New York to Oregon: On Traveling and Not Growing Up

(This is the Part 1 of a seven-part series on my cross-country road trip from New York to Oregon.)

Looking back, it seems like I had no choice but to hitchhike across the U.S. after I graduated from college.

What else could I do?

Twenty years ago I’d probably be be getting married, finding a job at the widget factory, buying a cute little fixer-upper in the suburbs. But not now — not anymore. Now 29% of couples married in their early 20s will divorce; we’re still in a recession, with national employment around 9%; the country is still recovering from the housing market crisis. The New York Times noted in August that people now in their 20s are “taking longer to reach adulthood”: we’re marrying later, delaying careers, waiting to grow up.

Damn right we are. We saw the mess that got our parents in. Those dreams are a tough sell these days. My generation is too smart for that bill of goods, thank you very much — too smart, too sophisticated, too worldly. Or at least we think we are.

So what to do instead? A lot of us opt for the Meaningful Travel Experience. It’s a tradition as American as chocolate-covered bacon. We graduate from college, many of us loaded down with debt, realizing that our double-major in Using Big Words and Thinking About Stuff won’t be raking in six figures a year anytime soon. It suddenly becomes very important for us to “broaden our horizons” (or “flee in panic.”) So we pack our bags and buy our tickets. We teach English overseas, visit ruins, build houses — or in my case, play Jack Kerouac and light out for the opposite end of the continent.

I’d like to pretend my reasons were purely altruistic. I was learning something about the world, I told myself — breaking the fetters of my bourgeois upbringing and experiencing firsthand the plight of the downtrodden proletariat, thereby enabling myself to usurp society’s corporate-fascist power structures… ! (Note: politics majors actually think like this. We’re great at parties.) Damned if I wasn’t going to be exactly like Gael Garcia Bernal in The Motorcycle Diaries.

Honestly, I did try to go into the trip with as much humility as I could muster. I genuinely did want to take a look outside the bubble I grew up in. But the truth is that some part of me was just scared of trying to grow up. Failure looms large these days: failed marriages, failed careers, failed dreams. It’s much, much easier to play the Free Spirit card and take off for somewhere noncommittal. My good intentions might not have been complete crap, but there are still inescapable and not entirely glamorous reasons why I hit the road — why many of us do.

So I bought a bus ticket out of town and started loading my pack. I wasn’t going to get press-ganged into white-collar alimony servitude like those other rubes. No sir. I was going to learn some gritty truths about the world. I was about to have a life-changing experience. I’d come home and sit in bars with an air of faraway wisdom, sipping pints and assuring my enraptured audience that I knew — I’d Been There. Most importantly, I was going to look damn good with a three-day beard, à la Señor Bernal, looking smolderingly pensive on some dusty roadside.

And really — what else could I do?

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© Ryan Miga and The Nowhere Times-Dispatch, 2010. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ryan Miga and The Nowhere Times-Dispatch with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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