16 Dads Gone Wild

Chapter 16 Dads Gone Wild Coke and Pep leaned over the message, staring at it as if the words might change if they looked at them hard enough. "What is it with this house on a rock?" Coke whispered. "I don't know," his sister replied. "But we have to figure it out. Somebody wants us to be there on our birthday." "And don't forget; we need to get to the ball of twine, too," Coke noted. "We promised Bones." With so much on their minds, the twins went back to bed but slept poorly. They were groggy when their father woke them up early. He seemed anxious to check out of the campground

and get on the road. Northern Utah didn't look much different from the eastern part of Nevada. Flat. Hot. Dry. There wasn't a whole lot to look at, at least not along I-80. It was going to be one of those staring-out-the-window kind of days. After a few miles, a sign appeared. Dr. McDonald veered off the highway at exit 4. "Ben, where are you going?" Mrs. McDonald asked. "You'll see." He drove a few miles into the state park without saying a word to anybody. Mrs. McDonald and the twins shot nervous glances at

one another. It wasn't like Dr. Benjamin McDonald to do impulsive, spontaneous things. He was a planner. He liked schedules and lists. "This is a state park?" Pep asked, looking at the scenery. "It doesn't look like any state park I ever saw." "Yeah, what's so great about this place, Dad?" Coke asked. "There are lots of cooler state parks we could go to. This place looks like a lot of nothing." "A lot of salt," Mrs. McDonald added. "That's exactly what it is," Dr. McDonald agreed, smiling as he pulled off the access road and onto the white salt flat itself. "Thirty thousand acres of salt. Nothing but salt." "And we came here for what reason exactly?" Pep asked. "Do you have a sodium deficiency in your diet, Dad?" Coke asked. "Look around you," Dr. McDonald told the family. "It's so flat here that you can almost see the curvature of the earth. It's so barren, even

the simplest forms of life can't survive. It's like another planet, an alien world of potassium, magnesium lithium, and sodium chloride." The twins looked at each other. There was a good chance that their father had lost his marbles. "Thousands of years ago," he continued, "Lake Bonneville covered a third of what is now Utah. When the lake evaporated, salt and minerals were left on the bottom. And over time, the surface became flat and hard." "Okay, can we go now?" Pep said, shielding her eyes from the blinding sun reflecting off the salt flat. "It's probably a hundred degrees. If the RV broke down, we could die out here." "Yeah, this place is lame, Dad," Coke added. "This place is for me," Dr. McDonald said dreamily. "You get to go to your yo-yo museums and your Pez museums. You get to see your giant ball of twine and all those other goofball places Mom wants to visit. The Bonneville Salt Flats is a place I always wanted to go to ever

since I was a little boy." "Why, Ben?" Mrs. McDonald asked. "What's here? Is this some sort of midlife crisis for you?" "Yes, it is," Dr. McDonald admitted. "Do you guys know what the Bonneville Salt Flats is famous for?" "I do," Coke replied. Of course, Coke knew all about the Bonneville Salt Flats from a Saturday morning TV special he'd seen years earlier. He remembered every detail. It turns out that back in 1914, a daredevil named Teddy Tezlaff brought an early car—a Blitzen Benz—out to the Bonneville Salt Flats and drove it 141.73 miles per hour: the world record at the time. Ever since then car buffs from all over the world have come to the salt flats to see how fast they could drive. Over the years they bumped the world land speed record up to 300 mph, then 400 mph, and eventually past 600 mph. "When I was a kid," Dr. McDonald told the

family, "this guy named Craig Breedlove brought a jet-powered car out here and broke the sixhundred- mile-per-hour barrier. I still remember the name of his car: Spirit of America. Ever since then, I wanted to come to Bonneville." "I understand, Ben," Mrs. McDonald said, patting his shoulder. "So we're going to watch a race here?" "No," he replied. "Same sentence. Take out the 'watch a.'" "We're going to race here?" Pep asked, alarmed. "That's right," Dr. McDonald said. He had a devilish gleam in his eyes, and he gripped the steering wheel tightly. "Are you out of your mind, Ben?" his wife asked. "We're going to see how fast this baby can go," Dr. McDonald said calmly. "Yeah, let's do it, Dad!" urged Coke. "This is insanity," Pep said. "It's a recreational vehicle, Ben!" Mrs.