Beyond the Ruby Slippers

In a few weeks I’m boarding a van in the middle of the night with the man I love and five of the six children we share to drive for fifteen days from Minneapolis to Lake Ontario and back again. We’re going to take the S.S. Badger car ferry across Lake Michigan, ride a dune buggy on the gorgeous sands of Silver Lake, don raincoats and hats to feel the drenching raw power of Niagara Falls on the Maid of the Mist, spend a few nights in a rustic cabin on a remote privately owned island in Lake Ontario, parasail on Lake Huron, eat fudge on Mackinac Island, and pay homage to the greatest lake of all as we wend back home via Highway 2 along Superior, hitting Bayfield and Duluth on the way.

I hope I get some good stories out of the deal, because I can tell you that despite the thrills and overconsumption of fun and fuel, none of us are going to “find what we’re looking for” as we paddle toward the sea any more than we find it sitting in traffic on University Avenue. This truth goes back to the disillusionment of cactus and dust and angry bees on a summer day in childhood.

I was nine, living on the outskirts of Casper, Wyoming, with nothing but a six-foot cedar fence standing between my backyard and the wild open expanse of sagebrush, tumbleweeds, and prairie dogs leading up to the foothills of Casper Mountain, which loomed purple in the distance. Mostly this arid landscape was flat and uninspiring to a girl who’d not so long ago left the rocky majesty of Lake Superior.

I started riding my bike out behind the fence, as far as I could go in one direction and then another, learning to notice the humble beauty of various cacti and flora. And one day, I stumbled on the impossible, the wondrous: a gorge in the land, with two steep walls and a bottom, along which a pitiful but real trickle of water inched sluggishly along.

A hill, a stream—it clutched my heart with buried memories of home. I wanted to claim it, stick a flag in the ground, make it mine forever. It would be my secret place, my personal canyon, where I’d commune with the big sky and beyond. I’d return the next day to spend the whole afternoon, alone with myself and the world, snug in the safe crevice of earth that had found me at last.

I did return, my bike basket laden with the picnic I’d packed for a day in paradise. My heart thumped with anticipation and the happy exertion of the ride. Hot noon sun pounded down on me as I unloaded my goods and hauled them halfway down the dirt slope, scoping out a little bare spot to sit. I chewed a few dry bites of a peanut butter and honey sandwich, swallowing hard. I wasn’t really hungry, so I wrapped it back up and sipped orange juice from a plastic thermos. Sweat ran from my hairline into the corners of my mouth. The hard dirt was uncomfortable, the sun punishing, the cacti pokey. I didn’t feel magical. I felt sticky and itchy and awkward and dense and I had no idea what to do next. But to leave so soon would be to fail, to admit I’d been duped, that fairylands were make-believe and our cardboard house with its tin shell and flooded basement and scabs and boils was real as bone. And then, on cue, the bees arrived, swarming in for the honey and juice, and I grabbed my stuff, kicked up the dusty slope and pedaled home, heavy with a disappointment I could never have named.

The mindful among us would say, “Wherever you go, there you are.” But could I have understood then what I want so dearly for my own kids to hear now? That as summer’s limitless possibilities start popping like soap bubbles in the air around them, and the panic sets in, and they scramble to fend off the loss with more of something—anything—that wherever they go, and whatever they buy—there they will be, that to feed a monster only makes it hungrier? That those who can’t find satisfaction from others must turn to things—goods and services, toys and travel—to fill the emptiness within? That as Jack Kornfield writes in After the Ecstasy, The Laundry, “Socrates, who lived a simple life, loved to go to the market. When his students asked about this, he replied, ‘I love to go and see all the things I am happy without’”?

That I grew up dirt poor and money is better, that the tin house is thousands of miles past, but I’m still here, that life is tough but they can love it anyway, and that they are never going to find what they are looking for in the mall or even behind the cedar fence because The Wizard of Oz is absolutely a true story and they should listen up as fast and often as they can.