"No Seatbelts" by Etta Madden

Creative nonfiction

Photo by Josh Clemence

No Seatbelts

I had been hurtling along in a huge car, in a 1950s tank with tail fins and bench seats, no seat belts in sight. The driver’s face bore deep wrinkles, his shoulders slumped. He leaned forward to focus on the road, a challenge for his eyes. The driver I recognized. He was a much, much older version of my husband. The reach of my left arm across the bed now told me that my husband, ever the early riser, was gone. Jogging, I figured, since it was almost dawn. In these dark moments, not awakened in sweat but only with curiosity, I knew that had I described this dream to my fit and methodical husband, he would have brushed it off as nonsensical.

The vision haunted me for a week. So did another, a daydream instead of a nightmare. It flashed across my mind as I listened to an NPR Fresh Air interview. Sterlin Harjo, director, writer, and co-creator of the Hulu series Reservation Dogs spoke of the spirit character who appeared in the first episode, on a horse and wearing buckskins, like someone from a century earlier. Harjo explained how the show emerged from his childhood memories of Muscogee, Oklahoma, among the Cherokee nation. He added that for him and his buddies, television provided possibilities, beyond their Cherokee fathers’ lives. They saw “Indians,” the word he first learned to label his people and continues to use, as presented by Hollywood movies and TV westerns, but from MTV they also learned about urban life, Rap and HipHop. These were their way out of a part of Oklahoma that was not okay. We all need the possibility of going somewhere, the interview said. It’s a human urge. But linked to that urge, Harjo added, is a longing for the stability of the familiar past. The interview triggered my childhood memory of TV westerns. In this daydream, the man on horseback was my father—not the 61-year-old who died of a heart attack, but a much younger man, barely 30.

Two visions of traveling men, within a week of each other, haunted me as I went about my tasks. During days of researching nineteenth-century women, taking notes on marriage laws and marriage reform, the two men sat at my desk with me. They perched on my shoulders as I engaged in domestic tasks—chopping okra for the freezer, cooking down cherry tomatoes into compote, considering what we would eat for dinner.

I was tired of fresh garden veggies. For more than thirty years I had tended a small garden. I’d cooked for my husband even longer. Neither task was new. At this time of summer the monotonous abundance—tomatoes, okra, peppers, eggplant—was like manna in the wilderness that rotted when people tried to save it for later.

Trapped with the same food, the same chores, the same setting—the visions carried me to other places, other times, other people. They sometimes dissipated the darkness.

*

Days later, in another NPR interview, novelist Ian McEwan discussed his latest novel, Lessons. He referred to “the backward glance that haunts us all as we advance in years.” We carry around the past as we age. It lives with us, ever changing as we do he explained. “There’s no such thing as closure,” he said, despite what we try. McEwan did not use the word “ghost,” nor did he say “exorcise.” Instead, he explained that “the years that stack up behind us” are our necessary baggage. We must acknowledge and contemplate it.

I considered the suitcases I carry. Ever at-the-ready, they begged to be unpacked, contents re-examined, and repacked. Manna in the wilderness may be a better image, like those summer vegetables—an abundance now burdensome. We must choose what to do with this weight. Contempt is common. Waste is rarely wise but sometimes essential. I contemplated the nightmare and the daydream—the men that haunted me.

*

From my nightmare, a future vision of my husband, an aged man driving an old car with no seat belts. From a radio interview, the day vision of a young man on a horse—my father.

*

The vision of my father on a horse reappears: he rides across a pasture almost barren in the summer heat. He and the horse scramble across scrub brush and stones and up onto the Ozarks hillside on the southern horizon. I watch until he and the horse are a single speck, and then they are no longer visible. Vanished, like Little Joe on Bonanza.

Before that day I’d never seen my father on a horse. And yet after we had looked around my Uncle Walter’s barn and approached the corral, he asked, “Joe, do you want to ride?” My father rose in response. Taking the leather reins in his hand, he placed them on the saddle horn, stepping his left foot up and into the stirrup. In an instant he had lifted himself and thrown his right leg over the horse’s back, instinctually shifting his weight to settle into the saddle. Suddenly he was not just Joe, but Little Joe. His square jaw, brown eyes, and dark hair helped him blur with my television icon. To my little girl wonder, he galloped off.

He and the horse grew gradually smaller, an indistinguishable dot in the distance before they disappeared across the valley. I don’t recall what else happened in the expanse of time that seemed forever—except that I wondered where he was and whether he would return. Eventually the speck reappeared, growing larger as daddy and horse galloped toward us, and I breathed relief.

There were no “Indians” in the Arkansas hills like those on Bonanza, although John Rollin Ridge and other Cherokees traveling the Trail of Tears had passed nearby. Perhaps I feared that my father would be thrown, his back wrenched, his skull broken open on the jagged sandstone scattered through the pastures. Uncle Walter’s black stallion Dandy would buck. But Dandy stood in the corral, while my daddy romped away on a beautiful chestnut. Maybe I feared he might not return. But why? He traveled, yes, but he always returned. His paychecks—from a single employer until he retired—went into the bank account he and my mother shared until he died. This certainty was predictable. Although there was never enough money for decadence or waste, I never questioned the stable support of food, clothing, and shelter.

Not all of my father’s behavior was predictable, though. Following those happy years I recall from my early childhood, I witnessed his anger unfurl unexpectedly. The fury was triggered, I speculate now, by disappointments, what he lacked beyond the basics. Sometimes he skipped meals. Cigarettes may have staved off his hunger, but low blood sugar may have made him occasionally “hangry.” A lack of “cigs” was never the cause. They never ran low. An entire kitchen drawer was dedicated to them—until he cut the near-forty-year habit at age fifty, when his first heart attack shocked us all. Before and after that day, the unpredictable lightning-strikes of temper would send other shocks.

Sometimes the dinner table was disrupted by a fit of outrage. My father demanded that my sister push her glasses back up the tiny bridge of her little nose, only to see them slide down again. Again he would insist, and she would push them up. Again, they slid down. Another evening, another sister was asked to clean her plate, although she already had eaten her fill. The results again were not what he wanted. After he shoveled forkfuls of spaghetti into her mouth, I witnessed the sounds and sight of a few reflexive gags before the undigested noodles and meat sauce poured out like a dump truck load, refilling her plate.

Depression with its darkness, diagnosed only later in life, added to the swings of instability. The safest place I knew was in the calm of elsewhere. I found solace in books, in friends’ homes, in going away. Beautiful places and gentle people, the calm of friends’ homes and their quiet fathers, happy endings and light.

*

I didn’t know where we were going in that old car in the nightmare, but I knew the man was my husband. I knew by the way our infrequent words floated through the air, by the way I felt when they broke the silence. We communicated with each other apart from the words, from a depth of years together, like the compacted sedimentary rock of the Ozarks soil. We rode in silence until, curious as much as troubled, I asked where we were headed. With no wasted words, my husband responded with his usual three: “I don’t know.”

*

I didn’t know where my daddy was going, that day he took off on my uncle’s horse. I watched and waited, breathing relief on his return. Now the memory weeps other emotions. I wanted to gallop away, too, across that rocky pasture to see what was up and over the next rise. I longed to be legs straddling saddle behind him, arms around his waist, riding with the soothing rhythm, exploring the spaces beyond the valley. Although the man driving the car does not know where we are going, he has not left me behind. Years ago, when I thought I knew what lay ahead for us, we agreed to travel together.

*

One chilly fall night within two months of meeting, we ride in his rusty Maverick, without seatbelts, without functioning heater, without locks. I ride with hands stuffed in my corduroy coat pockets for warmth. Later that night I learn the car’s front passenger door doesn’t close well. My date, the driver, takes a left turn to enter a highway ramp and, proud of the engine’s power, accelerates. Centrifugal force throws the passenger door open. I tumble out and, like a cocooned mummy, roll to a stop. Thanks to having hands in pockets, I avoid broken wrists. Somehow, I also avoid any significant head injury. The long-ago night was not a dream.

Another night, months later, I am driving his Maverick. Again, we ride with no seat belts. I see a Jeep in the headlights just before we crash—head on at highway speed. This time, no one rolls out. A rescue team cuts the crumpled car with the “jaws of life” and pulls us out of the wreckage. This time, the injuries are significant. The night and weeks that followed were near nightmare.

*

Now we hurtle into the unknown. I live in the wilderness of older adulthood. A friend said, “If I knew exactly how my journey would unfold, I might not keep going.” Another friend once asked of spouses, “Burden or ballast?” I hold the visions juxtaposed, suspended, waking and sleeping. I feel the pull of desire to ride off, free, no seat belts. I want to gallop away from everything, as my father did in the Ozark hills. But he returned, if only to the stability of the familiar life that sometimes seemed stifling, rife with imperfections, and provoking anger and outrage. He returned. And my husband and I rattle forward on a dark road, at night, in a car with no airbags, no seat belts, no GPS to our future.

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Etta Madden has taught and published articles and books on a wide range of topics, especially US women writers and communal groups, during her career as an English professor at Missouri State University. Her love of life writing—memoir, travel writing, and biography—reaches back more than thirty years and has pushed her to write recently about her own experiences, of which this essay is an example. Other essays have appeared in MO Humanities, The Biographer’s Craft, Communities Magazine, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Utopian Studies, and elsewhere, including her monthly newsletter All Things Italy . . . a little bit more (on Substack).

Etta’s latest book is Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks (SUNY Press 2022). Related to the research for it, she has been a visiting professor in Italy at the University of Pisa and the University of Catania and a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome. Fellowships from the New York Public Library and the Library Company of Philadelphia have also supported her research and writing.

When she is not at her desk in the Missouri Ozarks or in Italy, Etta may be swimming, cycling, cooking, or gardening.

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