KATRINA HEADED OFF TO Williams College not long after we got home. There has been no recurrence of the leishmaniasis. The FDA has now approved the treatment she received in Germany for use in the United States. Her absence felt familiar, even as we missed her. For her, the trip offered the independence she was craving. I would like to think—though I’m sure she would deny it—that we imbued her with some of her sense of adventure. She opted to ride her bicycle to college: a two-day, one-hundred-and-twenty-mile journey. We drove separately with her belongings.
Sophie put VLACS behind her (forever, I hope) and returned to Hanover High School for her senior year. She was a much, much more serious student. It is hard to know if that had anything to do with the trip, or if it was just maturity taking its course. She became a teaching assistant for a calculus class, which, given our battles over pre-calculus, was like a longtime prison inmate becoming a warden. She was accepted at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, where she is captain of the varsity volleyball team. This was the college that she discovered while hanging out in our hotel room in Hobart, Tasmania. She is working so hard that she is on pace to graduate in three years—in large part because of extra online courses she has taken.
CJ is in high school. The last time we were in New York City, he set out alone in the morning with twenty dollars in search of good Mexican food and came back five hours later. He talks about taking a gap year to go to Zanzibar to become a dive instructor with Spanish Dancer Divers. He does not eat red meat unless it was grass-fed and raised locally. He persuaded us to begin composting. He still ogles fancy cars, but of late Teslas get him most excited.
Leah went back to teaching for a year and then became an elementary school principal, a job in which she spends her days making the buses run on time, literally and figuratively. She envelops small children with love while dealing with one crisis after another, from the predawn hour when teachers begin calling in sick until late afternoon when the last child has been delivered safely home. Her school is in a rural area profoundly affected by the opioid epidemic. Many of the challenges facing even elementary school students are sad and serious, but many are fun and/or funny, like the spelling test a third-grade teacher brought worriedly to the principal. One of the spelling words was “trace.” A third-grader used it in the following sentence: “My dad left traces of pot on the table.” Principal Wheelan decided: (1) full credit for the spelling test; (2) keep an eye on the situation.
Leah loves the challenge, just as her Myers-Briggs profile would predict: “Main interest is in things that directly and visibly affect people’s lives.” Dwight Eisenhower would be proud.
I went back to teaching at Dartmouth. My first term began almost immediately. As the summer unfolded, I revisited my novel and shared it with a few people. My mother passed it along to a friend of hers who owns an independent bookstore—because that is what mothers do. The feedback was positive. To make a long story short, I really have become “an artist.” The Rationing was published by W. W. Norton in May 2019.
And then there is my niece Claire. Have I not mentioned Claire? She is the daughter of Jeff and Noel, who lived in our house while we were traveling. Claire decided that she really liked living in Hanover—so much so that she did not want to return home to Colorado to finish high school. After extensive discussions and negotiations, Claire ended up living with us in Hanover for two years so she could finish high school here. Yes, it is ironic: after all my kvetching around the world about the teenage brain, we ended up with another teenager. One thing that influenced Leah and me in making this decision is something we observed while traveling: Extended family tends to play a more important role in many of the countries we visited than it does in America. In India or Tanzania, there would be nothing unusual about raising a niece or nephew for a couple of years. So that is what we did. I bet you did not see that coming back in Chapter Three. Neither did we.
As for the other characters who joined us along the way, Kati, hero of the leishmaniasis challenge, is finishing her degree in biology in Munich. She is considering a graduate program that would combine a medical degree and a Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology. My niece Tess, CJ’s chatter buddy, returned to her family in Boulder and has been urging them to visit exotic places ever since. Isabel attends Fordham University in New York City and has plans to travel after graduation. She is just one borough away from where Sophie is in school, and they often meet for brunch on the weekends.
At some point, I started to read the New York Times travel section again. There are so many cool places in the world that we still have not visited. How is it that we have never been to Morocco? Or to the Dalmatian coast? Or to North Korea? The wanderlust never goes away. Sometimes when several of us are in the kitchen, we stop what we are doing and watch the electronic picture frame as it cycles randomly through the photos. I took most of the photos, so I often have an emotional reaction. I can remember seeing the image through the viewfinder of the camera. One of us will usually identify the picture: “That was the amusement park in Vienna,” or “That was at lunch after Katrina and I went to the medical clinic in Hanoi.”
Often I think to myself, Wow, we did that.
We came, we saw, we left.
ILLUSTRATIONS INSERT
Charlie, official trip photographer.
Leah and Charlie in Patagonia.
Katrina, making her views clear.
Sophie in Golden Bay, New Zealand.
CJ outside the Spanish Dancer Divers’ hut in Zanzibar.
Katrina, CJ, and Sophie at the end of a short hike in New Zealand.
Road trip in New Zealand.
Geared up for the night dive on the Great Barrier Reef.
The vast openness of the Bolivian salt flats made for interesting images.
Charlie’s idea for a photo in the Bolivian salt flats.
The “make it look like an album cover” photo on the road to Queenstown.
Selfie at Machu Picchu.
CJ’s selfie with a lion.
A navigational dispute underwater. Only later would we realize that neither Leah nor Charlie could read the compass without glasses.
Sophie and friends at Janet’s house in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
The trampoline on Janet’s sweeping back lawn in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with the Indian Ocean in the background.
CJ welcomes a cold morning in Bhutan.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS WAS A HARDER BOOK to write than I had expected, in part because of the challenge of distilling nine months of experiences into a few hundred pages. It feels almost unfair that I have such good editors, Drake McFeely and Bee Holekamp. They were the miracle workers who helped me sort through the raw material to focus on the events and moments and stories that brought the whole adventure to life. The readers should thank you, and I do, too.
Of course, there would have been no book without Team Wheelan. Thanks to each of you for making this journey, and then thanks again for having the self-confidence and forbearance to allow me to tell our story.
Tina Bennett enabled me to do what I love to do, which is write about interesting things. She made this book possible, and then when I returned and announced that I had written a novel during our travels, she brought that book to life, too.
Thanks to so many people around the world who helped to make our experience what it was. Some of those wonderful people appear in the book, such as Kevin and Maria and the Shankardass family, but many do not. I mention in the text that the world is still an interesting place. I would add here that the world is also a kind place (with some notably sad exceptions). The trip was delightful in large part because so many of the people we encountered were interesting, friendly, welcoming, curious, and humane.
I owe a debt to Dartmouth College, and the Rockefeller Center in particular, for giving me the time to make the trip while still having a job—a home, really—to return to.
And although I have already thanked Leah as a member of Team Wheelan, I would like t
o thank her separately for being the greatest life partner one could imagine.
Don’t miss Charles Wheelan’s The Rationing charleswheelan.com
A prescient novel about a pandemic, written before the COVID pandemic: Political backstabbing, rank hypocrisy, and dastardly deception reign in this delightfully entertaining political satire, sure to lift one’s spirits far above the national stage.
“A brilliant and bold novel. Get ready for twists and turns, exploring life and death decisions, and the intrigue, good and bad, of political leadership as the country searches to solve a pathogen crisis. This is an exciting and exhilarating read, and provides some needed lessons for our country today.”—Matthew Dowd, chief political analyst, ABC News
ALSO BY CHARLES WHEELAN
The Rationing: A Novel
Naked Money: A Revealing Look at Our Financial System
The Centrist Manifesto
Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data
10 ½ Things No Commencement Speaker Has Ever Said
Revealing Chicago: An Aerial Portrait (with Terry Evans)
Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science
Copyright © 2021 by Charles Wheelan
All rights reserved
First Edition
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at [email protected] or 800-233-4830
Production manager: Julia Druskin
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Wheelan, Charles J., author.
Title: We came, we saw, we left : a family gap year / Charles Wheelan.
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020035520 | ISBN 9780393633955 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780393633962 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Wheelan, Charles J.—Travel. | Parent and teenager. | Voyages and travels.
Classification: LCC G465 .W465 2021 | DDC 910.4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035520
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS
We Came, We Saw, We Left Page 29
