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wild and woolly. I’ve met a guy from Vancouver who lives in a 100 percent vegetable oil-fuelled truck. I’ve heard such statements as “We were building the camera obscura when Maggie, the emu, got into the concrete and ate half a bag of it. But she was fine.”
    Now I am heading in the direction of Oaxaca, Mexico, via Las Cruces, El Paso, Juarez and many buses.
    Hasta la vista,
Casey
    Another email made a casual reference to “maybe hopping freights.” Okay, hitchhike if you must, I zinged back, but do us a favour: no freight trains. Yes, it’s the hipster street-cred thing to do. But people also get their legs chopped off, I reminded him. Rail-yard guard dogs can bite you, and security will arrest you. He was noncommittal in his reply.
    One of the songs he liked to sing, I remembered, was Spring-steen’s version of a ballad by Woody Guthrie:
    The highway is alive tonight
But nobody’s kiddin’ nobody about where it goes
I’m sittin’ down here in the campfire light
Searchin’ for the ghost of Tom Joad
    Like many other families of our generation, Casey is an only child who moved easily among adults and our community of friends. The three of us could all sit on the couch and laugh at This Is Spinal Tap , and we were a good example, I thought, of the sort of modern family where the kids don’t rebel and parental roles blur into a kind of peer friendship with our children. Which we enjoyed, of course; Casey is great company, full of energy, and funny. His ease in our circles, with roots in the old days when community was more important than making money, seemed like a good thing. But there was no confusing our fading world with the one coming up.
    My parents and their attention to the art of “home” also impressed him. His grandfather was an engineer whose practical skills represented a refreshing switch from our own two-writer jerry-rigged household. My mother was a knowledgeable and inventive cook who liked to track her grandson’s quixotic appetites and allergies. When Casey went vegan for a few years in his teens, my mother rose to the challenge of pigs in a blanket, hold the blanket, hold the pig. He and my mother share a certain mad-scientist creativity.
    What I didn’t realize when our son first left home was that the leaving had only begun. The dramas, conflict, and heartbreaks were still to come, in the course of his early twenties, as we kept negotiating and renegotiating our closeness, our distance. At the age of 18 his values were admirable, if somewhat untested. He believed in treating others with fairness and respect, and he couldn’t abide anyone in authority who abused their power. But he wasn’t grown up yet, not by a long shot. And we still had ground to cover as parents.
    In the meantime, it didn’t matter to Casey that the Summer of Love was now just a vintage T-shirt or that the world has since become a more venal and dangerous place than the one I travelled through. He thought I was just catastrophizing as usual.
    Another issue, minor but genuine, was that I didn’t want him to be disappointed by Chuck Berry or Woody Guthrie. I wanted the songs and the books to be true.

Vertical Travel
    I N MY EFFORTS not to fret about him, I told myself that Casey had embarked on something that boys his age seem to hunger after, in one form or another: a rite of passage; a journey, preferably dangerous, to carry them over the threshold from boyhood to manhood. In aboriginal cultures (what is left of them), these ceremonies still take place. The circumstances are important. If possible, they unfold in a natural setting, in the company of elders, on hallowed ancestral ground.
    In my son’s case, spending his first night on the road sleeping under the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign might have been the closest thing his culture has to offer as sacred ground.
    Traditionally, a rite of passage involves some sort of physical