Oregon or Bust

Of all the lessons in letting go that have come my way lately, the biggest one came watching my son’s taillights going down that driveway.

My son has gone on driveabout, the American version of the Australian walkabout, the rambling, cross-country rite of passage that young people all go on if they are lucky. I went myself, back in the day, and it was one of the best experiences I could have had.

But it’s different watching it from the other side, being a mother and watching your child go off in a car with 200,000 miles on it. Granted he got new axles and gaskets before he left.

I know my worries are excessive. My son carries electronic equipment that we never had. He has a Tracfone, a prepaid cell phone. He has a computer. The first night I got an email from a rest area outside of Albany, New York and then I heard again from a closed “Welcome to Iowa” center where he had stopped to rest. I happened to be online at the same time and we had an email conversation – me here on my red couch in the comfort of my living room and my child at the border of Iowa on Route 80, alone in the dark, traveling with his bed in the back and the camp stove and the old coffee pot we bought in Idaho City when we traveled across country with the Frog Army.

I didn’t hear anything for four days after that.  I told myself that it wouldn’t be much of an adventure, not much of a true driveabout if a young traveler had to keep in touch with his mother all the time now would it? But my mind, which can go from zero to sixty in two minutes or less when it comes to dreadful scenarios, was working overtime. In most of the scenarios we never even found the body.

I finally got so worried that I went to our local bank. It’s a small town and a small town bank and the tellers have known us both for donkey’s years. I asked if there had been any activity on his debit card and they were kind enough to tell me that there had, just that morning in Boise, Idaho.

I shouldn’t have done that. My son’s father was quick to tell me, when I spoke to him on the phone that he disapproved. “He’s twenty years old” he said. “He’s gone and you have to get used to it.”

My son made it to Oregon and is staying for a few days with my sister, his aunt. Just this evening he called and told me all about his hike out to Bagby Hot Springs, down near Estacada, Oregon. I had told him to be sure to go out there. It was one of my favorite day trips when I lived out there, an easy scenic hike through old growth Douglas Fir forest and at the end a bathhouse with bathtubs made of hollow logs, fed by a steaming hot natural spring. It was wonderful hearing him talk about it, hearing how much he’d enjoyed it. “I think I’ll go up to the Olympia, Washington area for a bit” he said.

And I’ll let him go and not ask the ladies at the bank to help me track him. I’ll let him go.

A few weeks ago I saw a baby. I was coming around the north end of Lake Morey and I passed a long low wooden building with porches all along the front. The baby was on a green lawn in front of the building. It wore a long dress made of stripes of brightly colored woven fabric, reminiscent of Guatemalan indigenous weaving. The baby was completely bald.
It was walking very carefully with both hands straight up in the air. A woman in blue jeans held one hand and they were walking towards another woman who stood on the porch with a striped dishtowel over her shoulder and the woman was smiling.

Another thing I saw was a flock of birds. I was on my way to work and driving down the interstate highway south. I saw what looked like a large flock of geese off in the distance, flying north, flying toward me. But they flew like no flock of geese I’d ever seen. The black forms against the morning sky first began to form the usual V but then began spreading out into a long line. Then they began coiling and uncoiling the line, moving it in serpentine curves across the sky. I could not stop but I slowed down as much as I dared to watch them. The curving, coiling line passed my car, off to the left, and I opened my window to listen to them but they did not make a sound.

John Hiatt calls them stolen moments. “Don’t you know we are living in stolen moments?” he sings.  More and more often these moments strike me and stay, golden and perfect in my mind. It begins to seem as if life is a string of stolen, golden moments.

My son graduated from high school just last month. I went to the Baccalaureate ceremony the Sunday evening before graduation. It was held in the Congregational church on the green. It is a very old church, the oldest meetinghouse in Vermont, built in 1787. It is very plain and graceful inside. The walls are a sort of parchmenty yellow and the woodwork is white. The windows are very tall and run all the way from the white wainscoting to the choir loft and balcony.
Martha, the Head of School, talked about having known many of the young men and women as children. She talked about how we as a community had watched over them all their lives and picked them up when they fell and kept them safe. Now, she said, it was time for them to fly, but like trapeze performers who fly through the air under the big top they must let go of the first bar in order to fly to the next, held up by nothing but air. It would be frightening, she said, but they must do it. Their community would still be watching them from below, she said, and we would hold the net for them should they need it.

My son and I have been planning for this change. He will have our house, and I intend to move in with a friend who lives in the next town north. My son has been accepted to the college of his choice. The college is nearby. He’ll live at home while he attends college, but it will be his home, not his and mine anymore.

My son stayed at the school graduation party all night after the ceremony and came back home at about 5:30 in the morning. He told me that when the school bus brought them all back from the athletic club where the party was held, as the students got into cars and trucks to go home, there was a spontaneous mass “peel-out” from the school parking lot. “Even I laid rubber, Mom,” he said, laughing. “I didn’t know my car could even do that!”

He went to bed and as he slept I got out the card I had bought to give to him for his graduation. It had a picture of a dirt road curving around a bend in the woods, and I opened it and began to write:

Dear Chris,
I bought this card because the road in the picture curves around the bend. I cannot see where it goes, I cannot see the end.
I do not know where your road will take you. If life works as it should, I will never see the end of your road.
I hope that your journey is long. I hope the journey holds many joys for you.
I love you more than I ever thought it possible to love anyone. After almost twenty years it is now time for me to let you go to travel your own way, on your own road. A safe journey I wish you.
May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back and the rain fall soft upon your fields.

And I wrote that a sum of money had been deposited in his account to help him on his journey and I signed it: with love.

I left the card propped up on his desk and a few hours later, he came to me as I sat at the table reading the newspaper and sat down opposite.
“I was really touched by your card,” he said. “I know this is hard for you, Mom.”
I held out my hand and he clasped it across the table. My eyes were wet and my vision blurred.
“I love you, Chris,” I said.
“I love you too,” he said.
After a moment he got up and turned to go but then he turned back.
“So, when are you moving out? “ he said.
And in the cocked eyebrow, the triangular grin, and the perfect timing of the delivery, I saw his namesake: my brother.

Stolen moment.