Welcome to the April issue of Wild Greens. 

In “Beep Beep, Vroom Vroom” issue, we’re thinking about all things transportation. What I found particularly moving (sorry!) about the issue is how many contributors were inspired to look in the rear view mirror — classic cars, old tram models, the remembered favorite word of a two-year-old child (“backhoe loader!”). There’s a real sense of nostalgia in this issue: the time we spend in cars takes up more of our lives than we’d think.

Maggie Topel’s digital logo creates an imaginary transit map for Wild Greens.

Jessica Jenschke’s poem “Vehicle Registration” looks at how different vehicles have different personalities and elicit unique responses from neighbors. I am reminded of my sister’s response to her neighbor’s new cybertruck…

Lauren Kimball's “Backhoe Loader” in watercolor and pen commemorates her son’s favorite word from when he was two-years-old. D. C. Nobes’s photograph “Old Red International Farm Truck, Arrowtown, New Zealand” captures the essence of a classic, historic vehicle.

“Chariot of the Gods,” a short story by Jane Hertenstein, examines unspoken rules and patriarchal concepts as a grandfather’s reverence for his Cadillac impacts the whole family. George Figueroa’s photograph “Final Judgement” explores Latino culture and stigma and shows a lowrider with religious motifs painted under the hood.

Philip Byrne’s poem “True North” dreams of the joyrides of loves past: the rocking horse kind and the mechanical bull kind. Angela Patera’s “Straßenbahn Linie 30,” in watercolor and ink, depicts a historic tram line in Vienna.  

Danna Walker’s personal essay “The Drive to Natchitoches” dives deep into the time she spent in the backseat of the car while her father drove. In Melissa Lomax’s multimedia “Sketchbook Bus Road Trip,” sweet characters from her comic, “Doodle Town,” take a road trip together.  

Hayley J. Boyle’s watercolor cover for the issue, "A Love Note to SEPTA," is an ode to SEPTA— Philadelphia’s beleaguered and beloved transit system.

Transportation systems, whether trams, trolleys, or roads, are the pumping veins of our cities and towns, connecting us to each other. Hitch a ride, catch a cab, hop on a tram and go visit a friend.    

-Rebecca

P.S. Check out our new wordmark on the site— we’re really going places.

Vehicle Registration

Chariot of the Gods

by Jane Hertenstein

My grandpa used to go out to his car to smoke cigarillos. He always said they were better, healthier for him than cigarettes because he didn’t inhale. Until he did.

Anyway, Grandpa was from the Motor City and had worked in the car factories in Flint. Until he didn’t. He said it was back pain, but my mom said it was the layoffs. Either way, he supported the family afterwards with a big truck garden and the occasional hunting and fishing. More for recreation than economy. 

My grandparents’ home was the go-to place. At any given time, there were a dozen of us staying there, grandkids and strays, plus shelter dogs. Whenever Granddad needed a break, he’d retreat to his car, a classic bronze-colored Cadillac. In today’s terms, it was his man cave.

He’d sit there and puff his cigarillos, listening to the AM/FM radio. It was a treat for him to load up the grandkids to go for a ride to the ice cream store or 7/11 for a lottery ticket and microwave burritos. He’d pay us to wash and wax the Caddy, coming out to inspect our work and hand rub with a soft chamois some detail we’d missed. He wasn’t contentious, just particular. God forbid a bird poop on that baby. He would be out there in a heartbeat, carefully picking it off. He knew every curve, every angle, every part of that car. It wasn’t a car, but a lover. He made no secret of his adoration. She had seen him through loves and heartbreak, a bad first marriage, the emergency late-night ride to an emergency room, and now she was retired. Let out to pasture in the driveway, resting under a faded corrugated plastic overhang. His refuge.

We all knew not to touch Grandpa’s ride. 

And we were sneaky bastards. Timmy burned down the pole barn, on accident. Lena pitched a rock and killed a bird, another accident. Simmie went swimming in the neighbor’s pond and almost drowned, and none of us told on the other. Grandma, too, kept our secrets. She always warned us to stay away from Grandpa’s Cadillac. The keys hung by the door on a hook along with other keys, but that one, that one radiated with the ferocity of the Holy of Holies in Raiders of the Lost Ark. We all pictured the heat of the key burning our palms, the skin melting off the bone. No one messed with the idea lest by complicity we fall under a curse and die.

So it was until one day. When my kid sister fell out of a tree. We looked at her, still and gray, her arm bent at a weird angle. I ran to tell Grandma Lena was dead.

Not dead, but hurt bad. Grandma carried her in a rusty red Flyer wagon to the house. Her car was in the shop and Granddad was off fishing and her daughter, my mom, was at work at the dentist's office. There was only one thing to do. She took down the keys.

By now Lena was awake and crying. We all told her we’d prefer Lena dead than for her to drive Grandpa’s car. Grandma hesitated, the weight of sin, the consequences of what might happen, should she get behind the wheel of the Cadillac. 

Lena moaned. All of us, the dogs included, jammed into the car for the 20-mile drive to see the doctor. A drive that took twice as long because Granny never went over the speed limit and came to a complete stop at every intersection, looking both ways. By the time Grandpa got home that evening, the Caddy was under the overhang, and Lena was in a plaster cast, eating ice cream. 

No one said a word.

I often think back to this incident, to Grandma staring intently over the steering wheel, eyes straight ahead, Lena across our laps in the backseat, milking her wounds for all they were worth, and Grandpa, the loving look he cast upon the Cadillac outside ablaze under a slanting setting sun, a glory like no other. Those days are long past. Rust eventually claimed the Radio Flyer, the corroded plastic overhang broke off one winter under heavy snowfall, damaging the Cadillac covered in bird poop and dust. Left dormant after Grandpa died. All of it buried. Only the image of a bronze-colored Cadillac, chariot of the gods, shining bright, burning a hole in my memory.

True North

The Drive to Natchitoches

by Danna Walker

It was quiet in the car, but Dad was not relaxed behind the wheel. The sun was lowering fast, and we heard the distant boom of firecrackers, marking the beginning of the world-famous Natchitoches Christmas Festival on the banks of the Cane River, a channel of the Red. 

Natchitoches would later become famous as the setting for the movie Steel Magnolias, but on this day, it was Louisiana’s “City of Lights,” our destination from Shreveport.

We’d moved to Shreveport when I was 12, and this was the first and last time the whole family—my father, mother, younger sister, and I—ventured southward together to explore any part of the rest of our adopted state. On this humid Saturday in December 1965, we were at a dead stop on LA-6 E, a two-lane, black-top highway off Interstate 49. Our 76-mile trip south took us through Mansfield, Coushatta, and other stops in my dad’s sales territory. They are places where people scrape together what they can to buy life insurance, should hard work or hard living relegate them to an early grave. I knew somehow that it was their money we lived on, just enough to feed my dreams of escape.

We had already missed the parade, as well as the meat pie vendors. “Late” was our modus operandi; we were always grabbing things and running out the door, crabby and ill-prepared, Dad mad. As a near-teenager, I was a particular problem in that regard, but I looked forward to this outing. I had heard that people sat on the riverbank in the dark, and then a zillion lights suddenly went on, unveiling giant, sparkling nutcrackers, toy trains, gingerbread houses, and holy crosses worthy of the Vegas Strip.

A line of cars stretched ahead. We moved forward a few feet, then stopped. I was in the back with my sister, admonishing myself for my decision to wear a head-full of painful brush rollers—metal with webbing and spiny bristles. I had no other solution for acceptable church hair in the morning, knowing there was no recovery for hair that spent several hours in the winter humidity in Louisiana. I’d have to rewash and roll, and it would be too late when I got home.

From the back seat, I could stare at the side of my father’s neck, studying his profile, the way his top lip rested on the bottom one with confidence, an occasional ball of spittle nesting there. The way his crow’s feet reflected his intelligence and easy laughter that I sensed sometimes masked rage. I could detect the slightest change in his facial canvas, taking note where dark met light and shadows came and went, as directed by thoughts and moods I devoted my life to discerning.

I suddenly saw his jaw, with his slight underbite, tighten.

My father did not like waiting. As an insurance man, he was the one invited in. He disrupted the daily drone of people’s lives. He brought husband and wife together to focus on the important business of family finance and taking care of the kids’ futures. Dad was their “agent,” available on the phone at all hours to offer quiet counsel on matters of life and death.

Waiting in line was for chumps. A line meant he was forced to take his place among the masses, that he was not a man held out in front of others and in control of his time.  

But that’s exactly what was happening on this two-lane road in northwest Louisiana. Several minutes passed.  No one said, “We should have left earlier,” which is what I thought, craving a meat pie. I doubled down on my hair worries.

I saw families in the cars ahead and behind, perhaps taking the waiting time to talk and have pimento cheese sandwiches on Rainbo white bread brought from home.

But Dad was not like them. Getting to the front where he belonged was all that was on his mind.

The windows in the white Ford Fairlane were half down and the air was warmer and stickier even than in Shreveport. I didn’t know where I was geographically or even what a Cajun was. The Shreveport-Bossier City metroplex was more akin to East Texas than Louisiana in culture and practice. But I knew that farther south, more bayous and swampy waterways led all the way down the 240 miles to New Orleans.

I looked over at my younger sister. Sitting behind our mother, she could see what my father was up to. She seemed to stay focused on playing with her doll, pretending it was all dressed up for the Christmas festival.

Suddenly, wide-eyed, she turned to me. I leaned forward and saw Dad grabbing the steering wheel, hand over hand, virtually beating at it in a hard turn to the left, almost grazing the bumper in front of us.

“Monte!” my mother yelled.

“Dad!” I exclaimed, my hands flying up to the back of his seat.

But our cries only inspired his next move, which was to thrust the column shift in reverse, jerk his head to glance through the back window, and start pounding the steering wheel to the right. Then he gunned it.

We broke free of the line and tore south on the northbound side of the narrow blacktop, shoulders nothing but a strip of dirt. My mother raised her palm to her forehead, the other gripping the armrest on the inside of the door. I turned to my sister and suppressed a squeal. Now on alert, I grabbed the back of Dad’s seat, his self-appointed scout.

“You’re clear!” I shouted. I didn’t know our speed, but it felt like we were flying.

The driver in the first car we passed stared. His wife’s mouth hung open, and that scene repeated down the line of cars. My mother faced forward, silent, unblinking. 

“Look at that nut job!” I imagined the dads behind us yelling. “Who does he think he is? What kind of idiot does that?” they’d ask their astonished children.

My sister and I kept our eyes focused on the road ahead, ignoring what we knew—that we were pariahs in this stalled caravan of patience and self-control. As was often the case with my father, we bore both the thrill and shame of being renegades.

“It’s fine,” Dad said flatly but a little loudly, eyes on the road. “Good grief.”

No shoulder, no off-ramp or intersection, just us driving south in the northbound lane, passing the long line of cars. I could see nothing was coming, but I knew that wouldn’t last. Would a driver headed north know our options—that if we were to swerve right, we’d hit the line of cars, and if we swerved left, we’d run off the road, likely into a field or ditch, possibly losing control? Would he also swerve to the right, a logical move, and hit us head-on?

What if we had to ask for help from the very people we had scorned, the drones we left behind in the line? Would they make room for us to merge or watch in glee at our fate, our mouths open in screams as we crashed and perished in flames?

The headline I imagined read, “Natchitoches Festival of Lights Marred by Death of Family of Four.” The story beneath it would quote an onlooker: “Apparently, the father of the clan didn’t want to wait in the line of traffic.”

As the minutes passed and we drove on, my usual accommodation where Dad was concerned settled in. Dad’s right. It’s just a plain, old, black-topped road in front of us. We can see quite a ways away. No one will just keep driving and plow into us. That’s stupid. Of course, we’ll be fine. Dad will figure out some lie to tell the cop who I’m sure is up ahead directing traffic.

Then the line to the right of us began to move. The loser line was getting somewhere, picking up speed, just as I saw the oncoming car, the people inside it perhaps not yet aware that we were directly in their sightline.

Dad started drifting over to the right, trying to nudge the Fairlane into an opening. The car he was cutting in front of sped up. Dad dared back, trying to force his way in but then acquiesced as the speed of the line picked up.

Just as we broke in, an oncoming car zoomed by, the driver perhaps briefly wondering what he had just seen and whether he should have been worried.

I glanced at my sister, back playing with her doll as we drove on at speed. Dad looked straight forward, his right hand hanging leisurely over the top of the steering wheel, his shoulder and jaw relaxed. My mother glanced over at him but said nothing.

Little cheats. Jumping the line. Put downs of the average, the uninspired, the lemmings who didn’t “get” it. Side deals. Hot tips. Buying in on the goods sold out of a trunk. Know-a-guy scams. Parking in front. Beating the clock, the boss, the “man.” That was Dad.

As a middle-class professional, he wanted to be good enough to be part of the establishment he admired, but he didn’t kiss ass, and angry outbursts were the birthright of men in charge. He admired the way James Bond broke the rules while nailing the task at hand. His hero, the legendary baseball player Ted Williams, cursed and spat at his fans and abused his family, while being one of the most perfect hitters in history.

Dad wouldn’t cross into criminality, not really. If he got a deal on some goods he could resell, that was just an opportunity. Nobody got hurt. If anything characterized his philosophy, it was that you had to take your shot, work, or circumnavigate the system and seek revenge if it all went wrong. If it meant taking advantage of someone, well, that was the cost of doing business. They’d do the same to you, wouldn’t they?

As a result, Dad collected people—clients, of course, but also everyday working folks—barflies, YMCA handball buddies, secretaries, waitresses, other traveling salespeople, and the down-and-out and hangers-on. They are the people who exist in the back rooms, alleys, clubs, and break rooms of a provincial city where men with long legs and chiseled chins, smarts, and a quick smile can thrive. Where wit, charm, and the means to buy another round mean just about everything.

I grew up thinking it normal for men to flout rules, sometimes take risks with their families’ safety and ignore convention. I understood that men with guts didn’t ask for permission or wait in line. They weren’t beholden to others, women especially, and they didn’t admit to harboring guilt or regret. They lived a full life outside of home, always with cash in their pockets, admirers nearby and a drink in hand. Under threat to their beliefs, their defenses were up and ready.

This meant that throughout my childhood, I was a passenger in a life with a mostly obstructed view of the driver, one who might explode into oncoming traffic at any moment. Me, as navigator, had to discern when the car might go off the road.