“The American Dream” can feel like a trap. The mortgage, car payment and school schedule drumbeating its way toward the standardized tests to churn out college-ready kids on their way to ‘the workforce’. Illusory ‘work-life-balance’. Running kids from soccer to gymnastics to theater. Overtired parents. Competing agendas. “Success” can feel like a cruel joke. Family time a rare occasion. Relationships and togetherness challenged. The ironic, busy isolation of the modern condition setting up the next generation of depression, anxiety and restless consumerism. Since early in my professional career I’ve felt this way frequently, and believed deeply there must be another way.
Sitting down this week with a family of six – pioneers of a modern frontier – I feel a sense of excitement and wonder at their story. Over coffee in the cockpit of their 45-foot sailboat, our children play together below deck and we chat about their next adventure. They’re about to set sail on The Great Loop – a six-thousand-mile journey along waterways that wind through the Great Lakes, central US, the southern and eastern coastal waters, the northeastern seaboard and portions of eastern Canada. This isn’t “a vacation” or a year “off” from life; it’s the way they’ve chosen to live their lives together. For the past four years, they’ve traveled the United States together in an RV. Now they’re taking it to the sea.
It was through Dustin – a colleague of mine at a large multinational corporation – that I first learned of ‘roadschooling’. It’s a growing trend and community of families who are dropping the norm of “The American Dream” and hitting the road together for a life of adventure, togetherness and learning-by-living. Following a hands-on, practical and immersive approach to learning, roadschooling practices a life of learning centered around experience. The road is the classroom. The journey is the curriculum. Boundaries dissolve while the family – and the community – learns and grows together. I wonder if it isn’t the leading edge of a societal evolution. A better way. A new and improved “American Dream”.
Dustin explains that they started out on these adventures four years ago with a simple set of rules; 1 – have fun, 2 – learn something, 3 – try something new. It’s an approach to life that seems to have served this smiling, relaxed, obviously close-knit family well. Their four-year-old daughter with wild blond hair and outstanding negotiation skills she picked up in some North Dakota flea market seems already wise beyond her years. She’s only ever known this nomadic life. Their ten-year-old daughter with a quiet but confident presence is already becoming a capable sailor after the summer’s hands-on learning on Lake Michigan’s sparkling, salt-less seas. The boys – eight and eleven – play piano, read, play video games, fish off the fore-deck and inhabit their ship as though they’ve been seafaring all their lives. It’s clear they’re honoring their first rule, and as the family ‘learns by doing’ everything about sailing there will be no shortage of the other two rules along the way.
As I bombard Dustin and Jill with questions about their chosen path, I become more deeply convinced there’s something important going on here. Observations of the differences between what has become accepted as ‘traditional’ in American life and what this family is experiencing call out a sharp contrast. Children truly engaged in learning. Practical life skills and capability. Community and accountability. No ‘bullying’ problem. Disparate political, religious and lifestyle beliefs co-existing peacefully. People outside. Children playing together and living life in wandering-but-connected ‘neighborhoods’. Time. Time spent together immersed in life as a family and community. Less absorption in devices. Less connectivity. More connection.
Living in close quarters as a family of six has its challenges. It demands minimalism. I recall arriving for a week-long work function with my backpack and rollerbag and to meet Dustin – his entire week’s wardrobe and gear in a single small computer bag. Another contrast between our realities. Living the wandering lifestyle and finding ways to provide everyone their own space in the confines of an RV or a boat also comes with its frustrations and difficulties. But then, the same can be said of my own family of six in a four-bedroom home in the suburbs. Here on the Greenheart though, (That’s the proud name of their new home on the water) there’s no lawn to mow, no garage to keep rearranging, no basement burgeoning with unused ‘stuff’.
Not to over-glamorize their chosen life, there are responsibilities and difficulties aplenty. Sometimes Dustin must travel for work, so they plan their route and movements carefully. It can be stressful trying to manage a corporate job while living a non-traditional life, with concerns over the impressions and assumptions that may be drawn at work. Then there are the mechanical talents required to service an RV or large marine diesel engine, the constant chores of maintenance attendant to a road or live-aboard life, the logistical quandaries of obtaining food and sundries without so much as a bicycle for land transportation. For Jill as a mother-and-head-teacher there are the rigors of parenting, running a household, planning and overseeing curriculum, rallying children to keep them out of Dad’s hair during work hours and orchestrating a family life in less space than many of us sleep in. It’s not a life that one might reasonably refer to as ‘easy’ but one that clearly radiates with goodness.
In the two hours we spent together conversation flowed. Our children played and bonded, we discovered ‘small-world’ connections between our families and friends. We explored common themes in our recognition that life is for living – and the weighty limits this American life seems to impose on that living. It seemed evident to me that this unique family, their Great Loop adventure and the roadschooling movement are all part of an emerging “other way” that may hold a new promise for our society. As I tucked my little girls in that night and talked to them about what we’d seen and learned through our friends that day, I was grateful for the gift they’d given us; a first-hand experience with the beauty and the freedom of “The Possible”. Maybe that’s what the American Dream was supposed to be all along.
Follow their journeys on Facebook and Instagram @GreenHeartAdventure
~GWB~
