For Phoenix writer and graduate student Amanda Kehrberg, one particular drive across the country wasn't just a road trip. It was the beginning of a journey.
AMANDA KEHRBERG: My dad and I were about 30 minutes outside Albuquerque when I realized I’d forgotten my favorite pillow. It was back at the hotel, camouflaged in a crisp white case. It was a Goldilocks pillow: down feathers, just the right amount of give and pushback, like a good parent.
We decided not to go back. I could get another pillow.
I was on my way back from graduate school in Oklahoma for the summer. We’d already taken a few detours: stood on the grassy knoll in Dallas, snapped selfies with George W. Bush’s rather lumpy early portraiture at the presidential library, and cheered on the Oklahoma City Thunder in the playoffs. In Albuquerque, we stopped by The Candy Lady and my dad posed as Walter White from Breaking Bad with a box full of bright blue rock candy designed after the show’s iconic meth. His arm started to shake under the weight; little tremors, like at dinner the night before.
I kicked my shoes off and stretched my feet out on the dash.
“Tell me about Tiger,” I said, while I got to work building Ritz cracker sandwiches of cheddar cheese and summer sausage.
Tiger was a little mutt puppy born on the U.S. Naval Base in Kevlavik, Iceland, where my dad was stationed for a year in the 1970s working on aircraft equipment in a massive hangar while nearby stations scanned the oceans for possible Soviet activity. My dad’s Navy stories were always my favorite road trip entertainment, a classic bildungsroman but with more comedy. He’d joined the Navy to avoid the Vietnam draft and spent his first three years on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. He told of day trips to Pompeii, playing “don’t look” with his bunkmates, the time the jet blast picked him up and threw him across the deck like a leaf.
But the best stories were of Tiger: how he would jump into your arms when you patted your chest. The time they were driving around the base in a freezing Iceland winter in a U.S. Navy issued open-top jeep and Tiger was yeeted out of the side on a sharp turn. Tiger always landed on his feet. He once chased down a taxiing aircraft, just a tiny brown and gold fluffball barking and yelping at a gigantic plane, followed by my dad waving his arms to stop. And then Tiger just bounded over to the plane’s front wheel, lifted his leg, and peed.
Crackers and Tiger tales were running thin as we reached the winding mountain roads near Rock Springs.
“I need to tell you something,” my dad said. “They know what the tremors are. It’s ALS.”
And then he told different Navy stories: how veterans are at least twice as likely to get ALS, how the incidence rises for those who worked around aircraft, and how much support the VA offers.
He had waited to tell me ‘til we were getting close to home, where my mom was waiting to take off the sunglasses hiding my red, swollen eyes and wrap me in a big hug. But I wished later that we’d gone back for my pillow, so I could have had just one more hour of stories and sandwiches and safety.
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