me.
âMy way of rebelling was to take something pointless seriously. Thatâs what I did with travelling. I took my aimlessness seriously.
âAlthough, 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 youâre being totally original, that youâre the first person ever to rebel and strike out on your own, to reject your pastâwhen in fact, this is a terribly conventional thing to do.
âIn North America, identity is not about belonging to something bigger than yourself, itâs 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.
âBut I learned that itâs not so easy to be out on your own. It is exciting but itâs also limited and repetitive. I wanted to be part of the big wide world, but the world actually narrows when youâre on your own. It gets boring. It is also hard to have fun by yourself.
âAt the end of my trip I decided that I wouldnât travel on my own in the same way again.â
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.
âHere I am.â
The Generation Gap vs.
The Friendly Parent
I TâS HARD to remember what long-distance communication was like for families in the 1960s and â70s, and how this contributed to the gap between the values of my parents and the experimental lives of their wayward kids. My son and his friends travel the globe and never entirely leave home:we can see the set of their shoulders and monitor their haircuts on Skype; we go back and forth with them on Facebook, privy to every blip in their moods. If things go wrong,weâre there to cybernetically hold their hand. Family life goes on, attenuated, but still intimate. More intimate than it used to be.
Which is good. Right?
In the late 1960s, when we went travelling it was a dramatic rupture from the family. A little death. You left home one person and might very well come back as another. The young went away to âfind themselves.â No one expected us to find ourselves inside the dimly lit cave of the family.
And nourishing the generation gap, staying out of touch, was easily achieved. Communication was rushed, sporadic, and superficial. Letters from home had to be sent well ahead of time, to a predetermined list of American Express offices along our routeâ if we stuck with our plans. There was no expectation of sharing our experiences on the road with our families. And in many cases (smoking opium and living in caves being two examples that spring to mind) our experiences werenât of the sharing sort.
Not that drugs were to my taste; for the most part, they scared me. During university and my early twenties, I felt that my grip on my sanity,which I equated with my self-control , was tenuous at best, and drugs only made this worse. I was a bit afraid of losing my mind if I took acid or smoked too much dope. (This was a form of ambition, actually; one of the few adventurous options open to women in those days was to totally snapâto be Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath, brilliant and broken.)
I became adept at contact highs, however.
Communication with my family consisted of letters scribbled on thin blue sheets of airmail stationery. The post office sold these with the stamps already on; you filled one side with writing, then folded it into an envelope that slowly made its way, with its already stale news, to my parents,who anxiously awaited the arrival of the postman every morning, in case he brought news of my survival in unimaginable foreign lands.
In 1969,my
âMy way of rebelling was to take something pointless seriously. Thatâs what I did with travelling. I took my aimlessness seriously.
âAlthough, 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 youâre being totally original, that youâre the first person ever to rebel and strike out on your own, to reject your pastâwhen in fact, this is a terribly conventional thing to do.
âIn North America, identity is not about belonging to something bigger than yourself, itâs 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.
âBut I learned that itâs not so easy to be out on your own. It is exciting but itâs also limited and repetitive. I wanted to be part of the big wide world, but the world actually narrows when youâre on your own. It gets boring. It is also hard to have fun by yourself.
âAt the end of my trip I decided that I wouldnât travel on my own in the same way again.â
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.
âHere I am.â
The Generation Gap vs.
The Friendly Parent
I TâS HARD to remember what long-distance communication was like for families in the 1960s and â70s, and how this contributed to the gap between the values of my parents and the experimental lives of their wayward kids. My son and his friends travel the globe and never entirely leave home:we can see the set of their shoulders and monitor their haircuts on Skype; we go back and forth with them on Facebook, privy to every blip in their moods. If things go wrong,weâre there to cybernetically hold their hand. Family life goes on, attenuated, but still intimate. More intimate than it used to be.
Which is good. Right?
In the late 1960s, when we went travelling it was a dramatic rupture from the family. A little death. You left home one person and might very well come back as another. The young went away to âfind themselves.â No one expected us to find ourselves inside the dimly lit cave of the family.
And nourishing the generation gap, staying out of touch, was easily achieved. Communication was rushed, sporadic, and superficial. Letters from home had to be sent well ahead of time, to a predetermined list of American Express offices along our routeâ if we stuck with our plans. There was no expectation of sharing our experiences on the road with our families. And in many cases (smoking opium and living in caves being two examples that spring to mind) our experiences werenât of the sharing sort.
Not that drugs were to my taste; for the most part, they scared me. During university and my early twenties, I felt that my grip on my sanity,which I equated with my self-control , was tenuous at best, and drugs only made this worse. I was a bit afraid of losing my mind if I took acid or smoked too much dope. (This was a form of ambition, actually; one of the few adventurous options open to women in those days was to totally snapâto be Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath, brilliant and broken.)
I became adept at contact highs, however.
Communication with my family consisted of letters scribbled on thin blue sheets of airmail stationery. The post office sold these with the stamps already on; you filled one side with writing, then folded it into an envelope that slowly made its way, with its already stale news, to my parents,who anxiously awaited the arrival of the postman every morning, in case he brought news of my survival in unimaginable foreign lands.
In 1969,my
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