Chapter 1: Leaving and Going

Paul Fast

US Border Guard: “What’s your destination?”

Me: “Argentina.”

US Border Guard: “Sir, you better turn off the engine.”

As it turns out, the border guard was actually more interested in how we were going to

homeschool our kids across 16 countries than whether we had any contraband on board, or

whether to believe our travel ambitions.

US Border Guard: “Where’s home?”

It’s a fair question for a border guard to ask, but it wriggles irritatingly in my mind. What is our home? Home….that word slides itself comfortably into many situations, and I’ve found myself thinking about what it will mean to us. In the past weeks, we have boxed up all of our belongings, parcelled them out to various garages and packed our lives into a camper smaller than a Manhattan bachelor pad. We handed over the keys to our house, canceled our internet (nothing says goodbye to home like a canceled Telus contract) and borrowed out the Silverado.

We have said goodbye to an army of friends that loaded us with candy, baking and plenty of warnings. As we drove home from the party, and in the stillness of goodbye tears and heavy

hearts, Elias offered an observation: “Well, from here on we will be unknown.”

What will home be for the next year? How will we be known? Can our beloved camper become a home familiar enough to get us through a year away from Vancouver? We have done our best to layer on the nostalgia of things we know….pictures of the boys’ family and friends cover their closet door, and there’s always the smell….which Daniella claims is of ripe boys who haven’t showered in weeks.

The night before we leave, we eat dinner at my parent’s house. Goodbyes are said (again), and then it is just the five of us in an empty house full of someone else’s boxes. What was a home now feels more like a house, and already it is unfamiliar terrain. I gather the family around our chair-less kitchen table and we commence with a tradition….pre-expedition speeches and a toast. Brave words are spoken through quivering lips as the pre-dawn departure ticks slowly closer.

It has felt as though the past three months have been an extended process of leaving. And yet to leave, you must go somewhere, and now it is finally time to “go”. At 7am, in the dark, wet embrace of a West Coast morning lit by the orange glow of the street lights, we climb into the truck and turn the wheel so that the compass finally declares an unequivocal “South”. A cheer erupts from the back bench.

Home is a place that you know and that knows you. It is a place that you are familiar with. It is

the place you are connected to, feel rooted in and that shapes who you are. Over the next year, we will need to leave that home behind. We will need to find new rhythms and we will be shaped by a series of places rather than a single one. There will be new customs, a new language and things that will shape us outside of our control.

Our first night finds us on the edge of the Redwoods. We scored on cheap propane at a 24 hour station near midnight last night, so it was a toasty sleep with the furnace on full blast. We had pulled off of the single lane road late in the night with the kid’s asleep and parked ourselves in a clearing at the end of a gravel road. In the early morning hours, daylight revealed the scale of the forest around us. With the cold pressing around us, and coffee brewing on the stove, the camper is a cozy place. The kids have become accustomed to waking up and asking “where are we”? Daniella and I laugh -it’s good to be on the road again. The first cup of coffee goes down the hatch and then we are off.

In the middle of Jedidiah Smith National Forest, we find an unmarked road and pull off. We park the truck and head out to explore. Squatting on the foundations of enormous burls, they thrust their shaggy bodies into the sky reaching for the salt-air. I am fully aware that the Redwoods, like much of the old-growth back home face an existential threat, and that what we are enjoying is a tiny microcosm of what was once a much larger natural empire. Despite this, the base of a. redwood tree is a place of optimism and hope. In a place so ancient you are forced to think of the future and what part you will play in it.

As the boys play amongst the giant ferns, Elias suddenly turns around and asks “Is it time to go back home yet?” He caught himself, and then clarified that he meant the truck, but in his

Freudian slip, I find a glimmer of hope. Perhaps home for the next year can be a transient place and I suspect that leaving Vancouver will be good for us. It will teach us to let go of certain things. We will find shelter in the homes of strangers and comfort in new customs.

And just maybe our nomadic ways will uncover for us where our true roots lie.