<< Back 7/3/02 The Bookies and The Beast Literary landmarks, wailing winds and 18 hours in the family truckster By Jeff Minick Let me tell you the story of the bookies and the Beast. First, you should know that the Beast is a hulking, 1984 Suburban, big and ungainly as an old Army tank. Unlike today’s puny excuses for cars, the Beast actually has interior metal parts. It rumbles noisily, belches diesel fuel hot and stinky as a dragon’s breath, and shakes when the motor is running like a dog getting out of a pond. Normally, we use the Beast, so named by our 6-year-old, for carrying books to sell at conferences. This year, however, my wife and I decided to drive it 18 hours north to the beaches of Rockport, Mass., for a vacation with my wife’s family. You should also know that the air-conditioning in the Beast does’t work. Most people might regard the lack of air-conditioning as a terrible affliction, a horrendous torment scarcely to be endured nowadays. Yet the one great advantage to the lack of air conditioning is noise. The Beast is noisy at all times, but with the windows open it is absolutely impossible to communicate inside the Beast without shouting. Even then, the person sitting in the third seat back from the front has little chance of being heard by the driver. I understand that everyone would not regard this noise as an advantage. If forced to ride in the Beast, the Trapp Family Singers would doubtless miss their song fests, their yodeling, and their sweet conversations. Families like television’s Waltons would regret the lost opportunity to engage in those warm dialogues they once carried on around the dining room table. In my own family, however, the maxim that best works on any car trip is: the less said, the better. Though I often torment my children by breaking into song, we don’t cantillate like the Von Trapps, and we rarely engage in highbrow discussions. Instead, we argue, we snipe, we skirmish. We get on one another’s nerves like cats in a sack. Son Number Two takes a verbal pot-shot at Son Number Three, gets harassed by Daughter Number One, who is reprimanded by Mom, who receives scowl from Dad, who receives dark mutterings from Son Number One. This small-arms fire is bearable on a trip to Asheville, but to drive under such dire conditions for nearly a thousand miles might produce a situation that would land the survivors on the Jerry Springer show. How, then, to amuse ourselves? The answer was books, of course. We bought several cassette players with headsets for five dollars apiece at Wal-Mart, checked out a box of books and tapes from the library, and then set out Of course, we did discover that certain disadvantages accrue to riding in the Beast with the windows rolled down. We emerged at rest stops and hamburger joints looking as windblown as if we had just endured a gale. Frequently the aroma of manure and fertilizer wafted through the car. I had also forgotten how loud trucks sound on a freeway as they zip past an open window at 80 miles per hour. Yet the plan worked. There was little talk, and what there was of it was affable. There was also a wonderful amount of reading: A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, a repeat for my daughter of one of her favorite books; Patriot Games, my oldest son’s first Clancy novel; How Firm A Foundation, a novel of religious apologetics read by wife in which a delightful misspelling has a woman unable to “bare any more children;” soccer magazines and political journals; a book on the founding fathers; a book on the training undergone by the Navy Seals that resulted in a long discussion about the meaning of 20/20 eyesight; the audio versions of Redwall, The Mighty, one of Dr. Laura’s books about stupid things people do, and several other books on tape. The Beast also carried us to places known to other bookies: Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables in Salem; the fabulous used bookstore in Manchester By The Sea; the congenial public library near the house where we stayed; the graveyard in Concord where Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts are all sleeping their eternal sleep within just a few yards of one another; and nearby Walden Pond, which is much nicer than I’d heard. (By this time in the trip we had discovered that if we shut the Beast down, it would not restart for several hours. Let me apologize here to all those Yankees I asphyxiated in the parking lot at Concord’s Old North Bridge). Finally, we began the trek home, smelling of the sun and tanning oil, and still reading and listening to book tapes. We made a final stop at the Green Valley Book Fair in the Shenandoah Valley. Located off 1-81 at Exit 240, Green Valley Book Fair is open about two weeks per month throughout the year. It’s an enormous warehouse jammed with discounted books of all sorts. If you haven’t visited there and you’re traveling the Valley, you’ll find it a worthwhile stop. So here’s to the Beast, and the beach, and the books, and to you bookies everywhere. May you find as many delights in your own summer vacation. (Jeff Minick can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)