fixed it, and mostly our little Taurus station wagon served us very well.

But our whole trip from Seattle, driving across the vast, arid planes of the ‘mountain states’ we noticed that we saw significantly more Harley Davidsons then we had seen two years previously. At first, we thought maybe Harley was just more popular out west than back in the east. But as we got to western Montana we figured they must be doing some kind of a big promotion in Montana and Dakota and everyone was cashing in. After the little lawnmower engine ‘baby taxis’ of Bangladesh and India, Harley Davidsons sure looked huge! And they made a lot of noise as well.

Remember this was before there were google maps, so we had picked up one of those highway atlases: a big book with all the roads drawn onto each of the states, and we were running from that. We checked it constantly. (my guess is that it didn’t show altitude however, which would have been how we got into the car problem in Montana.) We planned our trip by looking about 500 miles ahead each day to try to aim for a town that would have a Motel 6 – or any cheap lodging opportunities – that were family friendly. We would simply drive there as quickly as possible so that we could book in before they were full. If we found nothing we kept going until we did. This plan was working for the first few days of our trip. We stopped in Colfax, Washington and saw my grandmother for what would prove to be the last time. (She, in her dotage, was very happy to think that my husband was her son, I was her daughter-in-law and our kids were my older brother and sister returning from their time in Africa, from 50 years before. What goes around comes around I guess). Then we played in the Snake River and didn’t get much past it on our second day out of Seattle.

We did stay at a Motel 6 somewhere. It had a big poster of the Taj Mahal at the entrance saying “Yes but do they have HBO and ESPN?” Sadie asked what HBO and ESPN were. The receptionist explained about TV channels and got Sadie’s dander up – so my 8 year old blurted out “the Taj Mahal isn’t a Hotel, it’s a mausoleum. I’ve been there”. Now the receptionist was pissed off at our uppity daughter and she told me about Sadie (assuming, I presume, an overactive imagination). I had to back my daughter up with an explanation that we were moving back from 2 years in South Asia. The receptionist didn’t like us after that.

We also visited Yellowstone with many ‘bear spottings’ and lots of ooooohs and aaaaaahs at the hot springs. But we pretty much drove straight through.

I remember distinctly that dinner almost every night of this particular exploration of America was at a different fast-food restaurant. “Oh we haven’t tried Taco Bell in two years”….. I swear we gained at least 30 pounds between us four over our week of traveling.

So in early August, we found a town in South Dakota on our map and aimed to stay there that night. I was intrigued by its name, though I had never heard of the town, because I have a friend whose maiden name was Sturgis.

And the Harley Davidsons just kept on coming. At one point we saw about ten coming towards us across the divided highway only to be passed by at least a dozen more in a sociable clump on our side. Granted this was high summer which would be a good time of year to take out your ‘vroom machine’ but still somehow the whole Harley invasion was really getting weird!

As usual it took longer than we had hoped to drive our 500 miles and by the time we pulled into the tourist office that evening, it was nearly closing time. None the less we confidently pulled into the parking right out front. By now we had seen all the camping going on around the edge of town, and figured out that something special was going on for Harley Davidsons in this small town. Still we parked in front of the office of tourism and I ran in, Lew stayed in the car with the kids and I asked for a hotel nearby.

The man laughed in my face and said “Haven’t you ever heard of the annual Sturgis Harley Davidson Rally? There is not a room in town and any campgrounds are full too. Just keep driving.”

“Oh” says I “We couldn’t camp anyway. We have two little kids in the back seat of our station wagon and we are stone tired. How far is the next town?”.

He clearly felt sorry for me as he said it was at least another two hours on the highway. Then he paused and said: “Wait a minute. I know an old widow woman in a double wide. I bet she can make room for you.” Now was my turn to want to laugh in his face, but I was clearly excited and promised no Harley Davidsons as he called her.

“Well, she already has somebody staying at her place but she likes kids so she says head on over and see if she can help you guys out”. I felt a bit like Hansel and Gretel coming upon the house of in the woods.

I guess her “double-wide” had three bedrooms even if it was a trailer home because she had one room for herself, she had already booked her second room to a couple we never met, and Lew and I got the third room. But she kindly let Terry and Sadie sleep on her sofa in the living room. They remember her parrot and really enjoying trying to teach it to speak, but to no avail.

I think we unloaded our suitcases, then went out to dinner. By the time we returned ‘home’ to the ‘doublewide’, it was quiet, the parrot was covered in his cage, and the other sleepers stayed quiet. The other quests left before we woke up and we savored breakfast with the “old widder woman” who told us about her life on as a Dakota farmer. When her husband had died five years earlier, she had sold the farm and bought her nice trailer and a new car. She seemed quite content with her lot. She shared her home made banana bread but the kids ate cheerios. We said we were heading to Mount Rushmore, and she sent us first to Wall drug to see the important watering hole.  She said we had to see it – being a major tourist attraction.  She liked to go down there often to meet her friends for her coffee clutch.

We got to Mount Rushmore that day and were underwealmed….somehow some presidents’ heads carved into an Native American mountain side just didn’t do much for me.

But getting to stay in the home of an unassuming, but very accommodating, American woman, proved to be an important part of our re-entry process to life in these United States. That ‘ol widder woman’ knew full well that nobody was better or worse than she was, and she made room for a family in distress as long as we paid her our fair share. She was not providing charity – but she was providing a fair deal just to be neighborly.

That attitude, and the free coffee refills at diners, are what I like best about America.