Chapter 4. Which self-created journeys have you taken?

4.       Which self-created journeys have you taken?

You took out a map.  

You picked your destinations.  

You bought some tickets.  

You searched out your passport and updated it. 

You began your research.  

You created your plan. 

You said goodbye to your normal life.  

You packed your clothes and stuff.  

Off you went.

You took off on a journey you created.

When was the first time you did that?

Were you just 4 or 5 years old and you were off to go completely around the block your house was on in your neighborhood for the first time on your tricycle.  You knew the rules.  You knew that your mom said you could only go to the ends of your block.  At that point you had to turn around and head back.  Your mom had created an automatic homing system that instinctively pulled or guided you back toward your home.

But that day you had decided to take your trusty steed and go on an adventure.  You were going to see what you hadn’t seen before.  You were going to follow in Megellan, Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus’ footsteps.  You were going all the way around.  You were going to visit unknown territory, explore new lands.

For some of us when we were little boys or girls that would describe our first self-created journeys.  We might have packed a juice box and a couple cookies to take care of hunger and thirst and took along our surrogate friend: bunny, tiger or blankie for support.  I can imagine the scene from many episodes of Leave it to Beaver or the Dennis the Menace movie or cartoons.

Take a couple minutes to jot down some notes, thoughts, memories from your first journey. 

Where did you plan to go? 

How did you travel? 

How did it feel to finally go? 

How far did you travel? 

What was your personal reward? 

A sense of accomplishment.  A feeling of pride.  Or did you possibly get a spanking when you got home later for breaking your mother’s rules?

My earliest journey didn’t take me across the street, around the block or onto the next block.  Those journeys came later when I could finally ride a two wheel bicycle.  My first dangerous journey took place in a lake near Platte, South Dakota.

I was five years old.  My family was on our first long automobile family vacation.  We had driven all the way from Detroit, Michigan to Platte, a town with no traffic light and one police officer, who would race up and down the two blocks of the main street with his lights flashing and siren blaring every once in awhile at night when everyone else was home for the night.  Perhaps he was a relative of Barney Fyffe.

My adult cousin, Irene, her husband and two children lived in Platte.  Dwayne, her husband was born there.  The two of them had met in her homeland, Scotland, when he was stationed in the army during World War II.  They had married and moved back to his home town to live and raise their family.

Irene was the only other person in my family that I ever met who was born with a birth defect.  One of her hands only had a small thumb and no fingers.  Her mother, one of my two favorite, always smiling and loving, aunts sewed special gloves for her to wear most of the time that masked the fact that her hand was not normal.

I remember that she was a pretty woman, old woman to this 5 year old boy.  Irene was probably 25 or 26 then.  I remember the photos my Aunt Mary had sent my mother of Irene as a champion skater, an Olympic skater for the Scottish team.  Her brother, Bert was also an Olympic skater, a hockey player, eventually the player coach for the Scottish Olympic Hockey team for several years.  The two of them served as heroes and dreamy-eyed role models for me as a kid when I skated around and around on Milt Love’s backyard ice rink.

Her journeys through life were ones that my mother often spoke of as I grew up.  Her journeys lead her to a broken marriage, divorce, heartbreak and early death in a tragic drunken car accident on a dark road one night in Montana years later.

In 1950 during our family trip we visited Mt. Rushmore.  I don’t remember if xxx had finished the famous sculpture yet.  I was too little to notice or even care.  I remember that the sculpture was pretty big and seemed pretty “neat.”  It was the first of seemingly thousands of American, man-made and natural, historic and tourist sites I would see before I turned 17.  That trip we also visited the famous Wall Drugs.  It was a simple little drug store, sitting out in the middle of no-where or even beyond no-where.  A simple little drug store that had begun to become world famous by 1950 because of some very clever promotion by its owner and some of the local boys who went off to fight in World War II. 

The owner of Wall Drugs first started drawing attention to his little store by putting out road signs along all the roads in South Dakota, advertising ice cold water and clean toilets.  Then he started putting up signs in adjoining states in the west.  When some of his friends and customers went to Europe or Asia to fight they made and put up signs in Germany, France, England, Japan, Australia all advertising how many miles it was from those spots to Wall Drugs.

The first time I remember getting my picture taken sitting on a stuffed bronco horse, standing under the raised paws of a giant stuffed black bear or leaning next to a stuffed buffalo Wall Drug was the size of any neighborhood drug store in any town in America.  The next time I saw the store it was the size of a K-Mart, Target or a normal-size Wal-Mart.

Back to my first journey.  The lake story.

My family, my cousin and her little family, her in-laws and great-grandmother-in-law were all staying in the same cottage with a wrap around screened porch.  Everyone was off doing stuff.  My pesty older brothers: Jim and Brian, were out of sight.  So were my mother and father and everyone else.  It was just me at the water’s edge.

I picked up a gigantic inflated inner tube.  It probably was from Dwayne’s truck.  He worked for a mining company or an oil company or something like that.  A five year old doesn’t remember that kinda stuff.  I dragged my inflated rubber life support to the water’s edge and ventured out into the water all alone.  Alone for the first time in my life.  I climbed into it in a sitting position and began paddling out toward the center of the lake.  I can almost feel that wet and cold rubber against skin today.  I can easily remember the damn air stem and the pain it could inflict if you rubbed against it because you didn’t sit in the inner tube correctly.

My destination was a dock or a fixed raft, a wood platform, that we dove off of into the water.  We had all been diving from it several times already that trip.  This time I was going it alone.  I was an Olympic star, a champion swimmer.  I was all alone for the first time in the middle of the water.  I climbed out of the water onto the raft leaving my inner tube in the water at the side of the raft.

Without noticing it my inner tube drifted away.  I was truly alone on the raft, my wooden island in the middle of the gigantic lake, probably a small pond actually.  It felt good to be on my own.  It felt good to be on my own until I realized, that I was all on my own.  No one was in sight. 

I realized I was stuck.  I could not swim.  I hadn’t learned yet. I couldn’t see anyone who could help me.  The inner tube had floated a long ways away from the raft.

I probably stood and sat on the raft for what may have seemed for a long, long time, all alone, stuck on the raft in the middle of a big lake, knowing that I could not swim.

The next couple details of my memory are blank.  I know I ended up in the water.  I know I ended up struggling to swim towards my faithful inner tube, fearing I was going to drown.  The more I struggled the more afraid I became.  My growing fear motivated me to struggle harder.  All my struggle intuitively turned into natural swimming strokes called the doggy paddle.  With my struggle came success.  In what seemed like a very long time, probably seconds or a few short minutes actually, I had swam, swam for the first time in my short life and without a single lesson to have learned from. 

I had winged it and survived.  A strategy that I have often used in my life.

Without realizing it I had paddled my way to shallow water, shallow enough that I could easily stand up.

I had saved my own life.  My first journey at sea had been a success.  And there was no one to applaud or congratulate me.  I didn’t tell anyone.  I couldn’t.  I couldn’t for fear that I would never be trusted alone by the water again and probably be spanked or punished.  I have kept that success secret, that journey, to myself, all my life.

Many times in my life since then I have used that memory to motivate me to keep trying to keep paddling to keep doing what I can already naturally do, no matter whether it was the right thing or best thing to do at the time and to know not to give up or give in to the problem, challenge, disaster or tragedy, whether or not I knew what I was doing at the time.  Just keep paddling.  Struggle on.

Have you struggled on even when you didn’t know what to do or how to do something?

Having that motivating memory from when I was only five helped me to push off on a friend’s two wheel bike and finally ride freely on only two wheels three years later at 8 years old.  No one had taught me how.  My brothers were 16 and 13 at that time and never played with me or ever let me tag along with them on their excursions or journeys.  They simply were never there in my life. 

That first ride took place two blocks away from my house on a parking lot at St. Raymond’s church and school next to the nunnery, the building where the teaching nun’s lived.  We use to play pick up baseball on that lot or field.  I remember it was partially paved with black top and partially just a flat gravel and dirt area used for parking during church services. 

I vaguely remember that the edge and a portion of it was paved.  The edge along side of the nunnery building was ramped up forming a short wall and had a chain link fence on top of it.  What I remember is that I leaned my friend’s bicycle, a girl’s bicycle, a bicycle without that horrible cross bar that I would painfully discover many times later, up against the steeply sloping asphalt wall. I remember climbing on the seat, balancing myself ever so carefully, while hanging onto the fence and then pushing off.  The first ride was probably pretty wobbly but I was able to ride, to guide that bike.  I rode a two wheeler for the first time.  I had taught myself.  Actually I had learned by accident simply because I tried what I didn’t know how to do and was successful one more time.

I had winged it to success once again.

I had taken another short journey not a guided tour.  No one: not my mom, my dad or one of my bigger brothers, or a friend held the bike to protect me against possible harm or to safely guide me.  I simply blasted off into unknown skies and took my first solo flight, my first two-wheel bicycle ride.

Once again because my journey involved going two blocks from my home where I wasn’t allowed to go I didn’t tell anyone in my family about my success.  It remained my secret story, one of many, many such successes in my life, unshared, unrecognized, unrewarded and fortunately unpunished because I was breaking a parent’s rule.

My childhood is filled with such journeys, unknown journeys, at least unknown to my parents.

Looking back it seems that as long as I showed up for meal time and when it was time to come in at night after or before the sun went down I was free to wander on my journeys nearly anywhere I chose to go.  I had freedom that I exercised without realizing how much I really had.  I don’t think I ever really abused my mother’s trust.  Actually that is not necessarily true.  But those are journeys I may share later.

My radius of freedom, my foreign lands, the area I could roam increased as I got older.  I can’t remember my mother ever telling me that I could not go beyond any set distance.  The limits I lived with when I was younger, mostly set by my vehicle, my tricycle, I guess were only in my own mind.  I have no memory of my mother saying “Alan you can not go beyond…..”

Once I had my own two wheeler, my brother Brian’s 20 or 24 inch hand-me-down at first and then my brother Jim’s 26 inch hand-me-down eventually my territory greatly increased from a couple blocks to many.  Yes I was the third child of parents who had grown up with less than nothing and made it through the depression leaving their families and native countries to create new safe and secure lives in a new country through their own hard work, struggle and frugal financial efforts and practices.

The bigger “my” bike the bigger my world to journey in became.  Thinking back now I can see that my foreign territory, my lands of travel stretched in each direction about a mile to the east, south and west but mostly just only to the other side of 8 mile road to the north.  Our family street, Joann street, started at 8 mile road and ran southward to 7 mile road.  Except to ride to the old Motor City Raceway located on the other side of 8 mile road near the intersection of 8 mile road and Schoenherr Road approximately 3/4s of a mile away to the east of our house I rarely ventured further northward until I could drive a car.  It was as if there was a magic wall or a barrier behind the row of factories that lined the north side of 8 mile.  Actually I don’t remember knowing as a kid what could be behind or beyond those factory buildings.  I had no knowledge or motivation to go that way on any of my journeys.

8 mile road was a divided highway with a large grassed area separating the pairs of east and west bound lanes.  The speed limit was 45 mph what seemed like a very dangerous speed to be trying to cross when I was young on foot or on my bicycle.  I remember the adrenaline rush I would later get the first few times my friends and I would venture across the busy road, darting between groups of speeding cars on one of our excursions.