A Visit to the Salt Flats: Fulfilling a 56 Year Old Dream

My mother died when I was seven years old. It was Christmas week. My father, like any father would be, was ill-equipped to handle nine kids on his own. I cannot imagine all he had to endure.

He’d gone from a breadwinner married to a wheelchair-bound wife who was a good, but at times abusive, mother to a single father struggling with anger issues.

Until then, Jack Ryan’s most loving thing he ever did was shower us with Christmas and birthday gifts and summer vacations around the Northeast. However, they were drowned by the beatings, beratings, and how he could see little good in anything his kids did. We all grew up as suspects in his strange world. He often set traps for us simply so he could punish us. He’d count the cookies in the tins, and when he stopped catching us, he began counting the Milkbone dog biscuits because he knew we turned to snacking on them when he was at work. He measured the frosting on cakes, seeing if any of us had peeled off a sliver as a treat. And when he found someone had, and no one confessed, he lined us up around his bed and whipped us with his belt.

But in the summer of 1969, with all of us in a haze, Jack Ryan did a brave and loving thing: he traded in our old station wagon for a new one and bought a Skamper tent trailer that could sleep eight.

We were off on a month-long coast-to-coast trip, but part of the fun was leading up to it. Each night, after dinner, for weeks and weeks, Jack would spread out maps on the kitchen table and talk about the places we’d see.

Our trip was delayed by a few days when my brother Eddie totaled the new station wagon, which needed to be replaced. Joanne and John, the two oldest, stayed home because they were in their early twenties and had jobs.

The lasting gift of that trip was not just seeing the Grand Canyon, Mammoth Cave, the Redwoods, Yellowstone, and Mount Rushmore. What was even more valuable to us was seeing my father more like a peer. Oh, don’t get me wrong. He was a strict leader on that trip, but his temper rarely flashed. When we gazed upon America’s natural wonders (along with Disney Land and Marine World), I could also look at my father and, for the first time in my young life, see joy and awe that equaled ours. For the first time, we could be around him without fearing the worst.