Wild in the Country

The family vacation: We all took ‘em as kids, and we’ve all got our stories.

Every trip we took was within about a day’s drive of home, so we saw almost everything there was to see in the Midwest. Certain rituals were repeated each year: the excitement of the night before we left, with fitful sleeping; the argument between my parents while packing the car; the license-plate game and the counting of gas stations; the midday picnics with sandwiches from the ice chest in the trunk; the fights between my brother and me in the back seat and their customary offshoot—one or the other of us announcing that we’d had enough and wanted to go home; the unveiling of Mom’s famous treat box, which inevitably featured types of candy we didn’t keep around the house; splashing around in motel swimming pools with Dad; all of us talking a while in the dark before going to sleep in the same room; the disappointment of waking up on the last day.

A repeated feature on every trip was the rising tension whenever it came time to stop for a meal, or for the night. My parents were—and are—the sort of people who trust that when it’s time to eat or sleep, there will be a place available to do it. Today, there might well be—but 35 years ago, you couldn’t always bank on it. And so I remember a hundred-mile stretch of the Dakotas that got very hungry—and a group of people who got very bitchy—before a restaurant finally came in sight.

That Dakota trip was the last one I went on. I was 17, and due to bad timing, I had just quit both of the jobs I had earlier in the summer. Perhaps if I still had one of them, I might have been permitted to stay home and work, but I was expected to go on vacation. This is probably why: My girlfriend was just home from a month in Europe. One can only imagine what might have happened if we’d had the house to ourselves for several days after that long separation. (Goodness knows I have.)

So I imagine I wasn’t a very good traveling companion, but I was there. And we saw a lot: the Black Hills and the Wall Drug Store and the Badlands and Mount Rushmore and the geographical center of North America. On August 16, we had turned for home when I persuaded Dad to put the Cubs game on the radio. And somewhere on a Dakota interstate, we heard WGN’s Lou Boudreau report that Elvis Presley had died that afternoon in Memphis at age 42. We timed our stop for the night so we could get more details, and I can still see us sitting on the beds in a motel room, sunlight streaming in, getting the details from Walter Cronkite.

On that day, I knew Elvis as an artifact from history—more precisely, as somebody who had been something once, but wasn’t anymore. As a chart geek, I knew Elvis had scored a handful of hits within my memory. In fact, he had one on the radio at the time of his death, “Way Down.” But it had been a lot of years since he had been who he once was.

And so I was as baffled by the reaction to his death as everybody else. We know now that our bafflement (is that a word?) was the bafflement of people who have just seen the world change at a stroke but don’t recognize it yet. Back then, the impromptu shrine of flowers and stuffed animals outside Graceland and the ostentatious displays of public grief by people who had never met the man seemed of a piece with the other tacky accoutrements of the Elvis phenomenon—velvet paintings, Hound Dog whiskey decanters, and so on. What they really represented was the first occurrence of something that’s familiar now. The way we, as a culture, commemorate famous deaths started with those displays, 30 years ago this week.

I realized it only dimly in 1977—as we all did—but Elvis had already been through a couple of incarnations at that point, and there were more to come in the years after 1977. I wrote about them on the 20th anniversary of his death, in one of the few written pieces about music that I ever got paid for. Since the analysis seems solid and the writing itself is pretty good, I’m always grateful for the excuse to call readers’ attention to it again.

Instead of posting tracks today, I’ll merely direct you to Co_Co, which has posted its Elvis Top 100 to conclude a huge week of Elvis postings. (In Dutch, but still.) Coming tomorrow here: One man’s guide to achieving Elvitude.