June 1977. Annie won a Tony for best musical. Stevie Wonder sang “Sir Duke,” and KC and the Sunshine Band released “I’m Your Boogie Man.” Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo and For the Love of Benji beat out MacArthur at the box office. Friends in college and I spent most of our time quoting almost every line from Young Frankenstein, which had hit theaters a couple of years earlier. I was in a college traveling musical group called Belles and Beaux.
We were about to begin our cross-country summer tour, going through Texas and west to California, swinging around through Colorado, and making our way back to beautiful downtown Searcy, Arkansas.
I loved traveling with that group. It was a kind of recruiting group for the university. We would go to churches, auditoriums, and all sorts of different venues, wearing our bumblebee-yellow costumes, and do a concert of popular tunes of the day. I usually ended up with a Barry Manilow ballad or a song like Neal Sedaka’s “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” We stayed with church families along the way, who fed us well and often gave us food for our trip. Homemade cookies and cupcakes were particularly popular.
Before we left on the first morning of our two-week adventure, Cliff Ganus, the director, and I went to pick up a U-Haul trailer, which connected to the back of the van by a hitch and two chains and carried our costumes, musical instruments, and sound equipment. I talked with Cliff about our options. Could we put everything in the van and forget the U-Haul? We decided to use the two-wheeler anyway, to give ourselves more legroom in the van. We hooked the chains and the hitch to the back of the van, loaded up, and headed out on our adventure.
The van, which was an off brand called Superior, had been donated to us from an old department store chain called Gibson’s Discount Center. It was supposed to have an exceptionally sturdy frame. It was covered—floor, walls, and ceiling—with red carpet. Two separate seats were at the front of the van: one for the driver and one passenger seat, separated by a console. When you opened the back door on the right side, there was a labeled quickie step that was, theoretically, supposed to mechanically appear from under the van and jut out and downward so you could step up comfortably onto the van. It never worked. So even for six-foot-three me, it was like stepping onto a moving train, jumping what seemed like two feet to get aboard.
When you were finally able to get into the van, to your left, you would see three rows of seats that could hold maybe seven or eight people. Well, not seats exactly—more like cushioned pews, so we could lie down to sleep if we wanted to. If you turned right, you would see two benches facing each other, attached to opposite sides of the van, with an aisle between them. We all claimed our spots for the trip and took off.
About midday, my friend Barbara Wright complained that her eyes were burning. I had natural, soothing eye drops made of rose petals. I didn’t think to tell Barbara the drops were made from a flowering shrub since in that decade, we had no idea of the healing properties of essential oils. We put a couple of drops in each of her eyes, and she settled down for a nap. Evidently, unbeknownst to us, Barbara was allergic to roses. When she woke up, she looked at me, and I stifled a startled gasp, as if the Elephant Man had just crossed my path. “How do your eyes feel?” I choked out.
“Oh, wow. They feel so much better.”
In truth, she looked uncannily like Marty Feldman. I felt as if I were watching a tree frog startled into bug-eyed awareness that a hoot owl was diving down to devour it. I spent the rest of the day keeping her away from anything remotely resembling a mirror.
The second day out, we were driving through Texas, about forty-five minutes from Seguin. The temperature could have melted metal, which melts in the neighborhood of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Barbara, her eyes back to normal, sat in the driver’s seat with Cliff beside her up front. I stretched out on the floor in the aisle between the two pews facing each other, sobbing while reading the last two pages of Where the Red Fern Grows. Being a true Arkansan, I was barefoot.
Barbara, driving the van, was trying to open her window to shoo an annoying fly. The window wouldn’t budge. She wrestled with the clasp. Meanwhile, the van began to drift. It drifted more. It headed for the columns under an overpass. Cliff’s wife, Debbie, sitting somewhere above me, said, “We’re going to do something.” I closed my book and laid it on my chest, oddly annoyed that I was only one page from the end.
Suddenly, the road was gone, and we were careening through a field. Cliff yelled, “Turn the wheels to the right! Turn them to the right!”
Then the weirdest thing happened. There was no noise. No sound. The van’s wheels left the gravel and scalding dirt of a Texas flatland. The van rolled with a thud onto its side and then over again, settling on the roof. Everyone and everything was thrown around as if we were in a clothes dryer. My first memory after we landed was that I was still holding my book.
The silence continued for a few seconds.
We all began to stir around, obviously in shock. I had seen none of the wreck; one minute, I’d been on the floor, looking at the ceiling, and the next, I’d face-planted into the same ceiling. I jumped up and heard someone yelling out to see if Chuck was okay. Chuck, one of our group, sometimes had trouble walking. I realized he could have been hurt most, and I too yelled out for him. As fate had it, he’d landed at my feet, and he yelled that he was okay. So I stepped on him and plowed toward the door.
I threw the door open once I figured out where the handle was in its new upside-down position. My senses were firing on all cylinders, and I noticed several things simultaneously. One, when I opened the door, the quickie step magically began to operate and slid into place, up toward the sky. To this day, I still think it was just waiting for the right time to show its abnormal, unhealthy sense of humor.
The second thing I noticed was that the U-Haul had not become unattached. Somehow, it had detached from the hitch, but the chains had kept it from running away or flipping over with the van.
At that moment, an unbearable stench met intense heat emitting from the sandy terrain. Shoeless, I jumped from the van, and my feet sank into something that recently had died in the very spot where we’d flipped the van. To be honest, to this day, the emotional trauma of that singular event eclipses the entire wreck experience. I am relatively certain it was a roadkill chupacabra.
Someone still in the bowels of the doomed vehicle behind me screamed, “Could this thing explode?”
Instantaneously, a herd of humanity piled out of the van into the blistering heat.
Miraculously, no one was severely hurt. We had only bumps and cuts. However, when keyboardist Jan stepped out, her face was covered with tiny white flecks of skin. It was apparent she had slid face-first on the carpet-lined wall up onto the carpet-lined ceiling. She wasn’t reacting to the fact that she looked like an extra in Night of the Living Dead. I stood transfixed, waiting for her to start shrieking when her brain finally registered pain.
Then I noticed the same particles of skin on the front of her shirt. I chose not to think about it. It was too much to process. Besides, I just kept thinking, I stepped in something really bad.
Semis and cars pulled off the road, and their occupants ran to check on us. Nobody had cell phones back then, so one of the truck drivers got on his Convoy CB and called for a tow.
The van was eventually turned right side up again. The tow truck showed up. We all climbed aboard, which seemed more than a little dangerous, and were hauled to a cantina on the outskirts of a small town.
I looked around at our stuff scattered across the floor, wondering where my shoes had ended up. I noticed a cardboard box that once had been filled with white-frosted cupcakes, which now had what could well have been a face print in them. I glanced back at flake-covered Jan and burst into hysterical laughter.
“What?” She seemed unreasonably offended that I was laughing at her since no one had informed her she was covered in cupcake icing. At the same time, I was bizarrely upset that all those heavenly cupcakes were ruined.
Half an hour later, while the others tried to relax at tables in the tiny cantina, talking about the experience, I headed straight to the bathroom. I had my foot hanging precariously over the sink, trying to wash off the dead chupacabra, when one of the other guys walked in and leaned against the wall in the corner, glancing sheepishly at me, apparently channeling Boo Radley. Finally, he leaned toward me and said, “That was really scary, wasn’t it?” I raised my eyebrows and nodded. He leaned really close to me and almost whispered, “Tim, did you have an accident?”
It took a few seconds for me to wrap my brain around his concerned expression. Finally, with my foot in the sink, I hollered, “No! I stepped in something really bad!”
When we got back to the tables, I sat down in just enough time to hear Debbie say, “It’s a good thing we had a Superior body.”
I thought, Wow, yeah. I didn’t even stop to consider how we were protected. It is only by the mercy of God that we’re all sitting here okay. We all solemnly nodded. I think I actually clasped my hands together in an attitude of reflective, grateful prayer.
Debbie continued. “’Cause if we’d been in a Winnebago, we’d all be dead right now.”
I casually unfolded my hands and began playing with the salt and pepper shakers.
We all made collect calls from the pay phone to let our families know we were alive.
Then we joined in a group discussion and decided to be strong and resilient, rent a van, and continue our tour. The new van was decidedly better appointed than the old one. The new rig had beds for napping and even a bathroom. We chained the U-Haul to the van and forged ahead.
It’s my personal opinion that the U-Haul somehow felt it was not being afforded the due attention it deserved after the accident. It, after all, never had lost its footing and had kept our clothes, speakers, and microphones safe.
About halfway into our two-week tour, Mr. U-Haul decided to have a flat tire. I can’t remember if we changed it, if someone came and changed it, or even if there was a spare tire; I just remember having to unload the trailer on the side of the highway so it could be jacked up and then reloaded after the new tire was installed.
A few more days passed, when the same tire blew out again. Nobody was happy about having to unload the trailer, change the tire, and reload again, which added to the anxiety of rushing to get to the next venue.
But somewhere in Colorado, probably close to Castle Rock, while lounging on one of the beds, looking out the window as the sun set in breathtaking, dazzling fashion over the mountains, I thought how the drive was finally serene and peaceful.
Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something yellow rolling at breakneck speed across the field to my left, toward the purple mountain majesties. On further eye-squinting investigation, I realized it was Mr. U-Haul, seemingly still upset over being snubbed at the wreckage site. In his nomadic escape, blatantly snapping the chains that confined him, he appeared to say, “I can’t take it anymore.”
I watched in fascination, waiting for him to make his last effort for recognition by finally rolling over. But it never happened. I watched him, farther in the distance behind us now, do a half turn in the dust and settle back, as if pointing his trailer-hitch nose to the sky in a defiant “So there” attitude, before I turned my head toward the front of the van and calmly said, “Uh, Cliff?”
