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. O
r 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.
The Road
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 flight to Portugal, in 1971. I was 25.
We were in the “smoking section” of the plane, a conceptual corral marked by an imaginary line through the airspace of the cabin. I rummaged around for my blue packet of Drum tobacco and rolled him one too. We smoked our cigarettes and talked some more, about Neil Young, Günter Grass and Hermann Hesse. He seemed smart and charmingly jaded for his age, the same as mine. Then we went back to reading. Elbows touching.
I had spotted him in the check-in line; his hair was long and blond like mine, only more ragged, and he wore purple bellbottoms frayed at the hem, a white Indian shirt, and mirror aviator shades. The more dandyish style of the London hippie, with a whiff of old money too, perhaps. I was wearing a rose-coloured shirt from Biba’s and a patchwork vest I had made out of scraps of my old clothes, including the bad turquoise prom dress and the lining from my mother’s fur coat.
I contrived to sit beside him on the plane. It turned out that he had worked as a journalist in London, although he was already disenchanted with the scene.
“A seedy lot,when you get down to it,” he said. I didn’t mention that I earned my living, such as it was, writing book reviews for a newspaper.
When we landed in Lisbon, there was an awkward stretch as we left the plane and I didn’t know whether to walk beside him. Passengers rushing to make their connections jostled around us. As we came to a Y in the corridors he turned to me.
“You’re staying a while in Lisbon, then?”
“Yeah, at the hostel. I’ll check out the city for a few days, then probably hitchhike south to Sagres.”
He gestured up the other arm of the hall. “I’ve got to catch my flight, but if you end up in the area, come find me. I’m staying in the hills north of Faro, near São Brás de Alportel. Ask after the inglês in the village; anyone will tell you the way.”
I tried to memorize the name of the village, but the slurry Portuguese syllables were new to me.
He started walking down the corridor then turned.
“Alportel, not Albufeira,” he called back. “You don’t want to go there.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t!” I sang out. Then he was gone.
Chris was his name. Chris who?
Now the roads have turned into glossy cobblestones, and Brenda and I must drive slowly. The village of Santa Margarita turns out to be nothing more than a cluster of whitewashed houses and one church, perched on the saddle between a pair of mountains. We find the Rua Dos Corralloes (where there actually is a corral, with two grey horses). The lane narrows between high white walls until it is barely wider than my car mirrors, and we arrive at my casita for one.
Not bad, I think, for an Internet stab in the dark: a pretty white house like the others in the village,with dark green shutters and a scalloped, orange-tiled roof. The familiar rooster-shaped weather vane. Brenda hands over the keys and drives off—rather quickly, I notice, as if I might change my mind and race back to the airport. I suppose it is odd, a middle-aged woman on her own holed up here in March, before the blossoms are out. The place has the sequestered aspect I remember from my first time in the Algarve, with the houses facing inward to walled courtyards. As if winds and hot sun are bad spirits.
I stand in the driveway and look south over a gentle green slope of orchards, still tight-budded, across broad scrubby plains to a thin, silver line flashing on the horizon—the sea. The owners,who live in the apartment across the courtyard, don’t seem to be home. An invisible donkey brays, but otherwise it’s silent.
I jerk my suitcase wheels over the cobblestones and roll it into the bedroom, where the bed is high and puffy. A sizable brown spider scuttles out of the corner, and I accidentally roll over it. Oh dear, bad juju. I bounce on the bed. Here I am, apparently the only tourist on this mountain in southern Portugal, at the end of a cobbled road in off-season. It’s much cooler than I expected.
Car wheels crunch in the driveway, and I hurry out to meet the owners, a short, energetic East Indian woman and her partner, a shy New Zealander with a snaggle-toothed smile. Bob and Kathy. I like them immediately. They open the shutters and doors of my apartment to let the sun in. What about phones and computers, I quiz them. They do have a computer, but it is dial-up and unreliable. The nearest hotel, a half hour’s drive away, might have an Internet connection for guests, but they aren’t sure. As for telephones, there’s a kiosk in Alte, another half hour beyond the hotel.
“This is why people come here,”Kathy says, smiling, “to be out of touch.”
Interestingly, I have travelled to a corner of the developed world where communication with my family will be more problematic than from the smallest village of Mexico.
Now it’s my son’s turn to find me.
The next morning, I consider an exploratory tramp around the valley. Little birds are singing in the courtyard. Instead, I drive directly to the neo-Grecian, deserted-looking hotel on the road to Alte. A computer the size of a convection oven sits idle in a spare office, and for a Euro they let me use it. After many pings and gurgles the thing dredges up the Internet, like a squid in a fishing net. I log in and find a fresh email from Casey.
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2003 17:11:24 -0500
Subject: Hello from Chiapas
Yesterday, I played soccer with a bunch of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who referred to me as Canada. “Hey Canada, aqui, aqui!” And not one word about Jesus.
I am considering buying this Brooklyn dude’s bike and touring gear to bike around Guatemala and Chiapas, but we’ll see. I am in the mountain city of San Cristobal de las Casas now, which is full of tourists, but also is still great and old.
I have been asked to “Say hi to Comandante Marcos” from a guy in Salina Cruz, but I don’t plan on taking up arms. In any case, people love the revolution here. Next stop is either Guatemala or back up the Caribbean coast.
Great! Comandante Casey. What could be more appealing to a boy fed up with middle-class Toronto? I review the available options: either he will join the Zapatistas or he will bicycle alone through Guatemala, where the Canadian Embassy is now posting daily warnings for tourists.
His email goes on to say that he plans to meet up with the cycle dude after a few weeks, in Guatemala, near Lake Atitl
an. They’ll rendezvous in a town called Panajachel.
Panajachel! This time I know exactly what is in store for him, and at last I have a legitimate reason to worry. As it happens—I don’t think Casey even knows or remembers this about his mother— I rode a bicycle through Guatemala when I was in my twenties. And it was the road leading up from Panajachel that almost did me in. You climb 2,000 vertical feet on a grade that would cause a donkey to tip over. It’s stupid. But it’s just a vague plan, I thought, and maybe it will fall through. He doesn’t like to plan.
I leave the hotel and head back to my casita, where I pour a giant glass of Vinho Verde and ponder the ironies of my situation. Now I know—exactly—how my parents must have felt when I told them that I was going to bike my way down into South America with Tom (“The one with the motorcycle?” my father asked). I remember the day I took the commuter train home to Burlington to break the news.
It was late November. The first flakes of snow were whirling around in a dither, as if to say, “Where the hell are we—isn’t there some place nicer we can land?”The air had that stony cold that arrives just in time for the Santa Claus parade.
I stepped off the train to my father’s waiting car. The front seat of the big Buick was covered in a woolly sheepskin, and so was the steering wheel; the circulation in his fingers was poor, and his hands got cold. We drove home,where my mother was still in her blue bathrobe, sitting in the den. This was unheard of in the middle of the afternoon. She didn’t get up to greet me, she just swivelled in my direction, looking filmy-eyed and distant—the Valium look. She was sitting in her usual spot, an upholstered chair (everything in our house was upholstered, including the placemats) that rocked and pivoted. She liked to sit there and watch the kids walk home from my old school, a few blocks away.
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