I had 20 hours in a car with my son last weekend, and he didn't drive me crazy.

Not even a little bit.

My oldest son Henry spent this summer clearing trails and doing battles with Canadian beavers for the North Dakota Forest Service. He lived in a trailer in a tiny town and made $13.25 an hour. For me, that sounds like a nightmare. For him, who has lived his entire life in Texas, North Dakota was an exotic foreign locale where he could tease the locals. “Do you have buses in North Dakota?” he would ask his coworkers. “What about voting? Is this a real state?”

But last weekend he had a problem. He had to work Friday in North Dakota and turn in some paperwork at his apartment in College Station by the end of the day on Sunday. That meant he had to drive 1,245 miles in two days. There’s no way I was letting him drive alone for 20 hours.

I flew up to meet him on Friday. I left Austin in the morning and arrived in Fargo in the ‘90s. I opened my Lyft app, and it basically said, Are you sure about this? There were no drivers available in the state. I asked the information desk where the taxi stand was and was handed a slip of paper with five phone numbers. The driver who picked me up a few minutes later was from Ghana. He was in the process of applying for citizenship.

“Thank you for choosing us,” I said.

“I love it here,” he said. “Anyone who works hard can get ahead.”

I didn’t tell him. Probably better to let him find out in due course.

On the way to the hotel, I noticed a mall anchored by a J.C. Penny’s and a Barnes & Noble. I half expected to see newspaper vending boxes, Fotomats, and beeper stores. I’m pretty sure the last Beyoncé album to be released in Fargo was Destiny’s Child.

Later, my son arrived, sweaty from a day’s work in his green uniform polo and ball cap. When he took off his shirt to shower, he had me check his back for ticks. I marveled at his newly muscled body that I had once held in the length of half my arm. When he was a baby, I somehow knew that to touch his face by his ears would make his eyes close. In high school, he broke his arm badly, and at first I was the only parent in the hospital room with him. I was relieved that I knew where to touch him to soothe him. It was like useful phrases from a language you haven’t spoken in years floating back into your brain. Oh, right. I know this. And now he let me scan his back for ticks, and I noticed moles I’d never seen before, or forgotten. His body had become fully his own.

Over dinner he told me about work. I remember little of what he said. I get nervous, worried that I won’t know what to say to him. It used to be easy. I could show him the “Mah Na Mah Na” skit on The Muppet Show, and he would laugh with joy and demand I play it over and over. He would ask me why things were funny, and we would deconstruct jokes. Now he’s inside himself, trying to find his way out of adolescence, so he tells me facts of his life, including trouble he had backing up a trailer and his battle with a 70-pound Canadian beaver. This all comes as a shock to me. I feel handy when I tell the leasing office that we have a burned out light in the bathroom.

“I’m just impressed I have a son who can back up a trailer,” I offer.

“The thing is, dad, you don’t.”

I should probably tell you about the battle with the beaver, but I suspect he would rather I not. Apparently there was this massive beaver damming up a stream that would then flood a trail. Every day Henry would troop in and clear the stream, and every evening the beaver would reinforce the dam, even going so far as to purposefully clog the culvert. Finally, the forest rangers decided to trap the beaver and his family.

“Well, that’s nice,” I said. “Where did they take them, Canada?”

Apparently they were euthanized.

“I didn’t know that’s what they meant when they said we were trapping them,” he said guiltily.

***

The next morning we drove through a lot of nothing, otherwise known as the Dakotas. I was stunned by the lack of commerce. Some of the blue highway attractions signs for Gas, Food and Lodging were blank, either aspirational or remnants of better days. All I saw were green fields of corn. Corn, corn everywhere, and not a Starbucks to drink. I can’t believe each of these states gets two senators.

Henry was texting. I asked what he was up to, and — parents of teenagers, hold onto your butts — he told me he was answering questions from a girl. He just came right out and said it. Probing further, I asked what the questions were and — you are not going to believe this — he told me.

“She wants to know what my favorite space TV show and movie are,” he said.

Game on. We ran through the comparative and declining merits of the Star Wars franchise, the holes in his knowledge of the Star Trek franchise, and how Dune was impenetrable crap. We settled on The Martian and his real favorite, Space Jam.

“What about the reboot?” I asked.

“We don’t talk about the reboot,” he said.

Morgan Wallen’s “Whiskey Glasses” came up on shuffle. I don’t listen to a lot of country, but my friend Walker had suggested it as a country song that successfully incorporated hiphop elements, and like most modern country songs, it was all hook, no cattle.

Henry, who’s developed a taste for country music at Texas A&M, looked up as the song began to play. He told me that Wallen, who was a big country star, got caught yelling the N-word at someone. There was a backlash, of course, as Wallen quickly “promise[d] to do better” Instead of ruining his career, Henry said, Wallen had become more popular than ever with the segment of the audience that took objection not as much to the N-word if at all, but to the backlash. We live in the age of backlashes and then backlashes to the backlashes.

“Galaxy Quest!” I shouted, finally and belatedly thinking of the right answer to the girl’s rote question.

“Oh, ri… Wait! Muppets in Space!” he piped in. We groaned, discouraged by our inability to more quickly recall inanities.

“What’s the next question?” I asked.

“‘What’s your favorite dinosaur?’” he read. Henry is a wildlife ecology major, I think, and can name every tree by looking at a leaf. I assumed he would have thoughts. I was correct. “Well, I don’t like theropods,” he said.

“What about T-rex?” I offered.

“Dad,” he said, not unkindly, “they are theropods.”

I thought for a second.

“What about Fred?” I suggested.

“What?”

“Say your favorite dinosaur is Fred,” I said. “She’ll think it’s funny.”

“I’m not saying my favorite dinosaur is Fred.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s Steve. Steve is much better. What’s the next question?”

“‘What would be your porn name?’”

“Well that’s obviously Fred.”

We stopped in Sioux Falls, a city in a million years I never thought I would be in. We googled “best pho in Sioux Falls” and were pleasantly surprised. I had one of the best bowls of wonton soup in my life.

The $1 billion lottery prize was still hanging out there, and I’d bought tickets for my office. If one of the numbers had hit, every person in my department would have won $33 million. Day dreams of penthouses and the freedom to write full-time danced in my head. I asked what he would do if he won, and he started listing people he would give the money to. We talked about how having that much money would occupy your whole life, and your job would become giving it away. Food banks replaced penthouses in my head.

It was his turn to drive after lunch. He handed me his phone and asked me to compose a text to the girl to explain he wouldn’t be available for the next few hours. I wrote, “Had a surprisingly good lunch. gonna be driving for a few hours. talk to you later”

I took care to make a dog’s breakfast of my punctuation and capitalization because I, oh wizened man that I am, know The Kids and their informal ways of communicating. I am hip. I am down. I know how to connect with The Youth.

Later Henry showed me her response: “OK mr businessman.” It was worse than not fooling her. I made my son look like a dad.

But I didn’t make him late for dinner. We got his paperwork turned in, and now we’re back in Austin before he returns next week for his senior year. I can’t say it seems like only yesterday when I moved him into his freshman dorm because so much has happened since then: a pandemic, George Floyd, Ice Storm Uri, the insurrection, Uvalde. The Orioles are even good now. I offered to take him shopping for clothes before he went back to school for one last time.

“Dad, I’ve got disposable income, and I’m older than 10,” he said. “I think I can buy my own clothes now.”

Yes, son, you can, and a lot more than that.

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.

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