“When one turns seventeen and begins to experience that first real independence, one’s senses are so alert, one’s sentiments so finely attuned that every conversation, every look, every laugh may be writ indelibly upon one’s memory.”
—Amor Towles, “A Gentleman in Moscow”
My older brother Dan and I stood patiently along the side of the road north of Accra, Ghana. A white Daihatsu pickup truck approached, and Dan patted one open palm into the other, the sign used by Peace Corps volunteers to hitch-hike in that West African country in the 1980s. The truck slowed to a stop, and Dan leaned toward the open window and explained that we were headed north, toward Kumasi. The driver smiled and offered a ride, and we jumped into the bed of the truck. As palm trees whizzed by and hot wind blew in my face, I told my seventeen-year-old self that this was the best summer ever.
Nearly four decades later, it is my son’s turn.
He won’t be hitch-hiking in Ghana, but at age seventeen, Matt will live in Chile for a month with the family of an exchange student we hosted for three months earlier this year. He will absorb the customs and the history and the cuisine of a place he previously knew little about.
This, then, is the first big step, isn’t it, this flight toward independence that I knew has been coming? The past seventeen years have been directed toward this goal, putting my child in a position to soar. Is it wrong to be conflicted about its arrival, or to be shocked at just how fast we got here?
When I was helping little fingers learn to tie their shoes or putting a Band-Aid across a skinned knee, this time seemed incalculably far away. Yet soon Matt’s bags will be packed by the door, his passport tucked into a pocket, his thoughts piqued much more by the allure of the unknown than by the familiar comforts of home. This is, I realise, as it should be.
My mother felt much the same way, informed by her own family history. At age seventeen, my mother’s father had been orphaned when both his parents died of the Spanish flu. Guided by the fragile promise of an uncle in America he had never met, my grandfather and his younger brother boarded a ship in Queenstown, Ireland, for a trans-Atlantic trip to the United States. Around their necks, they wore pouches with a bit of money that the villagers of Ballaghaderreen had cobbled together. The brothers arrived at Ellis Island on 11 June 1920, and although details of the rendezvous are lost to time, they indeed connected with that uncle. My grandfather settled in Cleveland, where my mother was born. And framed by her own father’s experience, she always ascribed special significance to independent travel at age seventeen.
If she or my father had any angst about sending me to Ghana on my own, they didn’t show it. In an age before cell phones, they implicitly trusted that I would safely land in Paris, make my connecting flight and meet up with Dan. If I felt any fear about this odyssey on my own at age seventeen—up until then, a big trip had been a car ride from Washington, D.C., to Cleveland to see grandparents—I don’t remember it.
I do remember there was a chance Dan wouldn’t be there to meet me. I was flying to Lome, Togo, a sliver of a country in West Africa where the continent mushrooms out into the Atlantic Ocean. At that time, Peace Corps volunteers in Ghana made the trip to neighbouring Togo once a month because their small stipend had more buying power there. I knew Dan planned to be in Togo, but I had no way to reach him on the day of my flight. My father calmly explained that if for some reason Dan wasn’t in Lome, I was to hail a cab outside the airport and ask for the Peace Corps Togo rest house.
I have no idea why this didn’t seem like a hare-brained backup plan, or why my father thought a random taxi driver in Lome would even know the location of the Peace Corps rest house. Maybe it was his calm, reassuring tone. In his own way, my father was saying to my seventeen-year-old self on the brink of independence, hey, you got this.
I have travelled and seen much since that first trip to Africa nearly forty years ago. I’ve trekked in Nepal and in what was then Zaire. I’ve scuba-dived off the coast of Honduras. I’ve driven across the United States twice. Yet images of Togo and Ghana, and the summer of seventeen, remain among the most vivid, as if folds deep in the memory are reserved exclusively for this year on the cusp of adulthood.
Four decades later, I can still see Dan on the observation deck of the Lome airport as I descended the plane’s stairs on the tarmac under a hot African sun. I hadn’t needed that taxi after all. I can still smell cooking fires in downtown Lome, and I can still see overcrowded lorries trying to slalom around potholes on Lome’s dusty dirt roads.
I can still hear the thump-thump-thump of Ghanaian women working with the precision of a ballet to make fufu, a cassava-based staple of West Africa. One woman drove a three-foot-long pestle into an oversized mortar, then raised it up again while another casually turned the batter by hand before the pestle hammered down again, missing her fingers by inches every time.
I can still see children from small Ghanaian villages racing to the road when they heard us drive by, beaming smiles chasing that Daihatsu pickup truck for forty or fifty yards. I can see the open-air markets, a kaleidoscope of fruits and fabrics, and I can hear Dan explaining that prices are only a suggestion and bargaining for a better deal is part of the game.
I can also see the two men that passed on either side of Dan and me along the main beachside thoroughfare in downtown Lome as we walked from a restaurant to our hotel after dinner one night. I can hear the screams from others in our travel party about fifty feet behind us when those men tried to rip a satchel away from one of my brother’s friends. As he fell to the ground and curled up in a fetal position to protect the satchel, someone else dropped his bag and tried to help. In the commotion, the thieves grabbed that other bag and ran. I remember sitting in a Lome police station and trying to explain all of this in the best three years of high school French I had to offer. Togo’s official language is French, and the Peace Corps Ghana crew didn’t speak French.
At age seventeen, I learned that travel can be chaotic, and at times dangerous, but also empowering. Yes, I could navigate Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris by myself and find my Air Afrique flight. Yes, I could figure out the customs process in Togo, even if more slowly than most—okay, all—other passengers. Yes, I could reasonably explain a street robbery to Togolese police officers in a foreign language.
I also learned that one of the most important things a traveller can pack is flexibility. My brother’s friend lost his passport in the roadside robbery, so we had to spend three extra days in Togo as he awaited an expedited new one. Red tape has no borders.
As Matt prepares to head off to Chile, I will watch him with wistful envy. I doubt he will see anyone make fufu, and I sincerely hope he won’t need to practice his three years of high school Spanish with la policía. I wonder, though, what sights, what sounds, what smells, will be writ indelibly upon his memory this summer of seventeen?
Maybe it will be the colour of the Pacific Ocean where it crashes into the coast of Antofagasta, the port city in northern Chile where Matt will live. Maybe it will be the smell of diesel fumes belching from a truck inching along in afternoon traffic. Maybe it will be the brown eyes and warm smile of a Chilean girl he meets at Colegio San Luis, the school he will attend. Maybe it will be the countless stars piercing the blackness of the Atacama Desert, which hugs northern Chile. These are only educated guesses, because I’ve never been to Chile.
This, then, is another part of the appeal. This adventure, this journey, is Matt’s to own. He will come home as the family expert on Chile, with experiences, friends, memories that are exclusively his. He will also come home with enhanced ability in Spanish that will serve him well, and with a keen understanding that, so often, real living begins where the tourist map ends.
If Matt’s trip is like mine, he will come home with the realisation that bus schedules, and dining habits, and airport procedures, are not the same the world over, and the American way is not the only way. He will also come home with a newfound appreciation and empathy for ethnic minorities, because for the first time in his life, he will be one. I remember seeing children in remote villages in Ghana peer out at my brother and me from behind the colourful dresses of their mothers, big eyes looking with shy curiosity at us, possibly the first fair-skinned people they had ever seen.
As parents, we all want what’s best for our children. We seek the best schools, the best neighbourhoods, the best our money can buy depending on means. Maybe the best thing we can give our children, though, is the chance to make these memories. Maybe the best thing we can give them is this opportunity to ease away from the nest at the impressionable age of seventeen. Maybe the best thing we can give them is our trust and our blessing to go, fly beyond the familiar, and revel in what they discover.
