The ludicrous amount of paperwork is what saved us. Or the fact that it is possible that no one at the train yard had ever created the documents that would have been needed to handle the situation, or no one would have been able to find them if they had been created. That is what spared us.
We were up to no good, but in a harmless way, so no harm had been done by definition, so nothing was done about us the night I stole a train.
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If the photo above is not of the actual car that my family owned in 1979, it is the same model Chevy Malibu station wagon that my memory has chosen to remember as the actual car that my parents drove to cart my sister and ten-year-old me around that summer and every other summer, before 1979 and after.
(My memory is not what it used to be: It is better!)
Our family road trips over about two decades included vacations in Vermont (to see family), weekends on Cape Cod and in Pennsylvania Dutch country and along the Connecticut shore. We were not a wealthy family, so our family vacations were always road trips to a destination that we could reach in one day or less of driving. My father was the only driver, so this was more than fair. The long(ish) car ride was simultaneously unendurable and somehow, maybe sometimes, the only part of the trip that was worth remembering.
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The photo above was taken at Nauset Beach on Cape Cod on a December afternoon in 2010; the white glaze covering the footprints is ice and snow, and the Atlantic has ice in it—some of the white caps were frozen, and the waves merely swelled them, shifted them. (It was taken with a not-smart cell phone held in chittering fingers, both of which contribute to its blurry artsy-ness, or perhaps just its blurriness.)
Henry Beston wrote perhaps the best physical description of Cape Cod in the opening lines to his classic book “The Outermost House“:
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