My backroad memorial

My favorite memories of my brother are of him in the driver's seat, tearing down dirt roads. So on nights when I miss him more than I can bear, I just turn up the radio, roll down the windows, and speed.

By Susan Straight

Read more: Susan Straight, Life

April 9, 2007 | About 10 times a year, I get completely airborne in my vehicle while speeding over the railroad tracks just past my daughters' elementary school a mile from our house.

The feeling of the van leaving the asphalt and the metal rails perpendicular to the tires, the whole body suspended for a moment -- and then, in my imagination gathering itself like an animal underneath me, legs curving while flying, and slamming back down on the other side -- is something I cannot give up, even though I am a single mother with three girls who lives a near-saintly daily existence of work and school runs and practice and laundry.

The fact that my car is an 11-year-old green Mercury Villager van, with honor roll bumper stickers, and dents put in the body by hit-and-run idiots, doesn't negate the fact that my car has enough power to fly up over those tracks, to fly around curves on desert highways and orange grove dirt roads.

I speed up when I see the tracks, when it's late at night and I'm alone in the van after dropping someone off for a sleepover, or picking up something near midnight at the grocery store, when I feel so lonely for my old, sometimes-wild life and my gone brother that I have no other choice but to turn the radio to Van Halen or AC/DC and pretend he and I are still driving together and not giving a damn about safety or sanity or anything but the pounding music and blur outside our open windows.

The windows have to be open. Because that's how it always was.

My brother, three years younger than me, was the only person in the world with my exact genetic heritage. I have half-brothers and -sisters, stepbrothers and -sisters, foster brothers and sisters. But when my brother's thick blond hair hung to his waist, as it did for more than 10 years, even our grandmother mistook us for each other from behind.

All my best memories of my brother are in vehicles, speeding, predatory or celebratory. We were just made to drive. For the last 12 years of his life, he lived as caretaker of an orange grove. There, on 18 acres, my brother collected cars and trucks and motorcycles. He raced around with my daughters and me in a golf cart. He tied our old dishwasher and a refrigerator to junk cars named Gumby and Monkey and had demolition derbies in the vacant land near his well. When he drove alone with me in one of his trucks, taking me to see a hundred-year-old citrus grove, we clattered down washboard dirt roads and flew over ditches. Our backbones rattled and I felt an unmatchable exhilaration.

When he came down "to the city" to see us, to kill a skunk or gopher for me, or to deliver oranges to us and his other, true cash crop to others, people who waited all year for him, my brother always had a dog on the front seat, and we could hear him blocks before he arrived. Van Halen or AC/DC screaming from the cab, his tires screaming around our corner, and once he was driving down the wrong lane, hollering, "I changed my mind -- I want this side now!"

He and I drove together across the country in 1983 -- 24 years ago and I remember it every day -- when he came to help me with the long journey home from graduate school in Massachusetts . He arrived by plane, and I didn't know he was carrying at least a pound of homegrown. I was 22, and he was 19. I didn't know why the three guys next door to my apartment were looped for days, until my brother and I packed up my Honda and I heard their pained laments at his departure.

We drove to Pennsylvania, stayed with a good friend, and my brother charmed everyone in her tough city by distributing a bit more smoky happiness. He had money. He bought gas. And I left my intellectual and very safe life behind, watching my brother take in the landscape without fear. We headed through West Virginia, and he rolled his own while I drove 90 down the interstate like I didn't care about college and my fiancC) or cops, and he played Bon Jovi's "Dead or Alive" and Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower."

We rolled into Sandusky, Ohio, and then straight through to the dryland high plains of Colorado, where our father was born. We raced down miles of country dirt road through wheat fields. We met our father's father for the first time, and spent days painting a relative's eaves. My brother smoked at night under a huge moose head in the den, brazenly, never afraid, until we got restless and sped off one morning and went straight through Utah and Nevada, Las Vegas and then home to Southern California.

Nothing has ever felt that way to me again. Not driving with my husband, or my daughters, or alone.

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Our father loved to race cars. As a teenager, left on his own by neglectful parents, he was desperate to survive, but when he had money, he customized mufflers on old cars, adding sewer pipes and glass packs for maximum sound effect, and he street-raced. My mother and father split up when I was three and my brother was still in the womb.

He moved 30 miles away, and later, he actually worked in the pit for the Fontana Motor Speedway. I remember him reverently mentioning Richard Petty and Mario Andretti -- their rhyming names like magic. My father taught me to drive, when I was 16 and visited him once a month. He had spent his life on the road, as a salesman for everything from cigarettes to hardware. He'd sold things to people along routes that took him through the deserts of California and Arizona and Nevada, and all along the freeways of Los Angeles and Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. He taught me well, knowing those asphalt trails and currents better than he knew most people. Between his house and my mother's, we drove in his white 1970 restored Mustang down endless gray lines of road between abandoned vineyards. He taught me never to swerve for an animal, always to stay away from the right side of trucks, and to respect the speed of the car and the traffic and not drive too slowly, which would make good drivers hate me.

Now I have to drive slowly every day, as we all do in Southern California, where the constant congestion of traffic is like nothing my father ever saw. And now I have a van full of girls, my own and other girls -- neighbors and basketball players and friends. Sometimes, my mother rides in the passenger seat, worrying aloud about every lane change and, always, that I am driving way too fast.

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