Driving Lesson

The road trip with my daughter took an unexpected turn

The Standard Road Trip

My daughter, Sidney, and I were in a rental car the size of a Pepsi can heading from Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon when it happened.

We had driven nearly eight hours without incident. The night was foggy, misty and still -- beautiful. It was just as I had imagined Arizona nights to be when I originally planned the trip. We were only 20 minutes from our hotel when I hit the deer.

Like a phantom in the moonlight it appeared, bounding away from the safety of a hillside thicket and aimed at my headlights.

After a brake-locked skid of about 30 yards -- and after I began breathing again -- from the back seat I heard Sidney ask, "What happened?" Those were the first words I'd heard her speak in about four hours.

Our trip took place at the end of Sidney's winter break, which marks the halfway point of sixth grade. We hadn't taken a road trip like this for over two years, and it would probably be our final vacation together -- just papa and daughter -- before I got remarried.

The last time we hit the open road, Sidney was 9 and chirped on mile after mile about school, movies and books. Now she was almost 12 and hesitant about divulging her thoughts. She still talks for hours -- but not to me. To friends, and mostly on the Internet.

So after loading up the car, she jumped in the back seat, put on her headphones and buried her head in a book about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So much for those long conversations about her future that I had envisioned.

"Here we go," I said, but she didn't hear a word from her nest in the back seat. Her cache of CDs held her attention.

Even when we stopped for lunch at Lake Havasu to see the London Bridge, she was quiet. I explained how the magnificent stone bridge that used to span London's Thames River had made its way to western Arizona, but her eyes were glued to a group of teenagers dancing and screaming. She would have walked right out of her skin just to be with them.

Back on the road, I often glanced in my rearview mirror to steal a look at her silently singing or pondering her book. When she caught me looking, she'd mouth, "What?" The chasm separating the front and back seats of the car seemed as broad as the Grand Canyon.

I turned onto Arizona 64, a smooth stretch of highway leading straight to the hotel. The ponderosa pines of the Kaibab National Forest lined the road like quiet sentinels. Occasionally, the moon and a handful of stars shone through the clouds. My senses felt heightened with the surrounding beauty. I slowed the car.

Jarred from Normalcy

And then from that dark thicket the deer leaped into the light, heading straight for our car. The impact woke Sid.

The car idled as we searched the road and the woods for any sign of the deer, but nothing moved in the darkness. I must have mumbled over and over something about what to do now because Sid asked, "Are you more concerned for the deer or the car?" I looked in the mirror and saw her face. It was an honest question.

"The deer," I replied, realizing that I had declined the rental company insurance. If the car was still running, and amazingly it was, and neither one of us was hurt, then my thoughts were for the deer.

Sid must have sensed me slipping away in my own thoughts to work things out in my head. I was brought back to the moment, however, by the sensation of her hand reaching out of the darkness, stretching across the wide depths of our tiny car and squeezing my shoulder. It took a full hour for me to drive the last several miles, but her hand stayed with me until we arrived at the hotel.

After checking in, we looked over the car thoroughly for damages. The driver's mirror had been ripped from its casing, the windshield had a Gothic appearance with its fractured glass spider web and one headlight was completely shattered. Nearly the whole left side of the car was mangled. I brushed away from the doorjamb a swath of fur fluttering lightly in the cold breeze.

I'd be lying if I said the remainder of our time together was the ideal vacation I had envisioned. Calls to the insurance, rental-car and credit-card companies ended any fun left for me. But Sid spent much of the trip home perched in the front seat, scouting the terrain for deer and leaning over to honk the horn at 20-second intervals. We talked a lot more about little things before she slipped into the back seat again. But I knew she was there with me this time. It's amazing how grace can be found in the strangest of places, if you just open your eyes and look.

I know that the fright and guilt and the image of that deer breaking the misty plane of light in front of the car are forever imprinted in my memory. But I will also keep with me the comforting feeling of Sid's hand resting on my shoulder. I thought that she was running away from me. I thought I'd lost her. But she'd been there all the time, as true as her reflection.