I picked up a small knife and began to peel potatoes. Meanwhile, my father passed through the kitchen, cracking his knuckles in vexation and relief,working hard to forgive me.
When I reach the top of the hill above Alportel, the white house is still there, but it’s been turned into three lavish rental units. An English couple in their sixties is staying in one; when they see me peering through the slats of the gate, they graciously invite me in. The man has a long white beard, like a hobbit, and the woman is tiny, tanned to a walnut colour, and wearing a bikini. I tour the house,where the huge blackened hearth in the kitchen is the same as I remember. So is the feel of the undulating, rosy tiles underfoot. The courtyard where the lemon and almond trees used to grow is now occupied by a swimming pool. The ledge at the back of the wall has been removed.
They are friendly and offer me a cocktail, but I say I don’t want to drive the mountain roads after dark.
On my way back, I swirl into the parking lot of the Alte hotel and ding another car with my mirror. There’s no damage, just a scratch on mine I will have to pay for. I log onto the computer one last time and find a brief email from Casey. He’s taking a break in Puebla, he writes, and plans to meet up with two friends from Montreal who are biking their way down the Mexican coast. He’ll ride with them a while, then gradually make his way back north. His hard travels seem to be behind him for now.
I buy a can of silver spray paint in town, a challenge to my Portuguese vocabulary. It covers the scratch on the mirror perfectly. Then I splurge on a phone call home to ask Brian to meet my flight. The sound of his voice steadies me. This is not a custom of ours, to pick each other up at the airport. We are very independent in our habits. In some ways, even after all these years we’re still learning how to be a couple.
His Version
AMONTH OR TWO after I got back to Toronto, Casey flew home from Las Vegas with his bike in a box. His hair was wild and his eyes were very blue. Whiffs of the ocean and the desert came off him. Somewhere on the road, in a pay phone, he had applied and been accepted for a job at a summer camp in Maine, leading canoe trips. More outside. More adventure.
And he thought he might go back to university in the fall after all. Maybe change his minor to environmental studies, cut back his course load a little.
That sounds good to us,we said.
There were a few weeks left before he had to be in Maine, so he stayed with us. Sometimes he would stay out with friends ’til 3 or 4 a.m., keeping Montreal hours, then biking home. I am a light sleeper. On those nights, I fell into a certain routine.
We go to bed shortly after midnight as usual. Then, around two,my eyes pop open. I can tell by the slant of the light in the hall that his bedroom door is still open. Not home yet. Never mind! Think of all the nights he’s been somewhere else, in Tucson or Tijuana or Montreal and you’re not around to worry about him showing up, I chastise myself. He’s in his twenties now, I remind myself, not a little boy lost in the mall; he could be driving a tank in Afghanistan. God, imagine that. (I do.)
Brian sleeps on, unperturbed, beside me. Then I think about a friend of ours, a psychotherapist with a son Casey’s age still living at home; she told me that she can’t help it, she stays awake ’til he gets home too. It’s like we’re soldiers with post-traumatic syndrome, who get triggered by harmless but familiar situations.
Three a.m. Was he wearing his helmet? I feel ridiculous, mothering away in the dark, for no good reason. Should I avail myself of the little blue crumbs of Ativan in the drawer by the bed? No, let’s wait a bit. Maybe the paperman will drive by earlier than usual— his muffler is shot so I know that sound too—and I can read the Globe.
I don’t think I have the telephone numbers of any of his Toronto friends. Alex, Tom, and Rhys. Rhys who?
Then I hear the chunnng of the wrought-iron fence closing and the front door unclasping. The delicate tick of the road bike being wheeled in. The fridge door opens, and closes, followed by his cautious steps on the stairs, adult and thoughtful.
The hall light goes off.
Now I can sleep.
Two years after our simultaneous journeys, I began to put together some notes for this book. But the chronology of events had faded, so I asked Casey to map out his itinerary for me. Also, had he thought more about why he wanted to take off and travel in the first place?
This is part of what he wrote back:
“Hitting the road was a bit of a shot in the dark. I knew I wanted a change and a new experience, but I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Part of it was a rejection of ‘the establishment,’ whatever that was. I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder about schooling and jobs and institutions. So I decided to get away and do something that wasn’t tied to any of these things. The freedom was exhilarating. Every bus stop and overpass and skyline seemed unbelievably real and vivid.
“One thing I noticed is that the farther from home you get, the more your differences stick out. I was a bit of an odd character in New Mexico but I really stuck out in Guatemala. I realized I would always be having the experience of a gringo, no matter how far I travelled. I began to notice how I must have appeared to people in the middle of their own regular lives. I was a dirty, aimless white kid hundreds of miles away from his family and friends. I was going nowhere in particular, for no apparent reason. In Mexico, especially, people often couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be away from their home and family.
“In Toronto, each adult person is, more or less, on their own. Not alone all the time, but when it comes down to the wire it’s sort of every man for himself. You go to school to succeed, and to make a life for yourself. People work at jobs, advance their careers, buy their own things, and support their own families. If you’re successful, it’s your achievement. If you fail, it’s your problem. The individual is the basic unit of social interaction. This puts a lot of pressure on the individual to succeed and to be an autonomous, fully functional member of society.
“In Latin America, from what I could see, the family was the basic unit of life, not the individual. People seemed to identify and understand themselves primarily according to their family, extended family, and community. It’s hard to say this and not sound clichéd, but family and community seemed to mean something totally different in Mexico than it did in my world.
“I don’t want to sound like a sociology textbook, so let me tell you why this is relevant to me. I was on a journey, spending time and money. I was choosing to go out into the world and find something. I was obviously doing something, but what the hell was it?
“First, I was getting away. I was striking out on my own and escaping my family. Why was I escaping my family? I don’t know. I have and had a great family, but for some reason I felt the need to get as far away from it as possible.
“Travelling was, in one sense, eye-opening, rewarding, and mind-expanding. But in another sense, it all led nowhere. It was a treadmill. Getting away gave me lots of perspective, but it didn’t leave me feeling like a well-defined individual. It was, sometimes, a little too much perspective. I was struck by how wonderful and different life could be but I didn’t return with anything substantial.
“I knew when I left that I was chasing after some kind of dream. My ideas, however, were hazy. I was looking for my own version of the American dream. Not the Star-Spangled Banner version though. I was looking to discover something that spoke to the reality of America,which I saw as being sort of fallen, desperate, excessive, and glorious. I wanted to experience America first-hand, as it really was. I thought of myself as walking in the footsteps of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Jack Kerouac—on the road.”
[So, I thought,my literary suspicions are confirmed. . . .]
“In a lot of ways, I was looking for glory. (This is stereotypical of young males everywhere, but for me it was true.) When I came home, I thought I would return with stories and a broader understanding of the world. I would never have admitted that I was looking for glory, but that was surel
y a large part of it.
“But I found that this kind of search eventually hits the wall. I saw all kinds of people, with all kinds of lives, and all kinds of stories, but whenever I’d stop to talk with someone, the question eventually came up—‘What is your story?’ They wondered what I was doing in their world, in their town. Did I have a wife or children? Where was my family? What mattered to me, and what was I doing so far from home?
“And that always left me in a funny position, because I wasn’t sure what my story was. I was part way through a history degree. I was from Toronto. My girlfriend had taken off to Hong Kong. My own world didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, so I was looking for that meaning somewhere else.
“It was like the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh,’which I studied in first year, where this prince or king goes off in search of the eternal sun, or something like that. He’s travelling with this half-man, half-animal guy named Enkidu. They end up finding what they’re searching for then lose it in a pond. They come back home empty-handed, and that’s that.
“The way I saw it, people all around me were taking rather pointless things very seriously. In university, for example, everyone took their marks and their future careers very seriously. But getting perfect marks and the perfect future didn’t appeal that much to me.
“My way of rebelling was to take something pointless seriously. That’s what I did with travelling. I took my aimlessness seriously.
“Although, I realize now that running off on my own into the great blue yonder was a typically North American thing to do. Individualism is a funny thing. As a frame of reference, it always makes you feel as if you’re being totally original, that you’re the first person ever to rebel and strike out on your own, to reject your past—when in fact, this is a terribly conventional thing to do.
“In North America, identity is not about belonging to something bigger than yourself, it’s about defining yourself in contrast to everyone else. It makes sense, then, that I set out to define myself against the world I came from.
“But I learned that it’s not so easy to be out on your own. It is exciting but it’s also limited and repetitive. I wanted to be part of the big wide world, but the world actually narrows when you’re on your own. It gets boring. It is also hard to have fun by yourself.
“At the end of my trip I decided that I wouldn’t travel on my own in the same way again.”
He left for the summer, before we had a chance to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. In a few weeks we got a postcard with an aerial shot of the camp, a cluster of almost invisible buildings surrounded by a swathe of forest and a large body of water. He had drawn an arrow, pointing to one red roof.
“Here I am.”
The Generation Gap vs.
The Friendly Parent
IT’S HARD to remember what long-distance communication was like for families in the 1960s and ’70s, and how this contributed to the gap between the values of my parents and the experimental lives of their wayward kids. My son and his friends travel the globe and never entirely leave home:we can see the set of their shoulders and monitor their haircuts on Skype; we go back and forth with them on Facebook, privy to every blip in their moods. If things go wrong,we’re there to cybernetically hold their hand. Family life goes on, attenuated, but still intimate. More intimate than it used to be.
Which is good. Right?
In the late 1960s, when we went travelling it was a dramatic rupture from the family. A little death. You left home one person and might very well come back as another. The young went away to “find themselves.” No one expected us to find ourselves inside the dimly lit cave of the family.
And nourishing the generation gap, staying out of touch, was easily achieved. Communication was rushed, sporadic, and superficial. Letters from home had to be sent well ahead of time, to a predetermined list of American Express offices along our route— if we stuck with our plans. There was no expectation of sharing our experiences on the road with our families. And in many cases (smoking opium and living in caves being two examples that spring to mind) our experiences weren’t of the sharing sort.
Not that drugs were to my taste; for the most part, they scared me. During university and my early twenties, I felt that my grip on my sanity,which I equated with my self-control, was tenuous at best, and drugs only made this worse. I was a bit afraid of losing my mind if I took acid or smoked too much dope. (This was a form of ambition, actually; one of the few adventurous options open to women in those days was to totally snap—to be Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath, brilliant and broken.)
I became adept at contact highs, however.
Communication with my family consisted of letters scribbled on thin blue sheets of airmail stationery. The post office sold these with the stamps already on; you filled one side with writing, then folded it into an envelope that slowly made its way, with its already stale news, to my parents,who anxiously awaited the arrival of the postman every morning, in case he brought news of my survival in unimaginable foreign lands.
In 1969,my family accepted the notion of a post-grad European trek, preferably with a Eurail Pass in hand. It counted as continuing education;we were “broadening”ourselves. But for them travel signified marble statues and historical ruins, not hitchhiking in strange cars and smoking dope in Amsterdam cafés.
That winter I was in Europe with my boyfriend, a tall poetry-writing lad from another nice family who would clearly protect me from bad men. In those days the hippie trail either led east from London to India, south to Ibiza off the coast of Spain or to Greece and the caves of Matala, which a feature in Life magazine had already made semi-famous. (Joni Mitchell arrived a month or two after we left and met the red-haired chef who inspired the song “Carey.”Several years later the bubonic plague broke out, and the idyll was over.)
After moving into a spacious cave with a view of the sea, I updated my family on our itinerary.
“The three of us are living in a small fishing village on the southern coast of Crete,” I wrote, having invented a chaperone-ish third party to offset the unavoidably domestic overtones of living as a couple in a cave. “This is a Greek archeological site,” I added (educational). “The cliffs have rows of man-made caves that date back to the Neolithic period,where travellers can stay for free”(frugality). “ We are staying in one of the larger caves. It’s very nice and has a door”(a tarpaulin). “The ocean is clean and perfect for swimming. The local fishermen sell fresh fish on the beach”(nutrition). “We’re getting a tan and enjoying a rest after being on the road all winter.”
Ah, the daughterly wiles of the young suburban hippie.
I doubt they imagined me hallucinating Jesus Christ on cough syrup (one of the preferred drugs at Matala was the cough medicine Romilar, a mix of speed and codeine). Although, I shouldn’t underestimate my mother’s lurid imagination about the bad things that might happen to me. She once warned me about a bacterial infection that you could catch from playing the bagpipes (not my instrument). And of course I wasn’t writing long anguished emails to them about my relationship, or my own Premarin-fuelled nuttiness. My mother worked hard to accept my adventures,having always been a freethinker and a science-minded rationalist. This was her brand of feminism, I think—a crisp lack of sentiment. Long before it became fashionable, her mantra was “it’s all chemistry” regarding addiction, dereliction, and sex offenders; for her it was all about the brain, and science has since caught up with her. Among other things, genes and chemistry explained homosexuality, which she accepted decades before the era of Gay Pride. After earning her degree in math and home ec (a combination that describes her well) she worked as a switchboard operator in Saskatoon. But in those early Depression days, couples were only allowed to hold down one job per household, and so when she married she had to stop working.
I just assumed the gap between my mother’s life and mine was unbridgeable. She had met my father when they were 13 and 14, and by their mid-twenties they had married and had their first child.
She dated a few others along the way and had the odd crush, she let me know, on other men, including her sister’s boyfriend. He was a dashing fighter pilot—are there any other kind?—named Ernie McNab,who once flew low over the university campus in his plane and waggled his wing tips at them.
But the concept of sleeping with different guys just because you were attracted to them was new to her, although it made sense, she thought, to try them out before you settle for one. As she used to mildly, somewhat admiringly muse, as I pursued the single life into my thirties,“Yes, you’ve had a lot of boyfriends.”
She never criticized me for not marrying (I recanted at the age of 50). But she worried that I would get hurt. Which, of course, I did. It became a bit of a pattern, in fact. I had talked myself out of wanting anything resembling “commitment,” but that turned out to eliminate too much.
Her reply to my letter describing our cave life was tactful and carefully upbeat. She caught me up on the family news—all good, in the style of the Christmas form letter, in which no doubt or heartache intrudes. Then she gave me a recipe for non-rising Irish soda bread, easily cooked in an iron frying pan on an open fire.
“Enjoy!” she gallantly signed off.
Earlier,while we were hitchhiking through Europe, she sent me letters with newspaper clippings about date-rape drugs. She warned me never to sit beside a stranger in a bar, who could jab a hypodermic needle into my thigh and cart me off as a sex slave.
Honestly, I thought,what was her problem?
The thing is, technically, she was right. Girls do fall into the hands of bad men. Women are sold as sex slaves. Date-rape drugs remain popular and effective. But at the time, I saw it as just another example of my mother’s xenophobic, unhip fears about “other people” (usually “swarthy”).
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