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Leaving

WE WATCHED him disappear into airport security. He walked with his usual bounce, even though he wore a towering backpack,with a pair of sneakers and a water bottle tied to the top. As the opaque glass doors slid shut behind him, he didn’t turn around, but I waved anyway. Maybe it was the kind of glass that he could see through on his side, but we couldn’t on ours.

Then we drove home in an indefinable state, without saying much. There didn’t seem to be anything left to say. I had already had all my feelings about our 20-year-old son dropping out of university to hit the road—or “taking a semester off to travel,” as I preferred to call it. I had already been sad, annoyed, alarmed, and finally excited, because that’s how he felt about this adventure. He was taking a cheap charter to Las Vegas to “ramble around” the southwest desert. Hitchhiking, alone. Then he thought he’d head south to Mexico for a while.

Mexico is very big, I pointed out.

I reminded him that the era of hitchhiking was long over, and that in 2003 only serial killers and hookers would stand around on some ramp in Nevada. But there was a romance going on. Casey had Woody Guthrie’s hoboing and probably Chuck Berry’s “Route 66”on his mind.

I gazed out the car window at the floral sculptures along the highway, advertising insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Not the Wild West by a long shot. I told myself that this was perfectly normal, for a 20-year-old to test himself. Boys are going to put themselves in harm’s way, one way or another. I tried to think of it as a delayed gap year—the one he probably should have taken after high school, before heading off to university in Montreal, at the still-tender age of 18.

Why do we assume that this is the natural order of things, for boys to leave home at the height of their restlessness, to sit in classrooms for four more years?

Then, in the first week of his first year of a history degree—the official version of why things happen in the world—along came 9/11, and the dominant narrative was blown up. No wonder he was rattled. It didn’t help that despite being a good student he had always questioned school, waiting for it to click into focus. That winter he put his shoulder to the wheel. He poured himself into writing ambitious essays then couldn’t understand why they came back marked B or B+.

“Try less hard,” I suggested. “Just give them what they ask for.”

When had I arrived at that sort of advice?

“He’s taking a semester off to travel,”I explained to friends whose sons were working on MBAs or off digging wells in Africa. A couple of footloose months, I thought,and he’d be back in school,grinding out essays on medieval concepts of time and postcolonialism in Africa.

I knew how useless a B.A. in liberal arts had become. But the parent part of my brain had swollen to such unseemly proportions that I still believed university was the last good daycare, the safest channel to a secure future in our unravelling, unforgiving world.

Promise you’ll come back and finish your degree, we both argued, in our mild way.

He didn’t say no. But he’d wait ’til he got back to make up his mind.

I did what I could; I went down to Mountain Equipment Co-op and bought him a small, shiny camping stove. A shard of home. He reassured us that he would stay in touch, although not by cellphone. Historically, hobos didn’t have cellphones. He would email us from Internet cafés. Every village in Mexico has one, he said.

There were no fights about this, but then conflict has never been our forte. Brian’s family is British, and his mother’s mantra, to which I aspire, is “Never mind!” Casey has always been civil and tactful with us but firm, as if negotiating with slightly impaired, part-time employees.

So off he went, holding his brown cowboy hat with the curled-up brim—a gift from his gently departing first-year girlfriend. Lindsay was doing an exchange semester abroad, in Hong Kong. Sensible girl!

I shouldn’t have been surprised by this turn of events. After all, Brian and I had both spent most of our twenties kicking around the world, ignoring the future. But when we left, our parents didn’t drive us to the airport, and in those days the generation gap worked like email in reverse: the point was not to stay in touch. The technology of the day reinforced the gap, since long-distance phone calls were expensive and the connections were poor; on a call from Burlington to Greece my father’s voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of the ocean (which it was). Airmail letters took forever. They sat scattered around Europe in American Express offices, waiting weeks for us to show up and claim them, if we didn’t change our itinerary. And back home, nobody opened the front door to check the mailbox 20 times a day.

Once we left, we were gone. And what our parents didn’t know (a great deal,which I will get to) couldn’t hurt them.

When we got back home, Brian settled back in at the computer, his mind already on other things. I drifted around, picking up odds and ends Casey had left behind in his old room. The McGill calendar, with tick marks beside strange courses—“Soil Science” or “The Physics of Music”—that he was hoping would be more “real” than history. I shoved the wooden case of crumpled tubes of acrylic paint back under his bed. He had the artist gene, all right (from his grandfather), but he probably wasn’t going to take that route. Music was more his thing, playing and writing it. Still, it wasn’t at all clear what path he was going to choose.

Which is normal, I thought, at 20.

I stowed the emergency-orange rain jacket I had bought him because he was always riding his bike home at 2 a.m. and kept his old address book, slightly curved from being carried in his back jeans pocket. Downstairs, his guitar amp (built decades earlier by my brother) was still set up in the dining room. I wound the power cable around the handle and lugged the TV-sized amp down into the basement. No more home recordings for now.

A few days later,we got our first message, a group email to family and friends:

Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2003 12:46:32 -0500

Subject: New Mexico

Hi there,

I am in Santa Fe and alive and well. Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico are beautiful! I spent my first night sleeping behind the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign beside the airport. Planes are loud. Vegas is bright all the time. Then I spent the whole next day trying to get out of town. Hitchhiking to Zion National Park was not successful. Word to the wise, do not try to hitch out of Vegas and into Utah—bad combination . . .

“Sounds like he’s doing all right,”Brian remarked.

“What are you saying?” I yelped, face in my hands. “Our son just spent the night sleeping on the ground, behind the ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ sign!”

“He’ll survive. Casey’s resourceful.”

The details came later. He had gotten off the plane thinking he could find a hostel or perhaps a grassy ditch to camp in. But Vegas is not a town of grassy ditches. He took buses all over, looking for the university (“students, they live cheaply”), then a hostel, then a cheap motel. But even the Super 8 on the outskirts of town cost an exorbitant $90. So, still wearing his overstuffed pack and cowboy hat, carrying his guitar, he made his way back to the airport, where he found a semi-secluded patch of grass behind the “Welcome” sign. He brushed his teeth and unrolled his sleeping bag. Not wanting to draw attention to himself, he decided not to put up his tent.

Desert nights, he discovered, can be surprisingly cold. In the morning, he made his way to the outskirts of the city, where he stood by the side of the road for five hours without getting a ride. Then he went back into town and bought a bus ticket to Santa Fe.

Just when you think your job as a mother is on the wane, the circuits all light up again.

In second year, before he dropped out, Casey had moved into an apartment with four roommates, a vast, Montreal-sized flat around the corner from the bagel shop on St. Viateur. It was sunny, with an old porcelain kitchen sink that hit you mid-thigh and a back balcony full of drying laundry and bicycles. The smell of grilled lamb and oregano from the Greek restaurant around the corner drifted in the windows. The apartment was a block away from the bohemian scene on the patio of the Club Social and across the street from a crepe shop where one of his roommates worked, pouring batter onto a grill the size of a record turntable. Ground Zero in Mile End,maybe the coolest intersection in North America for someone his age (or so it seemed to me). But he had decided that he would rather fly to the southwestern States in the dying days of that empire, to stand in the middle of the desert with this thumb out.

Did we play too much Dylan? Was it the cover of Bringing It All Back Home staring out at the three of us, that woman in the red dress? Even though we didn’t mythologize the past, our cultural debris was still lying around, and Casey seemed to have inherited some of our creaky old cynicism about “the system.”Careers were for squares. He had no time for the go-getters, the ones climbing the ladder. He was an outlaw; he would make his own way.

Wrong era, I felt like telling him. That romance is over. Even the phrase “dropping out” had been our idea, back when not working was the most ambitious thing you could do. In 1969 spending time in Tangiers was tantamount to getting an MBA. We did finish our degrees, but school was a relatively carefree experience, not the angsty job-grooming factory it has since become. The culturally approved thing for someone growing up then was to get as far from family as possible and to inhale the world.

And that was how we spent the next 10 years or so, fomenting revolution and playing in a band (Brian) or travelling, falling in love, and occasionally writing (me). Postponing adulthood, certainly. Alarming our families.

In many ways,we had simply conformed to the times. But it was obvious from our photo albums and our modest capital assets— we were in our thirties before we could commit to buying a couch, let alone a house—that we had valued freedom and adventure over careers and financial security. Because when we were growing up, that luxurious range of options still existed.

Now, our desire to reinvent the world has dwindled for many of us to a spirited defence of our right to unpasteurized cheese. But a familiar flame of indignation burned on in Casey. In school he was impatient just reading “one guy’s version of what happened in the past”; he wanted to get out into the world, to see and feel it for himself.

I saw his point. I had done the same thing, after all. But I also didn’t want him to lose his place in the fearful queue of training and competition that had become his culture.

My parents were the first generation in their modest prairie families to go to university, in Saskatoon. Education meant a great deal to them, but they didn’t pressure me to go to college. I could always work as a secretary. Or I could teach. (I was 40 before she threw out my old high-school textbooks, imagining they might come in handy the day I came to my senses and enrolled in teachers’ college.) University was more of a finishing-school, where girls went to get a smattering of knowledge while meeting “husband material.” My father encouraged my “flair for words”urging me to “write something funny for Reader’s Digest” (which I have only recently accomplished). So I ambled my way through an English degree, which suited me fine.

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.