TIM E HOLDER

June…1977. Annie won the Tony for best musical. Stevie Wonder sang “Sir Duke” along with “I’m Your Boogie Man” by KC and the Sunshine Band. “Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo” and “For The Love Of Benji” beat out “McArthur” at the box office. All of my friends in college and I spent most of our time quoting almost every line from “Young Frankenstein” which hit theaters a couple of years earlier. And I was in a college traveling musical group called Belles & Beaux.

We were about to begin our cross-country summer tour, going through Texas and across to California, swinging around through Colorado and back to beautiful downtown Searcy. I loved traveling with this band. It was a kind of recruiting group for the university. We would go to churches or auditoriums, all kinds of different venues, wearing our bumblebee yellow costumes and do a concert of popular tunes of the day. I usually ended up with a Barry Manilow or Neal Sedaka’s “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” ballad. We stayed with church families along the way who fed us really well, and quite often gave us food for our trip…homemade cookies and cupcakes were particularly popular.

Before we left on the first morning, Cliff Ganus, the director and I went to pick up a U-Haul trailer that we would connect with two chains to the back of the van and haul all of our costumes and musical instruments and sound equipment behind us. I remember Cliff and I talking about whether it would be better to just put everything in the van and forget the U-Haul, but decided it would give us a little more leg room if we went ahead and rented the two-wheeler. We hooked the chains on to the back of the van, loaded up and headed out on our adventure.

The van, which was an off brand called SUPERIOR, was donated to us from an old department store chain called Gibson’s Discount Center. It was supposed to have an exceptionally sturdy frame. It was covered, floor, walls and ceiling with carpet. There was a driver’s seat and passenger seat in the front. When you opened the door on the right side, there was a labeled “Quickie Step” that was supposed to mechanically appear from under the van and jut out downward so you could step up comfortably on to the van. It never worked. EVER. So, even for 6’3″ me, it was like stepping on to a moving train, jumping what seemed like 2 feet to get on. When you were finally able to get on the van, if you turned left, you would see 3 rows of seats that would hold maybe 7 or 8 people. Well, not seats exactly, more like cushioned pews so we could lie down and sleep if we wanted too. If you turned right, you would see two pews facing each other, each attached to the sides of the van and an aisle between them. We all pretty much claimed our spots for the trip and took off.

About mid-day, my friend Barbara complained that her eyes were burning. I was in possession of a “natural” eye drop made of rose petals. I didn’t think to tell Barbara the drops were made from a flowering shrub, since, in that decade, we were completely unaware of the healing properties of essential oils. We put a couple of drops in each eye and she closed her eyes for a nap. Evidently, unbeknownst to us, Barbara was allergic to roses. When she woke up, she looked at me and I stifled a startled gasp, like the Elephant Man just crossed my path. . “How do your eyes feel?” I choked out. “Oh, wow. They feel so much better.” The truth of the matter was that she looked uncannily like Marty Feldman. I felt like I was watching a tree frog that was, at the last second, startled into bug-eyed awareness that a hoot owl was diving down, moments from devouring it. I spent the rest of the day keeping her away from anything remotely resembling a mirror.

The second day out, we were driving through Texas, about 45 minutes from Seguine. It was relatively hot enough to melt metal, which is in the neighborhood of 2500 degrees Fahrenheit. Barbara, her eyes fairly back to normal, was driving. Cliff was in the passenger seat. I was stretched out on the floor in the aisle between the two pews facing each other, sobbing while reading the last page of Where The Red Fern Grows. And, being the true Arkansan that I am, I was, of course, barefoot.

From what I was able to ascertain later, Barb was trying to open the front window to shoo a fly out that was annoying her and keeping her from driving safely. She couldn’t get the window open, trying to unclasp a sliding window, and didn’t notice the van beginning to veer off the road headed straight for the columns under an overpass. I remember my friend, Debbie Ganus, sitting somewhere above me, saying, “We’re going to do something.” I closed my book and laid it on my chest, oddly annoyed that I was only one page from the end, when suddenly the road was gone and we were careening through a field. Cliff yelled, “Turn the wheels to the right. Turn them to the right.” Then the weirdest thing. There was no noise…no sound because the van’s wheels left the gravel and scalding dirt of a Texas flatland and the RV rolled with a thud on to it’s side and then over again, settling on the roof.

The silence continued for a few seconds. We all began to stir around, obviously in shock. I saw none of the wreck, one minute laying on the floor, looking at the ceiling, and the next, face-planted in the very same ceiling. I jumped up and remember someone yelling out if Chuck was okay. Chuck was one of our group who suffered from bad legs and would have a harder time getting up and out. I realized he could be hurt most and I too yelled out for him. As fate would have it, he was lying right at my feet and yelled that he thought he was okay. So, I stepped on him and plowed toward the door.

I threw the door open once I figured out where the handle was in its new, upside down position and jumped out. My senses were firing on all cylinders and I immediately noticed several things simultaneously. One, when I opened the door, the “Quickie Step” magically began to operate and slid in place, up toward the sky. To this day, I still think it was just waiting for the right time to show it’s abnormal, unhealthy sense of humor. The second thing I noticed was that the U-Haul did not become unattached and somehow the chains kept it from flipping over with the van. It was, at this moment, an unbearable stench coincided with the intensity of heat emitting from the sandy terrain on my bare feet, which collided with the exact moment I stepped into something that chose to die in the very spot we chose to flip a van. And to be honest, to this day, the emotional trauma of that singular event eclipsed the entire wreck experience. I am fairly certain it was a road kill Chupacabra.

Someone still in the bowels of the doomed vehicle behind me said, “could this thing explode?” And suddenly there was a herd of humans piling out of the van into the blistering heat. Miraculously, at first glance, no one was hurt badly. Only bumps and cuts. However, when Jan, our keyboardist stepped out, her face was covered with white flecks of skin. It was apparent that she slid, face first, on the carpet lined wall and up onto the carpet lined ceiling and was suffering from severe carpet burn. She wasn’t reacting to the fact that she looked like an extra in Night Of The Living Dead. I just stood there, waiting for her to start shrieking when her brain finally registered “PAIN!!!” But, then, I noticed the same flecks of skin were on the front of her shirt. I chose to not think about it. It was just to much to process after what we went through. Besides, I just kept saying, “I stepped in something really bad.”

Semi’s and cars were pulling off the road and running the couple hundred feet to see if we were alive. There were no cell phones back then so a truck driver got on his “Convoy” CB and called for a tow truck. Somehow the van was eventually turned right side up again, we all got back on the van and were hauled to a cantina on the outskirts of a small town. I looked around at all of our stuff scattered all over the floor, wondering where my shoes might have ended up and noticed what used to be a cardboard box filled with white frosted cupcakes with what could very well have been a face print in them. I glanced back at Jan and started laughing hysterically. She seemed so offended that I was laughing at her since no one informed her she was covered in icing. “What?” And at the same time, I was unnaturally upset that a whole pan of cupcakes were ruined.

Half an hour later, most of us were sitting at tables in the tiny cantina, talking about the experience. I was in the bathroom with my foot hanging precariously over the sink, trying to wash off the dead Chupacabra, when one of the other guys walked in and leaned against the wall in the corner, glancing sheepishly at me, like he was channeling Boo Radley. Finally, he leaned toward me and said, “That was really scary wasn’t it?” I replied, “Oh my gosh, yes.” He got really close to me and almost whispered, “Tim, did you have an accident?” It took a few seconds for my mind to wrap around what he was asking. But, finally, with my foot in the sink, I said, “NO…I stepped in something REALLY BAD.”

When we got back to the tables, I sat down in just enough time to hear Debbie say, “It’s a good thing we had a superior body.” And I thought, “Wow, yeah. I didn’t even stop to think how we were protected. It was only by the mercy of God that we’re all sitting here okay.” We all solemnly nodded in agreement. I think I actually clasped my hands together in an attitude of prayer, when Debbie continued, “‘Cause if we were in a Winnebago, we’d all be dead right now.”

We all made collect calls, one at a time, from the pay phone to let family know we were all alive. And then we joined in a group discussion where we decided to be strong, rent a van and continue our tour. The new van was so much nicer than the old one with beds for napping and even a bathroom. We chained the U-Haul on and forged ahead.

It’s my personal opinion that the U-Haul somehow felt as though it was not being afforded the due attention it deserved after the accident. It, after all, never lost its footing and kept our clothes and speakers and microphones safe. About a week in to our two-week tour, Mr. U-Haul decided to have a flat tire. I can’t remember if we changed it or if someone came and changed it, or even if there was a spare tire. I just remember unloading the trailer so it could be jacked up and then reloading it on the side of the highway.

A few more days passed, when the same tire blew out. None of us were happy about having to unload the trailer and change the tire, yet again, and reload yet again adding to the anxiety of rushing to get to the next venue. But, somewhere in Colorado, probably close to Castle Rock, I was lounging on one of the beds, looking out the window as the sun was setting in breathtaking, dazzling fashion over the mountains, and thought how the drive was finally, completely serene and peaceful. When out the corner of my eye, I noticed something yellow rolling at break-neck speed across the field to my left. On further eye-squinting investigation, I realized it was Mr. U-Haul, seemingly still upset over being snubbed at the wreck site, and in his nomadic escape, snapping the chains that confined him, appearing to say, “I can’t take it anymore.”

I watched in fascination, waiting for him to make his last effort for recognition by finally rolling over, but it never happened. I watched him, more in the distance behind us now, do a half turn in the dust and settle back on his trailer hitch, as if pointing his nose to the sky in a defiant, “So, there” attitude, before I climatically turned my head toward the front of the RV and calmly said, “Uh…Cliff?”