April 2009

Kevin’s gap year

“What am I getting myself into?”

Kevin Edwards and Lucas Braun geared up for their cross-country biking journey this past fall.

The cold was bad last September 19 in the King’s Inn parking lot on the first morning of Kevin Edwards’ Tacoma-to-Takoma odyssey, biking east from the state of Washington toward the Washington on the opposite coast. After a while his hands hurt so much he could barely switch gears. Of course, he had forgotten his gloves. He had packed his gear in a rush after eleven days of hiking across the face of Mt. Rainier with his dad, Bruce.

Bruce said good-bye in the parking lot, but fifty miles down the road he happened to find his son along the highway and stopped to chat. Kevin was tempted to crawl into his dad’s warm car. “I kept thinking, ‘What am I getting myself into?’ It was hard to say good-bye after that,” he said one morning, back temporarily at the family home on Sycamore Avenue.

On the roadside outside Tacoma, after one more hug, Kevin had watched his dad’s car speed away, leaving him and his biking pal, Lucas Braun, finally on their own, without gloves and without cell phones.

Within minutes, though, they spotted a herd of elk loping through an open forest, and a long-anticipated sense of adventure began to take hold.
For Kevin, who had decided to take a year off to experience the world of bohemian travel after finishing high school last spring, this was only the first stage.

It took seven weeks. In Wyoming they awoke to ice on their tent. One night, tired to the bones, Kevin fell asleep in a parking lot after patching a flat tire and was awakened by a local cop beaming a flashlight. In Odebolt, Iowa, a man put them up on a cold night in his farm shed, next to three tractors.

Bruce and his wife Peggy tracked Kevin through his ATM withdrawals, although they were infrequent. He and Lucas were frugal, sleeping outdoors and eating at cheap buffets. At a Pump ‘N Pantry/Taco Express they wolfed down burritos but were still hungry and waited until after hours for eight free leftover hot dogs. They ate a lot of greasy meats. “I was a vegetarian when I started the trip, but I totally gave it up,” Kevin said.

Kevin had a deadline for his return – Election Day, his first time in a voting booth. “When I saw Sligo Creek I got excited. I knew I was home.” The reunion with his folks went well, but it was short. Less than week later he was off again, this time for a Dublin-to-Madrid wandering, eleven countries in another seven weeks, without his bike but with a Takoma Park friend, Tyler Kelly.

Across the English Channel they rode a ferry, and for a while they tried thumbing along the roads. A friendly motorist picked them up with a warning, “You’re really dumb to be out here. Two kids with big packs – you’re sitting ducks.” So they bought a bus pass, and for a while they teamed up with a few road-wise local teens.

They had no set itinerary and changed plans almost every day, which was exactly how Kevin had envisioned it when he decided to defer college, a not uncommon decision for the modern teenage graduate. Trendsetters popularized the idea in Europe almost a generation ago, and now it’s fashionable among large numbers of Americans. A term has been coined for it – “gap year” -- and it’s possible to enroll in gap-year programs.

Kevin, though, wanted the open road, and when he made it back on New Year’s Eve from his second tour, having avoided all known perils except for one pickpocket in Madrid, his parents were still solidly behind his decision. “I wish I’d done this when I was young,” Bruce said, a few evenings after Kevin had settled back in.

Peggy agreed, “People told us, ‘Oh, he should join a program.’ But I like the fact he’s doing it his own way.”

In Idaho, Kevin had encountered a hitchhiker for whom wanderlust had become an obsession. The man had been on the road twelve years, he told Kevin, operating “by faith.”

Might Kevin ever be tempted by such an impermanent life? “No, never, I’ll definitely be in college in the fall. I’ve already been accepted and everything,” he replied. “But I do want to get the most out of this year.”

Hoping to finance a third tour Kevin spent a few weeks looking for a job, and when he came up empty he enrolled in a work-for-food program, the WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms). He chose a farm in a remote area near the Copper Canyon, east of Mexico City. By the first part of March, though, he had tired of the routine. He e-mailed Bruce and Peggy, “There are too many American kids here,” and he let them know he was heading into the mountains with his backpack.

At this point Bruce and Peggy did the sensible thing. They decided to join him. As it worked out, Bruce could not get vacation time, but, on April 4, Peggy and Kevin’s younger brother Eric left for Mexico. Kevin had contacted them, and they had identified a Quaker camp as a point of rendezvous.

Preparing for her departure, Peggy said, “I guess we’ll go where the road takes us.”