by Bill Nowacki

Ten years ago as one of my sons approached his 13th birthday, I determined it was important to share a coming of age experience – to dramatically move him from boyhood to manhood.

With an outfitter, I organized an expedition into the Holy Cross Wilderness. The climb to our 12,000 foot camp site would be challenging but we’d be rewarded by fly fishing in virgin streams and dusk-lit readings from TS Elliott and Walt Whitman.

As we left our home in Chicago to begin our journey, I asked my son to select something that typified his young life – something conspicuously boyish that had been part of him, and to bring it along.

He elected a baby tooth.

Altitude sickness, bone chilling waters, bear scat, and hikers’ rations took their toll on us both. Exhausted, we began to demonstrate to each other a vulnerability we’d not formerly shared; we spoke openly and deeply about life, adulthood, and dreams. As the days slipped by, I observed a change happening: he began to embrace the idea of being an adult. His posture changed. His carriage changed. His awareness changed.

After days, we packed our camp. Dirty, hungry, and a little melancholy, we girded ourselves for the 10 kilometer trek back to the trailhead. We paused for a second to consider everything that had been said and thought; at that instant I handed him a shovel as asked that he bury whatever it was he had brought “from his boyhood” there on the mountain.

We left it behind.

Our guide on the trip was a wiry bespectacled 61 year old who had left Wisconsin at the age of 17 to ski, smoke weed, and live a life unencumbered. He began outfitting 5 or 6 years into his western swing to augment his earnings then eventually traded winter skiing for leading telemark excursions to the same wilderness we would eventually share.

It was his idea to bring TS Elliott. Each evening after my son nodded off, he and I would talk about where we had been in our lives and where we were going. He confessed that his body was slowly giving out and that he could envisage a day where the summer streams would cease to flow for him. He offered that he had no savings, no assets, and no framework for living apart from the mountains. Forty years before, he had thumbed his nose at a world he didn’t understand and eschewed. And with 3/4th of his life behind him, it was dawning on him that many of his inspirations and ethos had been undeniably naïve and wrongheaded.

Fast-forward 10 years. I’m certain he’s no longer on the mountain and reasonably sure he often plays to a draw the if I had it to do over again game. Don’t we all rail in our youth against things we don’t understand? Don’t we all – as teens – create villains that we embrace in later life? Rules. Traditions. Our fathers. Our faith.

What’s different now though is whereby 30 or 40 years ago, this contagion was limited to the distance one’s voice could carry across a quad, it no longer has boundaries it’s not containable. Through social media, this up-is-down and black-is-white belief system is universally and continuously broadcast, choking out the immutable laws of physics: that “up” is up, and white is indeed white.

Back then, the disenchanted abjured from power, structure, and commercialism. Today, they want to dismantle it. Crush it. The former were benign. The latter, dangerous.

If they’d only open their eyes – the malcontents across college campuses – they’d discover the things they like best are products of the very things they damn.

Consider Uber. Ask any college kid what he likes about Uber, and he’ll adoringly explain that it allows anyone with a car and an appetite to set up shop and become a sole proprietorship able to flout the mega enterprises that are our rental car, taxi, and livery companies. It is to them the ultimate thumb in the eye of capitalism. Yet, Uber has raised over $1.2 billion in private equity investment, and at last check, the limited partners investing in PE aren’t 91 year old grandmas from Peoria. Uber is a mega corporation with fleets of lawyers fighting in every court in the land and at the same time tightening the noose on its quasi-independent drivers in search of Alpha. Uber is beautifully, enticingly adult. As much as young people want to believe it akin to a lean-it-up-against-a-tree bike sharing program, it is not.

And neither is Airbnb a smaller version of a hostel where one can find cheap, independent, off-the-grid places to bunk. Airbnb has raised an astonishing $1.5 billion in venture capital and like its four-wheeled cousin, it employs legions of attorneys and spends millions with creative agencies fine tuning its brand image. It is commercialism at its sexiest, grown-up best.

One of the benefits of youth is that since time has been recorded, their collective tipping at windmills has been forgiven and forgotten as they’ve transitioned to adulthood and embraced those things adult. But what would happen in a world where the young dreamers actually knocked over the windmills? What if their braying successfully undermined the institutional and market dynamics that make our adult world work?

A windmill is a difficult thing to topple.

Ultimately, their protestations will prove to be like the echoes my son and I bounced off the canyon walls all those years ago: unheard by anyone else, quickly fading into time. Not to be remembered.