Home Free (7 page)

“And that always left me in a funny position, because I wasn't sure what my story was. I was part way through a history degree. I was from Toronto. My girlfriend had taken off to Hong Kong. My own world didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, so I was looking for that meaning somewhere else.

“It was like the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh,'which I studied in first year, where this prince or king goes off in search of the eternal sun, or something like that. He's travelling with this half-man, half-animal guy named Enkidu. They end up finding what they're searching for then lose it in a pond. They come back home empty-handed, and that's that.

“The way I saw it, people all around me were taking rather pointless things very seriously. In university, for example, everyone took their marks and their future careers very seriously. But getting perfect marks and the perfect future didn't appeal that much to me.

“My way of rebelling was to take something pointless seriously. That's what I did with travelling. I took my aimlessness seriously.

“Although, I realize now that running off on my own into the great blue yonder was a typically North American thing to do. Individualism is a funny thing. As a frame of reference, it always makes you feel as if you're being totally original, that you're the first person ever to rebel and strike out on your own, to reject your past—when in fact, this is a terribly conventional thing to do.

“In North America, identity is not about belonging to something bigger than yourself, it's about defining yourself in contrast to everyone else. It makes sense, then, that I set out to define myself
against
the world I came from.

“But I learned that it's not so easy to be out on your own. It is exciting but it's also limited and repetitive. I wanted to be part of the big wide world, but the world actually narrows when you're on your own. It gets boring. It is also hard to have fun by yourself.

“At the end of my trip I decided that I wouldn't travel on my own in the same way again.”

He left for the summer, before we had a chance to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. In a few weeks we got a postcard with an aerial shot of the camp, a cluster of almost invisible buildings surrounded by a swathe of forest and a large body of water. He had drawn an arrow, pointing to one red roof.

“Here I am.”

The Generation Gap vs.
The Friendly Parent

I
T'S HARD to remember what long-distance communication was like for families in the 1960s and '70s, and how this contributed to the gap between the values of my parents and the experimental lives of their wayward kids. My son and his friends travel the globe and never entirely leave home:we can see the set of their shoulders and monitor their haircuts on Skype; we go back and forth with them on Facebook, privy to every blip in their moods. If things go wrong,we're there to cybernetically hold their hand. Family life goes on, attenuated, but still intimate. More intimate than it used to be.

Which is good. Right?

In the late 1960s, when we went travelling it was a dramatic rupture from the family. A little death. You left home one person and might very well come back as another. The young went away to “find themselves.” No one expected us to find ourselves inside the dimly lit cave of the family.

And nourishing the generation gap, staying out of touch, was easily achieved. Communication was rushed, sporadic, and superficial. Letters from home had to be sent well ahead of time, to a predetermined list of American Express offices along our route— if we stuck with our plans. There was no expectation of sharing our experiences on the road with our families. And in many cases (smoking opium and living in caves being two examples that spring to mind) our experiences weren't of the sharing sort.

Not that drugs were to my taste; for the most part, they scared me. During university and my early twenties, I felt that my grip on my sanity,which I equated with my
self-control
, was tenuous at best, and drugs only made this worse. I was a bit afraid of losing my mind if I took acid or smoked too much dope. (This was a form of ambition, actually; one of the few adventurous options open to women in those days was to totally snap—to be Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath, brilliant and broken.)

I became adept at contact highs, however.

Communication with my family consisted of letters scribbled on thin blue sheets of airmail stationery. The post office sold these with the stamps already on; you filled one side with writing, then folded it into an envelope that slowly made its way, with its already stale news, to my parents,who anxiously awaited the arrival of the postman every morning, in case he brought news of my survival in unimaginable foreign lands.

In 1969,my family accepted the notion of a post-grad European trek, preferably with a Eurail Pass in hand. It counted as continuing education;we were “broadening”ourselves. But for them travel signified marble statues and historical ruins, not hitchhiking in strange cars and smoking dope in Amsterdam cafés.

That winter I was in Europe with my boyfriend, a tall poetry-writing lad from another nice family who would clearly protect me from bad men. In those days the hippie trail either led east from London to India, south to Ibiza off the coast of Spain or to Greece and the caves of Matala, which a feature in
Life
magazine had already made semi-famous. (Joni Mitchell arrived a month or two after we left and met the red-haired chef who inspired the song “Carey.”Several years later the bubonic plague broke out, and the idyll was over.)

After moving into a spacious cave with a view of the sea, I updated my family on our itinerary.

“The three of us are living in a small fishing village on the southern coast of Crete,” I wrote, having invented a chaperone-ish third party to offset the unavoidably domestic overtones of living as a couple in a cave. “This is a Greek archeological site,” I added (educational). “The cliffs have rows of man-made caves that date back to the Neolithic period,where travellers can stay for free”(frugality). “ We are staying in one of the larger caves. It's very nice and has a door”(a tarpaulin). “The ocean is clean and perfect for swimming. The local fishermen sell fresh fish on the beach”(nutrition). “We're getting a tan and enjoying a rest after being on the road all winter.”

Ah, the daughterly wiles of the young suburban hippie.

I doubt they imagined me hallucinating Jesus Christ on cough syrup (one of the preferred drugs at Matala was the cough medicine Romilar, a mix of speed and codeine). Although, I shouldn't underestimate my mother's lurid imagination about the bad things that might happen to me. She once warned me about a bacterial infection that you could catch from playing the bagpipes (not my instrument). And of course I wasn't writing long anguished emails to them about my relationship, or my own Premarin-fuelled nuttiness. My mother worked hard to accept my adventures,having always been a freethinker and a science-minded rationalist. This was her brand of feminism, I think—a crisp lack of sentiment. Long before it became fashionable, her mantra was “it's all chemistry” regarding addiction, dereliction, and sex offenders; for her it was all about the brain, and science has since caught up with her. Among other things, genes and chemistry explained homosexuality, which she accepted decades before the era of Gay Pride. After earning her degree in math and home ec (a combination that describes her well) she worked as a switchboard operator in Saskatoon. But in those early Depression days, couples were only allowed to hold down one job per household, and so when she married she had to stop working.

I just assumed the gap between my mother's life and mine was unbridgeable. She had met my father when they were 13 and 14, and by their mid-twenties they had married and had their first child. She dated a few others along the way and had the odd crush, she let me know, on other men, including her sister's boyfriend. He was a dashing fighter pilot—are there any other kind?—named Ernie McNab,who once flew low over the university campus in his plane and waggled his wing tips at them.

But the concept of sleeping with different guys just because you were attracted to them was new to her, although it made sense, she thought, to try them out before you settle for one. As she used to mildly, somewhat admiringly muse, as I pursued the single life into my thirties,“Yes, you've had a lot of boyfriends.”

She never criticized me for not marrying (I recanted at the age of 50). But she worried that I would get hurt. Which, of course, I did. It became a bit of a pattern, in fact. I had talked myself out of wanting anything resembling “commitment,” but that turned out to eliminate too much.

Her reply to my letter describing our cave life was tactful and carefully upbeat. She caught me up on the family news—all good, in the style of the Christmas form letter, in which no doubt or heartache intrudes. Then she gave me a recipe for non-rising Irish soda bread, easily cooked in an iron frying pan on an open fire.

“Enjoy!” she gallantly signed off.

Earlier,while we were hitchhiking through Europe, she sent me letters with newspaper clippings about date-rape drugs. She warned me never to sit beside a stranger in a bar, who could jab a hypodermic needle into my thigh and cart me off as a sex slave.

Honestly, I thought,what was her problem?

The thing is, technically, she was right. Girls do fall into the hands of bad men. Women are sold as sex slaves. Date-rape drugs remain popular and effective. But at the time, I saw it as just another example of my mother's xenophobic, unhip fears about “other people” (usually “swarthy”).

My letters home from Europe that year were superficial, chipper, and full of evasion: the Goya paintings in the Prado were so much more impressive in person; there are a million stray cats in the Coliseum; the hostel in Thessalonika has this neat rooftop café; and so on. “Greg got a nail in his heel from his old boots—I keep telling him to get new ones,” I would report with wifely exasperation. “ Greg is writing a very detailed journal—thank goodness one of us is keeping track!”

I do not tell my mother about the man with the knife in the Marrakesh hostel. I don't tell my father that while hitchhiking to Bari, in Italy, we were picked up by a convicted rapist who kept us hostage for hours, until the police came to our rescue. And I don't mention that my gentle poet boyfriend slept with the girl in the cave next door. I went through my betrayals and depressions by myself, without my family—or, for that matter, the comfort of girlfriends. The sexual revolution predated the women's movement by a few ragged years.

Meanwhile,we were taking heavy-duty drugs: birth control pills that delivered veterinary levels of hormones and left us vulnerable to disease; acid:mushrooms and assorted mind-benders that other cultures surround with protective rituals and wise mentors. We put evil-looking IUDs like the Dalkon Shield into our wombs, devices that left thousands of women infertile. The notion of “free love,” in short, was a crock. But we went along with it. It was our equivalent of new software.

My parents hadn't travelled widely, and they feared the worst about European capitals. They imagined streets riddled with thieves, derelicts, and drug addicts—and, as it happened, when they did make it overseas that is exactly what they managed to attract,wherever they went.

On their first flight to London, the man sitting in the seat across the aisle from my mother died of a heart attack or a stroke. The flight was completely booked; dragging a body up the aisles was not an option, so the attendants had to drape a sheet over the poor man until they landed at Heathrow. In relating this story,my mother was quite sanguine and worldly, as if dead bodies were simply one of the little glitches one encountered on transcontinental flights. I was aghast. They were stepping into what they thought of as “my world,” and it was turning out to be as lurid as they had imagined.

I accompanied my parents on one of their first experiences riding the Underground in London. Burlington does not have a subway. Saskatoon did not have a subway. I've always looked upon urban public transit as a heartwarming democratic vision, where the citizens of a big city peaceably huddle together. I was eager to show off the splendour of the labyrinthine London Tube to my parents; my engineer father in particular, I thought, would be impressed by this clever inverted system of bridges.

We were in the Underground, on our way to the Tower of London. My parents sat side by side, smiling in their encouraging fashion at the commuters around them, who either ignored them or gave faint, stiff smiles in return. Across the aisle from us was a tall, painfully thin man, hanging onto the overhead strap. He seemed boneless and loose as he swayed like a weed in a stream with each lurch of the subway car. It was my mother who first noticed the hypodermic needle dangling from one bicep. Then I saw it, just as his head lolled back.

“Oh dear, how can he stand up,” she said, reasonably enough. In all my wanderings through all the wrong parts of foreign cities, in the back lanes of Tangiers or Istanbul, I had never encountered a junkie who didn't bother to take the needle out of his arm.

Miraculously, the man continued to hang from his strap, head pendulum-ing, chin bouncing off his chest, pants inching down his ass. Other passengers stared straight ahead. My father gave me an “Oh well!” sort of thumbs-up look, which made me feel better. We hustled out of the car and rode the escalators up, up into the daylight without discussing the incident.

A day or two later, on their way to Hampstead Heath,my parents encountered a homeless woman begging. Instead of putting coins in her hand and moving on, they sat down on the curb and got in a conversation with her.

“Her husband left and took all her savings with him—boy, she sure knows how to pick 'em,” said my father, relating their street adventure with relish. They gave her a little money and wished her well before they went on their way. I worried that they might have invited her to move to Canada and into their spare room (my room). My parents in their forties were innocents abroad—more innocent, I realized, than I was at 21.