With the bulk of the nation making their way to Mom, Dad, Grandma or Uncle Dick's house for Thanksgiving dinner this week, traveling in late November can be a trying experience. Whether you're heading to Warwick or the West Coast, the turkey and the loving family at the end of the road are usually reasons enough to fight the crowds. My family lives in Seattle, though, which is too long a haul for a four-day weekend. Since coming to Brown, the stress of cross country travel has led me to embark on a secondary plan: East Coast Thanksgivings.
For the past three Thanksgivings, I have traveled through 10 states along the Atlantic. And while pumpkin pie always inspires me to persevere, I have had some harrowing trips.
First year I was a homesick, fledgling vegetarian, wary of turkey and post-Sept. 11 air-travel. So I traveled by train to my aunt's house in Northern Virginia and stuck to her mashed potatoes, sans turkey gravy. The meal at my aunt's house and my travel along Amtrak's rails were both disappointing - mashed potatoes really do need to be drowned in gravy, and the train was flooded with what seemed like every prep-schooler on the eastern seaboard. Growing up in Seattle, I had never met a prep-school kid, so I was not used to their antics. As we inched through New Jersey, the shrieking on cell phones and the shuffling of their brown loafers got old real quick.
Sophomore year I decided to stay close to Providence, splitting the long weekend between the house of a friend's grandmother in southern Rhode Island and another friend's place in Boston. Grandma's house was a postcard Thanksgiving - warm and full of laughter, card games and family that loved one another. There was still something amiss in the Norman Rockwell scene, however. Laid out on the table was a big turkey and eight kinds of dessert - four ice creams, two pies and two cakes. But where were the side dishes?
I'm used to a Nebraskan Thanksgiving, which involves no less than three kinds of stuffing, two mashed starches, four green things and giblets. The family did cook some peas as a token vegetable and opened a can of cranberry sauce for a hint of color, but there were about 15 of us, and their proportions were horribly, horribly wrong. As far as I could tell, everyone got about eight peas, a teaspoon of mashed potatoes and half a pint of ice cream. Trying to fill up while not offending anyone by eating all the vegetables on the table, I was forced to eat, almost exclusively, turkey and dessert. Let's just say, after a year and a half of vegetarianism and usually limiting myself to three desserts at a time, my stomach was not prepared for that kind of gastrointestinal challenge.
The next day my friend drove me to Boston for the hand-off. En route, it started snowing. Coming from snowless Seattle, the thought of driving through the snow appalled me. But my hardened New England friend and her brother thought the snowstorm was no big deal, and we plowed on through Massachusetts. I curled into the fetal position in the backseat and prayed we didn't fishtail off a bridge. Ten minutes later, we hit some ice and careened into someone's front yard. The yard was fine, but while spinning out of control at a raging eight miles an hour, we managed to hit the lone fire hydrant on the block, head on. No one was hurt, but we knocked the fire plug to a 45-degree tilt and lost our license plate deep in the hole where the fire hydrant once stood. My plan for a low-travel, low-stress holiday did not pan out as expected.
Junior year I went back to the Washington, D.C., area, flying this time. I was expecting chaos at the airport but was not prepared for my first flight to be so tiny - the plane was a 19-seat commuter plane from Providence to New York - or so overbooked. Someone at the gate wasn't counting heads, because when everyone boarded and took their seats, there were still three people and a seeing-eye-dog-in-training looking for a spot. The dog stayed pretty calm and avoided the chance to freak out in the plane's small quarters, but its owner got kind of rabid, emphatic that the two of them get on the flight. A few businessmen who were no doubt dreading a holiday with the in-laws gave up their seats like as many hot potatoes. With a prayer that the dog wouldn't get air sick, we were off.
I made it down to D.C. in one piece and faced the next challenge: to eat turkey or not. Since the last time I'd seen him, my cousin had started college and become a born-again vegan who lived off of soy products and David Bowie alone. Watching my aunt make him a separate batch of mashed potatoes without butter I imagined the pilgrims were rolling over in their graves. There are morals, but then there are holidays, and mashed potatoes without butter for this flexible vegetarian was taking things one step too far. I was ready to have gravy back in my life and nibbled on some turkey for sentimental reasons. Turns out tryptophan, that drowse-inducing chemical in turkey, is kind of incredible in combating the stresses of holiday travel. It seeped into my bloodstream on slow release for the rest of the weekend, and I made it back to Providence, sleepy-eyed but well-fed.
So what's the plan for this year? After all my negotiations with german shepards and fire hydrants, I'm bracing myself for some travails in my travels. Over great distances or right nearby, getting to a home for the holidays can be a bumpy, icy, over-booked road. But even if it is not like Mom used to make it, there is plenty of tryptophan-laden turkey (or soy products and wine) to warm your heart and make the return trip a little easier.
Emily Nemens '05 wishes you safe travels.
