The summer before my Junior year of High School we took a family road trip across the country to visit colleges. The middle is an entirely different story. The story I want to tell is near the end when we were all tired and growing sick of each other.
My father has always been a very angry man. Korean is a spectacular language to be mad in and he's the kind of person with a big loud shouty voice coming out of a face and neck that grow redder and redder as he gets louder and louder. Everything about him really complimented the anger and he was a figure of absolute terror in my childhood. As we grew older he mellowed out more but the old memories persisted. And he was still the kind of person who after a loud fight with my mother in the middle of said road trip, walked out of the car at a red light in the middle of Boston. Mind you, he had the only cellphone, no one had his number memorized, and we had literally just driven into the city and did not have a hotel or otherwise designated meeting spot or even a map. My mother ordered my brother into the driver seat and we circled the block a few times before my father emerged from an alley. He got back in the car and we did the thing where we pretended none of that just happened. I don't even remember what the fight was about.
And it was this man who, near the end of our trip in a motel in the middle of nowhere, at 3 in the morning, woke me up. Just me. He told me to get dressed and into the car and I did, leaving my mother and two younger brothers behind. Without saying a single other word we started driving into the desert. We took small side roads and drover further and further away from everything for an hour. In that hour I went from sleepy to confused to growing ever more confused and bordering on terrified; all in total silence. Then we went off the road into the desert proper and I only became more scared. Thank god I had never watched Thelma & Louise, we weren't too far away from the Grand Canyon.
Eventually we stopped. I still have no idea how or why he decided where to stop. Add it to the big list of things I will absolutely never ask my father. He stepped out and reached into the backseat and grabbed a bag and out of it he pulled... a tripod. He set it up and attached the digital camera, pointing it east. I think this was the first moment I began to understand that my father, absolutely terrible with words, spoke with his actions.
The night before we had all discussed what we were going to do next. I had wanted to visit the Grand Canyon and I had wanted to take photos of the sunrise there. (This would have been my third attempt at time-lapse photography in that adorable awkward way teenagers explore hobbies with new toys.) My mother, tired and ornery, vetoed that in favor of going straight home. And what she wanted, she got. So instead my father hatched a secret plan to allow his son to get a piece of what he wanted without interfering with my mother's schedule. I didn't even notice him taking pictures of me as I looked at my watch and picked whatever intervals my heart desired to take pictures at.