“Be careful going in search of adventure – it’s ridiculously easy to find.”
– William Least Heat Moon
Fawn and I have this map on the wall of our closet. On this map, we’ve kept track of the places we’ve traveled to during our married life. The criteria for a pin is that we have to have spent at least one night in the place – just passing through doesn’t count. And it has to have been both of us on the trip, not just one of us.
I can look at any one of those red pins, and it’s as if a story is encapsulated within the head of that pin. If you cracked open any one of those pin heads, you’d see a little bit of our life’s adventures. Within each pin head is a story, an adventure, a chance encounter, a marvel, an experience, some fun, and (most times) lots of laughter. For each red pin head, I can instantly summon up images and reminiscences.
Take this one for instance…Big Bend National Park, inside the head of that red pin is a lesson in humility!
Fawn and I had only been married a few months, and we decided that we’d drive out to Big Bend for a long weekend of camping in the great outdoors. Before we left Houston, we stopped by her parent’s house to let them know our plans and our schedule. As we were leaving their house, Gene gave me a hug, shook my hand, then looked me square in the eye (still gripping my hand) and very seriously said something like, “You be careful, and you take care of my Baby Girl.” Well, obviously he’d forgotten that just a few months earlier, he had turned his “Baby Girl” over to ME. He obviously didn’t understand yet that I was now the head of my own household, the “paterfamilias”…the patriarch of my own family now, and I was certainly in charge of this trip, by golly! I knew what I was doing; I had it all under control!
About 10 hours later, it was almost dusk. That west Texas sun that we’d been enjoying all afternoon was now sinking slowly below the horizon in front of us. Music was blaring on the radio, we were singing Jimmy Buffett songs, just reveling in the freedom and excited to be on this first great adventure together…not a care in the world!
We were in the absolute middle of nowhere, somewhere east of Fort Stockton. Just as the sun finally disappeared and dusk suddenly turned to total darkness all around, I happened to glance down at the dashboard and noticed with panic that my gas gauge was on empty! The needle was actually below “E”, and I had no idea how long it had been like this. A sickening feeling entered my stomach. How could I have forgotten to watch the stupid gas gauge! Gene’s last words echoed in my head…”you take care of my Baby Girl”. Images entered my mind of me and “Baby Girl” stranded on the side of Interstate 10, in pitch darkness, me fighting to defend the honor of “Baby Girl”…fending off wave after wave of depraved truck drivers and savage illegal immigrants with my 2-inch pocket knife in one hand and a tent pole in the other, waiting anxiously for some unscrupulous wrecker driver to show up and tow us 80 miles to the nearest gas station!
Just a few minutes before the last fumes in the gas tank were consumed, I saw a single light just off in the darkness ahead. With great relief, I exited and we limped in under the dilapidated “Gas-Gro-Beer-Phone” marquee of the place, hoping it truly did have the promised Gas part anyway. It did! I’m convinced that I paid double the normal price for gas to the bandit station owner that night, but I was more than happy to do it.
Or this one…life in the big city:
I first visited Chicago in 1985. It is, to this day, truly my favorite city of all I’ve ever visited. On this trip, I was there for a week of training, learning about refractories. The plan was that Fawn would fly up on Friday at the end of that week and we’d spend the weekend there, exploring and just having fun in the city. That Friday morning, I was standing outside the Holiday Inn-Lakeshore Drive, waiting on Fawn to arrive. She was due to arrive at any time in a cab from O’Hare airport. Suddenly, I looked up the street and saw Fawn through the crowd of people on the sidewalk, panic-stricken, tears in her eyes, lugging her two big suitcases down the street towards the hotel. She had gotten out of the cab two blocks away from the hotel. I thought she’d been mugged!
I went to meet her, and asked her, “What in the world happened?” Seems that she had just had the “cab ride from Hell!” After Fawn had gotten in the cab at O’Hare, the cab driver, a Puerto Rican woman, first offered her some Chinese food from a cardboard box that was on the floorboard. Then she offered her a toke on her marijuana joint. She collided with a pickup truck on the freeway on the way, denting fenders and creating a traffic jam. After several other close calls in Chicago traffic, Fawn had had enough! The final straw was when smoke started belching from under the hood of the cab. Sensing that they were close enough to the hotel, she made the driver stop the cab in the middle of the street, retrieved her bags, and took off walking down Lakeshore Drive, luggage in hand. Welcome to the big city!
Then there’s this one…!
In December of 1982, right after we got married, Fawn’s Grandmother, Doris, invited us to join her on a trip to San Francisco. She wanted to drive to California to see a cousin of hers, and was nice enough to treat us dead-broke newlyweds to a wonderful cross country trip. What a grand adventure for a wide-eyed boy from Tyler, Texas. With a brand new job at Jones & Carter, it was hard to ask for a week off for a vacation, but I did it anyway and Bob Jones was nice enough to let me go.
I’ll never forget the night we arrived in San Francisco. The way I remember it after all these years, we drove over this mountain on the outskirts of San Francisco around 9 o’clock at night. As we reached the crest, there, laid out before us, was the most beautiful, crystal-clear view of the city of San Francisco you could ever hope to see! The air that night was as clear as a bell. The city lights were sparkling like stars. The Golden Gate Bridge was there before us as well, just as I had seen it all my life in magazines and on TV. We learned the next day from some locals that what we had seen that night before was truly an unusual event. It’s hardly ever that clear in San Francisco. What an incredible thing to see!
Even better than that image was the chance to spend all those hours in the car with these two special women who were still new in my life. Doris shared with us many stories of her own life’s adventures, travels with her own husband, Frank Emory Marney, who had just died not too long before that. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think now that part of the reason she invited us on that trip was to impart on us newlyweds some of the things that she herself had experienced with her husband and held dear. Things like the value of shared experiences, experiencing life together, exploring together, seeking out adventure wherever you go in life.
Then there’s this one – God’s Wondrous World:
In July, 2012, Fawn and I traveled to Calgary, rented a camper, and took off driving! We saw some of the most spectacular scenery we’ve ever seen, driving through the Canadian Rockies and Glacier National Park. Mountains, glaciers, lakes, roaring rivers, wildlife. The “highlight” stories inside the head of that red pin are are best shared through these pictures:
There was the bear that almost climbed into the front seat of our camper with us. We had pulled over to the side of the road, windows rolled down. Fawn kept calling it over to us….”come here little bear!”, making the tskking sounds like she was calling a dog or cat over to sit in her lap! The bear almost did just that, suddenly lunging and hitting the rear view mirror with his paw when he realized that Fawn didn’t really have anything for him to eat!
Angel Glacier….one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen. Standing below it, you could hear it pop and crackle, as the ice fissured, released and moved in the sunlight. I remember feeling so small and insignificant, in the presence of all this majesty.
Fawn’s buddies she met at Lake Louise. She struck up a conversation with these two guys. They had been at this exact spot 27 years ago and had smoked their hookah pipes together. They agreed then that they would return to the spot 27 years later, sit by the lake, and just spend the afternoon together, sharing time and smoking their hookah pipes again in that magical place.
My brush with the law in Canada.
Next Red Pin….The Big Apple:
If you looked inside this particular red pin, you’d see a bunch of wide-eyed members of the Fisher clan the time we invaded New York City. So many memories of this trip…riding the subways, the Statue of Liberty, cab rides, Times Square, a Broadway show….and one of the most poignant memories – looking down at the World Trade Center towers from the air as we left. A short time later, they simply wouldn’t be there anymore.
We’re blessed to have so many red pins on our map, so many memories, so many stories to tell. Spectacular sights, once in a lifetime adventures, special times with special friends and family. Each of these simple red pins represent times and experiences that I simply would not trade for anything in the world.
Get you a map. Get you some red pins. In the words of Saint Augustine, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” Travel makes you modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Paul's Point of View 
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