Columnist Susan Snyder: Giving it the old college try

Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2003 | 9:12 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

The Princeton Review has named the University of Colorado the nation's top party school, which means my mother is hiding from her children.

It's not that my older brother and I aren't proud of her. She graduated from high school a year early and traveled across the country to attend college in an era when most young women were expected to earn a "Mrs." and be done.

(This should offset any ugly e-mail she is typing at this very moment -- on the computer my brother and I bought her for Christmas. We starved ourselves to pay for it and carried it on our backs uphill from the computer store, protecting it from the harsh elements with our threadbare winter coats.)

Mom's longtime wish to show us her Boulder, Colo., alma mater came true in 1971.

Sorta. We saw the campus, along with dozens of hippies smoking dope and playing Frisbee.

"Mom went to Frisbee UUUUUUU," we sang in the back seat for the remainder of our three-week Colorado vacation.

First, no one should spend three weeks in the car with relatives. It's not natural. Not one of us smiling in recently discovered photos of this trip.

Except Mom. There's a shot of her in Estes Park balancing on crutches. Her leg is in a cast, and she's grinning like a Cheshire cat. Likely, it was the pain medication. She had broken her ankle the previous night navigating the terrain between our camp and the bathroom.

I vaguely remember standing outside the clinic while they set it, wondering whether they would fix the leg or shoot her. Too many Westerns, I suppose.

Our "camp" consisted of a tent-trailer that had three fold-out sections. This 1970s covered wagon was designed to give my brother and I our own spaces, as if one could provide enough personal space for siblings ages 15 and 10.

It folded into a compact, wheeled box that Dad could drag behind our hulking Mercury at 85 mph. And it was equipped with running commentary from the passenger seat.

"Jim, there's a truck behind us. Jim, slow down. Jim, you look sleepy. Would you like a drink of water? There's another truck behind us ..."

At least the trailer was easy to ignore -- until it began swaying side-to-side with the curves of a mountain road. These were curves Dad was comfortable taking at 80 mph because the "Merc" was "built to handle it."

Evidently, I wasn't. I spent the better part of three days on the floor of the back seat.

Once we set up camp, I commenced retching like a back-alley sot. A "doctor" in the next campsite told Mom it was altitude sickness and recommended I drink a cup of warm water every morning. I silently wished a pox on his hibachi.

Still, it was a pretty neat trip. I got my first pair of Wranglers, my first Stetson and my first glimpse of the mountain range that made me decide the West would one day be my home.

But Mom was forever disappointed in the University of Colorado. She hoped we would see that life has options even when society's rules or a world war dictates something else.

Well, we saw those possibilities.

But, "Mom went to Frisbee UUUUUUU" had a much better ring to it.