Rite of passage?

The Camino de Santiago de Compostella is an old, and I do mean old road.  As a Christian pilgrim road it's about 1,000 years old.  Before Christians began tramping their way westward, Celts wound their way along the Milkyway to the very end of the earth, Finisterra.  I'd almost be willing to bet that before them, during the time the fabulous cave paintings of  Lascaux and Altamira (which itself lies along the route now known as the Camino del Norte, just outside the city of Santander)  people found a reason to work their way west, towards the setting sun.  Actually that'd be cheating, I do know that many cultures find a way to transition from childhood to adulthood by using some kind of journey/adventure/passage to mark this transformation.  To "make" a man out of them as the phrase goes.  Here in the US it was always "Go West young man!"  as though there were discoveries there that could only be made by undertaking a huge journey across the continent.

Funny but I don't seem to hear so much of anyone doing this anymore.  Young people go to school, go to college, go out into the work force.  It's as though if they miss a single beat in getting "ahead" they might fall irretrievably behind.  Behind what I don't know.  If memory serves..and I don't think mine failing me yet, a great many of my generation took time to drop out, backpack around Europe or elsewhere in the world.  Or drive cross country, just pointed in a general direction, looking to see the world, explore, breathe.  I just don't seem to hear much of that anymore.  Or is it me?  I don't think it hurt us.  I know it didn't hurt me.

Ok granted I didn't get the chance to backpack thru Europe then, but I did disappear from my family here in the US for 6 long weeks the year I graduated from High School. (My postcards arrived a week after I returned home and had left again for Colorado!)  I stayed with my cousins in Stuttgart and Nurnberg.  My partners in crimes were Hennie (Henrietta),  Regina, Lilly and Barbara.  With some, but not a lot, of supervision, we traipsed around the cities, took trains and generally ran about, without running completely wild.   I know when I came back, albeit quite tipsy upon arrival, I'd grown up quite a bit, much to my poor parents surprise.  Although why that surprised them surprises me to this day.

Thinking about it now, I believe some of that "growth" was what allowed me to handle living on my own very shortly there after, still barely 18.  And, although I married very young,  21,  I've never felt a loss of adventuring or loss of life.  Well not much anyway.  That trip, including the month or more in Colorado working on, dare I say it, a Dude Ranch, gave me space and time to breathe, explore the world and myself too.   So by 21 I was ready to say I do, and a year later when my first son was born, I was ready for him too.  Well, sort of!

So now I'm on the other end of that familial equation!  My sons are grown, two are married, and one about to be a father!  Strangely, although they had freedom too...they didn't seem to want to simply go...not like I did, or at least not perhaps as long.  But me, I'm back at a point where I need some sort of marker, demarcation, transition from what has gone before.  Not to break with the past but to at least mark, remember, and celebrate what has been, and give thanks for it all.  At the same time, turning west to see what will come after the sun sets on this phase.