The fact was I had the vision. … I think everyone has. … what we lack is the method.
— Jack Kerouac
When Mike Marriner, Nathan Gebhard, and pals boarded their hideous lime-green RV in The Open Road, part of me wanted to cheer them on. They are, after all, partaking in an honorable tradition of hitting the road in search of adventure and self-discovery. But soon after their comically rocky start, I found myself asking, who is paying for this trip, and why aren’t I buying it?
If hitting the road sounds like a Kerouacian rite of passage, the comparison ends behind the wheel of The Open Road‘s fussy RV. Oppressed by the burden of growing up middle class in Laguna Beach, Calif., the lifelong friends found themselves at a crossroads. Dude! They didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives. While Marriner was following the family tradition of going into medicine, and Gebhard came from a family of entrepreneurs, neither felt those paths were theirs. So, a year short of graduation from Pepperdine, they hit the road in search of answers. Not from Kerouac’s “real people,” but from successful CEOs, and other corporate types who found their success through unconventional methods (i.e., Michael Dell). Along the way, they stopped at college campuses to pick up fellow wanderers to serve as part of the visiting committee.
The question that The Open Road interviewers posed was simple: Where was your head at when you were twentysomething, and how did you get to where you are now? The answers are not surprising. “Follow your bliss” was the general response. “Forge your own path” and similar advice tumbled from the mouths of interviewees from Saturday Night Live director Beth McCarthy, to IDEO CEO Tim Brown, to Dell, to Manny the Lobsterman (the only blue-collar worker included).
While I appreciate the angst of careening down a path that is horribly wrong, I can’t help but wonder: What happened to changing the world? What happened to making a difference? What happened to seeing the world beyond yourself, and yourself as a part of the world? If The Open Road is any indication, the underlying desire from this generation is “I want to be a big shot someday. Is there a way to do that without being too uncomfortable for too long?”
These temporary wanderers in particular seem the most dazzled by the chrome and glass of many of their informants’ surroundings. One young man seems particularly thrilled to be drinking coffee at Starbucks headquarters prior to the group’s visit with Starbucks chairman and founder Howard Schultz. (Yeah, the same place that banned The Austin Chronicle from its stores.) The young interviewers hang on every word that Kevin Carroll utters, and with good reason. The youthful, 43-year-old African-American speaks eloquently of a harsh childhood salvaged by sports.
“I see my dream in action,” Carroll says earnestly. “You have to be willing to put your dream out on the street.”
While Carroll’s words are the most inspirational, dramatically placed near the end of The Open Road, a cracked sense of reality occurs when you consider where Carroll works — Nike, one of the most notorious exploiters of human capital. While Carroll’s story from poor kid to corporate super promoter is compelling, one wonders why the subject of social responsibility never enters the discussion with Carroll or any other interviewee. Or maybe it did, and it was just too icky. After all, these kids have a hard enough time wrestling with the demands of the world without having to worry about nuisances like corporate greed or human exploitation.
Following Marriner and Gebhard’s initial tour, a franchise erupted. Under Roadtrip Productions, the pair produced The Open Road, co-authored a book with Joanne Gordon (Roadtrip Nation: A Guide to Discovering Your Path in Life), and developed a how-to college course. They are also directing Behind the Wheel, an eight-part series following the adventures of selected college-age kids who hit the road in the trademark lime-green RV for a summer interviewing other success stories across the country (more women and people of color would be welcome).
In the meantime, Marriner has given up medicine for a writing career. Gebhard wants to be a filmmaker. Kerouac may have lamented the lack of “method” for the youth of his generation to realize their visions, but Marriner and Gebhard discovered theirs in a lime-green RV, with some camera equipment, some well-placed knocks on doors, and enough capital to keep the cell phone connected, the gas tank filled, and the RV stocked with peanut butter. And to think other people get by on so much less.
The Open Road airs on PBS Friday, Nov. 14, at 10pm. The Roadtrip Nation RV pulls into the University of Texas on Monday, Nov. 10. For more information, visit www.roadtripnation.com.
This article appears in November 7 • 2003.