When he turned twelve, I decided he was finally big enough to control a vehicle on his own. After all, I had learned to drive the farm tractor at that age in Georgia. The closest thing I had to a tractor was the Land Rover, so I decided to start him on one of them.
Cubby had always been a small kid; whenever we had him weighed and measured he was always at the bottom of the charts for his age. That meant my own Land Rover was still kind of big for him even though he had pretty well mastered steering. He remained too little to handle the whole range of controls. A smaller-scale vehicle was needed, and I knew just where to find it.
A few years earlier, Land Rover had opened a driving school at a resort in Vermont that was less than two hours from our home. The school had just opened its doors to kids, and Cubby was one of the first students. He was very excited. Most weekends, I struggled to wake him up, but the day of his lesson he was moving under his own power at dawn. We were out the door and arrived in Manchester by eight o’clock, when the place opened.
We met Cubby’s instructor, a friendly fellow in Land Rover expedition garb. He introduced himself as Mike and reached down to shake Cubby’s hand. Cubby wasn’t used to that treatment, and he was impressed. He turned to me and said, “He looks like the biggame hunter in Jurassic Park. Does he have a gun? Will we see dinosaurs in the woods?” As we walked out to the course, Mike told Cubby about his time with Land Rover. He’d been with the company twenty years, and they’d sent him all over the world. Mike had driven the custom Land Rover Defenders that supported the race vehicles on Camel Trophy rallies in Mongolia, South America, and Indonesia. At that time, the Camel Trophy was a legendary off-road event. We had Trophy videos at home, so meeting someone who’d actually driven one was a real treat.
We saw the school’s fleet of Land Rovers. They had all the different models, each of which was painted white with off-road tires, winches, and Land Rover Driving School logos on the sides. Mike explained that those weren’t the ones for Cubby. They had smaller Rovers just for kids, he told us. He then led us to another garage, where the school had assembled a fleet of one-third-scale electric Land Rovers, decaled and equipped just like their full-scale brethren, except these were green instead of white. Cubby chose a spiffy two-door with no roof. He climbed in and gave a big grin as he bounced on the seat. Martha waved at him and I took their picture.
The controls on the one-third-scale Rovers were very similar to those on our full-size truck back home. The main difference was the motor. The school had electric vehicles that didn’t need to be started and ran silently. Ours was a diesel, which clattered and smoked. Given his diminutive size and lack of motoring experience, Cubby was naturally more comfortable in the school vehicle.
After a quick lesson in how to drive, Mike walked ahead and Cubby followed. “This isn’t about speed,” he told him. “It’s about precision. When you go fast off road, things break. Slow and steady wins the race.” Cubby grinned and nodded.
The first obstacle was a hill. Now there are gentle hills, and there are steep hills. You walk up the former and climb up the latter. This particular hill rose several times Cubby’s height with about the same slope as our refrigerator door back home. He was about to climb it in a Land Rover.
“Not so fast,” Mike said. “We have to talk about what you do if you get stuck halfway up.” Turning the wheel and rolling backward could cause Cubby’s Land Rover to flip over. If he got stuck, he had to keep the steering wheel straight and motor right back down to try again. Cubby was eyeing the hill with a new look of respect. He hadn’t thought about rolling his Rover.
“Steep hill,” Cubby said. “It sure is,” Mike agreed. “Better get out and check out the ground before you try and drive it. We always do that with rough terrain. Walk it first, and there won’t be any surprises later.” Mike knelt at the front of the Land Rover and pointed from the bottom of the front bumper to the ground in front of the tire. “See this angle?” he said. “It’s called the approach angle. It’s the steepest slope you can drive up without digging the nose into the ground.” Cubby got out and knelt in front to see if he could make the climb. Then he and Mike walked to the top and looked at the road he was about to drive. To Cubby’s surprise, the hill sloped back down just as steeply on the other side.
He had gone up and over hills like that with me many times in our full-scale Rover. He never seemed to hesitate when I was driving, but he looked a little nervous at the prospect of attacking little mountains on his own. After walking up and down the trail and looking carefully at both sides of the incline, he returned to his vehicle. He backed up carefully, looked straight ahead, and accelerated forward. The wheel spun a little as he neared the top, but he stayed steady on the pedal and he made it over.
We all applauded, and he was very proud. I took his picture.
They spent the rest of the day learning how to cross ditches, how to climb and descend slopes, and even how to winch a stuck Land Rover out of the mud. It was a great day for Cubby. I knew he was learning skills that would stay with him the rest of his life, or at least until the onset of senility, when they would become irrelevant anyway.
Cubby continued to grow after his driving lesson. Kids his age tend to do that, especially when fed. By the following spring, he was big enough to reach the pedals in a full-size Land Rover. I taught him how to work the winch, and how to rig lines and straps to pull stuck vehicles out safely. He was a quick study, and was thrilled when he pulled three kids from his school out of a swamp near our home. “If you were driving a Land Rover,” he told them, “you would not have gotten stuck.” They looked at their Jeep and kept quiet. If it weren’t for him, they’d still have been two feet deep in swamp water. Cubby was never strong on either tact or modesty.
He told my father and stepmother about his adventures, and they were properly impressed. Seeing my pictures of Cubby at the wheel gave my father an idea. A few weeks later, Cubby got a call from his Grandpa John. “I have a surprise for you,” his grandfather said. “See if your dad can bring you up next weekend.”
We drove up to Buckland to find the Honda ATV he had admired all polished up and ready to ride, sitting in front of their house. “I’ve decided to give it to you,” my dad told him. Cubby didn’t know what to say. We loaded the Honda onto our trailer and brought it home. Cubby rode it through the woods and even out to the power lines, a mile or more away. That old Honda had never seen such use. My father was very impressed by that.
With all that practice under his belt, we returned to Vermont for an event called Rovers De Mayo, on a wooded course outside the town of Woodstock. Cubby had just turned fifteen. A dozen Land Rovers and their owners gathered at the base of an old road that ascended the side of a mountain. I drove from home to the event, but as soon as we pulled off the main road, Cubby took over. I never let him drive on the road without a license, but off the road was another matter. No one cared on the trail. Traffic laws are the least of your concerns on a mountainside, as you pick your way over three-foot boulders and across roaring streams. Cubby was the youngest driver by far, but he was more capable than many people twice his age.
When Rovers got stuck he was right up front rigging the winch lines and pulling people to safety. When his turn came to cross the obstacles he remembered what the Land Rover instructor had told him—slow and cautious—and he made it through undamaged every time.
The Rover drive he’s most proud of today happened at a Land Rover club outing near Woodstock. At that event, Cubby took our red Discovery up several steep and difficult hills just fine before handing the controls over to Martha. Shortly after she started driving, the group encountered a particularly rough passage. She got the truck twisted sideways, flipped it over, and ended up upside down in the ditch at the bottom. When Martha and the dog made their way out of the overturned Land Rover, Cubby bounced clear off the ground, saying, “You flipped it over and I didn’t.”
We didn’t realize it then, but that was one of those classic Asperger m
oments. Instead of expressing relief that they were all okay, he was delighted that she had wrecked the car and he hadn’t, which meant his skills were better than hers.
“Maybe so,” one of the other drivers told him. “But now she’s an official member of the Rolled Rover Club, and you’re not!” Cubby was momentarily chagrined.
As the other people from the event gathered around, Cubby led the effort to rig the cables, pulleys, and straps, and winch our Discovery back onto its feet. Rolling a vehicle was an exciting moment at any off-road event, and everyone was eager to help. In a matter of minutes the guys had it back on the trail, on all four wheels, with most of its pieces intact. It was quite an impressive performance.
I was pretty happy to see the way his newfound skills were shaping up. From that point on, Cubby would be the driver and I’d just watch!
What’s that?” Cubby asked. Our car sat on a deserted road in Zoar, Massachusetts, otherwise known as the Gateway to Nowhere. The pavement ahead of us took a right turn and then disappeared into the mountainside. Cubby had seen tunnels before, but this one was different. It was more like an oversize mouse hole—a bare borehole into the rough granite of the Berkshires. He wondered where it went. There was no traffic going in or out.
I explained that engineers had hollowed out the mountain. They had dug tunnels from the Deerfield River, below us on the left, to the top of the mountain, eight hundred feet up to the right. Then the engineers bulldozed out an artificial lake on the summit, with a dam to hold the water in. When there was surplus electricity in the power grid, they used it to pump water from the river to the reservoir. When demand for electricity exceeded the supply, operators released water from the reservoir. The turbines that had pumped water to the top a few hours before now spun backward, generating power as the stored water dropped back to the river. In that way, the mountaintop reservoir acted like a giant storage battery. At full capacity, the Zoar plant generated six hundred megawatts of electricity, enough to power thousands of homes and factories.
Cubby had seen hydroelectric dams before—they were all around us. We had even ridden the fast water beneath the Deerfield hydro dam in our orange Zodiac inflatable boat. Water only flowed one way through a dam. The dam could be open or shut, but the water never ran backward. An installation that pumped water uphill in the morning and returned it to the river that night was something new for both of us. “Why does it do that?” he asked. I explained that demand for electricity falls when people go to work in the morning since their houses are empty. When they return home, lights and air conditioners come on, and the demand for power skyrockets. “It happens like this every summer,” I said, “especially when it’s hot and humid.”
“How does it do that?” If you ever doubted the value of general education, try explaining pumped storage to a curious child. But Cubby was always curious, especially when it came to great works of engineering. With that in mind, I explained how the Francis Turbines at Bear Mountain worked. He had seen water wheels, of course, but turbines were a big jump in sophistication. Still, I always believed that any child who hopes for a future in engineering should understand the basics of turbines. I wasn’t sure Cubby had engineering in mind for his life work, but it was the best thing I could imagine for him to do, so I felt it was my duty to try and facilitate it, the same way other parents groom their kids for careers in the Senate or investment banking.
I’d been showing him gargantuan, complex stuff like this since before he could walk, and I was confident he took in enough to understand what he saw a little better with every outing. Some people might doubt the ability of a kid to understand technical concepts, but I knew Cubby was different. He grasped engineering principles instinctively, though terms like hydroelectric and cogeneration still gave him pause for thought.
To get to Bear Mountain, we had motored confidently around the gates and past the power company’s No Trespassing signs. Ignoring the signs—which were obviously not meant for us—we’d crossed over the river and traveled a causeway along the water. The trip was worth it: The inside of the mountain was like a Hardy Boys book come to life. I remembered scenes from the Secret of the Lost Tunnel and the Mystery of the Spiral Bridge as I steered our old Rolls-Royce into the dark. In a few moments, my eyes adjusted to the tunnel and I saw that it was not dark at all. Our path was lit by gas discharge lights and the passageway was finished to a high standard. The road wound its way in, and we proceeded along.
When we arrived at the end, the differences between this tunnel and the ones in the Hardy Boys stories were unmistakable. Most obviously, there were no criminals in sight—only power company workers. A good-size parking area held a number of pickup trucks and a few company cars. The workmen were pretty surprised to see Cubby and me in an antique car, but we knew our rights. We were stockholders, there to inspect our property. By that time, we had long experience exploring, and on that day the foreman was friendly and happy to oblige. He explained the concept of the New England power grid. He showed us the turbine area, the transformer farm, and the rooms where they control the plant. We even saw where the water was finally released into a section of river they call the dryway. “We can dump a thousand cubic feet of water every second,” the foreman said reverently.
“That’s a slug of water about the size of our car,” I explained to Cubby. “So if it was cars getting dumped into the river, at one every second, the junkyard would fill up pretty fast. But it’s not cars, it’s water, so it just flows downstream toward the Connecticut River at Deerfield.” Sometimes Cubby accepted my explanations. Other times he seemed annoyed by my analogies. It’s hard teaching engineering principles to a kid, so I just took whatever success I got.
Over the years, thanks to the access our stock ownership provided, we saw most of the great engineering works of New England. Cubby didn’t say much about the places we went, but I knew the nuclear power plants, navy ships, rail yards, and dams made an impression. You could tell just by watching him on our tours. The little cogs were almost visible, revolving in his head.
I always hoped our adventures made Cubby a little smarter. Some people said intelligence was innate and you couldn’t change it, but I knew a foundation of experience would have a powerfully beneficial effect on whatever reasoning ability he was born with. Experience was what made common sense possible, and as my grandfather always said, common sense isn’t common at all.
I also hoped he’d see something that caught his interest. The only way I found electronics and cars—my two great loves—was when grown-ups showed them to me and helped me to unravel their secrets. Right from the beginning, I resolved to do that for Cubby.
I knew he’d have a great advantage in life if he found his interests early. The trajectory of my own life had shown me the value of acquiring skills in my teen years. Those years were fast approaching for Cubby. If I could help him find things he wanted to pursue and encourage him to study and go to college, I knew he’d be on a good path, with excellent odds of success.
I learned the value of college the hard way—by not going. Instead, I left home at sixteen and made my own way, without any legitimate credentials. Sure, I’m educated today, but I had to do it myself, a difficult and arduous process. Growing up was a rough ride, with times when I had nowhere to live and and foraged in Dumpsters, and I wanted to protect my son from that same fate. The best way I knew to do that was to teach him as much as I could, thereby giving him a head start on a real education—one that would make people want to hire him when he grew up. People complimented me for making my own way, as if it were admirable. If only they knew how much I’d rather have taken the easy and normal road!
For Cubby to take that gentler road, though, he had to find an interest and chase it. I could not make him want something just because I thought it was neat; he was manifestly different from me. The realization that he was not simply a newer version of me came to me over and over, and it was a surprise every time. His interest in trains waned, yet he never acquired
my love of electronics and music. I was worried and troubled. Was it possible that he simply wasn’t smart enough to fully appreciate the things I’d loved when I was his age? He didn’t show a passion for civil engineering or electronics. He rode in cars but didn’t show an urge to take them apart. He used computers but didn’t try to modify them or make them better. For a dad who loved machines, it was surprising and unsettling.
There was, however, one thing he loved: a card game called Yu-Gi-Oh! Cubby became a walking encyclopedia and statistical index to that game. He went to tournaments at the local mall, where he challenged freakish pimply twenty-five-year-olds and even stranger eight-year-olds. More often than not, he won.
The question was, what did those victories mean? I had played cards too as a kid, but I played poker with ordinary playing cards. Poker is a game of chance and skill, where a good player can calculate the odds and gain an advantage over less skilled opponents. The deck itself is always the same, not a tool manipulated by the other player.
The trading card games Cubby played were quite different. There was no such thing as a standard deck. People assembled their own decks, and some cards were better than others. Those cards cost more, and they had to be purchased or won. So you had a situation where a sharp player could work with anything, but he might get beaten by a little kid with rich parents who bought him an unbeatable deck.
At first I was disgusted, but then I realized real life was exactly the same. The deck of life is stacked in favor of rich, entitled people; kids who played Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon were just experiencing that early.
When I won at poker, I took my money and bought dinner in town. That gave winning a purpose outside of the game. When Cubby won, he expected me to buy him rare and exotic trading game cards that would make him a more powerful player next time. His reward came from my pocket! There was always a better card to buy. Yu-Gi-Oh! was what I called a closed loop. One played it in order to play more. Some people would call that addiction, and I wouldn’t disagree. The degree to which Cubby and the other kids immersed themselves in the game was almost scary.