can’t embrace; namely, abandon. A disregard for outcome, if you will. You must plan for the unplannable, and the best way to care is to not care, to—at the risk of being sued—not prize safety over experience. Bear with me.
We baby boomers and immediate post baby boomers are obsessed with preparation, mapping, detail, specialization. Our culture wants certainty, guarantees, a return on our investment. And it appears we are now applying these approaches to the family vacation. Well-planned, organized, safe, a sound investment—we’ll get our money’s worth and the activities will warrant the effort—but predictable, homogenous, managed. The Disney Cruise?! Is this what we want from the family vacation? It’s the holiday equivalent of the gated community . . . and sometimes we holiday in a gated community. But don’t we want grist for family lore? Adventure? Fun? Danger? Hair-raising experiences served up by blithely oblivious parents? Will we find that on a Disney cruise? Franz Kafka once wrote that you needn’t frantically chase the world in order to find it, since it would “present itself to you for its unmasking” even if you chose to just sit at your desk and be utterly still and silent. And so it is with the family vacation . . . well, except for the sitting-still part. Simply the act of being together will open the world up to you and allow you to define it through family—the world that is your family will unmask itself with or without grand plans, with or without great sights and peak experiences. The value created by the family vacation, its long-term familial meaning, will not necessarily reside in whether you got on all the rides you wanted to at Disneyland, or whether you got the table by the window every night on the cruise. Observing and existing in each moment together—accepting instead of grasping, as Kafka is essentially saying—is the fertile soil from which memories and meaning will grow. Abandon. Risk. Accept. Of course, you will be forgiven if you choose not to put your faith in Franz Kafka as the patron saint of the family vacation, given that his most famous story is about a man who wakes up one morning as a giant cockroach.
*
The road trip is an institution that has sometimes resulted in parents wishing they could be committed to one, and it’s hard to predict how it will evolve. There are the obvious environmental issues, although that is less about the vehicle than what’s fuelling it. Whether it’s hydrogen, battery power, even biomass fuel, families will still need ways to get from one place to another on their holidays. A more environmentally friendly fuel source might well fuel a resurgence in the road trip. The bigger question for me around the future of the road trip might be the creation of individual solitudes within the vehicle. Now that children have iPods, MP3s, iPads, and most significantly, movie centres that fold down out of the ceiling or the headrest in front of them, there is simply less chance for spontaneous interaction, less opportunity for something to happen, good or bad. Spending ten hours in a car will result in tedium somewhere along the way, and so whatever you can do to alleviate that can’t be a bad thing. It’s just that creating an impermeable bubble around each and every one of us may not be the answer. That bubble of distraction will occupy our children, to be sure, but it also signals to them that the journey is to be endured rather than considered.
Perhaps that’s why I can say we knew, even as kids, that our Mexico trip was significant. We didn’t have the words, but we understood it had meaning from the day we left until the day we arrived back home; especially once we were back home. Furthermore, home eventually became a fluid continuum rather than a specific physical structure, since that trip was part of what helped us understand that wherever we gathered as a family was our home, and that the support and togetherness we shared as a family was also our home.
Not that there weren’t times I would have loved to have escaped that car. And I know I wasn’t the only one. At one stretch my father drove seventeen hours. Halfway through that day, Keith turned from his spot in the throne and with no warning, delivered a wrecking-ball head butt directly onto my unsuspecting skull. I was briefly dazed and left with a throbbing headache for the next couple of days.
“What!” I half-shouted, trying to scramble back to retaliate, before my father shouted back at us to stop horsing around.
“He head-butted me . . . for no reason!”
“I’ve got a reason,” he said.
“I don’t give a damn about who did what,” said my father. “Stop horsing around. Do you want me to stop the car?”
I glared at Keith. “You’re dead. What’d you do that for?”
“Because I wish I had a comic to read right now,” he said.
Even though there were no comics to read, we made it through that day, and the days that followed in which there was still so much to come. There was Keith finding a dead baby hammerhead shark on the beach at Mazatlán, which he somehow persuaded my parents, and the American border guards, and the Canadian border guards, to let him bring home for show-and-tell at school, even though it had rotted badly by the time we got to Calgary. And then there was Mom, jumping up off her towel on the beach at Puerto Vallarta, shrieking at the top of her lungs, utterly hysterical, because she saw sharks in the water.
“Where?” said my dad, staring out over the water once we were all ashore.
“There,” she said, pointing. “Right there! See them?!”
My dad gazed out. “Pat,” he said. “Those are dolphins.”
She didn’t say anything more, but sometimes I’ve wondered, given the stresses involved in that trip, if she wasn’t screaming out of giddy hopefulness instead of terror. Who would have blamed her? Which was why it was so mystifying to me when my parents turned around less than a year later to buy a ratty old school bus and convert it into a long-haul recreational vehicle.
But I’ll come to that.
THE GILLESPIE FAMILY of 4232 Dalhart Road, circa 1975, was not poor in the strictest sense of the word: the family’s six children were clothed, fed, and in school. Still, we didn’t have wads of cash to throw around for frivolous expenditures like the latest toys, new ball gloves, haircuts, food. We ate out about once every four years. It was all about hand-me-downs, do-it-yourselves, and “I don’t care if you don’t want to use your brother’s old hockey equipment, and I don’t care that you think it smells like an armpit. If you don’t want it you can walk down the street and see if there are any other families that might want to adopt you.” I’m speaking hypothetically, of course; none of us played much competitive hockey. My mother and father were, however, parents of epic patience and resourcefulness who could have, and probably should have, been running the country; it would have been easier on them and better for the country. Ours was a small house for a family of four, let alone eight; for most of my teen years, my “bedroom” was a corner of the basement that I turned into a room by hanging a bedsheet from the rafters; it was a cross between a Moroccan yurt and the set of Midnight Express, depending on the state in which I kept it. As for privacy, well, that was like some foreign custom we’d heard about, but couldn’t imagine experiencing.
Our relative lack of affluence growing up was no hardship I recognized, resented, or even gave much thought, but it did mean that our early family vacations were usually low-budget. Or no budget. This meant camping, even though it has to be said, up front in the interests of full disclosure, that we were not one of those families deeply in touch with nature, who hiked regularly, who got out into the woods and mountains at every opportunity. Yes, we did the occasional hike, and we made it up to Banff National Park every now and then. But we were not the outdoorsy
