Book Excerpt from 7 Rooms: One Family Inside A Cult - The Church of the Open Road

by Edward Michael Francis (they/them/theirs)

An excerpt from their upcoming memoir, 7 Rooms: One Family Inside a Cult

www.cinemarchmedia.com/books

The Church of the Open Road

We were a camping family the way some families are a church family — religiously, ritualistically, without much debate about whether we'd keep doing it. Every summer, the Jayco pop-up trailer got hitched to the back of whatever van we were driving that decade, and we would disappear into America for a week or two, leaving behind every single thing that made home feel like a pressure system about to blow.

Getting there, though. Getting there was its own ordeal.

The decompression hadn't started yet on day one of driving, which meant my father was still fully himself — coiled, overstimulated, and in close quarters with his family for hours at a stretch with nowhere to put it. Boredom and sensory overload apparently occupy the same frequency in his nervous system, and when they collide, he needed somewhere to discharge. I was convenient.

If I shifted in my seat. If I made a noise. If I so much as telegraphed the existence of physical discomfort in my body — which, as an autistic kid on a multi-hour van trip with a pop-up trailer hitched to the back, I was going to do eventually — he would get this particular look.

The look of a man who had just located his material.

"Uh oh. Crisis count. Crisis count. Crisis count. Brrp brrp brrp."

It was a bit. He had a bit. For bullying his child in a moving vehicle.

And of course I reacted, because I was a child and he was my father and the reaction was the entire point, and the moment I reacted he would escalate with the theatrical ferocity of a man genuinely enjoying himself — "790 — 830 — ONE THOUSAND — BRRP BRRP BRRP — CRISIS OVERLOAD" — the numbers climbing with increasing mock-urgency while

I got progressively more frustrated and he got progressively more entertained, a feedback loop with no exit ramp, in a van, on a highway, with nowhere to go.

My mother, to my memory, said nothing.

The crisis count ended when he got bored of it. That was the only condition under which it ended.

My father needed about a week to actually arrive. His body would be there at the campsite — backing the trailer in with the practiced precision of a man who understood machinery better than he understood most people — but the rest of him took a few days to follow. You could watch it happen in real time: the first day he'd still have the posture of a man who managed corporate IT infrastructure and had opinions about it. By day three, his shoulders would drop about two inches. By day five, he'd be funny again.

There was a choreography to arrival that we all knew without being taught. First the jacks went down to level us against whatever ground we'd claimed, then the hitch came off.

Everyone had a job. My father orchestrated, my mother made the domestic calculus of turning a folded pop-up into a livable space look effortless, and my sister and I existed somewhere in the ecosystem of usefulness and chaos that children occupy when adults are focused on something else. By the time we'd done this a hundred times, the ritual had a kind of muscle memory to it — the particular clanking weight of the leveling jacks, the specific resistance of the crank handle, the moment when the trailer settled and stopped moving and became, for the next week, home.

Before I was eighteen I had been through roughly twenty-five states. Some we drove through like a held breath; others we stopped in long enough to leave a footprint. We camped heavily through Wisconsin — our primary territory when we still lived in Illinois — and by the time my parents finally pointed the van east toward Pennsylvania, I had also seen a few Canadian provinces, enough American national parks to have opinions about them, and one particular patch of land in Packwaukee, Wisconsin that I have never entirely stopped thinking about.

But of course, we have to talk about food and the crown jewel of campfire cuisine — the thing my family has evangelized to friends, neighbors, and exchange students from multiple continents with a fervor that borders on the religious — was the pudgie pie.

If you don't know what a pudgie pie is, I am delighted to be the one to tell you. They go by other names — mountain pies, camping pies, hobo pies, trail pies, road pies, depending on what part of the country raised you — but the apparatus is the same everywhere: a small cast iron pie maker on a long handle, hinged in the middle like a tiny waffle iron designed specifically for open flame. You butter two pieces of bread, lay them in the iron, fill them with whatever you have — cherry pie filling, pizza sauce and cheese, scrambled eggs and bacon, literally anything with the audacity to exist near a campfire — clamp it shut so the bread seals around the edges, and hold the whole contraption over hot coals until it comes out as a small, self-contained, three-inch miracle. The bread toasts against the iron. The filling gets molten. The edges crimp shut and the whole thing holds together like it was always meant to be exactly this.

We made them everywhere. Cherry was the classic. Pizza was the crowd pleaser. Breakfast pudgie pies — eggs, bacon, cheese — were the ones that made people stop talking and just eat. I have had pudgie pies in campgrounds across twenty-five states and they have never once been bad. The cast iron ones are the only correct choice; the cheap aluminum versions exist as a warning about compromise.

Every exchange student we ever hosted went home with the knowledge of pudgie pies. Every family friend who camped with us once came back specifically because of them. This is not an exaggeration. This is the documented social history of a cast iron pie maker on a stick.

My father could be complicated. The pudgie pies were not.

The trip that stays with me most was 1992. I was twelve years old and we pointed the van toward New Mexico, which at the time was just a shape on a map, a place we hadn't been, another state to add to the count. I didn't know yet that I was driving toward the place I would eventually land for good.

We stopped at Four Corners, which is exactly what it sounds like and somehow still more than you expect — a bronze disc in the ground marking the only point in the country where four states meet at once. I laid down across it in the wind, one limb in each state, twelve years old and deeply pleased with myself, while the high desert tried to relocate me. The wind at Four Corners is not interested in your plans. It comes off the plateau with a kind of editorial certainty, and the encampment of Native vendors set up around the monument worked right through it — jewelry and pottery and textiles arranged on blankets, business conducted with the practiced calm of people who have been there considerably longer than the bronze disc.

Somewhere near the Jemez we stopped for fry bread.

If you have never had fry bread sold roadside in New Mexico, still warm, I am genuinely sorry for whatever you have been doing instead. It is not a complicated food. It is dough and heat and the particular alchemy that happens when something is made by someone who knows exactly what they're doing and doesn't need to explain it to you. I was twelve and I ate it standing next to the van in the high desert sun and I still think about it.

Carlsbad Caverns descended into the earth like a secret the landscape had been keeping. You walk in and the temperature drops and the scale shifts completely — suddenly you are very small inside something very old, and the stalactites hang overhead with the patient indifference of geological time. My father, to his credit, understood how to let a place like that land without talking over it.

The VLA sat in the Plains of San Agustin like something dreamed up by a child who'd been told there was no limit — twenty-seven radio telescope dishes arranged across the desert in a perfect Y formation, each one the size of a building, the whole array pointed at the sky with a collective focus that felt almost devotional. I stood next to one of those dishes and understood, for the first time, that some questions are so large they require infrastructure.

Bandelier was built into the cliff face of Frijoles Canyon like the mountain had been persuaded to make room — rooms carved directly into the volcanic tuff, multi-story structures pressed against the rock wall, a whole civilization stacked vertically into the stone.

I remember standing at the base of it trying to understand the logic of a people who looked at a cliff and saw a neighborhood. The scale of it was harder to process than Carlsbad had been. The caverns were incomprehensibly large. Bandelier was incomprehensibly human.

At White Sands we ran down the dunes. That's the only way to put it — you climb and then you run, because the slope demands it, because the gypsum sand is so fine and so pale it doesn't feel entirely real, and my sister and I tumbled down together in the wind and the white and came up laughing with sand in every possible location. The dunes are the color of old pearls. The light does something strange there. I have been back as an adult and it is exactly as I remembered it, which almost never happens.

On the way back we went through Colorado. At Pikes Peak my father stopped the car and I stood next to a snowpack that rose three times my height — in summer, at altitude, in a year that had been dry by any reasonable measure. I put my hand against it. I was twelve years old and I had just seen four states at once, eaten fry bread on the side of a desert highway, descended into the earth, stood next to dishes pointed at space, traced my fingers along rooms carved into a cliff by people who had been gone for centuries, and tumbled down dunes the color of pearls with my sister. And now a wall of snow taller than my father's house, in July.

I didn't have the language for it then. But something was being written.

Thirty-some years later, I live twenty minutes from the Jemez. I pass the turnoff for White

Sands on the highway and think about my sister. The VLA is still out there on the plains, still listening.

Some trips, it turns out, are less about where you're going and more about where you're going to end up.

by Edward Michael Francis (they/them/theirs) from their upcoming memoir, 7 Rooms: One Family Inside a Cult

www.cinemarchmedia.com/books