Our station wagon is one of those extra long, cream-colored, fake wood paneling-type deals, and it moves over the steamy asphalt with all the speed of a barge in a lifeless canal. The car has three seats - two facing the front and one facing back and the six of us are crammed into it, arms out the windows because the air-conditioning doesn't work and it's a God-awful hot July day.
My parents are in the front seat of course, Dad in his shirt sleeves and smoking his pipe and Mom dozing off beside him with a crinkled, unused map in her hand, her auburn topped head bobbing with every jolt of the car on the bumpy road.
We kids fight for the way-back seat, the one that faces where we've been. All you can see from the middle seat is the endless stretch of open road, the miles left to travel. From the back seat, you can almost see where you've come from, the very past, itself. And you can stick your tongue out at the people in the car behind.
Margaret and I win dibs on the way-back because we're older than the boys. But the whole trip they tease and poke us and make Mom miserable, and Dad threatens to strap them to the roof with the luggage.
Moms tries to pacify them by starting games of Punch Bug and License Plate Bingo and she says things like, Look kids a cow! But we've given up humoring her because it's the same darn cow over and over it seems, and we've made the trip so many times that just about any game bores us. Pathetically our of tune, we sing rounds of Barry Manilow's current hit "Copacabana", until our lungs are bursting and Mom is pleading with us for mercy because we've got the words all wrong.
The trip takes four hours from the heart of Boston to sleepy Old St. Albans, Vermont and we make the most of it with a picnic lunch and frequent pit stops. But I think all that keep my parents going is the anticipation of my grandparents' house some hundreds of miles and counting down the road.
Going to St. Albans every summer is a big deal for all of us. For Margaret and Edward and Stephen and I, it signifies our release from school into three months of freedom. We walk freely through the streets, something we are not allowed at home, up St. Albans Hill to where the great, grand old mansions are; "downstreet" to the freestanding shops and department stores that line the sidewalks of Main Street. The town is like something out of the Saturday Evening Post. We eat Creemies while sitting on a bench in Taylor Park, pay two dollars for the matinee at the Welden Cinema (which only has one screen!), And spend hours at the playground of the Barlow Street School, which we get to by slipping through a hole in the fence at the end of our grandparents' dead end street. The fun we have once we arrive makes the hours in the car worth the trip
We get to this one stretch of road and up ahead of us looms what is commonly known to us kids as "Poppa's Bridge"; a study in gray and iron. My grandfather, given the nickname Poppa out of love by his children, was a contractor who built bridges all over Vermont. My mother has often told us stories of living at camps when he was on the road and we can picture her, gawky and freckled, watching her father erect history. She has told us the story of this bridge many times -- of the crane that ended up in the water one night when the river crested, the same crane that had toppled earlier in the job, crushing a bystanders bike. Her father, she'd told us, had done more than just apologize to the little boy with the busted Schwinn. He'd bought him a new one. Poppa was like that - generous and kind.
He built this bridge practically with his own hands, so we've decided. His corporation, Blow and Cote, completed it in 1966, when my parents were still newlyweds. We kids squeeze our heads out the windows and crane our necks to take in the massive expanse.
The bridge rests on the Missisquoi River, connecting West Swanson with Swanton. Although he sold his share of the company to his partner Denny the year I was born, the bridge stands as a reminder to us that Poppa once built things like this; built the means to get one place to another; built a way for us to get to him. We are still so young that we wonder-if he hadn't built this bridge, how would we ever get to his house?
We pull our heads back in the windows and press our noses to the glass as the bridge rises above and behind us. When more of it is behind us than in front, Margaret and I sit still in the way-back seat while the boys turn in the middle and the four of us gaze in silence out the rear window. We watch it unfolding behind us for miles, as we move slowly away and it becomes only a faint speck over acres of blue. When it disappears behind a cloud we lean our heads back against the seats and sleep until we reach our destination.
In my dreams I always picture Poppa and my visions are always the same. I see him, as he will be when we reach his home; the way that he's always been to my young mind. Here he is, a large man. Quite round, in fact, with wavy salt and pepper hair and a bulbous nose that keeps his gold-rimmed glasses in place. Behind them, his deep brown eyes swim with tears when he first sees us and when it's time for us to leave; his bear hugs are free and warm.
When I was very young he would put on a wide-brimmed straw hat and take us all for long walks in the field behind the house, following the brook that bordered the property. He would march us to splendid sunsets, promising that the water ran as far as Canada, always turning us back before we reached it end. But now it is hard for him to get around, so he sits in a brown vinyl armchair by the front picture window and we gather at his feet. He tells us stories of his boyhood and we believe them, as far-fetched as they may seem, because he is our Poppa.
He tells us of his father, the late great Willie P., whose middle initial stood for nothing. Of growing up on Grand Isle, where his mother dressed him like a girl (we've seen pictures!), First in long white tunics and then finally in funny short pants. He tells us of our great-grandfathers dog, Babe, who sat at the dinner table in a highchair (and stresses this was on our grandmothers side). And he tells of how he met her, our Gram, when she was a switchboard operator in South Hero, and we try to picture them at nineteen, when they were young and thin and just starting out. Before he built for her the house they live in; the house I will forever think of as home.
We hang on his every word. Each syllable is rhythmic; every tale is dripping with sentiment. When he's excited the chair rocks and creaks with movement, but sometimes he swivels it around to face the window and just stares out at the quiet street. Margaret, Edward, Stephen and I sit on the floor and watch his straight back and wonder what he's thinking. In my dreams, he always swivels back around and his proud face is soft and his strong arms are open, and the pools that are his eyes spill over and run down his fat, rosy cheeks. And I always awaken to find that we are there.
I am no longer ten years old, but twenty. The station wagon groaned and dies a lone time ago and I drive a small foreign car now; speedy and smooth, it moves efficiently along the highway, away from my grandparents house. Foolishly, I thought that I'd always be able to go back; that nothing important would ever change. I planned to return to the house to fine it exactly the same, but fate deals a deadly hand, and life has no guarantees. I arrive to fine the armchair empty, as I'd known it would be. Still, its starkness startled me; it stood untouched and unoccupied in a room of well-worn furniture-a throne without a king.
I left the house only an hour ago, the bright sun beating down on the cherry-red roof of my little car, my mother already dozing in the seat beside me. It is only the two of us this year, as many families will, ours has scattered. We are two silent figures on the lonely road with miles upon miles to go; yet I hear the voices of the others in my head as I drive along. Copacabana plays on the oldies station and I laugh because I still don't know all the words, and Mom wakes at the sound. Her graying head bounces up and her mouth smiles at me even if her eyes don't. She glances out the window and says, Look dear-a cow, but I barely hear her because "Poppa's Bridge" Has risen up before us sooner that I'd expected or remembered.
I slowed the car and Mom sticks her head out the window to get a better look, but she doesn't repeat the story of how the bridge was built; the words hang unspoken in the stagnant air between us. I speed up the car as we cross the bridge and I realize that all I'm really sure about is the Margaret and Edward are still in school in Boston and Stephen is somewhere in New York with my father and I am here, in this hot confining car with my mother at my side, because I had to see for myself how things had changed.
And I wonder what the other would have thought, if they has seen his chair-alone. If they had walked the length of the brook to find its banks littered with beer cans and cigarette butts, overgrown and untended. Would they have made it to its end as I did, bramble-scratched and bloodied, to find it formed a murky pond below a highway overpass? Would they have cried as the sun set on their childhood?
I catch one final glimpse of the bridge in the rearview mirror and I hold it in my minds eye as I drive away. In my memory the bridge is girder upon girder of indestructible iron and steel; in the mirror it is gray dust-ashes caught in the summer breeze.
© 2012 
