Buffalo, 1971

Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning.Red sky at night, sailor's delight.

I'd always thought of Gary's fiery steel mills as the outer edge of my world. Wh en we left Chicago every summer to drive to Boston, we always saw their red skies in the morning; when we returned, always at night, the skies blazed, and I was as delighted as if they'd been fireworks heralding our arrival.

This time, however, we were not going to come back for any fireworks. We were moving to Boston for good. But this trip across country was more than a move from place to place. It was like a time-elapsed photograph, starting with Motown and ending with Joplin, beginning with childhood—I was about to turn 12—and ending in adolescence. No more familiar inflatable Dino the Dinosaur from the Sinclair station; no more kiddie pools or vibrating beds. This time it was winter, and I sat up front in my mother's old place, keeping my eyes on the road, as vigilant as a driver's-ed instructor. She'd been dead for 11 months. My sense of what the emergency might be had little to do with road conditions or bad driving skills. I was terrified that my father would wreck the car if I fell asleep or even took my eyes off the road. I did not fear my own death—I did not even consider it—but could only contemplate how alone I would be if my father were dead.

And so I stared at the road and tried to be cheerful and tuned and retuned the radio as we made our way east. Certain songs seemed to follow us like gulls following a ship: Janis Joplin's "Bobby McGee," "Just My Imagination" by The Temptations, Brewer & Shipley's "One Toke Over the Line." By Ohio I'd learned all the words, so that something was familiar and comforting after we'd left every last recognizable landmark behind. As the trip wore on, I began punching the radio station knobs like the buttons on my father's accordion, trying to find my now "favorite" songs. Uncharacteristically, my father did not stop my fiddling, nor did my brother, Howard, complain about it. It was as if we'd all agreed that this would be the soundtrack of our trip.

Gary's sky had been an accurate barometer. It began to snow. At first the intermittent flakes just melted, turning the pavement blacker. Soon there was a white fringe on the side of the road, like the carefully cultivated tonsure on a balding man's head. Then we began to see plows. The slap-slap of the wipers making their quick arcs erased the flakes like chalk, only to find the dark world itself as smudged as a chalkboard with myopic headlights and sloppy snow.

I learned to work the heater and defroster, which made me feel very grown-up, almost a genuine copilot of our cramped ship. Of course, if I'd really been the copilot, I would have turned the car around and gone back to Illinois, back to Evanston, to our dead-end street and my mint-green room and my old life. At least I would have stopped for the night once the snow began to pile up. But my father drove on.

We hurtled, then plodded down the interstate. The heavy seatbelt buckle pressed on my bladder. I gripped the armrest, worked the heat and radio—which was full of dire predictions—and kept my eyes riveted to the slippery road. Howard was asleep. The dinner we'd wolfed down was already 100 miles ago. I'd stopped chattering, but now ventured in my most adult voice that it might be time to find a place to stay for the night. "As soon as we hit Buffalo," my father promised, in marathon mode.

I remembered the week a few months earlier that I'd watched Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster on the new UHF channel. For some reason, it was broadcast every night. It began with a dance marathon, and...