“There’s no brakes!” my father wailed, pumping his entire leg into the brake pedal.

“There’s no brakes!” lifting his foot, pumping, lifting again, pumping.

“There’s no brakes!” nearly standing up in the driver’s seat.

On a hot Nevada highway in 1984, our family was literally speeding out of control, trapped inside a motor home known affectionately as the Golden Goose.  The view of the Sierra Nevada Mountains blurred outside the windows as all seven tons of her hurtled downhill faster than we’d ever felt her go.  My mother tried to steady herself in the co-pilot’s seat as the world zoomed by out the windows.  I sat 25 feet behind them, 10 years old, snuggled into my favorite place on one of the back beds.  This was where I could wave out the rear window to truckers and ask them, with a fist-pump, to honk their horns. Nine times out of ten they saw me, and they did it. When not in school, I traveled in this solid steel box with my parents, crisscrossing North America.  An only child, the back of the Goose was also my place to write stories and poems in my travel journals. But my father’s screams and the window-rattling speed of our giant vehicle made me put down my journal that day, close my eyes, and pray.

The Sierra Nevadas had fried the old Goose’s front brakes, the only ones — we would later learn — that had been working since we had left our home near Seattle on our way to Sedona, Arizona. The back brakes had been defective from the beginning, but my father hadn’t been able to tell.  My father, an electrical engineer, could usually repair anything. 

One of the biggest tests to his fixing finesse was this giant box of metal, built in the 1970’s, and somehow, through a series of events that I never really understood, was left to die on a lonely field somewhere in the middle of Montana. When Dad flew from Seattle, where we lived, to Bozeman to pick her up in 1981, she had chipping blue paint, a broken gas tank, engine problems, turn signals that didn’t work, cooling and heating issues, among other ills. Despite her problems, she was his favorite patient, and after nursing her back to Seattle, she entered intensive care, complete with a paint job at the Boeing aircraft manufacturing plant.  Her faded blue got sloughed off and replaced with shiny beige, gold and tan stripes.  After her makeover, Dad named her the Golden Goose.

Despite Dad’s long hours working on her while she was parked next to our house, on the road Golden Goose got tired sometimes and just quit. On several occasions she needed a tow, but most of the time Dad could figure out how to coax her into one more reluctant start. One of these occasions was when she wouldn’t start after we’d parked her on the beach on a remote stretch of the Washington coast. When we were ready to leave, the tide was creeping toward us.  Before long, waves lapped at the front tires and the whole motor home sunk into the newly-wet sand. The front end tilted down.  Mom and I were ready to get out, but Dad wouldn’t abandon her. He trouble-shooted the engine problem and got her to start – just in time to reverse us out of the encroaching Pacific.

But on that hot Nevada day in 1984, there was nothing Dad could fix, at least not as we were racing down the highway.  For the first time I can remember, Dad couldn’t fix something. That something – the beloved Goose — might kill us.  As the thought kicked in that we all might die, I ran up to the front of the motor home where my parents were. But eventually I retreated to my comfort area in the back, holding on for the ride as the curtains shook and the cabinet doors rattled and my mind froze still.

Seventeen years later, Dad would be diagnosed with leukemia. Here was a man who could fix anything, yet no one could fix him. Not Dad, not the doctors, not Mom, not me. The invisible disease was racing through his veins, in forward and reverse, or maybe just settling in some natural resting place. A leukemia diagnosis is scary and sudden, like brakes giving out on a seven-ton motorhome with only a long, fast downhill as far as the eye can see.

Yet Dad handled cancer with a steady mind – surviving two and a half years when the doctors only gave him a few months. I was just shy of 30 when he passed away, by then a traveler in my own right, making my way into dozens of foreign countries on my own, and, in time, taking others overseas to volunteer. In some ways, my taking the lead, the steering wheel, of sorts — and keeping everyone along with me at least thinking I had some semblance of control – was ingrained.

While defective rear brakes and seared-off front ones couldn’t be attributed to luck, Western Nevada’s geography was indeed lucky for us that day in 1984. The incline bottomed out suddenly and then turned sharply uphill.  Dad steered straight. There were no other cars in our way.  As the road turned upward, the motor home slowed, and then rolled backwards. Oh no — we were rolling backwards. I looked out the back window for oncoming cars as we headed the wrong way down the highway, all the scenery that had whooshed past just a minute earlier now whooshing the opposite way. Eventually, we stopped naturally in the place between hills.  Dad had been steering us close to the shoulder the whole time – in reverse — with a steady set of hands.

The way Dad handled the Golden Goose that day stuck with me.  Like Dad, now I’m the one with the steady hand and mind (well, usually), able to think fast and troubleshoot situations overseas.  I also know life is about risk, and there’s little to no risk in staying home. When things go wrong, there are the times to let go and the times when you just have to hold on and try to steer everyone straight. Even when it feels like your life is going in reverse – and my life has doubled up on itself many times – you’re always moving somewhere. Life has no braking system. None whatsoever.

It’s the giving of yourself that matters, no matter how things turn out.