The Escape Custom
By Brendan Moss

 

Its not that I grew up without a culture or community, I grew out of them. I shed my culture, year by year, a process of separation. Like scales from my eyes, layers of influence and teaching fell. At the end, I discovered that I had not been what I had imagined my self to be, an individual. No, I had been isolated. “But ‘no man is an island,’ as they used to say.” I remember hearing that one time sitting in a Subway with my dad during one of our “figure out what’s wrong with Brendan” lunches. We had just moved to Michigan, away from my friends who I had grown up with, who had inspired me to grow up. I had not seen them in months, and I searched the horizon for any sign that I was not alone. So he told me, “no man is an island.” And I remember the certainty of my reply: “I am.”
What joy is there in community then? What unity can be found in the practice of tradition if tradition is connected to a place you have left behind? You can’t just start participating in the traditions of a place you don’t belong; you’d be a tourist, an observer at best. You can coexist with people, but you can’t become someone else. In Michigan, I went through motions and ceremony. I tried to be part of their traditions the way I once had to wear my father’s suit coat, shirt, and tie to a wedding: neither expecting or desiring them to fit. I felt like I missed home, but that wasn’t really the problem. Even at home I practiced my own sort of tradition; even there I had a habit of escaping.
I sometimes picture my life as a flickering bulb, neither on nor off for very long. When I was a child I think I remember that the light was on, I was happy, I was loved. As I grew, it became dim; maybe I ventured out of its range or maybe the source just grew weaker. In either case I was not sustained by family or community, not wholly. When it flickered for the first time, shock of doubt, I must have been surprised, thinking “Oh. Maybe that is not true after all. Maybe things don’t work that way, constant and unyielding to the touch. Maybe this is a malleable world after all.” I wondered about everything then. I questioned all truth from that point on. I was exhausting myself, and still the light was flickering. But when I became used to discerning in the uncertain light, I grew tired of its irregularity. I did not want to doubt, I wanted to be sure.
It began in the early years of high school. I woke up late at night and was unable to fall back asleep. Maybe I heard a voice. I climbed out my window, though no one would have stopped me using the door. I just walked, beneath the stars, amidst the sleeping suburban houses, by myself. I did not know what woke me up, nor the reason I felt the need to escape.
This habit continued through my time in Michigan, until at last I came home. It is strange to call Ohio home, but at the time I ached to be there (now I ache to be where I am). Home was just a place where all my friends were. What else does anyone mean when they talk about their culture, their community? This is mine:
In the cul-de-sac, on the pavement at the bottom of the steep hill, where it got dark early, we would lie. Big gulps, throwing up, riding skateboards down the hill and up again, holding on in a line to the back of Caleb’s rusty Bronco II as it struggled up the hill, I think I can, I think I can. I lived at Andy’s house, in the house on the left hand side of the cul-de-sac. The quaint ranch style home behind a manicured lawn -- I never understood why his dad bothered with it, he a bachelor at the bottom of a hill -- always peeked its red brick face with its yawning garage door apologetically around the impudent teenage cars parked on the street. I lived there for a year, paying $100 a month to live in the room behind the garage.
Andy was still in school. I was working and just starting college. Our lives were fragile. My girlfriend (now my wife) broke up with me, and her sister broke up with him. That action threw us mutually into isolation. We didn’t know anybody except people we had met through our relationships with the girls we loved. We bought a Nintendo. I beat Zelda. We watched movies. We waited. He was my family that year. He was a brother to me. I still felt the need to escape. Now my escapes had a companion.
Three or four nights a week we went to Waffle House. It wasn’t far, but we always took the long way, through the woods. I sat in the front seat of his old minivan, a 1990 Plymouth Voyager with wood paneling on the outside, my feet on the dash. It used to belong to Andy’s mom; it had waited for him to turn sixteen in front of his house, a reminder of her and a hope. If we had a friend with us I sat in back, on the floor because all the backseats were gone. The upholstery still held memories of his childhood: broken cheerios, lingering perfume his mom had worn, sand from a trip to the beach. I lay amongst these things and stared out at the sky through the windows, navigating by the stars, thinking, “we are going somewhere.” I closed my eyes and listened to the music, letting the velvet darkness fold in around me. On summer nights we rolled the windows down and turned the music up, some sad, ethereal song; a beacon of sorrow speeding on the back roads, deep warm sound diffusing in the night air like moisture and the moonlight. We turned off the headlights sometimes, feeling for the time like we were simply floating over the road ourselves, that we were carried on the wind, watching glowing broken streaks of fireflies shoot past, sometimes striking the windshield, flickering out.
Having reached our destination, Andy and I shuffled timidly towards the door, embarrassed of the frequency with which we entered it. We took a corner booth furthest from the door. The waitress brought the coffee (on the house) and we ordered pie. Then we sat for hours talking like we knew what we were saying, asking questions as if either one of us could answer them. We learned about God. We talked about movies, music, books, people we knew, people we wanted to know. We talked about the things we wanted to do and places we should go. Plans were made and unmade. All the things that I hold dear now began to be formed during those midnight trips to Waffle House. In my most important year, I had a friend.
That year and my habit culminated in a trip across the country. It was a burst, like a sprint, a mad dash into the west. We had been exercising restless muscles until we took off. Andy, our friend Nick Bee, and I condensed ourselves into Nick’s three-cylinder Geo Metro, thinking what Nick must have been thinking the day he bought it: “Sure, it’s uncomfortable, but it gets great gas mileage.”
We left at 1:00 AM. I drove the first night, happy and awake, making good time and leaving lots of world behind. It was like driving through a tunnel, the headlights held the featureless road in front of me and ignored or disregarded the world beyond their reach. Indiana, Illinois, we stopped for breakfast. Missouri, dreadful tedious Kansas, I-70 West. Tumbleweed. Grateful Colorado, Denver, mountains, night. I was at the wheel again, driving through the tunnels once again, this time through the mountains, with the snow. We shivered in our sleep for three hours at a rest stop on the Utah border. Onward, through the desert, in Nevada, the sun set yet again. Our noses itched to smell the salt air. I slept in the backseat as Nick endured the great sequoias, redwood trees, speeding cars on a treacherous road, he screamed a few times. We switched drivers at a Denny’s in the warm air. California. I drove again down Highway 1, just south of San Francisco. The mountains were lounging in the sea, I drove along them as sun came over the mountains and the early mist parted, unveiling the vast blue-green expanse of pacified chaos on our right (in which no man is an island). Carmel, Big Sur, Santa Monica. We stayed the night; it was the first full night’s sleep in three days. Whatever we had outrun caught up to us that night. We turned around and went home.
Things have since settled down. My escapes are more subtle now, the bursts are less violent. Still I get away, now with a wife and kids. We escape with the same eagerness and spontaneity that I practiced those short years ago. I take them to all the places that lacked their presence. I used to drive alone and look to the passenger seat, frustrated by what it ought to contain, the thing for which I sought, what I kept running off to find. She sits there now, feet on the dash, in her quiet beauty. It's not that different, really. In this most important year, I have a friend.
My community has never been one confined to a location. It has existed in locations, only to pack up and move with me wherever I have gone. I imagine if you were to ask a Bedouin or nomad where the center of their community was, the question would make no sense. The center is where the people are at any given time. It moves with them. When my wife and kids go to the store, home is at the store. When they visit her parents, home is at her parents. I don’t know what would happen to home if they died. I suspect it would cease to be, as physical as it ever really was. Home would be in heaven or with God, like God, absent and intangible, but full of love. That is where the custom comes from. Why pretend you have a home when it is as fragile as human life? The escape custom isn’t really about escape, but about taking something with you. It’s about knowing what you can take with you, and leaving everything else wherever it is.