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.
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