Peig Meets Dame Gitane

The vehicular story of how my mother Peig graduated from buying an old Borden’s milk wagon to a vintage Volkswagen camper. What wonderful winter excape transport. All it needed was— an engine!

When I was about eight years old, my mother Peig bought an old fashioned Borden's Milk horse-drawn milk wagon covered with a big label : Borden's Milk. Where on earth she got it, I don't know. She must have bought it secretly with her grocery money, and when Dad wasn’t looking, had it hauled onto our acre of land in Indianapolis.

My Mother Peig bought an old Borden’s milk truck like this one for me to play in.

It had huge wooden wagon wheels and it was dark green and had long wooden hitch for the horse and benches inside. It even had windows. With its crooked rusty wheels, it couldn't go anywhere, even if we had a horse. But it made a great hide-out for a tomgirl like me. I played in it every day after school. Better than a tree house. I dreamed about adventure. Espionage, plots and pirate maps and buried treasure.

Pirate map

I remember at the milk wagon, playing pirates, that's what I did, played pirates, only I didn’t have any other pirates to play with. One day I made a fake treasure map, showing places with made-up names like Grotty Cave and Boody River. I drew it on some of my mother’s art paper that was lumpy—probably water color paper—and then I buried it in the ground to make it dirty, and crumpled it up. I told the kids in the neighborhood that I’d found it somewhere under a rock on the grounds of the Mennonite Church they were building next door. I think I really did fool them. What was the treasure and where was the treasure buried? I am still looking for that treasure!

Whatever happened to the old milk wagon, I don't remember. We moved away from that house with the acre of land when I was ten, to house on a nicer street, more befitting a lawyer, my father said.. Dad didn't want something so ridiculous and old-fashioned as a Borden’s horse-drawn milk truck on his new property on Delaware Street.

Becoming a stage hand

After we moved, Peig squirreled away her grocery money again and had a grand wooden stage built for us in the basement. A real theatrical stage that we could enact plays on, built by a carpenter, board by board every day while Dad was at work. What a surprise for us! And my mother had been collecting old costumes for us from second hand shops. My sisters and I dressed up as fairies and elves and queens and marched around the stage spouting made-up languages and lines, and my mother got into it too, imaging herself as Katherine Hepburn “when the Calla lillies were in bloom.”

Dad was so angry at her. He wanted to have the stage torn down. "What's the use of that?" he bellowed. "How dare you spend my money like that!" And he docked her grocery money.

Pop-up camper

After that Peig bought one of the first a pop-up campers, a low trailer-contraption that opened up with canvas wings that opened out into beds on either side. She towed it to Wisconsin for us to spend summers at Camp Shishebogama on Lake Shishebogama, a summer camp, where I learned to water ski—became a slalom pro—and learned how to canoe across a lake all by myself and fish for perch and blue gill. My three sisters and I and Peig all slept in the camper, even when the canvas got wet, and we lived on baked beans and summer vegetables and cooked with Sterno.

Not a hearse!

Besides the old milk wagon and the nifty pop-up camper there had been other odd vehicles. One really embarrassed me and my three younger sisters. My mother, being petite, felt safe driving big things. An old Lincoln Continental wasn’t big enough for her, so she found a massive traffic-stopping vehicle—where I don’t remember, but it was cheap. She said made her feel secure to drive, because it would surely survive a collision. I dreaded each day in our high school car pool when it was Peig’s turn to pick up my classmates in the neighborhood and drive us to school. You can’t make this up: My mother actually did drive me and my friends to school in a big black hearse. Until it died. Then my mother found a wing-tipped gold Cadillac that made her look like a tiny ant, and drove that till the tranny went ka-poom..

The last honk-honk

The best vehicle Peig ever bought didn't even have an engine. Like the old Borden's milk wagon, it couldn’t be driven; it had to be hauled. She had kept it for years in outside storage, paying rent every month, until one year I was visiting her from Quebec, going mad with the deep Canadian winters lasting seven months long, and after 15 of them, determined to get away. It was then she took me to the storage - in the middle of a blizzard - to show me her $250 purchase, which had by then, cost four times that much in storage.

The doors were frozen shut, but through the blinding snow, we tried to look into the windows. The maintenace man on site thought we were trying to break in. We were, actually. He helped us unfreeze the doors. Suddenly, my heart pounded. I'd never seen the inside of a Volkswagen camper before.

This one was immaculate inside, with original wooden closets, a cute little metal sink, vintage dials, a perfect cream upholstered roof. I saw ESCAPE FROM WINTER written all over it. And I didn't have enough money together to buy a vehicle, and decided it would be a piecemeal work in progress, with the engine coming first and the body restoration later.