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 surely 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.”