[Linda P. Campbell] Texas mother’s hard-luck lessons through Allentown

Driving couldn’t possibly be worse than heading toward Allentown on an unfamiliar, dark highway, with walls of rain splashing away decent visibility and tractor-trailers barreling by with no regard for the treacherous road conditions.

It was Thursday last week, and you’d have thought Hurricane Irene had hit, even though she wouldn’t blow through Pennsylvania for another couple of days.

Thank goodness my 19-year-old daughter was behind the wheel instead of me ― or we’d have been crawling along Interstate 78 at about 45 miles an hour.

Finally, around 10 p.m., we found a major confluence with multiple hotels, only to see parking lots filled with old cars. Mackenzie guessed it immediately: An antique-car convention. The only room we could find was a budget-busting king-bed suite that we’d need for only a few hours.

But it was a room, and we were exhausted on this second 700-miles-plus day of driving from Fort Worth to Poughkeepsie by way of Hope, Ark.; Lebanon, Tenn.; Roanoke, Va.; and Hagerstown, Md.

I knew things could be worse: The last time I encountered Allentown headed from Texas to an East Coast destination was in 1985. The headlights on my Honda Accord went out as a classmate and I drove late into the night, bound back to law school after Christmas break.

I frantically messed with the switch, turning the brights (which still worked) on and off repeatedly. And I kept thinking of the despair in Billy Joel’s song “Allentown.’’

When the 18-wheeler traveling in front of us that forever-ago night pulled over to the shoulder, I realized the driver must have thought I was signaling him (or her) for help. To this day, I feel guilty that I didn’t pull over, too, to explain ― guiltier, even, than about driving the next four hours to New Haven with my brights on.

For the final leg of our return-Mackenzie-to-Marist trip, we didn’t need bright lights, just patience. The 150 miles on Friday seemed so much longer than that as we meandered through the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area along the two-lane road Google maps had laid out as the shortest route. Lovely mountains, towns that would be delightful to stop in ― on almost any other day.

That afternoon, as we unloaded our chock-full Sentra at the dorm, the Hudson River a few hundred yards away sparkled in the sunlight. It was a deceptive tranquility that Irene, with her howling winds and rain, was expected to crash by the next evening.

What if the river floods? Are they far enough away? High enough above the banks? I thought of college students displaced by Hurricane Katrina’s Gulf Coast devastation almost exactly six years earlier.

I advised Mackenzie and her roommates to stock up on water and buy flashlights. She kept urging me to leave earlier than my flight scheduled for Sunday morning. I got majorly miffed, feeling like she was unceremoniously pushing me out the door: Thanks for the ride, Mom, now please go. I need my space.

Meanwhile, all Sunday transportation in the region was getting suspended; the airports were planning to close. Around midnight Friday, I finally found an early-Saturday flight out. When Mackenzie dropped me at the Newburgh airport at 5 a.m., I had pangs about leaving my child in the path of a dangerous storm.

But parenthood is a continuing lesson in letting your kids learn from their own experiences, not yours.

All summer, I tried to equip my twins with useful knowledge: how to recognize and avoid email scams; how to keep their property safe; how to be frugal shoppers.

When some of the Marist dorms got evacuated because the parking lot flooded, and my daughter left without so much as her ID, I fretted that maybe I hadn’t taught her how to react in an emergency. Whether I had or not doesn’t matter now: She’s been there, done that.

Turns out, most of the details I got about the storm’s impact on the campus came from the college website, not personal reports. She was busy being a college sophomore.

This letting-go business is supposed to get easier on this end. I’m still wondering when that happens.

By Linda P. Campbell

Linda P. Campbell is a columnist and editorial writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. ― Ed.

(The Fort Worth Star-Telegram)

(McClatchy-Tribune Information Services)