Читать книгу Home Free - Marni Jackson - Страница 12

Vertical Travel

IN 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.

Apart from encountering a good philosophy prof, there’s little that encourages or rewards a young man for actively questioning the world he is expected to join. If our sons are feeling lost, their searching and their doubts alarm us. Nobody says to them,“Don’t worry. Confusion isn’t failure or weakness. This is part of it. Just sit with yourself for a while and learn.”We confuse liminal with limbo.

But before careers and family responsibilities come into the picture, there are a few undefined years of vulnerability that offer a chance to come to grips with who you are. Tough work at 23 or 53.

And with questing boys, things can also end badly. When I saw the movie Into the Wild, I was a wreck before the opening credits had even ended, for two reasons: Emile Hirsch bears a spooky resemblance to Casey in his high-haired period; and having read Jon Krakauer’s book, I knew the outcome of this particular rite of passage. The main character’s desire to cut loose from school and family, to experience the land, was so close to my son’s impulse to roam the American deserts. The hero’s attempt to shed the “system” and live in the wild was appealing but he was also naïve and underestimated the risks involved. He left behind his family as well as the friends he had made on the road to spend the winter alone, in a remote part of Alaska. He set up camp in an abandoned school bus. There, just as he came to realize that he missed people and wanted to rejoin society, he made one small mistake. He ate the wrong plant, got sick, and slowly died.

It’s a fine movie, but I wish I hadn’t seen it. Especially the scenes where an old guy befriends the hero just before he embarks on his wilderness sojourn. The old man offers to adopt him as his son. The scene where this loving elder drops him off and watches him head off into the bush in borrowed boots is the point where rite of passage turns into youthful folly.

And the young still need us.

By heading down into the American desert on his own, my son had opted for the classic liminal elements of solitude and independence, along with a measure of danger and discomfort. But there was no wider clan to protect and observe him, or to welcome him back into the fold. Well, there was his tiny family, loving, WASPy, unclannish clan that we are. And there were one or two family friends along his route to visit with and cook him dinner. But no older figures shadowing him into the future. His father was back home, assuming that all would be well with his wandering son— because he had wandered too as a young man, taken risks, and survived. Then there was me, firing off emails to him about level 60 sunscreen and highway bandits. Useful advice. But for a 20-year-old, useful advice from your mother is the last thing you want.

The other missing component of his trip was the survival of ancestral ground and an intact culture of his own. He was travelling in pre-Obama America, a country that had been in deep decay for some time. The Wild West that Casey had envisioned, that Chuck Berry sang about, Dylan’s fabled Highway 61 or the small towns that Springsteen mythologizes,were not so easy to locate.

“I now realize that in America, you’re nobody if you don’t have a car,” he emailed us one day. “When I stand on the on-ramp, people throw $2 bills at me out of the car windows as they go by. And not in a friendly way.”

We don’t seem to know what to do with our boys. They get wasted, and we waste them. It’s hard to pay attention to young men in ways that take them seriously, physically challenge them, and delight in their boyness. Everything boyish—wildness, exuberance, defiance, frail pride, and restlessness—becomes a potential deficit in our eyes. We overparent them and underestimate them, and our anxiety only registers as a lack of faith.

So boys improvise. They come together in skateboard parks or hockey rinks, dance clubs, abandoned buildings,underpasses. They walk over fiery coals of their own invention. They burn. We are clumsy in our guidance. And some of the lost ones come back to us stronger than the lucky, rare ones who glide through young manhood unscathed.

It was now March, the worst month of all if you live in Toronto. Winter recedes like the tide going out on a beach, revealing all the debris and orphaned bits that the snow has covered up. The wind has a bitter edge.

Another email arrived from Casey in southern Mexico, advising us not to eat an entire papaya at one sitting. “I don’t know why, but it is a bad feeling,” he reported. He had had a music session with some locals who were passing around a guitar.

“They keep asking me to play Besame Mucho, but that never works. But I get a very warm reception for Johnny Cash and Janis Joplin. And it’s true, everyone loves the Beet-les. They have this great chocolate drink here, called atole. . . .”

I had forgotten that part: it’s fun to be footloose in another country. Perhaps what I needed was a rite of passage of my own— a trip out of my chronic state of motherhood and on to some fresher version of myself. Or back to a former one. I began looking into flights to some place warm. Apart from Mexico.

It turned out that the cheapest fares flew to the Algarve, in southern Portugal. This happened to be a country I travelled through in my twenties, on my own. There was a romance involved too, with someone I had met on the road. I still kept a stash of his letters in my office.

So when I came across a listing for a charter flight and an apartment in a mountain village not far from my old haunts, I booked them both. A solo trip might remind me of how normal and benign life on the road can be. At the very least, it might pry me off email.

Brian endorsed my getaway, a bit too enthusiastically I thought. Maybe we all needed a break from family.