A Joy Ride With Its Fair Share of Bumps

My wife and I started out last weekend on a journey we expected would be arduous, but not perilous. We took my car, my wife’s being, in my opinion, unreliable if not downright hazardous.

We went to Santa Barbara for a two-day meeting of the Bookworms, an Assistance League support group my wife belongs to. The name perhaps makes them sound a bit stuffy, but in fact they are delightful people and their parties are always elegant fun.

The drive to Santa Barbara was a visual treat, past beautiful seascapes and green and yellow hills. We were staying in a cottage on the Birnam Wood Golf Club, which made us feel, for the moment, like the millionaires who really live there.

We went to Bookworm dinners at the golf club on Friday and Saturday nights. There were no speeches, no program, just a couple of vodka tonics, good wine and good conversation.

After breakfast on Sunday, we set out for Bakersfield, not knowing which way to go. We finally asked a man by the side of the road. He suggested we go back to Ventura and start from there. But one of the Bookworms had suggested going on up to Santa Maria and going inland there. I remembered that a few years ago we had taken that route and had seen some remarkable country.

I was reminded of the television commercial in which a driver stops at a gas station and asks, “Which way to Bakersfield?” The serviceman, noticing that the driver’s car is an ordinary sedan, gives him complex directions over various highways. The next person is driving a Jeep. She asks, “Which way to Bakersfield?” and the man says “Just go over that mountain there.”

When we reached Santa Maria and turned east, I realized we were on the route we had taken before. We passed hills and fields turned green and yellow with mustard grass by the winter’s rains. We passed farms and stables and little communities that appeared to be lifeless. Everything was clean.

At one point I asked my wife to pull over, if she could, near a tree. I had to go. She didn’t see a tree but stopped by some bushes.

Not long after that my wife slowed down and said, “I think he’s after me.”

She pulled off the road and stopped, and a Highway Patrolman appeared at my window. I wondered if he had seen me doing my business. Of course it’s against the law. When she rolled down the window, he said, “You were going between 75 and 80 miles an hour.”

Neither of us said anything, which was probably wise. The CHP man asked for her license. A hurried look in her purse did not produce it.

“Oh, my God “ she said. “I must have put it in my evening bag.”

She had to get out of the car and open the door to the back seat to look for her evening bag. She told me later that she was afraid the patrolman would think she was going for a gun.

I knew better. She was just doing her old bag trick. She would look frantically through one bag and then the other, until finally she found it. “Here it is!” she finally screamed at last. I sighed with relief.

The Highway Patrolman was very patient and polite. He took the license and went to the back of the car and wrote out a ticket, then explained that if she went to driving school, the ticket would not show on her record. She sighed in dismay. She had been to driving school. It was a bore.

“I understand they have a lot of comedy now,” the patrolman said. I had heard that, too, but traffic school seemed like an unlikely place for comedy.

He thanked us for our “cooperation,” and we drove off. He was a nice man.

After driving a few miles at moderate speed, my wife said, “How come you didn’t bawl me out?”

“Seems to me the ticket was enough,” I said.

Besides, it was true, as she said, that when she was going 75, people kept passing her.

We drove on slowly through that beautiful, peaceful land, coming to the twin towns of New Cuyama and Cuyama. I remembered having written about our first trip that it took less than a minute to pass through New Cuyama and that Cuyama was even smaller.

I had received a protesting letter from a woman who resided in one or the other and denied the towns were that small. Maybe the first time my wife hadn’t got a ticket and was driving faster, which would have made the towns seem smaller.

We had gone to Bakersfield to visit my wife’s sister, who was recovering from surgery in Mercy Hospital, where our older son was born.

It was a pleasant visit and we drove home slowly.

* Jack Smith’s column is published Mondays.