Home Free (3 page)

But I don't think my parents and I ever had a single conversation about what I might “become.” I was a girl; I already was who I was going to be.

That was then. Now,however, there have been endless conversations with my son, wearying to both of us, about what he might “become.”And all my alarms and doubts about this process were, unoriginally, funnelled into the question of school. If only he had gone to that cozy alternative school instead of the downtown public school he preferred. Or private school. Et cetera. Like Effexor, I thought school was the pill my son could swallow to solve our anxiety around what his true place in the world should be.

But maybe school wasn't the culprit. Maybe it was the cultural stuff he grew up around, all the romantic outlaws who sang and wrote about the American dream, when there still was one. I wandered into Casey's old room to do some forensics.

His bed faced a wall of bookshelves, full of our old heroes, half-mad visionaries like R. D. Laing and Charles Bukowski, ambitious Sylvia Plaths and train-hopping Al Purdys glaring down at him while he slept. Our books line one entire wall in “his” room, from the floor to the ceiling, but as I sat there I remembered the bookcase that Casey had kept in our previous house, as a teenager. It was just two shelves long, but strenuously edited. In a household full of print, with two journalist parents, he claimed not to be a reader. At 14 and 15, though, he did surreptitiously read, with his full attention. I could still reconstruct the titles that he kept in his room:

— Woody Guthrie,
Bound for Glory

— George Orwell,
Down and Out in Paris and London

—
Catcher in the Rye
, by J.D. Salinger, of course (Brian handed it to him in a bookstore when he was 14; he opened the maroon-covered paperback, read the first few lines and said, “I'll take this one.”)

—
Franny and Zooey

— Jack Kerouac,
On the Road

— A couple early stories by John Steinbeck, I forget which.

— Hunter S. Thompson,
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

— Al Purdy,
Rooms to Rent in the Outer Planets

— Bob Dylan,
Chronicles
. No, that came out later.

I forgot Allen Ginsberg's
Howl
. Casey's copy had migrated back onto our shelves, where the spine caught my eye. It was an original $3.95 City Lights edition, published in 1956. I opened to the first page, where Ginsberg begins his catalogue of “angelheaded hipsters” and the ones “who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico”—oh dear—“leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire-place Chicago. . . .”

Dungarees. A beautiful word fallen out of use.

I closed it. If only Casey had read less, not more.

Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2003 00:15:32 -0500
Subject: Buenos Dias

Hello from between Silver City and Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

Here is the latest news from my southwestern adventures. I've been staying in a place called the Mimbers Valley, in the mountains of south-central New Mexico, about a hundred miles north of the border. My hosts are Eric and Nancy, who run a pinhole photography journal and supplies business. I hitched here from Santa Fe on Saturday and got rides from all sorts of people . . .

The email went on to describe his conversations with Bill, a Vietnam vet from Georgia (“excellent company”), a video-editor dude, and José from Durango. José and his truck took him over the mountains into the Mimbers Valley as he quizzed Casey at some length about his personal relationship with Jesus.

Later he stopped and got me to take some photos of him posed in front of the truck with the mountains. He didn't seem to mind that I hadn't found Jesus. He was more surprised that I didn't have a cellphone.

New Mexico is wild and woolly. I've met a guy from Vancouver who lives in a 100 percent vegetable oil-fuelled truck. I've heard such statements as “We were building the camera obscura when Maggie, the emu, got into the concrete and ate half a bag of it. But she was fine.”

Now I am heading in the direction of Oaxaca, Mexico, via Las Cruces, El Paso, Juarez and many buses.

Hasta la vista,
Casey

Another email made a casual reference to “maybe hopping freights.” Okay, hitchhike if you must, I zinged back, but do us a favour: no freight trains. Yes, it's the hipster street-cred thing to do. But people also get their legs chopped off, I reminded him. Rail-yard guard dogs can bite you, and security will arrest you. He was noncommittal in his reply.

One of the songs he liked to sing, I remembered, was Spring-steen's version of a ballad by Woody Guthrie:

The highway is alive tonight
But nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it goes
I'm sittin' down here in the campfire light
Searchin' for the ghost of Tom Joad

Like many other families of our generation, Casey is an only child who moved easily among adults and our community of friends. The three of us could all sit on the couch and laugh at
This Is
Spinal Tap
, and we were a good example, I thought, of the sort of modern family where the kids don't rebel and parental roles blur into a kind of peer friendship with our children. Which we enjoyed, of course; Casey is great company, full of energy, and funny. His ease in our circles, with roots in the old days when community was more important than making money, seemed like a good thing. But there was no confusing our fading world with the one coming up.

My parents and their attention to the art of “home” also impressed him. His grandfather was an engineer whose practical skills represented a refreshing switch from our own two-writer jerry-rigged household. My mother was a knowledgeable and inventive cook who liked to track her grandson's quixotic appetites and allergies. When Casey went vegan for a few years in his teens, my mother rose to the challenge of pigs in a blanket, hold the blanket, hold the pig. He and my mother share a certain mad-scientist creativity.

What I didn't realize when our son first left home was that the leaving had only begun. The dramas, conflict, and heartbreaks were still to come, in the course of his early twenties, as we kept negotiating and renegotiating our closeness, our distance. At the age of 18 his values were admirable, if somewhat untested. He believed in treating others with fairness and respect, and he couldn't abide anyone in authority who abused their power. But he wasn't grown up yet, not by a long shot. And we still had ground to cover as parents.

In the meantime, it didn't matter to Casey that the Summer of Love was now just a vintage T-shirt or that the world has since become a more venal and dangerous place than the one I travelled through. He thought I was just catastrophizing as usual.

Another issue, minor but genuine, was that I didn't
want
him to be disappointed by Chuck Berry or Woody Guthrie. I wanted the songs and the books to be true.

Vertical Travel

I
N MY EFFORTS not to fret about him, I told myself that Casey had embarked on something that boys his age seem to hunger after, in one form or another: a rite of passage; a journey, preferably dangerous, to carry them over the threshold from boyhood to manhood. In aboriginal cultures (what is left of them), these ceremonies still take place. The circumstances are important. If possible, they unfold in a natural setting, in the company of elders, on hallowed ancestral ground.

In my son's case, spending his first night on the road sleeping under the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign might have been the closest thing his culture has to offer as sacred ground.

Traditionally, a rite of passage involves some sort of physical deprivation or test: a fast, a sweat lodge session, a night spent alone in the wilderness (or all three). Other elements might contribute to a state of altered consciousness—the burning of sweet grass, chanting, dancing, or drumming. It's an opportunity for a young man to test his strength and courage, within the protective circle of a wider clan, in a ceremony that marks his coming of age in body, soul, and mind.

(For many boys in western culture, I suppose the equivalent ritual is the march across a stage wearing a robe and a flat black hat to show their courage in the face of higher education.)

In aboriginal cultures, a boy on the brink of manhood is in a liminal, threshold state, both precarious and profound. According to anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, there are three stages associated with liminality and rite of passage: separation from the community, transformation, and finally reintegration into society in a renewed role. For our city-bred, digital boys we seem to have finessed the separation stage. There is a tendency to treat them as a separate benighted species. But the transformative part remains elusive, and reintegration into society—i.e., growing up—is protracted, if not off the agenda entirely.

The pencil marks on the wall keep inching upward as we track maturity. Twenty-five is not just the new 20; some social scientists, through a mysterious calibration, now put the onset of adulthood at 31. Neuroscience suggests that young brains aren't really “cooked” until around age 25 (something to keep in mind when 14-year-olds smoke industrial-strength weed). Everyone's lifespan has also increased, which spreads maturity across a wider arc. In short, youth lasts longer now. Sometimes it seems as if the entire culture is wearing its baseball cap backwards, at any age. (One hundred is the new two?)

Instead of being a brief stage, for many young men the liminal state—being betwixt and between, at risk, on the cusp, un-launched— stretches over a period years. Our response often doesn't help the situation; parents see the hallmarks of adolescence as flaws to be fixed, not as a process unfolding. Rather than accepting this period of doubt and confusion as part of growing up and learning courage, we ride them to get it together. Their response is to retreat further inside the treehouse of adolescence, where we aren't welcome. Which is fine with us. Boys will be boys. Separation from society is just what we expect from them.

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2003 17:11
Subject: Hello from Chiapas

Here are a few exciting facts from Mexico . . .

Buses come in all shapes and sorts. Most have something at the front for good luck, like the Virgin of Guadalupe, Jesus, a saint maybe or Bob Marley. Whatever gets you down the road. The chocolate is great here. The markets are also great. Every imaginable cow part. Live chickens and pigs on leashes. Mounds of grasshoppers. It's all about the flesh and blood around here.

And, Family. People are so sad that I have no brothers or sisters. Just yesterday, riding with a family in the back of their pickup, one of the kids asked me if I was married, if I had kids, and was rather worried that I wasn't and didn't . . .

Well,maybe he had to go all the way to Mexico to get some good news about family life. I was sorry he had to have his epiphanies by himself, on the fly, but he didn't seem to mind being on his own.

Although the rite of passage experience traditionally unfolds in the company of the older generation, it clears a space for a boy to venture down into himself, and to encounter himself alone. It's a chance for a boy to flex his autonomy within the respectful embrace of his clan, and another way of being on the road—a form of vertical travel.

For many men, joining the military or going off to war is the closest they will come to a rite of passage that lets them bond with other men and test their courage. It's certainly a good way to split off from society. But reintegration is more elusive. For some soldiers who have been through the horrors of combat, there is no true coming home. Friends and family don't understand what they've been through. It's easy for these combat-traumatized 19-and 20-year-olds to end up stalled in a liminal state, exiled from their past and yet unable to step into the future.

No wonder growing up lacks appeal, for civilians and soldiers alike, given the dismal associations adulthood has acquired. It needs to be rebranded so we don't see it as the rather boring part that comes between youth and death. We don't see dying as something inevitable at the far end of a natural continuum; instead it's kept apart like a snake in a box, under lock and key.

Our fear of aging and death doesn't register directly on the young, of course. Twenty-year-old boys don't go around saying, “Dying scares me therefore I am going to skateboard forever.” But adulthood seems to involve certain penalties: marriage as a loss of masculine freedom; “settling down” as giving up on your dreams; growing up as a diminishment of spirit and energy. Adulthood arrives with a shadow of compromise and capitulation instead of a sense of expansion, adventure, or growth in wisdom and stature.

In the past, aboriginal cultures haven't shared this way of thinking. They revered their elders and respected their experience. Of course, around the world these cultures are losing the traditional ways, and the role of their elders has become as endangered as their languages. In western culture, the old are seen as largely powerless, burdensome, and silly. Look at Homer Simpson's addled dad (look at Homer, for that matter). Why
should
a boy grow up, if that's what's in store?

So the threshold period in a young man's life drags on longer and longer. Rite-of-passage behaviour consumes years, even decades, and revolves around social rituals that involve plenty of risk but little renewal, such as binge-drinking, now entrenched among the young, not to mention much of the adult world.

But consider all the pressures on twentysomethings to “become” something—to get the degree, settle on a “career path,” score an entry-level job, find the right mate. That's a long to-do list. There is pressure, in other words, to be anything
but
what you are, at 22 or 23,which is very often alone and in flux, if not in chaos. No wonder getting wrecked is so popular. Community on the Internet is also liminality defined, a constant state of in-between-ness and flux. Twitter as sweat lodge. It's all good, from the neck up. But the integration of mind, body, and spirit is hard to come by in cyberspace.