My dear wife S. likes to look at me despairingly and ask why I’m the way I am. It’s a fair question. My usual trite response is that my mother raised me that way, at which point she says I should show my mother more respect, and so on. (I love my mother, truly.)
While this series is more focused on my career in tech than on my formative years, those formative years do explain a lot, and I like all the stories. This is the story of how the family wound up half-moving from Cape Cod to New Hampshire, plus an explosive revelation. It captures a lot of our family dynamics, and sheds a little light on my tendencies to resist authority.
Shortly after I was born in New York City, my parents decided that they didn’t want to raise a kid in Greenwich Village and moved to Cape Cod, where my father bought a small printing business and we settled in. Cape Cod’s a pretty great place to grow up in a lot of ways. It’s lovely, it’s horrendously crowded in the summer, and it’s intensely peaceful and quiet in the winter. A teenager can make a ton of money from the tourist industry in the summer and by the time winter rolls around you’re kind of happy for the break.
I attended Barnstable’s public school. This was the mid-1970s when educational reform was a hot topic – some things never change. The form this took at my school was something called competency-based progression, which means that at the end of every year they took each class of kids and divided them up according to how well they’d done in class. Some kids got to be in a more advanced classroom the next year, some kids proceeded according to the more or less expected schedule, and a few kids always had to redo the year they’d already been through.
I guess I think this could work under the right circumstances. Barnstable’s schools and I were not those circumstances. By my third year attending – and I completely skipped kindergarten – I was literally a head shorter than everyone else in my main classroom. Family lore says I was in the equivalent of a sixth grade class at that point. This seems about right, since I was reading fluently by the time I was three years old.
I was in no way happy or well-adjusted. I had no friends, I wasn’t enjoying my accelerated education, and I didn’t have the words to explain what I wanted.
My parents did figure it out eventually. My father was a bit rebellious himself, in the way kids from rich white New England preppie families are. His first impulse was to pull me and my brother out of school and travel across the country with us staying one step ahead of the truant officer. Rebellious, but not all that good at planning: that’s my father.
My mother didn’t take him seriously until he came home in an RV one day. (I did say rich family.)
At that point she spun into high gear, because she was good at planning. The RV was a fact of life. It was gonna get used no matter what. So she started researching possible private school avenues for me and my younger brother. Within a couple of weeks she nailed down Pine Hill Waldorf School (now High Mowing) in New Hampshire, got us enrolled for the fall semester, and presented Dad with a new plan. We were going to drive across the country in the RV all summer to learn about America. In the fall, she’d move up to New Hampshire with us kids, Dad would stay down in Cape Cod running the business, and the family would spend holidays together. This plan suited everyone, and it’s what happened.
After the last day of school, we all loaded into the RV with our big hound Sam. We had an absolutely great time for most of the trip. I remember seeing the Grand Canyon and being amazed. I remember my mother buying all the C. S. Lewis Narnia books, expecting them to last the whole trip; I remember figuring out where she hid them and burning through all seven books in like four days. I wish I’d been a little less turned inward as a nine year old. I don’t remember as much as I’d like about most of the places we visited.
Towards the very end of the trip, we were in Virginia, visiting Mount Vernon. While we were walking around the grounds, there was this big sound as if something was blowing up. Mom looked at Dad. Dad looked at Mom. A message passed between them. Mom said “Oh, they’re firing off the cannon,” very brightly. I believed her. Dad said “I have to go check on Sam,” and took off at top speed towards the section of the Mount Vernon parking lot reserved for RVs.
Here’s what I didn’t know at the time. The previous evening, Mom and Dad had a savage, quiet fight about which way the propane tank valve was supposed to be turned after the tank was topped off. You’d think it would have been second nature after a month of travel; perhaps the stress of the trip was weighing on them. The wrong person won the argument, and the valve was left in a state that would cause propane gas to build up to a point where a small spark could set off a large explosion.
Dad wasn’t lying when he said he had to check on Sam. Sam was hanging out in the RV, being unwelcome in the hallowed halls of George Washington’s estate. I’ve seen pictures of the RV even though they didn’t show it to us at the time: the walls were peeled back like a banana and the chassis was a smoking ruin. By some miracle, Sam was thrown completely clear and was just fine. The rest of us were very lucky we’d scheduled Mount Vernon for the day, because it could have exploded on the highway.
We found a motel for the night and rented a car to get home in. I remember it as being a tiny compact car. That memory is affected by the fact that Sam, while he was fine, did wind up with lightly singed fur all over. So the trip back was Mom and Dad in stony silence in the front seat, very unhappy about the fact that one of them nearly killed the whole family by blowing up the RV, and me and my brother and Sam in the back seat, with the scent of burnt dog hair in my nostrils the whole way home. It wasn’t a great ending to the trip.
And then we moved up to New Hampshire into a really cool old farmhouse. But that’s a different story.