We Came, We Saw, We Left

by Charles Wheelan

  We would soon have the answer. Teaching is hard anywhere. On the South Side of Chicago, there are layers of additional challenges. Most of Leah’s students were living in tough environments. This often manifested in students’ behavioral outbursts. Leah had a “panic button” in her classroom that she could push to summon a security guard if she felt that a situation was getting out of hand. It would be December—three months into the school year—before she finished a single school day without pushing the panic button.

  When we moved to New Hampshire, Leah began teaching in a school district affected by rural poverty and the opioid epidemic. The racial makeup of the student body was different, but the challenges in the classroom and the broader community were similar. The job was exhausting, both physically and emotionally. The teaching experiences have made Leah, who was unflappable to begin with, even more so. They have also given her a sense of perspective with regard to the true nature of hardship and crisis, particularly for young children. When a well-meaning parent in our Hanover bubble recounts some educational snafu (“Mr. B——hasn’t returned any of the labs in Honors Biology and the students have no idea how they’re doing, even though the midterm is Friday!”), her honest answer is, “I’m sure it will be fine.”

  There was one more thing. For me, this would also be time to learn: long days during which I could read, listen to podcasts, or do whatever else captured my intellectual fancy. The first time we traveled, I read books that I previously had not had time for (War and Peace) and reread some favorites (The Razor’s Edge). At age fifty, I wanted to do that again: read, listen, think, stare out the window.

  Because taking time off can be a great career move. My gap year after Dartmouth did not leave me facedown in a gutter, my parents’ concerns notwithstanding. Ironically, it launched my writing career. Before we left on our post-college trip, I managed to finagle a job writing freelance articles for the Valley News, a small newspaper in the Hanover, New Hampshire, area. I was technically a traveling correspondent, for which I would be paid fifty dollars for every story that made it into print. This was before e-mail and digital photos, so I had to write the stories longhand on airmail paper, shoot a roll of photos to accompany the piece, and then mail the story and the undeveloped black-and-white film back to White River Junction, Vermont. The mail could take up to two weeks, so I had to find stories that would be interesting to readers back home but not time-sensitive.

  I interviewed Americans serving life sentences in a Bangkok prison for drug offenses. I stumbled across a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Bali and wrote a piece on how incongruous it was to find an American fastfood restaurant in a relatively rural part of Indonesia. I visited and photographed “needle park” in the center of Zurich, where there was a needle exchange for intravenous drug users set up by the Swiss government to curb one of the highest rates of HIV infection in Europe. There I interviewed a guy my age who told me politely, “Please stop talking for a minute,” after which he tied a tourniquet around his arm and injected himself with heroin. He asked me not to use his name because his father was a prominent banker.

  I discovered that I have a good “story sense,” meaning that I can wander into a place and spot a story that is likely to be of interest to some distant audience. My gig with the Valley News meant that I finished the trip with “clips,” a compilation of published stories that proved I was capable of reporting and writing. The best way to become a writer is by writing, and that is what the gap year had allowed me to do.

  Because global travel would be an invaluable part of our children’s education. Like many Americans, we live in a bubble. Hanover is unrepresentative of New Hampshire, let alone the United States or the world. It is smaller and whiter and richer and more rural than most of America. For many years we lived in Chicago, which is more urban and diverse than New Hampshire but still radically different from Ho Chi Minh City or Dar es Salaam. One of our most important obligations as parents is to educate our children, and one of the easiest and most enjoyable ways to do that is by taking them to interesting places. Along the way, we would do the required homeschooling, but the real education would happen in the Amazonian jungle and on the streets of Cape Town.

  The trip would also be nine months of uninterrupted family time. We recognized, obviously, that not every moment with teenagers is laden with fun and joy. Still, family time is (for the most part) a good thing, especially since Katrina, our oldest daughter, was on the brink of leaving for college. Our role as her parents would soon change—from managers to consultants, as one of my friends once described it. Katrina’s siblings were not far behind. We had one last shot to make a lasting impact on their lives. The family gap year would be an experience that we would share forever—like a family road trip, only longer and with more bugs.

  Because I am a huge proponent of high school graduates taking a gap year. I teach college students. To put a finer point on it, I teach highly motivated college students who have been running fast and jumping through hoops since middle school, if not earlier. Some of those students are burned out by the time I see them. Many would have benefited from some time off after high school to mature, work, and/or reflect on why they are going to college, especially given the cost of higher education. In one of the classes I teach, I ask students to define education: What is it supposed to accomplish? Then I ask them to evaluate their own schooling against their definition of education.

  I get some depressing essays. Many students write about the joy they experienced in elementary school: how happy they were to go to school; how they studied science by hatching chickens and making pinhole cameras; how they loved learning. And then those same students too often go on to explain how their love of learning was beaten out of them by standardized tests and lack of sleep and pressure to get into the right college. Their eagerness to learn was replaced by a bizarre and erroneous notion that education is somehow a competition, not a process whereby a person becomes more capable and complete. There is even a term for the elite high school students most consumed by this phenomenon: “crispies”—because they have burned out.

  On occasion I teach military veterans who have enrolled in college after their service. These vets are profoundly different than my other students, both in their intellectual curiosity and in their respect for the opportunity that a college education affords. Obviously a year of traveling is not the same as active duty in Afghanistan. And many high school graduates are perfectly ready for college. Still, a year of anything between high school and college is likely to reinvigorate one’s love of learning. Most of my Dartmouth students would have benefited from working for a year as a waiter or waitress before matriculation, if only to earn some money to offset the ridiculous cost of college and to get a better sense of the world beyond the Ivy League. College should not be just one more hoop; it is an extraordinary privilege afforded to a tiny fraction of the world’s young people.

  Because it is much, much cheaper than you think. Some people ask how much the trip cost; most people just wonder. The reality is that traveling around the world for nine months is significantly cheaper than staying at home. For example, we rented out our house while we were gone. That revenue became our housing budget for the trip. We took the monthly rent and divided it by thirty; that was how much we had to spend on lodging each night. We spend less on food while traveling than we typically do at home, mostly because food tends to be cheaper in developing countries, especially street food. We would not be driving in most places—so no gas, and only enough insurance to protect against the garage collapsing on the relatively decrepit cars we left at home. Most of our other incidental expenses would go away, too: work clothes, costly hobbies (e.g., golf), fancy entertainment.

  We were swapping all that for a much cheaper day-to-day existence, even including plane, train, and bus tickets. In fact, the primary expense associated with traveling around the world has nothing to do with traveling around the world: It is forgone income. We would not be working for nine months. Even th
en, about forty percent of our income normally goes to taxes. The good news is that you don’t have to pay taxes on income you don’t earn! So, the real cost of our proposed adventure was about sixty percent of nine months of income. That is not a small number, but it is a far cry from what most people envisioned when we told them that we planned to travel around the world.

  We are privileged in many respects. Leah and I have saved aggressively over the years. We have jobs with sufficient flexibility that we could step away for a year. More important, we are employable enough that we could have quit those jobs, if necessary, and expected to find similar work when we returned. This is, of course, the leverage that allows you to get a year off. We are lucky—period. But sixty percent of nine months of income? That is not Mark Zuckerberg kind of money. Think of it this way: If you plan to retire at age sixty-five, then doing what we did would require retiring at sixty-six instead—hardly a lifechanging sacrifice. The point is that one does not need a trust fund or a winning lottery ticket to make a trip like this happen.

  And finally, why not? We love to travel. The world is an interesting place. We have a finite amount of time left, and even less time with our children. Why not spend nine months of it doing what we love? In some ways, our experience was the opposite of what happened to George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart’s character in It’s a Wonderful Life). George feels boxed in by his small-town existence and pines to explore the world. At every turn, his travel plans are thwarted. He never makes it out of Bellows Falls, but in being forced to stay, he comes to appreciate the wonder of his day-to-day life. That was our starting point. We began our adventure with a deep appreciation for our day-to-day life. At every point in the trip, we looked forward to getting back to that life. But we did make it out of Bellows Falls.

  * This is one of the few times I’m aware of when Leah’s planning skills were not top-notch. The prevailing winds in California blow from north to south, so a more sensible route would have been from Canada to Mexico.

  † Let the record reflect that I did become a writer. For example, I wrote this book.

  Chapter 3

  The Long Farewell

  We have possessions: a house, two cars, two dogs, and a fish.

  We would have to deal with all of these things.

  A FAMILY OF FIVE DOES NOT wake up in the morning and suddenly decide to leave home for nine months. Because Leah and I had done such a trip after college, we knew what is required in terms of planning. We also knew what the conditions would be like if we were to travel on a low budget in developing countries—and a low budget is the only thing that would make a long trip possible. And we knew, or at least believed, that our kids could manage rugged international travel reasonably well. They had been doing it for years. At the University of Chicago, and later at Dartmouth, I taught a course every fall that included an international travel component: India, Turkey, Rwanda, Madagascar, Jordan. Each year, the whole Wheelan family would tag along.

  By the age of seven, Katrina had a better feel for travel in the developing world than some of my graduate students. On a trip to India, one of my University of Chicago students developed some intestinal issues, as often happens in India. He was sitting in the back of the bus, bemoaning his illness and eating an ice-cream snack that he had just purchased at a roadside oasis. Katrina, barely in elementary school, sat down beside him. “Have you been brushing your teeth with tap water?” she asked solicitously. The grad student, who was in his mid-twenties, said that he had been. “You shouldn’t do that,” Katrina advised, shaking her head in surprise and disappointment. “And you really shouldn’t be eating ice cream.” Katrina eventually became so accustomed to travel in the developing world that when I took her to Washington, D.C., in middle school, she came scurrying out of the hotel bathroom and asked, “Can I drink the water here?”

  Sophie was even younger on that first India trip. As we walked through a chaotic market in Bangalore, a hunched old woman who was barely four feet tall stepped in Sophie’s path. The woman held out a cupped hand, jangling the coins she had gathered. Sophie reflexively took the coins out of the woman’s hand. “Thank you,” she said. The poor woman began shrieking like she had been physically struck. We quickly returned the coins, added a few more, and then had a long talk with Sophie about a hard subject.

  As the family trip discussion evolved, the big question became “when,” not “if.” There were some natural parameters. We did not want any of the kids to miss their first or last year of high school. We assumed that once Katrina went off to college she would not be willing to leave school to travel with us. These constraints winnowed the possibilities down to one window: the year after Katrina graduated from high school. She could take a gap year. Sophie would miss her junior of high school—not ideal, but better than the alternatives—and CJ would miss eighth grade. It was then or never.

  Leah and I did not want any professional obligations during the trip: no deadlines, no board obligations, no meetings, no conference calls. The trip was meant to be a gap year for the adults, too. Katrina would apply to college before the trip and with luck get accepted at a school she would be excited to attend. She would then defer for a year, which many colleges now encourage. As noted earlier, we would have to homeschool CJ and Sophie. Both Leah and I are educators; she is a certified teacher in New Hampshire.

  We have possessions: a house, two cars, two dogs, and a fish. We would have to deal with all these things. The house was most important from a financial standpoint because we were counting on the rental income to subsidize our travel. Fortunately, we live in a college town with a robust rental market. We had a pretty good idea what the monthly rental income would be. The cars could sit idle in the garage for nine months with only minimal insurance. The dogs were the biggest emotional challenge. We would have to find foster families for them, either together or in separate homes. The fish did not require a great deal of advance planning.

  Early polling showed that 66.7 percent of the children were in favor of the trip. Sophie was the holdout. She was the least excited about international travel, and she did not want to miss her junior year of high school. Sophie was perfectly capable of getting along in rugged places, but she had less interest in going to those places than the rest of us. We would have to manage the Sophie situation somehow. Neither of the two obvious solutions—forcing her to go or leaving her behind—was attractive.

  The job. I have never liked the phrase “salary negotiation.” It’s too narrow. The correct phrase should be “contract negotiation.” Salary is only one dimension on which a contract can be negotiated. You can also ask for a bigger office, a more competent assistant, a better coffee maker in the lounge—or time off. I am not a tenure-track academic. I work on three-or five-year contracts. Every time one of those contracts is negotiated, it is, as the verb would suggest, a negotiation. I enjoy my job and was eager to keep doing it. I just wanted an unpaid year off between contracts. In the end, I got nine months. I agreed to teach for two consecutive summers, leaving the intervening academic year free: September to June. That gave us nine months to travel, the same length as the original backpacking trip Leah and I had made.

  Leah was teaching high school math. The district did not have a policy for unpaid leave that would guarantee a position when she returned. However, there is a huge shortage of math teachers in New Hampshire (and everywhere else). The district could not make any promises, but the powers that be indicated there would be a spot for her when she got back. If not, we knew from experience that half the schools in our area would be scrambling to hire math teachers during the summer of our return. So we had the job thing more or less worked out for both of us.

  The extended family. My parents were healthy. Leah’s mother was also in good shape. (Her father died when she was very young.) Still, our parents were not getting any younger. We recognized that an adverse health event, for any of our parents or for one of us, was one thing that might derail the trip. That was beyond our control. Right up unt
il we flew out of the country, we always added a caveat when describing our plans: “Unless there is some reason we have to stay home.” Life is about planning for what you can predict, and being realistic about what you cannot.

  Obviously we did not need our parents’ permission to take the trip, but for what it’s worth, they were supportive. This was radically different than the first global adventure, when my parents were strenuously opposed. They feared that I would go full hippie on them. Instead, I kept my hair manageably short and proved over subsequent decades to be a respectable, taxpaying member of society. Once I even worked for a Republican. Meanwhile, my parents had begun to travel more and experience the joy of it. They also appreciated the educational impact that my international student trips were having on our children. Typically, we returned from those class trips in December. During the holidays, my parents would trot us all to the country club, where Katrina, dressed in some kind of velvet dress with a big bow, would casually tell my parents’ friends about meeting the dictator of Madagascar (true), or climbing a volcano in Rwanda (true), or sleeping on a cement floor in a rural Indian village (also true).

  Sophie may not be the most enthusiastic traveler, but she is the best storyteller, with a keen sense for what dazzles a country club audience. She would ask me for the benefit of her listeners, “What was the name of the woman we met in Jordan who is a direct descendent of Muhammad?” She served up adventure stories for the other children: “The monkey walked into our room and stole the bag of cashews. Then he climbed a tree and started throwing them at us!” As the adults clutched their plates in the buffet line, she might toss off a finale: “The villagers kept telling us, ‘Make sure you don’t step on a cobra!’”