We Came, We Saw, We Left

by Charles Wheelan

  A couple of things were clear. First, we really, really liked Colombia. There was a sense that the people had wrestled their country away from the dark side and did not want to give it back. Second, we had an interesting day, all things considered. Everyone was in a strikingly good mood over dinner, Katrina’s protestations over my choice of words notwithstanding. We had learned a lot about Medellín. We were pleasantly surprised by our encounters with law enforcement. We had confronted a small obstacle and pushed through. No one had panicked. Neither Leah nor I had said anything regrettable while the children were missing. And now we were discussing all this over a nice meal (with margaritas) in a vibrant part of the city.

  Maybe we would be able to pull off this crazy adventure travel thing after all.

  Chapter 2

  What Were We Thinking?

  The family gap year would be an experience that we would share forever—like one of those family road trips, only much longer and with more bugs.

  IF OUR FAMILY GAP YEAR were portrayed in a Hollywood film, I would hit my boss with a stapler, storm out of the office, take stock of my vapid life, and then head home, where I would tell my stunned wife and children: “Pack up. We’re going around the world!”

  Only the midlife part is correct. There was nothing impulsive about the trip, nor was there an eagerness to escape. For the record, my boss is a very kind man. In fact, one of the most appealing parts of the “gap year” plan was that we would be able to return to the life that we left. We were not looking for an escape, only a breather.

  That notion of an extended family adventure had begun many years earlier as a half-baked idea, a kind of “what if?” I am the family brainstormer, the one who offers a fusillade of possibilities. Leah, the planner, curates the ideas with potential, steering them to a better place. There was, for example, the time I proposed that we buy a house on an island in a lake in New Hampshire. We were still living in Chicago at the time; a friend told us about the property for sale, which was the only dwelling on the island. “How cool would it be to have our own island?” I declared.

  “How would we get to the house?” Leah asked without judgment.

  “By boat,” I said.

  “In the winter?”

  “We could snowshoe across the ice—or maybe we’d have a snowmobile.”

  “What if one of us fell through the ice?” Leah asked.

  “We would all wear survival suits, like the Alaska fishermen,” I explained.

  “Hmm,” Leah said. “What if you just wanted to go out for coffee?”

  Now I was stumped. I like to take short walks to get coffee when I need a break while working at home. As I pondered this dilemma, Leah offered a delicate redirect: “The house in New Hampshire sounds lovely. What if we bought something closer to town?” Three months later, we owned a small house (from which one can walk to several coffee shops) in the town of Hanover. We spent summers there for many years, renting the house out for the balance of the year. Eventually we moved to Hanover full-time. We do not own a boat or a snowmobile or survival suits. However, I feel compelled to point out our entire New Hampshire existence began with the house-on-the-island idea.

  The family gap year evolved in a similar manner. Over the years, many ideas sank—moving to India for a year, buying a farm in Tuscany, raising goats in the backyard—while the notion of traveling the world with the family kept bobbing to the surface. Every once in a while, over a glass of wine or a Sunday breakfast, Leah and I would mull over the logistics. Could five people really step away from complicated lives for nine months? During these fanciful discussions, the “how” was always subservient to the “why.” Before we loaned out the dogs, rented the house, and strapped on backpacks, we had to be committed to the journey. Why would two sane adults living comfortable lives want to travel for nine months in difficult places on a low budget, spending nearly twenty-four hours a day with three teenagers?

  For a lot of reasons.

  Because the world is an interesting place. I became “hooked on the world” in middle school. I was a suburban kid living in a nondescript subdivision in Northbrook, Illinois. You may have watched my adolescence in the movies. I attended the same high school as the late film director John Hughes: Glenbrook North. Many of my classmates were extras in Sixteen Candles. The school building was the setting for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And I served one day of suspension in the Breakfast Club, albeit on a school day rather than on a Saturday.

  Occasionally our family would go into “the city” (Chicago), which was foreign and exciting and mildly scary. My mother had been to Europe once; my father had never been outside of North America. In eighth grade, my Spanish teacher organized the ultimate learning adventure: a class trip to Cuernavaca, Mexico. In hindsight, I am amazed she had the audacity to take a group of middle school students to a developing country, but I am delighted that she did. We stayed with families and visited the usual tourist spots, such as the Aztec pyramids. What I remember most, however, was just walking around and experiencing a place that was radically different from everything I knew. The electricity would go out for long stretches; no one who lived in Cuernavaca seemed even mildly surprised by this. For me, the suburban middle school kid, the notion of regular power blackouts was mind-blowing, as was the food (not like Mexican food at home), the poverty, the vitality, and the sheer excitement of just walking around. I wanted more of it—“it” being the world.

  In fact, I was so hooked on the idea of traveling the world that senior year in high school I floated the idea of taking a year off to travel before going to college. I formulated a serious plan before I went public with it: I would work after graduation, earn enough money to travel someplace interesting for a long stretch, and start college the following year. No one used the term “gap year” back then, but that is what I was trying to do. My parents thought this was an insane idea, as did my high school principal and the college counselor. They were all risk-averse in a suburban kind of way. The powers that be were convinced that one year of international travel would leave me with long hair, multiple body piercings, and a permanent lack of interest in employment or college.

  I buckled. My high school principal did give me one piece of meaningful advice as he discouraged the gap year. “Travel after college,” he told me. “You’ll get more out of it.” He was right. On the other hand, if I had traveled during a gap year, I would have arrived at college as a more serious student. I applied to Dartmouth College because of its extensive array of foreign study programs. My sophomore year I studied abroad in France and lived with a local family. France was lovely; my French family was charming. But what really rocked my world was the Eurail Pass: a fixed-price ticket that allowed unlimited rail travel anywhere in Europe for two months. Any train, any time, any place. I remember staring up at the departure board in the Austerlitz Station in Paris. That was back when the signs were still mechanical, not digital, and every few seconds there would be a whirring and clicking as some new destination was posted: Madrid, Vienna, Rome, Copenhagen. I would think, I can get on any of those trains.

  During my junior year at Dartmouth, I arranged an internship at an English-language newspaper in Kuwait. This was before the Iraqi invasion and the first Gulf War. At the time, most Americans, including my parents, would struggle to find Kuwait on a map. (To be fair, it is a very small country.) I called home to tell my parents that I would be going to Kuwait for the summer. They were excited that I had a job, and even more excited that I would be paying for my airline ticket by selling the motorcycle I had inadvisably bought the previous summer. Unfortunately, their enthusiasm waned dramatically when they hung up the phone and opened the family atlas. Kuwait is a tiny country on the Persian Gulf near the border between Iraq and Iran, two countries that were at war at the time. The pay phone in the hallway of my dormitory rang several hours later; someone roused me from my room to let me know that my parents were on the line. “Do you know where Kuwait is!” my mother exclaimed.

&nbs
p; I did.

  In 1987, Kuwait was as closed and conservative as Saudi Arabia. In many ways, the culture was alien: men in flowing white robes; a monotonous sandy landscape that was sometimes painted green to give the illusion of vegetation; the call to prayer that rang out five times a day; the Indian and Pakistani and Filipino men and women who would leave their families for years at a time to live in Kuwait while sending money home. When I went to the movies at the cinema near my apartment in Kuwait City, I was seated in the section designated for single men. I never spoke to a Kuwaiti woman during my ten weeks in the country. I met expatriate women who had come to Kuwait for various reasons but not one native Kuwaiti woman, married or single.

  The Kuwaiti royal family ran the country with a firm hand. Autocracy was new to my American sensibilities. There was a government censor with an office in our building. One of my jobs was to show him photos for approval before we could run them in the newspaper. The censor was a friendly enough guy, though he spoke no English and I spoke no Arabic, so most of our interactions were done via pantomime. Every picture of a woman, for example, had to have her arms and legs covered. This presented a curious challenge when it came to women’s fashion. Kuwaiti citizens (as opposed to the many foreigners imported to run the country) are rich and fashionable. What is a conservative newspaper to do when the fall fashion photos that come over the Reuters wire show bare legs, arms, shoulders, and backs? I was the solution. One of my jobs was to use a black felt-tip pen to lengthen skirts and add sleeves—Christian Lacroix, as interpreted by Charles Wheelan with a Sharpie.

  Much like that middle school trip to Mexico, the Kuwait experience inflamed my interest in exploring the globe. After working a late shift at the newspaper, I would return home to my apartment and read into the morning hours, sometimes until sunrise, about other fascinating places: Nepal, Tibet, Burma, the South Pacific. One of my favorite books was a volume of Somerset Maugham short stories set in exotic locales at the height of the British Empire. I wanted to go to those places. I was learning that interesting travel does not sate the urge to explore; it feeds it. This is true even at age fifty.

  Because Leah and I had done a global gap year once before, and we wanted to do it again. Leah and I met during freshman orientation at Dartmouth. We were assigned to do the “ice breaker” exercise with one another. This involved interviewing each other—two nervous students from different parts of the country—and then reporting back to the group. (“Leah is from Boulder, Colorado. She went to a public high school. She has two brothers and a sister . . .”) The ice-breaking exercise went very well, though we did not begin formally dating until senior year. By then, we shared a vision for traveling after graduation. While I spent the summer in Kuwait, Leah had bicycled from Mexico to Canada, mostly along California Route 1.* She and her fellow riders made the eighteen-hundred-mile journey in about six weeks, camping along the way. I had found a fellow adventurer.

  Leah and I recognized that the year after graduation presented a unique opportunity for a long spell of travel. Why not begin work a year later? We made a plan that would enable us to pay for the trip ourselves. I was lucky enough to graduate from college without debt. Leah had major student loans, so we constructed a budget in which she would prepay them for nine months. Our plan was to live at home or some other subsidized location after graduation, work multiple jobs, and then, when we had enough cash for a global adventure, fly west. Yet, as graduation approached, we were feeling the pressure that comes when one tries to run against the herd, just as I had when I tried to take a gap year after high school. Our friends were hustling to get corporate jobs. My parents were eager for me to become employed.

  Curiously, many of our Dartmouth classmates openly discouraged our travel plan, in part because the campus was awash with groupthink regarding corporate recruiting. As graduation approached, even Leah began to waffle. She was offered a job by a prestigious consulting firm. She accepted the offer contingent on the firm deferring her start date for a year. This was a more modest request than it may appear. The firm hired a large batch of college graduates every year; there was no logical reason why she could not start work with the next cohort, just like deferring college admission. Alas, the firm felt otherwise and issued her an ultimatum: Start the job this year or there will be no job. I, on the other hand, had no employment offers. Much to my parents’ horror, I had lofty plans to become a writer after our travels.†

  Word got around campus that Leah was considering walking away from an attractive consulting job in order to backpack around the world with me. At one point during this stretch, a mutual friend walked up to her in a fraternity basement and said, “I heard you’re being stupid.” I could feel it happening again: risk aversion and conformity conspiring to foil my global travel plans. But this time there would be no buckling to convention. Leah turned down the job offer. Or, more accurately, she called the firm’s bluff. Once she proved that she was willing to get on a plane rather than take the job, the company backed down and allowed her to start with the next year’s hires. Not so stupid after all.

  We worked jobs after graduation that allowed us to stockpile cash. Leah waitressed at a country club in Nantucket and lived rent-free in a bunkhouse on the grounds. I moved home with my parents. During the week, I worked at a law firm putting thousands of documents in chronological order. On the weekends, I caddied. At night (and sometimes during the day at work, admittedly), I studied the world atlas, planning our route. By October, we had saved enough cash for a ninemonth global adventure. It would prove to be one of the most formative experiences of our lives.

  After making our way west across the country, we tried to hitchhike from San Francisco to Los Angeles, where we would catch a flight to Tahiti. Our progress down the coast was slow—a series of short rides. Eventually we gave up and decided to take a bus the rest of the way to L.A. so we would not miss our flight. However, to take the bus, we needed to get one last ride from our hostel to the bus station. We went to the road and put our thumbs out. A kindly old man stopped and offered us a ride. He was at least seventy years old, smaller than both of us, and wearing a coat and tie. We told this elderly gentleman that we needed to go to the bus station. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To the bus station,” I repeated.

  “Yes, but where are you going on the bus?” he insisted. He had a faint European accent that I could not place.

  We explained that we had to get to the airport in Los Angeles by midnight in order to catch our flight. He looked at his watch and said, “I can take you to Los Angeles.” And he did. We stopped for frozen yogurt, and later to see the Pacific Ocean. This kind man, Alex, drove us for five hours and dropped us off at LAX. Obviously at some point I felt compelled to ask him why he was so generous with his time. A little background is necessary to understand his answer. I was twenty-two at the time. I was tan and fit, with a crew cut for ease of travel. Alex pointed at me and explained, “I was liberated from a concentration camp by American GIs. When you were standing there by the side of the road with your pack, you reminded me of a soldier. I feel I owe a debt of gratitude to the country, and this is how I repay it.”

  That was our first week on the road. There were nine months of adventures. Some were simple and beautiful, like riding bicycles through rural Indonesia and seeing the brilliant green terraced rice paddies that I had studied in a class on monsoon Asia. Some were more unexpected and tumultuous. We arrived in Lhasa, Tibet, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight to Dharamsala, India (where he still resides). Unbeknownst to us, the native Tibetans had seized on the occasion to launch a massive protest against China’s occupation of Tibet. In response, the Chinese government cracked down ruthlessly. We watched from the lobby of our hotel as Chinese tanks rolled through the street. This was the spring of 1989. Several months later, the Chinese authorities would order soldiers to attack demonstrators in Tiananmen Square and we would realize that what we saw in Tibet was a warm-up act.

>   By then we were in Eastern Europe, where 1989 was also an extraordinary year. We arrived in Budapest just as the government lifted its ban on the books that had been illegal since the Communists took power forty years earlier. We could literally see freedom breaking out in the form makeshift tables the booksellers had stacked with previously illicit titles: 1984, Animal Farm, and the like. I was left with a deeper, more visceral understanding of what life had been like behind the Iron Curtain, and also a great respect for the resiliency of the people now tossing those regimes aside.

  Our world travels were a fifth year of college education, at a much lower cost than a year of tuition. We would be different people if we had not taken that trip. Now that we had our own family, it felt like it was time to do it again.

  Because we needed/wanted a year to recharge and reflect. Leah and I had both been working very hard in different capacities for more than twenty-five years. We enjoyed our work, but we were tired. This was not retirement. If anything, it was the opposite: a chance to take a break so we would be reinvigorated to work for another twenty-five years. We are both privileged people in the sense that we do work that we find rewarding. Still, it is work. I had recently finished two books; those deadlines are always exhausting. I was also teaching classes and had launched a political organization, Unite America, designed to re-empower the political center. My to-do list never felt like it was getting any shorter.

  In Chicago, Leah had founded the aforementioned technology consulting company. As the CEO, she did not have much time off, regardless of what the personnel handbook said. Later, after selling the business, she began her second career as a math teacher. Her intent was to teach in a high-poverty neighborhood. She completed an alternative certification program and was hired to teach third grade in a school adjacent to one of Chicago’s notorious housing projects. The job arose suddenly because a third-grade teacher had quit three days into the school year. In the excitement of the moment, both Leah and I neglected to ask a crucial question: Why does an experienced teacher quit after three days?