Home Free Read Online Free PDF Page A

“system” and live in the wild was appealing but he was also naïve and underestimated the risks involved. He left behind his family as well as the friends he had made on the road to spend the winter alone, in a remote part of Alaska. He set up camp in an abandoned school bus. There, just as he came to realize that he missed people and wanted to rejoin society, he made one small mistake. He ate the wrong plant, got sick, and slowly died.
    It’s a fine movie, but I wish I hadn’t seen it. Especially the scenes where an old guy befriends the hero just before he embarks on his wilderness sojourn. The old man offers to adopt him as his son. The scene where this loving elder drops him off and watches him head off into the bush in borrowed boots is the point where rite of passage turns into youthful folly.
    And the young still need us.
    By heading down into the American desert on his own, my son had opted for the classic liminal elements of solitude and independence, along with a measure of danger and discomfort. But there was no wider clan to protect and observe him, or to welcome him back into the fold. Well, there was his tiny family, loving, WASPy, unclannish clan that we are. And there were one or two family friends along his route to visit with and cook him dinner. But no older figures shadowing him into the future. His father was back home, assuming that all would be well with his wandering son— because he had wandered too as a young man, taken risks, and survived. Then there was me, firing off emails to him about level 60 sunscreen and highway bandits. Useful advice. But for a 20-year-old, useful advice from your mother is the last thing you want.
    The other missing component of his trip was the survival of ancestral ground and an intact culture of his own. He was travelling in pre-Obama America, a country that had been in deep decay for some time. The Wild West that Casey had envisioned, that Chuck Berry sang about, Dylan’s fabled Highway 61 or the small towns that Springsteen mythologizes,were not so easy to locate.
    â€œI now realize that in America, you’re nobody if you don’t have a car,” he emailed us one day. “When I stand on the on-ramp, people throw $2 bills at me out of the car windows as they go by. And not in a friendly way.”
    We don’t seem to know what to do with our boys. They get wasted, and we waste them. It’s hard to pay attention to young men in ways that take them seriously, physically challenge them, and delight in their boyness. Everything boyish—wildness, exuberance, defiance, frail pride, and restlessness—becomes a potential deficit in our eyes. We overparent them and underestimate them, and our anxiety only registers as a lack of faith.
    So boys improvise. They come together in skateboard parks or hockey rinks, dance clubs, abandoned buildings,underpasses. They walk over fiery coals of their own invention. They burn. We are clumsy in our guidance. And some of the lost ones come back to us stronger than the lucky, rare ones who glide through young manhood unscathed.
    It was now March, the worst month of all if you live in Toronto. Winter recedes like the tide going out on a beach, revealing all the debris and orphaned bits that the snow has covered up. The wind has a bitter edge.
    Another email arrived from Casey in southern Mexico, advising us not to eat an entire papaya at one sitting. “I don’t know why, but it is a bad feeling,” he reported. He had had a music session with some locals who were passing around a guitar.
    â€œ They keep asking me to play Besame Mucho , but that never works. But I get a very warm reception for Johnny Cash and Janis Joplin. And it’s true, everyone loves the Beet-les. They have this great chocolate drink here, called atole. . . .”
    I had forgotten that part: it’s fun to be footloose in another country. Perhaps what I needed was a rite of passage of my own— a