Upon my release from rehab in St. Helena, I had conquered my involuntary weeping, but I was still unenthusiastic about being alive. I knew I had to stay alive because of my daughters, but the important thing was to want to be alive. In the service of that, I decided to proceed with the plan Cynthia and I had made earlier.
We had decided that upon my return from Sarajevo, we would take a long tour of the north country with my daughters. We were going to attend a Horner family reunion in Alberta and then embark on the Inside Passage by riding the ferries of the Alaska Marine Highway System so we could follow the Chilkoot Trail to the north slope of Alaska. I decided, and Elaine was incredibly brave in allowing me to do this, that I would now take that trip myself with Leah, Anna, and Amelia, who were then twelve, ten, and eight years old.
I went to Pinedale and threw them all into the back of the family Suburban and headed north. We had so many adventures on that trip that it probably merits a book of its own. We experienced such beauty, such peril, and such crushing boredom that by the time we started south from Fairbanks, I wanted to be alive. I did not have to be alive. I wanted to be alive because of my daughters, the Barlow-ettes.
The four of us had so many conversations, many of which are still under way, as we bumped across hundreds of miles of scrawny pine tundra. After a while, they even quit asking, “Are we there yet?” Because there was no there there.
Moreover, I made several extraordinary realizations about child-rearing. One of them was based on a phrase I’d once heard that was attributed to Dr. Benjamin Spock: “All children are lawyers.” It certainly became clear to me that much of the trouble erupting from the rear of the Suburban was actually an attempt to litigate. What my daughters wanted was rendered judgment from me, the Supreme Court. Like the Supreme Court, I realized I did not have to hear the case. I could simply refuse to hear it. For several days, they thought this was unimaginably cruel, but then the level of attempted litigation decreased dramatically.
The other thing I discovered was the art of cooperating with the enemy. In this case, the enemy was whining. After we had traversed several hundred miles of scrawny pine tundra, I could hear the subtones of a whine developing among them. And so I would stop the car and say, “Okay. It is time for a five-minute whine. Everybody out. All of you get out of the car.”
We would then all whine about how ugly the countryside was and how long the trip was taking and how stupid we all were to have ever done this in the first place. We rarely needed the whole five minutes. We came back down the Inside Passage as a different familial unit than we’d been going up it.
We stopped at Cynthia’s parents’ house in Nanaimo and formed such a bond with her mother and father that they said if anything ever happened to Elaine and me, they would be happy to raise the Barlow-ettes.
After taking my daughters back to Pinedale in time for school, I then resumed my life on the road, flying and speaking and speaking and flying.