“Goddamn it Harriet, You’re going to kill us all.”  Those were the words that bellowed out of the big mans chest startling the boy into a motionless figure staring in amazement at his father. He had heard his father swear before but never with such conviction and utter finality. It was a shock, not just the swear words, he had heard them before, but the fact that it was directed at his mother. The words “Goddamn it Harriet, you’re going to kill us all.”  rang in his ears sending a thrilling but terrifying sensation through his eight year old body like the time he stuck his finger in the light socket to see what it felt like. This was different than regular conversation. His mother just sat there with that stubborn defiant look on her face that was ripening into a righteous anger and the boy knew something really bad was going to happen. When that look appeared there was going to a reckoning and there would come a reckoning later, his mother was going to address this situation with his father. They were going to talk about it. And that talk would be loud and long-lasting, like way into the night long-lasting and he would lay there in his bed hanging on every word trying to figure out what everything meant, afraid but mostly curious.

The problem that caused that explosive reaction from his father was simple on the surface. There was a wasp in the car. A huge wasp. The Grandmother of all wasps. His mother didn’t like wasps, she didn’t like bees, she didn’t like flies, she didn’t like bats, she didn’t like any thing that could fly and dart around, possibly and however remotely, get tangled in her hair. She wasn’t one of those women that if she got bit by a bee or a wasp she’d just die. She wasn’t allergic. No, this was something else, it was just a primal fear of anything that moved like bugs do. Spiders! Spiders were even worse than things that could get tangled in her hair. Those creepy things would set her off in a hysterical reaction that was epic to behold. If there was a spider scurrying somewhere in the house or even next door at the neighbor’s house and she knew about it she would nearly go out of her mind. Everything stopped until that miserable spider was dealt with and dispatched to spider hell.

The incident that became known as the Family Calamity happened as the family were in the early stages of a road trip to see his mother’s brother and family in California. There was a chance they might get to go to Disneyland or even Knottsberry farm once they got there. Everybody, especially the two kids, were pretty excited. They were heading across the Mojave desert en route from the wilds of Northern Wisconsin in a 1951 Hudson Hornet that his father had borrowed from the boy’s grandfather so they could go to California to see his mom’s brother and all of his kids. Their family car, an old used Chevy that was on its last legs, would never have made the trip so it was their good fortune to have the luxury of this huge comfortable car. His father was driving, he had on a white t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up because of the heat, normally you’d see a pack of cigarettes in that rolled up part of the sleeve. Maybe a pack of Lucky Strikes or unfiltered camels rolled up tight in there because they fit just right. A pack of Pall-malls were too long and looked funny so you didn’t carry those. His father didn’t smoke he just rolled his sleeves up like the other guys did without the pack of cigarettes, the boy guessed that was what men did then, sort of a look that meant you were a man and don’t mess with me.

His mother was prettier than the average woman, this was back in 1951 when she was 25-26 years old and everyone thought she looked like Jane Russell. She was also dressed for the heat with a sleeveless blouse and a kind of scarf thing wrapped around her head to keep the dust from the wind out of her hair. Besides being pretty the boy thought she was smart and the best mother in the world but she had this awful fear, his father called it an idiosyncrasy, whatever that meant, about any thing that could fly and get tangled in her hair or bite her. All of the rest of the family just thought it meant that she was extra scared, not like an ‘idio’ which some of the boy’s friends thought meant, like an idiot, but as they didn’t know what syncrasy, the other part of the word meant, the boy would punch anyone that said it meant his mother was an idiot regardless of what syncrasy meant.

They had just left the gas station, the one with the flying red horse on its sign, where they got one of those desert water bags, one of the grey ones that felt like it was made out of an old blanket with the picture of a wagon being pulled by some mules on it, the picture was a faded red, even the cactus in the background and they filled it up with water. It was then hung off the hood ornament by the rope on top of it like a picture frame so that it hung down in front of the radiator so that when you drove, the wind the car made would blow through it and let cool air into the radiator as they drove across the desert and the car wouldn’t overheat. It was hot in the desert, it would get up to a 115° during the day, it was hot, hot, hot.

The old Hudson didn’t have air conditioning. In those days they rolled the windows down but that only worked for a little while because it was sort of like, well, a rotisserie, or like one of those convection ovens they have now where it blows hot air over your chicken to cook it. That’s what it was like. The kids sat in the back on those big wide grey, prickly feeling seats that were wide enough they were like a bed and as they proceeded across the heartless desert with its unrelenting heat they began turning a beautiful cherry red color. Not only because of the sun being so hot but because the heat sucked the moisture out of their bodies and they just got redder and redder. They lay there panting like a pile of puppies, tongues nearly hanging out and just endured. Now they would call it heat exhaustion or something like that. Back then it was just what happened. If they lived and almost everyone did they just called it an experience. Now they would call it heat exhaustion or something worse and they’d be arrested for child endangerment or something. 

The boy’s father’s arm, the left one which rested on the window sill and slowly turned into third degree burns found its place there seeming of its own accord everyday even though the boy’s father knew the price he’d pay. When he got done driving at night the boy’s mother would put some kind of ointment on it they called Udder Balm that was good for burns and other ailments and also cows udders which apparently often needed it, because there’d be just about blisters all up and down his arm and his father would be the brightest red imaginable. Plus a little irritable, course he was irritable a lot of the time so you didn’t notice it after a while. But there wasn’t anywhere else to put your arm while you were driving so that was the price you paid for driving across the desert in the hot sun during the daytime.

They left early about four in the morning, as they wanted to be way across the desert before it got real hot just so they wouldn’t have engine trouble because of the heat and die alongside the road. The longest stretch of that mean desert could be made in a day if you didn’t falter and laze around. “Best not to Tarry” my grandfather said to my dad, the only advice he gave him for the trip.

In all that desolation, in the heat where nothing could possibly live, somewhere, some how, there was the Wasp. Unannounced It blew into the car through the open window, flew past the boy’s mother’s face just slow enough that she could count the black and yellow rings on its tail and trigger the “Bee Reflex”.  The Bee Reflex was involuntary. She shrieked, not once but four or five times, threw her arms up, swatted at it but instead of hitting the wasp hit the boy’s father in the face knocking his glasses off, making a red mark on the bridge of his nose that he rubbed a lot over the next few days, causing him to jerk the steering wheel severely to the right and head off across the highway into the unknown desert. Swerving and fishtailing they rocketed in and out of the shallow ditch alongside the road, a rooster tail of dust and sand shooting into the sky, bumped through several hundred yards of unadulterated desert and came back up onto the pavement as if the whole thing had been planned. Fortunately nothing happened to the Hudson, it didn’t roll over, nothing really bad happened except the boy’s father said “Goddamn it Harriet, you’re going to kill us all.” He actually said that several times.

Immediately the boy’s mother bristled and snapped “It was a bee.” in a louder voice than was perhaps necessary. “No, it was a wasp.” the boy’s father said. “Well that ‘s even worse.” his mother replied. “No, generally a wasp won’t kill you, a bee might kill you because they have like bee poison in them, but a wasp won’t.” the father replied. He was an expert apparently on whether a wasp would kill you or a bee would kill you. It was his considered opinion, like it was on most things, that bees killed you. So if you’re going to get bit by something then get bit by a wasp, you’ll live.

HIs mother on the other hand didn’t care what it was. If it flew, if it got near her hair it was deadly and it was to be killed immediately or she was going to take us all with her as we went flying into the ditch at 65 miles per hour.

The wasp was still a clear and present danger and needed to be dealt with. His father tried to stop the car but he was a afraid to because the temperature gauge on that old Hudson was hovering way, way too close to 212° and although you could drive them a little hot he was afraid that if he did stop, the car would overheat for sure with no air blowing on the radiator and before long their bleached bones were going to be found inside that old Hudson alongside the road, in the middle of that desert and they’d all be dead and desiccated because Harriet his wife of many years was afraid of bees and had hit him in the nose leaving a mark.

When he realized he couldn’t stop the car he thought that if he went slow enough the car shouldn’t overheat. He got it down to about 10-15 miles per hour and he said to the boy “lean over the front seat here and steer. Be careful stay in the lane. Don’t hit nothing.” while he proceeded to swat at the wasp and tried drive it out the window. But wasps are pretty smart. If you got a wasp in a quiet car where they can sort of float around and buzz  and look like they’ll sting you just for the hell of it, and you give them a choice whether they want to head out into 65 mile per hour, 115° degree wind, or stay inside and bite you, most of the time they won’t do it, they won’t leave. You have to really convince them.

In all of his eight years the boy had never participated in anything as exciting as Wasp killing, Hudson Hornet driving and avoiding running back off into the desert even at a slow rate of speed, while his father swung his arms all over trying to kill the wasp while bellowing at his wife to shut up as his mother shrieked like a banshee. That was exciting.

The 1951 Hudson had one of those great big wide, front divided center bench seats that stretched clear across the width of the car with a backrest that folded down to meet the lower seat creating a console between the front seat passengers. A kid could sit up on there and see out of the windshield. That was before car seats. In fact that was before seat belts. Kids did that all the time, sit up there, look out feeling like they were grown up. The boy was laying on that console and he was so proud because although he could just barely see down the road over the dash he was steering the car.  And he wasn’t hitting anything, course there wasn’t anything to hit but he was still steering. His father was killing the wasp or trying to, his mother was still shrieking, his little sister in the back was sound asleep on the back seat until she heard her mother screeching then she began crying because mom was yelling. And all of this excitement was taking place at 115 degrees.

All of this heady excitement couldn’t last. It got to the point where something had to give. It had to be the wasp, or it had to be, put boy’s mother out on the side of the road, whatever, but it had to be something. His father found a road map, picked it up and rolled it into a kind of a tight cylinder affair. It was a little stiffer than the map would be just holding it flat although it was no longer as wide making hitting the wasp that much harder but he kept aiming and swiping and swinging at the wasp and every time he missed the boy’s mother would shriek ” Stop it! You’re just going to make it mad and it’s going to bite me.” His father just grunted and kept swinging. But he was determined then. He had to kill the wasp, it had become a thing.

In order to be a father and be a man and prove himself he had to murder that wasp. Every once in a while the wasp flew by his wife’s face and that’s when he really reacted and gave that wasp a smack, or tried  to, missing the wasp but not missing his wife as he accidentally smacked her a couple of times right across the bridge of her nose. That added fuel to fire, as if it could get any more volatile, because by then his mother was screaming “The wasp isn’t going to kill me, you’re going to kill me. You’re not even driving.” His Father said “The boy’s driving, the boy can drive. I’m going to kill the wasp. I’m going to kill the wasp before it kills us. If I don’t we’re all going to die, so just shut up and sit back.”

Eventually the wasp became so irritated and probably just embarrassed by the whole situation that it decided that suicide would be better than staying inside the vehicle with these people. The father took one last hit at the wasp just narrowly missing his wife’s face and barely hitting the wasp a little bit and that was it, he darted out into that 65 mile per hour, now 20 mile per hour wind and was out of our life forever.

So that was that. The wasp was gone, mom began to settle down, his father took back the wheel saying “I got it now son, I’ll drive.”

The boy was kind of disappointed because he figured he had another few miles in him. He leaned back into the rear seat pulling up the folding center console and sat down next to his sister. She had stopped crying and wanted to know what was going on but at four years old there wasn’t much to tell her other than “Bee.” At that she looked at her mother, then she nodded her head in a knowing way, way beyond her years, and began playing with her stuffed rabbit with the missing ear and it was life back to normal.

So that episode passed into family lore in the form of an adventure, actually it was a lot worse than an adventure. It was more one of those calamities, a family calamity. Once you’ve been through one and nobody died except maybe the wasp then you’ve got something. You got history, family history. A story that will be told at every family event until those that took part in it aren’t around to tell it anymore. The young boy told his friends ” I drove a 1951 Hudson Hornet across the desert in Nevada.” And he told them the story of the Family Calamity. It gave the young boy some real street cred. He would have the other boys undivided attention. He could embellish it a little, maybe add some stuff that wasn’t all that accurate or didn’t really happen. It didn’t matter they weren’t there. Their reaction was always “Really! Holy cow, did that really happen?” Of course he’d get a stern look on his face and say “By God it did! and you know what my dad said to my mom?” and everybody would lean in and say “No, What?” in hushed anticipatory whispers and he’d say, “he said Goddamn it, Harriet you’re going to kill us all.”