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.
AT THE FARO AIRPORT, I step out into the soft, bright early morning air,where Brenda, the agent I had found online, is waiting for me. She’s my age, short and robust. A few years ago, fed up with the winters in Dorset, she moved to a village near Alte, where she lives alone with her corgis in a renovated church.
Hmm. Is this my new template? Other women I know are heading off to treks in Bhutan or ashrams in India. Instead I’m going to drive a rental car around a place I’ve already been, famous for olives and unbearably sad music, while I try not to worry about my son.
I grip the wheel of my navy blue Corsa and follow Brenda’s SUV along the expressways and roundabouts of Faro as the roads circle, ascend, narrow, and then deteriorate. My eyes want to shut; they think it should be night. We climb away from the coast with its high-rises and golf courses into the sparsely populated hills— dry, brown, rugged mountains, worn down like molars, domesticated by centuries of farming. Not Canada, raw and unauthored.
As we drive north, I think about the turn life had taken on my first