When do the kids turn into adults?

Ah, life with kids. It's been my mission, my all-encompassing project, my focus and attention, my purpose, my meaning, my every day, and my everydays for a long time now. Sixteen-plus years, in fact.

So when does it end?

Working as a river guide I heard a bunch of times that silly tourist question that always arouses snickers around these parts: When do the deer turn into elk? Silly, but that, to me, is a lot like how we look at kids turning into adults.

But, seriously, when does a boy become a man? A kid an adult?

Not that I'm hurrying the end along. With that end in sight, I'm savoring every taste of those every days, and those everyday experiences of life with kids. But right now we're in an interesting transition zone around here: My 16-year-old son wants to be treated like an adult -- of course. But my wife and I find (or at least feel) we need to keep intervening in his life in the role of parents, because, well, in a nutshell, he's only 16.

And it's got me wondering, when, exactly, do those kids become non-kids?

There are several logical and easy landmarks proposed as marking the divide between adolescence and adulthood, including

• Getting a driver's license. The first sort of "adult" thing kids have to opportunity to do -- and about the closest thing our culture offers as a socially recognized rite of passage. Seeing many of my kids' friends now doing this, and hearing my son talking it up, I'd say it it's a start, but hardly proves, or rarely even indicates, any sort of "adultness" of the bearer. 

• Turning 18. This, of course, is the legal definition. Meaningless aside from a nice, clean -- and completely arbitrary -- number.
  

• Turning 21. When you are old enough to drink. Which, I, myself, think, is stupid. Frankly, I'd rather see the drinking age at 18 and the driving age at 21.  
  

• Graduating high school. 'cause then kids really get to see the fantasy they were living in high school. 
  

• Entering college or the military or getting a  job. This, I agree, almost surely gets shifts a kid's psychic transmission into the adult range of gears. It still often takes a while to learn how to use the clutch to keep from grinding those gears, though ...

• Getting married. Which is, as any married person can tell you, indicative of absolutely nothing related to being an adult. Except in the "adult film" sense.

All valid points of departure worth noting on the landscape between kidhood and adulthood. But none of them really are good, useful, or validating definitions of adulthood. None of them can offer some observable, viable, visible cue that a young person has moved from kid to grown up.

And as a parent, I'd like some measure. Something for myself, and that I can offer up as a compass bearing, a sort of psychic GPS, to my kids. 

So after much thought and observation, I'd like to propose the following two-point operational definition of "adult":

• Adults control their attitudes. Only children think they can always do only what they enjoy. Adults seek meaning and enjoyment, and endeavor to do their best, at whatever they do, in whatever circumstances they finds themselves in. Even -- and especially -- in situations they don't control. 
  

• Adults are responsible for their journey. Only a child thinks you can just float along and be okay. Adults actively, deliberately, strategically navigate their lives and their situations. It's like river running: adults learn to not blame fate or nature or the nature of things, they don't blame what got them where they are, and they don't blame others for where they are now. They act. They enjoy the float, but they also learn, observe, plan, and adapt. And if they flip, wrap or swim, they don't blame the river. They get back in and row again, wiser.
  

In short, adults know their lives are their true work and art, and that if they don't make it into something, others will.

I understand. This offers no nice clear number to mark this definition of "adult." You don't get any card. It doesn't even grant with any particular freedoms or abilities.

But it's still what I'm going to look for in my own kids as they get their driver's licenses, graduate from high school, move into the world, start their own families. Somewhere along those landmarks, I will be looking for real adults to appear.

And I will welcome them, as peers.

A happy Four Corners New Year!

Pardon me if I've been away, but I just got back from my New Year's celebration.

See, my New Year falls in mid-May, and lasts a little more than week. And every year its comprised of the same series of rituals plotted along the same itinerary: A circuit tour of the Four Corners, with some 25 or 30 people in tow, doing service work and visiting local landmarks while studying the region's past and present.

In my life, once a year this excursion is a sacred ceremony, a sort of walkabout by fifteen-passenger van. And it gives me a chance to set up my stance, my attitude, and to plot my approach and strategy and goals for the upcoming summer and year ahead.

I always leave this trip purged and redirected and revitalized. And exhausted.



Some background: The trip is organized by an education-travel company that does most of its trips in Latin America and overseas. This is one of their few domestic-travel programs, and it was put together specifically for a single group: A private school in San Francisco. Every year the graduating two-dozen or so from the 8th grade class, soon to be launched into a variety of high schools after many of them had been together for their entire scholastic careers, comes en masse to, sort of, well, travel abroad in their own county.

And every year it's a mind-expanding, eye-opening, spirit-spreading venture. For all of us.

The kids get a sort of smorgasbord sampling of the variety of people, places, and activities the Four Corners have to offer. They raft in Durango, wander Silverton, walk Cortez, and dance in the Bear Dance in Ignacio. They work with the Forest Service in the mountains and with Ute Mountain rangers in the backcountry of the Ute Mountain Tribal Park. They get talks from a Four Corners historian, BLM archaeologists, and Southern Ute tribal officers.

My role is part organizer, part regional public relations, and while the trip is on, full-time local guide. I get paid to do this trip, sure. But it's not the wage that makes me blot out a week each spring to cavort with 24 hormonal urban adolescents. I figure that, given it's 24/7 for seven days, plus prepping and wrap-up, I make only a few bucks and some odd cents per hour.

But for me it's the best below-minimum-wage job I've ever found.

Because for me, this foray into what's right around our home works as a pilgrimage into theme, into place, into my place and its people -- my personal passions. And it provides the space (even if it's often a rather loud, hectic, demanding space) to reassess my connection with those things, with how I'm doing my living in this place.

And the encounters I have on this excursion -- from river guides to retired miners to small-town business owners to federal land managers to tribal officials -- every time reminds me that there is a group here bonded beyond our familiar, hard, daily, civilized, socialized, acculturated borders. That there is a strong, long band of us that just plain share a love of this place, as a place, and for the place that it is.

And the great thing, too, is that most of those kids -- some who've never been above sea level, and some well-off enough to have already traveled the world -- see those things, too. And are touched by them. Even if only for a week.

I know, because they say so. And that's why I do this every year.

That, and because every year walking this personally sacred path -- okay, driving roads all over La Plata and Montezuma and San Juan counties with a rat-pack of rabid teens in tow -- is the place where I refind my place in this place.

A crazy ritual, perhaps. But, as this trip reminds me every time, the world is what you make it. And that's a message we all need to be reminded of. Regularly.

The Traveling Teacher

I like to think of one of my so-called "careers" as that of an anti-career counselor.

I mostly practice this on an as-can basis -- meaning, where ever and whenever I can slip in my subversive messages, I do: into writings (of course), conversations (especially with kids), college-class discussions, interviews, karate classes ... where ever a teaching moment may arise, I endeavor to grasp the opportunity to impart the message of The Option:

You don't necessarily have to join the rat-pack racing for the job, house, cars, toys, etc. etc.

You really can choose to live a life, rather than merely make a living.

The Option is to realize and recognize that there are options. And to realize they're real, and valid, and worthwhile, and attainable.

And so it came to pass that one of those most recent teachable moments arose around the barbeque grill. (An anti-counselor must always be ready to dispense wisdom ...) I was with my nephew, a 17 year old fresh out on his own, seeking those first tenuous, troublesome steps into the Big World, out there.

His big question, it seemed to me, was, what to make those first steps toward.

He is a thinking man, it's obvious, since he already has the insight to question the well-trodden, downright traffic-jammed, trail toward paycheck and pension oblivion. He also made it clear he'd much rather be following less-traveled roads toward faraway places and exotic other worlds beyond the one he grew up in.

A boy of my own heart, for sure. And I, of course, had an answer -- one he perhaps hadn't heard much from the other adults around him (being from a big city back East), or school, or on TV:

Yes! Travel, yes!

Make a life of traveling, yes!

If I could give my nephew anything at that point -- at that moment in time together, and at that point in his life -- the best I could do, I believed, was to give him that: a big fat yes!.

Then, though, I had to really be a counselor: I explained to him that while I believe being a traveler, even a bum -- not just someone who takes trips, but one whose whole life is traveling -- is doable, even preferable, to a "normal" career path, it is, nonetheless, a "career": It still requires learning, preparation, patience, persistence, and strategy to make it happen, and to make it work.

That might mean working two jobs for a while to finance a trip; or it can meaning acquiring skills that you can use to work while you do extended trips -- for years, even. (I, myself, found restaurant work and professional driving (buses, trucks, limos, taxis) to have paid for a lot of traveling and bumming for me.)

Mostly, though, I urged him to start now, immediately, to make those dreams of his come true -- even when he goes back to that big city back East. No matter what he did. In everything he did.

Study.

Prepare.

Strategize.

And do those with persistence and patience.

That, too, is the traveler's journey. That, too, is Yes!

Take it from your anti-career counselor.

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This post also appears on InsideOutsideMag.com.