Pam Platt | Taking a road trip down memory lane

The other day I read that Johnny Depp is going to do a remake of “The Lone Ranger,” only this time Tonto will be the head honcho and the guy with the mask will be the sidekick. Justice at last! And I knew that, somewhere, my dad was smiling.

Dad had been a Tonto partisan from way back, and even schooled my daughter in his subversive view of the duo — Tonto was the real brains of the operation, and knew it; the masked man was clueless, and didn't — while we made a cross-country car trip about 12 years ago. I can't remember how it came up, but we were out West, a long way from our Florida home and on our way to or from our destination of Montana, when he started riffing on Tonto.

Do you know, he asked my daughter, what Tonto was really calling the Lone Ranger every time he called him “Kemo Sabe”?

No, she said.

Well, Dad explained, he was calling him … something unexpected and hilarious, and unfit to print. I think we laughed for 50 miles. And from that day forth, grandfather and granddaughter had a code word between them. It came up a lot on that trip.

“That driver's a real Kemo Sabe,” Dad would drawl, and then look in the rearview mirror to catch my daughter's answering grin.

I hadn't thought about the Kemo Sabe story for a long time, but once I did (thanks, Johnny) it took me down many other roads belonging to the car trips that crisscrossed my childhood and some in the years since. At the time, they may have seemed interminable (and some of them, indeed, were). In time, though, they have become invaluable for what they revealed of the world, and for what they revealed about my family, especially the two in the front seat.

I still love to drive on long trips — not in spite of that history, but because of it — and I'm happy for today's families that technology has made the miles less of a challenge. But I have wondered, as I watch them watching their personal DVD screens that pop out from the ceilings of their vehicles, what sights they are missing along the way, or what Kemo Sabe moments they aren't having with their fellow travelers while they're tapped into something less unique.