A Reckoning and a Road Trip

My brother and I spent a lot of time together during the last months of our Dad’s life. It was a time of reckoning for both of us; and, it was during this time that we stumbled on the idea of a road trip. We talked, joked, laughed, revisited highlights and a few lowlights from the years that had so quietly slipped away. What we were doing, of course, was trying desperately to avoid the reality that Dad’s life rapidly approaching its end.

I was 58 at the time; and my brother, Mel, was just about to click over 50 on the old age odometer.

Days and then weeks slipped quietly away until, ultimately, we transferred Dad from home to the Mater Private Hospital in Redland Bay; in order to more effectively manage his pain.

An uncomfortable truth

I’ve never liked hospitals; and generally I avoid them like the plague. But there was no way of avoiding this particular hospital room. Perhaps it was watching our Dad’s vitality ebb as he neared the end that I found so unsettling; or maybe it was the fact that so much time had slipped by since Mel and I had spent time together. On the other hand, it might have been something else or perhaps nothing at all. We all know that our parents will leave us one day; but, we never seem to be ready for that day when it arrives.

Eventually, I needed a break to clear my head and top up my nicotine. So I slipped quietly out, down the stairs and onto the hospital’s front lawn. As I stood, looking out over the sea in the distance, it occurred to me that I’d already lived more of my life than I had remaining; that there were a great many things I wanted to do but had put on the back-burner, as I am too often wont to do, until I had more time; and, if I actually wanted to do any of the things that had been on the back-burner, I’d better get my arse into gear, get my shit together and get a few things ticked off the bucket list.

By the time I’d finished the cigarette and made my way back to the room, Dad had drifted off to sleep. So, I eased myself into a seat next to my brother and turned to him. 

Facing facts

‘You know Mate . . . we haven’t spent much time together over the last forty years have we?’

Mel shook his head thoughtfully but said nothing for a while. Awkward silences have a way of drawing out as this one was doing while my question just hovered there between us; uncomfortably and confronting, like a fart in an elevator.

 ‘No . . . you get a bit busy, eh? And time just seems to sneak away,’ he said quietly.

It was certainly true that our working lives had taken us on very different trajectories. He’d become a clergyman and I was a chalkie. We’d grown apart; or perhaps we’d just been careless about the things that really mattered. It was also quite possible that we’d just allowed ourselves to become preoccupied. Perhaps we’d become too busy raising kids and paying off mortgages to notice how quickly time had been slipping by. Maybe the petty blizzard of compromises, insults and disappointments that make up the weave and warp of our lives, had obscured what was really important.

I looked away and, almost to myself, mumbled. 

‘We actually don’t even know each other that well anymore, do we?’

‘No . . . I guess not’.

He was still looking at me . . . and I?

Well, I wasn’t sure where this conversation might go; and wasn’t sure that I was ready for it to go in any of the directions that it might.

What about a road trip?

‘You interested in doing a road trip?’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Well, it would give us some time together. After a few thousand miles we’d either be mates or just two blokes on the same road,’ I said.

Mel didn’t say anything for a while and the hospital room went pretty quiet again. I watched Dad’s chest rise and fall under the crisp white sheet. His breathing was shallow and quiet; more so than I’d ever known it to be. Dad’s snoring could rattle windows. The clock on the wall, like a metronome, ticked off seconds, and then minutes. The silence drew out and became deeper and more awkward.

‘OK,’ he said cautiously. ‘What you got in mind?’

Well, truth be told, I didn’t have anything much in mind. 

When I was a kid, my Dad used to say: it’s better to keep your mouth shut and have people wonder, than open it and remove all doubt. I’d taken this little gem of wisdom to heart; and, as a consequence, had acquired an undeserved reputation for being a bit deep and mysterious. The truth is that, in difficult situations, I often find myself at a loss for words. So, in accordance with Dad’s bons mot, I’ve made a habit of retreating into silence; and right then, I was a bit lost for words. 

Eventually though, I came up with something. 

Just a thought

’How about we ride Route 66? I’ve wanted to do that ever since I heard Chuck Berry screaming Get Your Kicks on Route 66.’

‘OK . . . when?’

What about ‘Harley’s 110th Anniversary in 2013. Why don’t we go to that in Milwaukie, then ride Route 66 out of Chicago back to LA.’

‘Sounds like that could work,’ he said, ‘but hell, that’s five years away.’

‘So? We could go to the 105th Anniversary . . . but we’d have to leave next week. And, even if we flew straight there, we’d probably miss half of it. Think about it Mate, there’d be plenty of time to work out where we’d want to go; how long we’d want to take; and, what we might want to do along the way. Then there’d still be time to do a bit of planning and getting our ducks in a row.’

We’d had that conversation on a Monday afternoon in Early August.

Back home to check on things

Over the months since Dad’s initial diagnosis with pancreatic cancer, Mel and I had played ‘tag team’ in an effort to spend as much time with the old man as possible. That week, Mel had arrived by plane from Sydney on a Sunday afternoon. I’d explained to Dad that, as I had been away for almost ten days, I needed to go home to see the family; spend some time sorting urgent College business; and chair the meeting of the Principals’ Forum. I’d assured him that I’d return on Friday’s midnight flight and would catch up with him on Saturday morning. But, I’d also said that it would be OK if he needed to go before I got back. Of course, it never occurred to me for even a minute that this might actually happen.

Bone weary, I got off the Darwin flight in the early hours of Tuesday morning. I snatched a few hours sleep and fronted my office at the College at 6.30am. My in-tray was full to overflowing; quarterly financial reports were spread out on the desk awaiting my review and endorsement; I had interviews scheduled for most of the day; and, there was a note from the CEO Director reminding me that I hadn’t circulated the Agenda for the Principals’ Forum.

Bad news

It was late on Wednesday evening before I came up for air. I phoned Mel to see how Dad was travelling. He’d had a constant stream of visitors; past colleagues, friends and extended family members. The afternoon had been filled with animated conversation, stories from the old days and much laughter. It had been good, Mel said, to hear Dad laugh; bask in the warmth of people, friends, anecdotes; and relive memories from the past.

On Thursday, I reported early to the Catholic Education Office, agenda in hand. I took my place at the head of the table and reviewed for the Principals the business for the next two days. Later, we ploughed through system finances, checked accountability protocols, and a bewildering array of other administrivia that is part of the daily routine of any Principal. But, in truth, my heart just wasn’t in it. My thoughts were three and a half thousand kilometres away.

Then, at morning tea break, the Director sidled up to me. He’d received a phone call from Dad’s Hospital. After the high of the previous day, it seemed, Dad was going downhill, and quickly.

‘You need to get on a plane and get yourself down there,’ he whispered.

Back to the bedside . . . but too late.

I boarded Jetstar’s Brisbane flight just after midnight and was asleep before the plane even left the ground. Now, I don’t sleep much on aircraft unless I’m pretty tired. But that night I did until, after a few hours, something woke me. I’m still not sure why or how but suddenly I was wide awake. The cabin was dark and eerily quiet as I hoisted myself out of the seat. I felt my way forward towards where I could see a hostess at work in the adjacent galley.

‘Excuse me,’ I whispered, ‘could you let me know what time it is?’

‘A little after 5 am, Sir,’ she whispered back.

‘OK, thanks . . . so, we’re about an hour out of Brisbane?’

‘Yes, that’s about right.’

An hour later, as we were disembarking, I pulled the cell phone out of my jacket pocket and turned it on as I stepped out onto the skybridge. It pinged almost immediately and right there a text message from Mel jumped off the screen at me.

Hey Mate, we lost Dad at 5.06 this morning, it said.

Dad passed not long after his 86th Birthday in August of 2008. We buried him next to his brother, Gordon, in the shade of the tall gums that border the Redland Bay Cemetery. 

What a man

Born the youngest of a family of eleven just seven years before the Wall Street Crash tipped the world’s major economies into what was to be the longest, most devastating Depression anyone had ever experienced. After he’d completed his Primary Schooling in Busselton he’d gone to work on the family farm; but only long enough to decide that there had to be more to life than farming. Within a couple of months, he’d absconded and started driving ‘timber jinkers’ in Australia’s south west. Restless soul that he was, it wasn’t long before he headed north to transport cattle in the far north of Western Australia.  

Change of direction

One Friday night, he was driving from Marble Bar to the railhead at Meekatharra with a road-train full of cattle. The cattle-train’s engine mounts, fatigued by relentless hammering across potholes and corrugations, broke and dumped the engine on the front suspension crossmember. He found himself miles from anywhere on a road that, at best, may have carried a couple of vehicles a week – in a good week. As a boy, I’d heard Dad tell this story in all its detail, but that tale is one for another place and time. Suffice to say this was something of a ‘Damascus’ experience for Dad. And, it was on this road, miles from anywhere, in the remote North West of Australia that he made his decision to quit truck driving and study for the Ministry.

A vocation and a tragedy

During the years that followed, he’d married, travelled to the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, gained Master Mariner’s qualifications and taught himself to speak Motu. He’d sailed mission launches through all the coastal regions; and trekked the length and breadth of the inhospitable terrain that formed the backbone of that country. He’d run schools and established mission stations; built houses; survived a marine explosion and fire; and, wept when he’d buried his wife and two boys.

He’d survived typhoid, malaria and black-water fever and become a life-long friend of the Territory Administrator, Sir Donald Cleland, the Deputy Administrator, Dr John Gunther, and the Flying Bishop, Leo Archfeldt. When I was a lad, he’d seemed bulletproof; but those years had slipped away and cancer was eating away at what nothing else had ever managed to destroy.

After the wake, Mel caught a plane back to his life and work in Sydney. Barb and I headed back to the Northern Territory. On our flight home, while settled in the quiet half-light of the cabin, the enormity of what had just happened enveloped me like a suffocating fog. I was now an orphan; a redundant reminder of Dad’s first wife, first family and first life. Fate had progressively chiseled away at the granite block that was once my family; a ship explosion in the early fifties had been broken off three chunks; a plane crash had broken off another piece; and now the core had just been smashed. I alone remained; just a redundant, residual fragment. It was not a good feeling

Life goes on . . . but not as we knew it.

Mel went back to being absorbed with and by his vocation. I got back to the business of managing the College. My preoccupation with the unrelenting demands of work, allowed me to abscond from the emptiness that Dad’s passing had created. As the years continued to slip away, we called each other from time to time. We texted and sent the occasional email; and, agreed to get down to planning our road trip – soon.

And so it was that 2008 rolled into 2009 which in turn became 2010 and then 2011. We spoke with increasing frequency about our impending road trip. But, somehow we always found a way to avoid getting down to the nuts and bolts of planning. Perhaps neither of us really believed that the road trip was ever going to happen.

A wake up call.

By 2012, I was running the College in the NT, spending a week each month in Canberra managing CaSPA, and burning up an inordinate amount of my life commuting between Darwin and Canberra. Then, in November of that year, while visiting my daughter and her husband in Sydney, I had a heart attack.

I woke that Saturday morning long before it was light. My throat was dry as the floor of a parrot’s cage, and a pain in the chest made my eyes water. Heartburn I thought. I eased myself out of bed and shuffled unsteadily downstairs to get a glass of water and some Eno. Afterwards, although I’d slaked my thirst, the pain in my chest felt worse. Clearly, someone had slipped a stiletto under my rib cage and was using it to randomly probe at the centre of my chest. I shuffled back towards the staircase with the aim of going back to bed for an hour or two; or until the ‘heartburn’ subsided. 

The problem was that, by the time I got to the the staircase, I couldn’t seem to muster the enthusiasm or strength to make the climb. Instead, I opted for a bit of a sit down on the bottom stair tread. I thought of Barb back home in Darwin and my daughter and grandchildren upstairs. And I was still there, parked on the bottom step, when my daughter came down to make morning coffee.

‘Morning Dad . . . up early as usual I see.’

I grunted.

‘You OK Dad?’ she asked with growing alarm.

‘Not really,’ I mumbled, ‘got really bad heartburn,’

And, before I knew what was happening, I found myself in the ICU at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.

No more postponing dreams

Perhaps the universe was giving me a reminder that I’d already lived more of my life than I had left. There were still a great many things I wanted to do; so, I needed to get my shit together and get a few road trips done.

I decided, there and then, to quit running the College. 

Suddenly alert to the fact that our road trip was less than a year away, we agreed to take out eight weeks from the end of July, 2013. We’d fly in to Los Angeles, visit Sturgis, and go to Harley Davidson’s 110th Anniversary Celebrations in Milwaukie. Then we’d ride Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles. The rest we would make up as we went along. 

We’d had a reckoning, of sorts, at Dad’s bedside. What I didn’t know at the time was that there was a far greater reckoning in store on our road trip.

Ernest Charles Lemke 1922 – 2008 

Rest In Peace 

Just a thought . . .

Life is short . . . go ahead, buy the damned Motorcycle

Click to continue reading: US 1: Looking for an Endless Summer