And then there was the business of trying to get some distance on what was unfolding day by day: almost impossible. As Joan Didion has said, a writer always betrays her subjects, sooner or later. This has nothing to do with whether the portrait is loving or critical; it’s the act of putting someone on the page that feels mildly, inescapably treacherous. For me the writing itself was an act of separation that I wasn’t prepared for. But my son was a step ahead of me in that department.
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,