Juniper Beach

54 SHANNON CAIN JUNIPER BEACH C harlie works as an auto travel counselor in the Cranston, Rhode Island, branch office of the American Automobile Association. Mostly her job involves the assembly of TripTiks. Charlie’s parents are newly dead, their car having run off the road three weeks ago outside Tucson, Arizona. Upon her return to work after their funeral, she began creating TripTiks that send Triple A members to destinations different from those they’d asked for. There have been complaints. But this week Charlie rescued a pair of newlyweds from a hackneyed Niagara Falls weekend, sending them instead on an off-season bargain honeymoon in the turret of a renovated French Canadian chateau overlooking Lake Ontario. Yesterday a father showed up at her counter in the hope that a White Mountains fishing trip would separate his teenage sons from their Xboxes; Charlie saved him from koa campground monotony and sent him and the boys to a grouping of National Forest log cabins on the Tioga River. The TripTik Request Form now at the top of Charlie’s inbox has been submitted by Ruth and Geoffrey Leaf, who report that they would like to travel to Orlando. They want her to reserve for them a Premium Campsite at Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort . The brochure Mrs. Leaf has attached to the Request Form, presumably as a caution against Charlie’s being unable to find Disney World on a map, describes the campground’s recent improvements , including “enlarged paving in many sites.” Charlie tosses the brochure into her wastebasket. If Ruth and Geoffrey Leaf carry out their plans, the Leaf children will not, during this vacation, run squealing into the waves of the great and friendly Atlantic. They will not bite into tuna sandwiches gritty with sand. They will not squint into the clear sky and engage in thrilling speculation about Gulf Coast hurricanes. A TripTik consists of a series of map strips, printed on narrow slips of paper. If you clipped a particular section of Ameri- 55 Cain can interstate—fifty miles, say—out of a typical road map and enlarged it tenfold, you’d have a TripTik strip. Each strip opens like a pamphlet and has a map detail inside, upon which appear popular landscape features, human-made monuments, secondary roads. Charlie pulls strips of map from their cubbyholes, creating a little pile, and sits down at her desk. She runs her orange highlighter over the interstate. At the end of each strip she draws an arrowhead, to redundantly indicate that it’s time to turn the page. Charlie’s mother used to say that one mustn’t take a paycheck for granted. Charlie twirls the rubber stamp carousel on her desk, plucks off the stamp that says speed limit rigidly enforced and thumps it onto strip c-122, between exits 14 and 7 in southern Georgia, where the interstate crosses Rose Creek Swamp. In fifty-one years Charlie’s mother never earned a dollar she could call her own. She died when Charlie’s father, traveling drunk at top speed on a perfectly straight road in the shadow of a place called Tumamoc Hill, ended their vacation by driving their tinny rented Ford Fiesta into a two-hundredyear -old giant saguaro cactus, top-heavy with six tons of monsoon -season moisture. It collapsed onto their car, crushing it. It would be nice if the circumstances of her parents’ death didn’t remind her of a scene from a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, but she keeps imagining the Road Runner, that wicked little witness to all manner of coyote injury, speeding from the scene. The Leaf family will take Interstate 95, straight south. There’s a tricky exit, however, where the 287 intersects the New Jersey Turnpike: Mr. Leaf will need to make a quick left-lane merge, otherwise he’ll end up on Route 440 to Perth Amboy, descending into a nightmare of auxiliary roads. Charlie turns to the map detail on the inside of the strip and draws a loop to demonstrate how to navigate this cloverleaf. After this point, it’s smooth sailing, as long as he watches the signs. Nobody really needs a TripTik...