I suppose, in his own way, my father was a nature boy at heart. I say this because once every year, he would schedule a vacation to Yellowstone National Park. In this respect, Pop's list of life's certainties deviated from the norm. Whereas most people could only be assured of death and taxes, we were given a third bonus. At Yellowstone, we would stand around and pay tribute to the awe inspiring natural hot springs, molten puddles of boiling mud and, of course, all of this would be topped off by witnessing the grand finale of Old Faithful blowing a spout of gas bubbles towards the heavens. It was like visiting a peptic ulcer. There remains one more area located near these phenomenal wonders which covers a great and mighty expanse of land. This local is commonly referred to as The Sulfur Pits. If one is so inclined, the highlights of the sulfur pits can be experienced by entering a retirement village shortly after the residents have ingested a lethal concoction of prunes, baked beans and cabbage. Anyone who has been graced with the opportunity to visit the sulfur pits will wholeheartedly admit that a repeat performance is really not necessary. It is enough to send a proctologist into early retirement. Mind you, the park offers a great deal more than just farting water. It just so happens that my father was peculiarly fascinated with this one minute aspect and would invariably manage to steer us towards their location. I still can’t help but feel there is something terribly wrong with any individual who makes deliberate and repetitive plans to venture into a plot of land which assaults every major sense organ of the human body. It is only natural that this blatant display of repugnant sights, sounds and scents would prompt me to regard this section of Yellowstone Park as being The Butt Swamp. On a more positive note, I must say the sulfur pits are perhaps the only place on the planet where one can freely cut the cheese without worrying anyone will notice. It is probably due to these childhood experiences that I have always regarded the Earth to be a living entity. I can say this without fear of ridicule because I have traveled the entirety of its intestinal tract and anus. It is quite possible the sulfur pit zone was once a calm and serene paradise. I can only guess that our planet is suffering from a severe case of indigestion caused by all of those years of tossing virginal sacrifices into the mouths of volcanoes. "Hey kids! Are you ready to go see Old Faithful?" My father's voice would ring out with zeal and gusto. Insofar as I cared, Pop might just as well cook cow plops on a portable grill and save the traveling time. Though this would alleviate a great deal of duress, we so hated to spoil his one moment of happiness. We would pretend our joy was barely containable. I always figured Pop simply felt more at home there. Fathers are like that. They like to vacation yet still enjoy the comforts of home. Yellowstone just happens to be the one vacation site which can socially keep pace with a man who watches television in his underwear. As with all family vacations, we were well stocked with vast roles of film to record these warm moments for posterity. However, sharing an entire week with a group of people who do nothing more than breath into their shirt tops was not something I particularly cared to cherish. I, for one, prayed for a major sinus infection to pack up every known airway of my head. My parents had a shoe box in their bedroom closet where they kept the photos of these happy times. It was filled with pictures of steaming water, bubbling mud, Old Faithful and group shots of the entire family. Our faces would ultimately be twisted into some displeasing contortion as we stood on a wooden dock in the middle of some sulfuric sauna. We looked like a family of birth defects on vacation in Hell. "Quit making those awful faces and smile!" Pop would say as he focused the camera. I was doing my best just to keep from passing out. There is one main rule to observe while touring The Butt Swamp. Take short intermittent breaths. This will give you a headache. Any attempts to breathe normally will cause acute toxemia. Either way, one rarely escapes these noxious fumes without acquiring some degree of a respiratory ailment, neurological disorder or brain damage. "Hurry up and take the darn picture before we all blow a load!" someone would shout. Click. Pop would finally push the flash button and the camera would close its watchful eye. At this point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the camera up chucked the entire spool of film. Few people made it as far as we did. Most tourists could barely manage fifty yards into the Butt Swamp before they wheeled in midair and burned a blue streak towards the nearest pharmacy. Parents ditched their young quicker than a school of minnows in a fish hatchery. From out of the mist, we could hear my father's voice as he explored the all too familiar terrain. "Woo whee! Hey everyone! I found a ripe one over here!" It was as though he half expected us to scurry over and take turns sniffing the damn thing. After just a few short hours, we had witnessed enough displays of pressurized gas to heat the entire state of Colorado and launch an Apollo crew into the next solar system. We were getting weak from the lack of oxygen. Our skin began to sallow and our fingernails turned blue. We slowly plodded onward, shuffling our feet as though they had sandbags tied to them. We had the redeeming features of a zombie family in Night of the Living Dead. My mother was usually the first to throw in the proverbial towel and could be found sitting on a rock, deliriously repeating the words, "Car,......car,.....car". It was the pathetic cry of a dying crow. We wanted out of there as desperately as she did. "Group shot!" my father would yell as he whipped out the camera again. "This stinks!" I exclaimed. And I was right. Everything did stink. The air stunk, the ground stunk, our clothes stunk, even the pictures we took stunk. More appropriately, this vacation stunk. These yearly excursions became testimonials to our steadfast endurance, persistence and will to live. We not only took the worst of what the world had to offer, we came back for more. As if withstanding the rigors of our father’s folly was not enough, we were also subjected to several hours of long distance travel by car. For most families, this would be an effortless task. They simply loaded their suitcases into the trunk and drove off into the sunrise while gleefully singing Merrily We Roll Along. We were not nearly so fortunate. There was one additional drawback to our vacations. I suffered from a violent case of motion sickness. I belched and retched my way across every highway and byway of the great Midwest. There existed no pill, elixir, herb, tonic or ointment which successfully combated my affection for riding with my head inside a plastic bucket. As soon as the announcement was made that we were going on vacation, all attention would suddenly focus in my direction. "How are you feeling this year?" my mother would ask. She always made a vain attempt to act nonchalant. Within seconds she'd be in the bathroom feverishly ransacking the cabinets for last year's supply of Dramamine tablets as though she were Neeley O'Hara in Valley Of The Dolls. Meanwhile, my two sisters would simultaneously whip out a nickel to improve their coin tossing prowess. A coin toss was their concept of fair play. Two out of three flips determined who was to be my ill-fated back seat companion. Vacations made me about as popular as a herpes lesion. That was the nice thing about my family. Nobody pretended to be overwhelmed with sympathy and compassion and I never acted insulted for not being awarded the Interstate Hospitality Medal. "I think I'll be okay this year," I'd say in a reassuring tone. I knew it was a lie. They did too. Before we managed to hit the first state line everybody knew I'd be hacking and kecking like twenty Angora cats with fur balls. "You better not puke on me like you did last year, ya little creep!" my sister spat the words at me between coin tosses. It was true. The awesome sight of that spurting geyser was contained in my thirty-six inch body. In fact, it seemed rather redundant to travel for six hours to see Old Faithful when one could simply throw me into the back seat, drive for two hours and then flip me onto my back. The resemblance would have been uncanny. As with most of life's dilemmas, friends and relatives feel it is their civic duty to offer versions of home remedies, half-baked hypotheses and lengthy stories of their personal experiences with motion sickness. Such stories usually involved the grandchild of the second cousin of their aunt Lula June on their father's side of the family. These long and laborious tales were generally as nerve racking as they were pointless. However, my parents were willing to try anything. I ended up becoming a human guinea pig to each and every one of these idiotic road theories. One such concept was that I should be forced to eat a very large meal just prior to traveling. Supposedly, being uncomfortably full would limit the movement of my stomach. Thus, I would be rendered physically unable to get car sick. Needless to say, this theory was an abysmal failure. The fact of the matter is simple. The more gas you put into a car the further it will go. Another suggestion was that I should look through the rear window of the car. I wasn't allowed to do anything except watch the road twist and turn and curve and disappear over the horizon. Without fail, our car would end up being followed close behind by an elderly couple who persisted in waving to me every thirty seconds. After an hour of this, the game gets rather irritating. As I waved for the seven hundred and thirty-second time, I started to visualize ways to get rid of the old fossils. I placed imaginary nails in their path and squirted oil on the road. I put explosives in their gas tank and disconnected their engine. Fortunately for them, my creative powers had physical limitations. Suddenly, right in the middle of this new game, it hit me. I was sick. And horribly so. This in itself was not all bad. I discovered that spewing chunks on the rear dash managed to put a considerable distance between us. A pained look spread across the old couple's faces. Their perky smiles vanished inward as though they had been sucked down their throats with a Hoover vacuum. The old woman cranked the window down like she was reeling in a youth serum and threw her face into the wind. Granted, this looking out the rear window didn't keep me from getting ill, but on a scale of one to five, it ranked as a two for the entertainment value. My parents were not about to give up easily. They pumped me full of sugar water, tea and peppermint Schnapps. I chewed gum and crackers until my jaw ached. I laid down, sat up, looked forward, looked backward, up, down and sideways. I tried the front seat, the back seat and sitting on the floor with my head between my knees. No matter what was attempted, the outcome was always the same. I just chucked my cookies in a different location. One vacation was particularly rough. We had just left Yellowstone Park. The fragrant aroma of the Butt Swamp was just beginning to air out of our clothes. We were continuing our trek southwest to visit my aunt, uncle and their three teenage daughters in Wyoming. Four hours into the drive, my father brought the car to an unscheduled stop. I was lying on the back seat in a prone state of delirium. "Oh my gawd!" my mother shrieked. Her exclamation was followed by my two sisters making such hideous gasps that it sounded as if they were sucking barnacles off the Titanic. My father just stared straight ahead and mumbled, "Oh shit". Using my last surge of strength, I raised my head from the vinyl upholstery and flung my upper torso over the front seat. "Whassamatter?" I slurred. I half expected to see some sort of cataclysmic disaster like a herd of dead water buffalo blocking the road or we had reached the edge of the earth or something. I found it annoying that all of this commotion was being made over a lousy detour sign. The highway was obviously under heavy reconstruction. The work crews had designed an alternative route which ran parallel with the expressway. As I gazed out the front window, my eyes slowly adjusted to the harsh afternoon sunlight. The reasoning behind their horror was now quite apparent. The make-shift road stretched as far as the eye could see. Actually, it didn't really qualify as a road per se. It was more like a series of gravel covered hills, slopes, valleys, dips and mini-mountains. It met all of the crude qualifications of a roller coaster ride built by two country bumpkins and a drunken carnival attendant. Soon after the third angular decline, I lost consciousness and slipped into a coma. We pulled into the driveway at my aunt and uncle's home five hours later. My limp carcass was dragged into the house along with the rest of the luggage. At this stage, about the only thing which differentiated me from being another suitcase was that I didn't have a handle affixed to my back. I awoke to a startling discovery. I wasn't dead. I was weak but ambulatory enough to stagger into the living room. My sights were immediately arrested by a wide and scattered array of bags, boxes, suitcases, fishing gear, storage tins, tackle boxes, canned foods and enough camping gear to outfit an arctic expedition. "What's all this stuff doing here?" The tone of my voice conveyed I was not happy with the look of things. The only view I wanted to see was a hospital bed and a shot of Demerol. My mother instantly threw a sympathetic glance towards me as if I was some sort of wounded animal who should be fired upon with a 16 gauge rifle so it needn't suffer anymore. "You’re uncle Ken rented a couple of cabins!" my father exclaimed. That Yellowstone glee was in his voice again. "We were just waiting for you to feel a little better before we headed up into the mountains." I threw myself on top of the pile. "Just load me up when you're ready to go," I said. By the time we reached the cabins, I was pounding on Death's door like an Amway representative. It was night. For some unknown reason, the crisp mountain air rejuvenated me in record time. I was up and running wild through the thickets within minutes. My mother made futile attempts to restrain my activity level. I got the distinct impression she was either afraid I'd give myself motion sickness or wander off and become a late night snack for some laggardly beast. "Settle down!" she scolded. "You’re going to make yourself ill again!" My mother was obviously not grasping the concept of car sickness. I rolled my eyes. "Being inside a moving car makes me barf, Ma, not just moving near one." "Well, sit down anyway. I don't want you to get yourself too excited." Of course I was excited. I had just spent thirteen hours in a car. The only view I had seen all day was the Butt Swamp and my breakfast inside a plastic bucket, which come to think of it, really wasn't all too much of a change in scenery. Camping was fun even though neither my parents, my sisters nor I were very good at it. My uncle was the sportsman of the group. He hunted, fished, shot bows and arrows and would have been quite content with being left on a mountain top to live off the land. It was like being around the reincarnation of Davy Crockett. This ultimately made my family look like a basket weaving troop from Arizona. As with most adults who wish to enjoy their vacation, they're usually off somewhere doing grown up things. All of which would seem boring to the average child. It was only natural that the group would segregate into distinct categories. There was the men, the women, the girls,...and me. My uncle and my father went Rainbow Trout fishing in the stream. It was the men thing to do. Naturally, my uncle was the only one to ever catch anything edible. I sometimes thought he invited my father along just so he could increase his limit. My father usually spent the day unsnagging his line from rocks, tree branches and the seat of his pants. I don't know why, but they could use the exact same lure and Pop still couldn’t catch a darn thing. My uncle could stand right next to him, spit on a safety pin and yank fish out of the water, two and three at a time. Only once did my father bring home a catch. It was a boot. My dad could never figure it out either. Nothing infuriated him more than having to tell his children he didn't catch anything. Had our survival depended on dear old dad, we would have used up our food rations within two days and spent the rest of the week eating poisonous berries. "Don't be so hard on yourself," my uncle would tease. "That was a real nice Cedar Pine tree you had there for a minute." I think the highlight for the women was when they got to gut the fish. Other than that, I couldn't see where a vacation differed from being at home. They cooked and cleaned come rain or shine. If it hadn't been for the tacky souvenir shop just up the road, my mother probably would have ended up half mad. She'd have lost it and probably end up stringing a new necklace out of red and white fishing line floats. I don't believe anyone even considered the fact that this left me in the fateful hands of five teenage, puberty charged females. Two of which already despised me from the long drive in the car. Not only did I not fit in, I was in constant danger of becoming the virginal sacrifice to the cruel and hateful Hormone Gods. I was a skinned rat walking a tight rope over a pack of wolverines. I was their plaything. A toy that never needed new batteries, grooming, or a front end alignment. I silently endured the agonizing torment of every male who had ever caused these fair maidens even the slightest twinge of heartache, humiliation or emotional turmoil. I resented being singled out as the one to be held accountable for the plights and perils of testosterone, yet my exalted position as martyr seemed inescapable. Within the first twenty-four hours, fate had already dealt the cards of my destiny. The look of ultimate suffering was tattooed so deeply upon my face that nothing short of sandblasting would have removed it. I recalled a time when I was likewise faced with such insurmountable odds. I was given these words of wisdom. "If you can’t beat em, join em." I didn't see how this was suppose to help me in the slightest. If, for one moment, I had thought joining hands with the Wicked Wenches Of The Wilderness would have alleviated even a small fraction of this daily tyranny, I'd have gladly traded my entire collection of white jockey shorts for just one sequined gown from La Cage Aux Folles. The rough mountain terrain offered a limited selection of activities. Few of which were entertaining enough to keep six children occupied for more than ten minutes. Hiking was one of these. However, as the area contained nothing but jutting rocks and boulders the size of Kilimanjaro, there remained a very fine line between hiking and mountain climbing. With hiking you don't get any gear. The only site which didn't require a rope and pickax was along the embankment of the steep mountain road and even this was at a 45 degree angle. As we hiked along, someone came up with the idea that we should walk in complete unison. Left, right, left right. At the sight of an oncoming car, one of us would count, "One , two, three,...stop!" At the point where the car was about to pass us, we would all simultaneously freeze in place. The reactions of the automobile passengers added substantial spice to an otherwise bland activity. It eventually came to light that this may not be such a wise thing to do when the driver of a station wagon broke into a fit of hysterical laughter, lost control of the car and came within inches of rocketing his entire family off the cliff. Hiking was quickly replaced with wading through the mountain stream. There were additional hazards involved with this sport as well. Not only was the thigh high water bitter cold, but the creek bed was slippery as snot and the undercurrent was strong enough to pull the legs off a rhino. If one didn't keep a steady foothold and a tight grip on rocks and fallen trees, they could be swept downstream through Utah, the Grand Canyon and eventually dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to this, the water temperature would numb our legs to the point were we often felt more like Weebles. Being the youngest, smallest and only male in the water wading group, I experienced things a little differently. My attentions were more focused on trying to pry my gonads out of my armpits. If nothing else, navigating our way across the creek bed most certainly reduced the physical barriers which distinguished me from the girls. Yet, even the joy of freezing your circulatory system to the consistency of a Seven Eleven slurpy came to an end. Somehow, the sight of my second to the oldest sister flailing her arms over her head as she bobbed downstream and disappeared around the bend sent the rest of us scaling up the nearest boulder like fiddler crabs at high tide. The men had to hike almost a mile before they found her snagged to a fallen tree. She was a little shook up, but other than that, relatively well. Hiking and wading were ultimately replaced with slipping on a bikini, slopping enough Coppertone on to baste a Manatee and then parking your lazy butt on a big rock. This was about as much fun as listening to a recording of Henry Kissinger explain the metric system. I was grateful only two days remained before we loaded up the car and headed home. Puking my guts into a bucket was preferable to this. That day arrived. The suitcases were packed and put inside the trunk. My two sisters were frantically flipping an assortment of coins into the air while my father placed the bucket on the back seat. My mother was a nervous wreck. She couldn't find the packet of motion sickness pills and a shower of sweat beads dripped off her furrowed brow. My aunt, uncle and cousins forced smiles as they watched her begin to dig through her purse like a wart hog shoveling for grubs. I sat in the car, grinning and waving out the rear window. The sight of this grandiose display probably led them to believe we would all be better off if I was injected with morphine and sent home by Express Mail but I didn't care. After two weeks of being treated like a vaginal yeast infection, I derived a certain pleasure from this sudden parade of attention. For the next ten hours, everyone in the car was one of my loyal subjects. There but to serve and cater to my every need. I may not have been much, but I was definitely King Of The Road.