Fishing, with emesis

The summer before my fourth birthday, my parents and grandparents and brother and I embarked on a fishing vacation that involved a cabin on Lake Kabetogama, about 10 miles from International Falls and about as far north as you can go in Minnesota and still be in the United States of America.

Dad's big Oldsmobile was loaded with suitcases, fishing gear, cabin needs, and everything else a family of six would need for such an excursion, and off we went at some ungodly hour of the morning for a one-day trip of 630 miles on two-lane roads. The men were in the front – my dad driving, my brother on the hump, and Grandpa by the passenger window; in the back it was Mother, me in the middle, and Grandma.

I was car sick.

Everyone quickly tired of stopping every couple miles for me to climb out of the car to vomit, so my father got a minnow bucket out of the trunk for me to puke into. Every 50 or 75 miles he'd stop near a stream or some other source of water so the bucket could be rinsed out.

After 250 miles of this, we interrupted the trip with a stop in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. There was a clinic open where some young doctor very cleverly diagnosed motion sickness and gave us a supply of pills which were small and yellow and very, very bitter and which put me soundly to sleep.

The rest of the story is family legend because of the complete and utter despondency my neat-freak mother experienced trying to keep house in a place where there were bugs and critters and fish and sand and live bait and all manner of other unsavory things. She never went on another trip to a lake, never rented another cabin, never again went fishing, and never had any more children who were car sick because she made me take those damn pills before every car ride of 50 or more miles until, at about age 13, I was finally able to convince her I had outgrown it.