Breaking Away
By DANA SPIOTTA
Cherry Valley, N.Y.
MY parents were not hippies. We were a deeply conventional, middle-class American family, but my clean-cut mother and father tried to embrace, in a haphazard and innocent way, the values of the counterculture — at least enough to send me, their moody 14-year-old daughter, alone on a four-week bike trip through Greece.
My parents always approached my sister and me with an open-mindedness that was part idealism and part indulgence. So even when we were tiny, they let us stay up with the adults. We drifted off to sleep on various laps amid the murmur of late-night conversation. We attended an experimental school that, in sixth grade, gave us the option of studying math or doing book reports. (To this day, I don’t really understand fractions.) We were the only ones in our suburban neighborhood who ate brown bread and made yogurt.
My housewife mother was never without makeup and high heels, but she wanted to be sure I was raised with the hard-won feminist insistence on limitless possibility. So we listened to Marlo Thomas’s record “Free to Be You and Me,” her effort to instill women’s lib in the coming generation.
Later, we sang along to Carole King and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” My sister and I would perform the entire rock opera during car rides on our summer vacations.
Those vacations consisted exclusively of visits to our relatives, often at a rented house at the Jersey Shore. There I would tag along after my older sister and my older cousins as they discussed boyfriends and rock ’n’ roll. They wore gauze blouses and tousled Stevie Nicks perms.
And then my cousins became teenagers and they began to go on bike trips, with others their own age, to exotic places like France or the Netherlands. And whichever cousin went off would come back transformed: fit, tan, smoking clove cigarettes, carrying tooled-leather items and wearing a seen-it-all continental daze that never appeared in suburbia.
These trips were organized by hippies who believed discomfort led to enlightenment. Among their precepts were that the children shouldn’t know one another in advance — it was good to be thrust head-on into the unfamiliar — and that everyone had to pull her own weight, carrying all her stuff in her own pack. The biking was long and tough. At night they all slept in hostels.
Occasionally a cousin would call, a week or so into a trip, tearful with exhaustion and begging to come home. My uncle would talk her into staying, and then she wouldn’t be heard from again until she arrived at the airport, looking European and happy, dying to do it again.
I studied my cousins’ bike trip catalog obsessively until I was finally old enough, in the summer after eighth grade, to sign up for a monthlong “phantom” trip to Greece.
A phantom trip meant that, under the guidance of a group leader, we teenagers would make up the itinerary as we went along. In other words, we were going to do whatever we wanted. And in that pre-cellphone age, I would be entirely out of touch, except for the few times we called home from tourist centers.
Nonetheless, my parents didn’t hesitate to send me off. For my father, the countercultural promise of liberation was a perfect fit with his idea of the American dream. He believed in a teleology that started with the struggles of our Italian ancestors, continued through the sacrifices of his immigrant parents and his own rise from poverty to the corporate middle class, and reached completion in his children having the opportunity and desire to discover the world.
Equally important to my being allowed to go was the cultural moment. The ’70s, for all that decade’s cliché excesses, were a time of freedom and openness, a time before omnipresent fear. People felt an obligation to embrace new experiences: by going somewhere unknown you might discover who you were, or could be.
And for a young woman growing up in the wake of the women’s movement, it was a particularly special time. Even in the far reaches of suburbia, feminism insisted on not overprotecting girls.
Still, when I stepped off the plane in Greece, far removed from my American cul-de-sac life, with no one I knew to look out for me, I was terrified. Part of me wanted to make one of those tearful calls home, but instead I met up with the other teenagers on my trip and we immediately bonded in our dislocation.
The weeks passed quickly. We biked on dirt roads through tiny villages; into a valley where butterflies covered every surface; to ancient ruins, stopping along the way to eat salty cheese.
I never made that desperate phone call, despite some rough moments. At one point, I crashed and badly cut my leg. There were days when I couldn’t find a bathroom because some small village bars allowed only men. Once, I fell far behind and spent one long afternoon thinking I was truly lost.
Mostly, though, I had great fun doing things I wouldn’t do back home. We stayed up until dawn talking to other young travelers at the hostels. We ate grilled octopus and glorious tomatoes. I had my first espresso. I drank my first cocktail, a grasshopper (made from crème de menthe, crème de cacao and cream, it tasted like melted mint-chip ice cream — a drink seemingly designed for a child).
One night some of us decided to camp on a perfect white beach, and I lay my sleeping-bag right next to the boy on whom I had a mad, secret crush. During the night, our sleeping-bag-encased bodies nearly touched. And when, at 5 a.m., an angry man roughly awakened us and kicked us off the apparently private beach, we got on our bikes and rode away, laughing. We felt untouchable, in a way. Everything, good and bad, was part of the experience.
Our last days we spent swimming in clear, warm water off a rocky cove. I remember feeling happier swimming there than any time swimming near our home in California or at the Jersey Shore. Somehow, I looked and felt right on the Greek beach. I hadn’t just survived my bike trip; I felt profoundly myself for the first time.
These days, my parents’ willingness to send me off almost seems careless — American child-rearing has tipped away from curiosity and toward fear. It is too bad, because especially during adolescence, when we’re so trapped inside ourselves, there’s a perspective to be gained from seeing things from a distance.
When my family picked me up at the airport, I finally wore that worldly sophistication I had admired in my cousins. I felt independent and confident, although I knew this confidence was fleeting — I was going back to my home, to high school and to those beaches where I would never feel quite right — but at least I now knew something about myself I never had before. Something that would help gird me for September and the suburbs.
Dana Spiotta is the author of “Eat the Document,” a novel. |
