The Farewell Tour
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The New York Times October 8, 2006 The Farewell Tour By RALPH GARDNER Jr. DIANE McWHORTER was visiting colleges down South with her daughter Lucy, a high school senior, while listening to the Pixies song, —Hey,“ on the car‘s CD player. It‘s a song whose chorus repeats the lyrics —We‘re chained“ 17 times. —Lucy said, ”If I were making a movie, I‘d definitely put this song on the soundtrack,‘ “ Ms. McWhorter recalled. —‘It would be right before the character is about to commit suicide.‘“ Ms. McWhorter was having the same disturbing thoughts. —Here‘s a little moment of mother-daughter telepathy,“ she said proudly. Obviously, the two New Yorkers had been together in the car for too long. But the song and the ride served its purpose: not to help Lucy decide where she wants to go to college next year – that‘s the icing on the cake – but as an opportunity for Ms. McWhorter, however idiosyncratically, to bond with her teenager. —I found it very moving,“ Ms. McWhorter said of the trip. —It‘s a concrete version of a rite of passage.“ Ms. McWhorter, the Pulitzer-winning author of —Carry Me Home,“ about the civil rights struggle in her hometown, Birmingham, Ala., added: —Usually, you only realize these things in retrospect. It‘s a rite of passage in real time.“ Back when Baby Boomers were applying to college, it wasn‘t unusual to see the school where you would be spending the next four years of your life for the first time when your parents pulled the packed family station wagon up to your freshman dorm. But for this generation of parents and teenagers, the road trip to find the perfect college has become as integral to the admissions process as acing the SAT‘s or hitting up well-connected friends for letters of recommendation. For many families, though, the treks are also an opportunity for adventure and some last-minute quality time. In an often painless, occasionally profound way, and across miles of road and hours of conversation, the college tour allows parents to come to terms with the fact that their teenager‘s childhood is ending, and that, against all odds, the kid may just be able to survive on his or her own. —The college tour is a metaphor for saying goodbye to your kid,“ said Martin Tandler, who this summer traveled the Middlebury-Dartmouth College axis with his daughter Katherine, a senior at the Spence School in New York. —You‘re going on separate journeys from here on out.“ Central to this ritual is not so much arriving at one‘s destination as traveling there. The drive often embodies elements of Kerouac‘s —On The Road“ and National Lampoon‘s —Vacation“: meals at fancy and not-so-fancy restaurants and college cafeterias; dumpy motels and quaint bed-and-breakfasts; too many wrong turns and the occasional fender bender. Not to mention the silent praying that a state trooper won‘t catch your teenager behind the wheel on the Interstate with only a learner‘s permit. These voyages are not always unalloyed love fests. Teenagers are known to be moody. And parents have a knack for picking the most inopportune moments to bring up their children‘s shortcomings or bug them about that uncompleted college application personal essay. But the chance to spend several uninterrupted hours in a car with your adolescent, with whom you may not have exchanged a thousand words over the last four years, does help to reacquaint the two of you. —When the kids are small, the important conversations start before bedtime,“ said Jenny Elmlinger of New York, the mother of a high school senior. —But when they get older and go to bed after you do, the moments the kids feel like talking are at inconvenient times.“ When Ms. McWhorter thinks of her college trip with Lucy, she thinks of their near-death experience in Charlottesville, Va., when she made a U-turn and they were almost hit by another car. But she also remembers the trip‘s soundtrack, a result of spirited negotiation. —I said: ”I‘m driving. If I‘m irritated by the music we won‘t be safe.‘ “ Nonetheless, Lucy managed to make known her misgivings about some of the greatest hits of her mother‘s youth. —We were listening to David Bowie,“ Ms. McWhorter recalled, specifically to —Space Oddity,“ the song about Major Tom. —I never realized how stupid the words were until I heard my daughter do it in this hyper-articulated English accent.“ According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, 74 percent of colleges and universities reported an increase in campus visits in 2005 over 2004. Hamilton, a liberal arts college in Clinton, N.Y., experienced a 36 percent jump this summer over last. Visits to Middlebury College in Vermont rose by 40 percent over the same period last year. Robert Mitchell, a Harvard spokesman, said that this summer more than 1,000 prospective applicants and their families a day could be seen wending their way through the campus on the undergraduate admissions tours. —Ten years ago that was unheard of,“ he said. The tours, taken over spring and summer breaks and on long weekends during junior and senior year, can include 20 or more colleges, and often involve Southern, Midwest and West Coast swings. Emily Cohen of New York, a television executive, said her trip to Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., with her daughter Molly, a high school senior, was also an opportunity to visit the nearby Mall of America. —All of our trips revolve around food and shopping,“ she said, adding that they picked their lodgings based on which offered a free buffet breakfast, a shared interest. Dining at college cafeterias using discount coupons supplied by the admissions office is also part of the adventure. Over all, Ms. Cohen said, —I‘ve seen a lot of her with her iPod. Equally as much there has been a free-association conversation. The other key is, we don‘t have to look at each other if I‘m driving. It removes some of the conflict enhancers.“ At least one moment lingers with both mother and daughter: the day they spotted a moose through the pouring rain on their way to visit colleges in Maine. —I always wanted to see a moose,“ Ms. Cohen said. —It was on my list of things to do before I died. I was focusing really hard and saw this enormous thing on the side of the road, approaching the car. I screamed really loud, ”Molly, this is it! We‘re seeing a moose!‘ She shot up and we‘re screaming, ”We saw a moose!‘ “ In retelling the tale, Molly was slightly more reserved. —When she told me, I was asleep with the seat back,“ Molly remembered. —She starts hitting, almost smacking me. When I think of the trip to Maine, it is more the moose than the colleges.“ Ostensibly, though, choosing a college is the reason for the trips. College officials and parents said there are several reasons families are making more visits: the greater involvement of this generation of parents in the lives of children; the suspect belief that where you go to college is crucial to surviving in an economically volatile world; and the cutthroat competitiveness of the admissions process which makes choices and strategy so important. And then, some parents and counselors said, there‘s the not-insignificant matter of tuition. It only seems fair that parents have the opportunity to see the schools that will be helping them go broke. —If you are going to plunk down $150,000, that‘s like buying a house,“ said Patty Kovacs, a college counselor at the University of Chicago Laboratory High School. —You‘re not going to want to plunk down all that money without looking at the kitchen.“ But both parents and students said the bonding that occurs while checking out the bulletin boards in the student union and critiquing the student tour guides was definitely a bonus. Kenley Stark of New York, a high school senior, said that the distressing accommodations on some of their college trips – a decidedly unaesthetic motel on a visit to Cornell and a room over a saloon on a tour of Western Pennsylvania colleges – brought her and her mother, Anne, closer. And when they both realized they preferred country colleges, Kenley learned something more: —We‘re a lot more similar than I ever realized,“ she said. Stewart Cutler thinks the tour‘s road-trip aspect deepened his relationship with his daughter Ginger, 18, who drove more than a thousand miles on her learner‘s permit. —Her driving was excellent,“ said Mr. Cutler, an investment banker. —I was able to work clicking along on my BlackBerry and taking conference calls. It was truly a partnership effort.“ Evan Graff, a senior at Laboratory High School, and his parents turned his college tour into a birdwatching expedition – a ploy his father devised to get Evan, a nature photographer, to Washington University in St. Louis, where the Eurasian tree sparrow is a local resident. On the Maine leg of their trip they spotted the even rarer Western reef heron – which, like them, was just visiting. Nancy Lerman, Evan‘s mother, hopes the heron sighting bodes well for his prospects of getting into Bowdoin College. —We were going: ”This is like fate. It‘s a good sign, a convergence,‘ “ Ms. Lerman said. Tom Likovich of Bronxville, N.Y., who was at Hamilton College with his wife, Ellen, and daughter, Alex, on a recent weekend morning, said the visits were a lesson in letting his daughter call the shots.