Having reveled in the unusual (smoking a joint with Bob Marley, for instance, or going for midnight sails with caviar poachers in the Caspian Sea, or driving 32 hours to see the Dalai Lama in Dharmsala) on behalf of magazines like Esquire, Outside and Rolling Stone, Jacobson never went in for typical summer holidays. He and his wife, Nancy, had always avoided theme-park vacations, preferring instead to drive through the bayous and Cajun prairies of southern Louisiana or dig for fossils in the South Dakota Badlands. But their kids seemed stuck in a cultural wasteland. So in the summer of 2000, only something truly foreign would do: Thailand, Cambodia, India, Nepal, Egypt, Jordan and Israel and the rickety planes, trains, rental cars and rickshaws that got them there.
“12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time” (270 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $23) is Jacobson’s account of their journey (with occasional “Talkback/Backtalk” chapters written by his daughter Rae), a book that unfolds less as a travelogue than an entertaining–and at times frustrating–story of the family’s struggle to keep pop culture and entropy at bay.
Jacobson doesn’t need to make much of a case for his initial revolt, as exasperation with what he calls “idiot culture” is something nearly anyone can relate to. But it wasn’t just the full-court press of 21st-century Americana driving him nuts. Jacobson and his wife were also reeling from what every parent dreads: a teenager, under their roof. Anais Nin said adolescence is like a “cactus,” and their eldest daughter was getting pricklier by the day. Rae cut nearly as many classes as she attended after being accepted into Manhattan’s prestigious LaGuardia High (a.k.a. the “Fame” school). She spent her time wandering around the city (and getting her nose pierced) by day and sneaking into downtown clubs at night. No amount of cajoling, threats, speeches or discipline seemed to help–she Didn’t Want To Talk About It. Turns out she didn’t want to go around the world, either–“my teenager social butterfly insecure side … said ‘God, if you go you’ll miss everything, you’ll be separated from all your friends for three months,” she writes (and the reader either sighs in recognition, or seethes with indignation). But bailing on the family wasn’t an option. It was The World or a militant summer boarding school.
And so the trip shaped up as a lifeboat of sorts, a way to keep the family from drifting farther apart. Instead, they planned on drifting together.
Ultimately, we’re shortchanged on a prognosis: it would take more than the book’s breezy 250-plus pages to determine the efficacy of the Jacobson prescription. But rattling around Asia, the Middle East and Europe on a relative shoestring is radical therapy–and it’s an amusingly chronicled and appealing ride. It only takes 23 hours or so on a plane to rip the family from its moorings. The book’s first stop is the funeral pyres of Varanasi, where even seen-it-all Jacobson is disturbed by the sight of dismembered corpses floating down the Ganges. Torn between his bohemian dedication to the value of experience above all else and the sight of his 9-year-old coming face-to-decaying-face with a rotting body, he decides to shield his children: “In search of The Real,” he writes, “it was important to screen out the Too Real.”
There’s more second-guessing at places like Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, where a mere 25 years ago the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed thousands of fellow Cambodians whose skulls now line its walls. “My wife and I [had] discussed this trip as partly a mnemonic exercise, to implant in the kids’ tender minds a better class of memories than total recall of ‘Buffy’ episodes,” Jacobson writes. “In the wake of Tuol Sleng, we wondered about this strategy. Was it really right to puncture the however deplorable media cocoon with this ‘reality’?” Rae’s response leaves the question murkier than ever. “I will never see anything like that again if I can help it,” she begins–but then, perhaps unwittingly, makes a case for having done so: “Words cannot describe this place; pictures won’t take you there and make you feel it. I’m still nauseous. I wonder if things will ever seem the same after this.”
Such decisions along the way were clearly difficult, but fortunately for the Jacobsons–and the reader–the journey isn’t all blood and guts and mortality. The family makes it to happier places: the peaceful Thai island of Ko Samet, Kathmandu, which “offered its special scent of romance,” and Jordan’s ancient city of Petra, at which point they “formally acknowledged [they] were having a good time … At Petra, [their] planets lined up in harmonic convergence,” Jacobson writes.
But did all that exotic, forced-family bonding erase any cultural pickling or declaw the demons of adolescence? Since the book doesn’t have much of an epilogue, the Jacobson authors agreed to meet me in their old neighborhood, the East Village, to offer themselves up as Exhibit A.
It was obviously no practiced PR date or rehearsal for their book tour. Rae, now 19, was a half hour late for our 1 p.m. meeting (Jacobson’s call from the restaurant woke her from a sound sleep.) But when she did arrive, the only trace of sullen teen was in her all-black ensemble: miniskirt, shredded fishnets, leg warmers, and a sleeveless Sun Studio T shirt. (Too Cool.) Belying her hipster outfit, Rae seemed anything but aloof or superior: she was articulate, self-possessed and entirely comfortable in her own skin–and her father’s presence.
In what may not be a conventional happy ending, she has dropped out of college after only one semester, claiming the decision stemmed not from any depression or rebellion but from a desire to excel. “I want to go back and finish school, but not until I know I can do well,” she explains. “I want to be good at something. If I go now, I know I won’t succeed–I’m not ready–and what will that prove? It’ll just be a waste of time and money. So for now, I want to try something else.”
“Something else” turns out to be living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, working on her first novel (so far, she’s got 60 pages down) and considering some magazine writing, like her dad–who seems almost alarmingly mellow about it all. Where’s the guy whose offspring made him blue in the face? The father who “was on her case, screaming about her being lazy, not trying”? The father who, in a Rae-induced rage, kicked a hole in the wall of their Park Slope apartment?
“She has all the qualities in myself I want to strangle,” Jacobson admits with a smile. “It’s frustrating, yeah. But you just have to relax about it. What can you do?”
Huh.
Maybe they’ve both grown up a little. Maybe it started with their trip around the world. But whatever the reason, it’s heartening to see a father and daughter with such a sweet (but not saccharine) rapport–he ribs her about oversleeping, she’s apologetic but finally rolls her eyes, smiling the whole time. They talk about shared musical tastes, laugh recalling a fellow writer’s warning about marijuana–“she says it’s addictive” (more eye rolling)–and chat about the Steve Earle concert they’re going to later that night, just the two of them. While each admits to having needed a little breathing room following the trip, father and daughter confess to being almost embarrassingly close these days.
But before booking any family tickets to Asia, know this: formerly sweet, even-tempered middle child Rosie–she of the angelic smile on the book jacket–seems to have taken a turn for the … nettlesome. “Oh my God,” Rae breathes, “she’s 16 now, and she’s a thousand times worse than I was.”
“Well, come on. Not a thousand …” Jacobson hedges. Rosie’s a ska punk girl. And–surprise!–she hates high school, with a particularly feverish vengeance (“It’s this enormous place in a Hasidic neighborhood …” Jacobson says with a rueful chuckle.) “Put it this way: she’s incredibly aggressive. Really. Aggressive. Rae used to bob-and-weave her way through an argument. Rosie tears full speed ahead.” But at least she’s not a pop-culture princess, hanging out at McDonald’s, wearing Abercrombie & Fitch and listening to Britney Spears.
Right?
