The Road to Someone

Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash

When I was a child, an unlikely story captured my imagination. I loved reading about a man marooned on an island, a young reader’s edition of Robinson Crusoe. I say unlikely because the story is not only centuries removed (the original was published in 1719), the novel describes a world foreign to a child growing up in suburban Southern California. Daniel Defoe, the author, had his cultural blind spots, all of that lost on me then, of course. What drew me, I think, while I was forging my own growing sense of self, was the rugged determination of Crusoe to front life with his own wits.

A similar flight of imagination stirred in me when I watched the movie My Side of the Mountain, the story of young Sam Gribley, driven to leave civilization, which set me to fantasizing what it would be like to walk far into the deep woods to set up life in a hollowed-out tree with little more than a penknife and ingenuity as the keys to my survival.

Later still: Walden, the account by nineteenth-century New England essayist Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau’s tale of two years on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, was required reading for a high school lit class. I loved it.

When my wife Jill and I got in the car a couple of years ago for a trip to New England to see our son and his family who live near Boston, I realized we could easily make the 45-minute drive to Concord from our home base, and see Walden the lake, even the cabin (well, a replica, anyway). We would also see plenty of pilgrims and tourists, as you’d imagine for a place so romanticized, some 150 years after Thoreau wrote about those two years escaping from normal convention and community. Again, something about that seeming simplicity and freedom stirred me.

“We love,” my friend Liz Snell writes, “stories about people who set off to survive in the wilderness alone.” A suitcase tantalizes us to daydream about the road, the airport, the train, the leaving.

Much of that wander-longing has to do with the part of us that longs for independence, freedom from custom, an escape from ties and duties that threaten to grind us down. (We rightly celebrate as a nation this time of year our drive to independence centuries ago.) And I know that some of my youthful dreaming of wilderness adventure grew out of a mother who failed routinely to resist a temptation to overparent, who would not only embrace but also cling. Who had mixed feelings about my own independence. Who, as Saint Augustine said of his own mother, “She had a passion for my presence, which is the way mothers are, but with her it was far more the case than with most.”

Speaking of a common experience of mothers so often portrayed in pop culture, from Everybody Loves Raymond to Gilmore Girls, James K. A. Smith notes how a mother’s love, for all its vibrancy in the making of a self, can also undo: “Her presence swells and overwhelms and inhales all the oxygen an independent self needs to breathe.”

We may, however, so react against the excess that we run from the legitimate expressions. We can declare conversely a too-individualized self. Thus the fantasies of living, as Willie Nelson sang, “on the road again.” If the pandemic has shown us anything, it is how vital to our thriving healthy relationships are. The idea of a self-made person is folly. The ties that bind become links of nurture and freedom. All real living, said Jewish sage Martin Buber, is meeting. Most everything vital to life happens among others. And we owe them.

Better than the idea of independent, the image of a solo traveler, is for me the life goal of being interdependent. Inter as in among. As in a self made not by my own scheming and dreaming, but through all kinds of interactions, all kinds of enriching encounters, all kinds of rubbing-shoulders-with. Not just tires rolling down endless asphalt but also a landing, the sitting round a convivial table. A road is only appealing if at its end some kind of haven or home beckons.

I’m wrestling lately with the interplay of dependence and interdependence in my own journey to a loving (though not suffocating or clutching) God. Our parents may often get the balance wrong, but with God there is a closeness that brings life. This is a God, after all, who both Jewish and Christian tradition says, knit us together in our mother’s womb. We did not love ourselves into being, into thriving life. We owe God and God’s human birth-giving agents big-time. Our stories of adventure will seem empty without a movement toward the One who made not only all, but also all of us. Made me.

“Oh, the twisted roads I walked!” the ancient sage and saint Augustine recalled. He was thinking of his self-determined false longings and jog-legs off the steadfast road. “But look, you’re here, freeing us from our unhappy wandering, setting us firmly on your track, comforting us and saying, ‘Run the race! [Live your life!] I’ll carry you! I’ll carry you clear to the end, and even at the end, I’ll carry you.’”