Keith Epstein

Countering the ‘Family-Time Famine’

A Two-Month Getaway in the Northern Cascades

The Washington Post — April 11, 1994

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By Keith Epstein, Special to The Washington Post

When I returned to Washington this autumn, following 2 1/2 months of idyllic life with my family in the remote forests of the northern Cascades, I found myself suddenly a target of Beltway conspiracy theorists.

“What were you really doing all that time?” people wanted to know. “Writing a book, right?”

A White House staffer I know begged me to please tell him “what’s the secret project you’ve been working on?”

One member of Congress even asked if it was true I had been investigating a certain other member of Congress.

Again and again I insisted: We went to a place you can only get to by taking a four-hour boat trip or hiking nine miles over rugged passes. We camped, hiked, stayed in a cabin, picked huckleberries and read stories to each other. Except for a five-day trek learning to climb glaciers and use an ice ax, I was with my family.

“For two months?” one acquaintance persisted, eyeing me suspiciously. “You didn’t even read a paper?”

Then I realized: People in this city just can’t believe a young and ambitious professional, an investigative reporter at a major newspaper’s Washington bureau, would take paternity leave — just to spend time with his spouse and two children. There had to be a hidden agenda.

Suddenly I knew how Dennis Eckart, the Democratic representative from Ohio, must have felt when he quit Congress two years ago. Though a rising star, he complained of the “treadmill” on the Hill. “Both my son and my father are growing older,” he explained. “I am missing days with both.”

Still, Washington buzzed.

After covering the 1988 presidential campaign for The Washington Post, 41-year-old Paul Taylor stunned more than a few of us by giving up the high-prestige politics beat to cover — of all things — family issues. “It’s a more sane lifestyle,” he told me. His eventual posting to South Africa ended the gossip; conventional wisdom had reasserted itself.

When Peter Lynch stepped down in 1990 as manager of the nation’s most successful mutual fund he, too, startled his professional peers. Turns out what he really wanted to do was make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for his daughters.

Such men were, in a sense, paternal pioneers in a society that now officially recognizes the longing of fathers to spend more time with their families. Yet in Washington, where the supposedly enlightened created, debated and passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, spending time with family just isn’t done. Look at the workaholic example of the First Couple. Or Congress, which worked on Thanksgiving eve.

Look at the law firms, the houses of Congress, the press corps, the consultants, the legions of lobbyists and other professional classes that still are burning with activity on any given Saturday night. We’re pretty lucky, many of us. How many Americans, how many single mothers and lower-income parents have the luxury to take time off? We, meanwhile, have the financial means to spend more time with our families, in the day-to-day or all at once. Yet we opt for the psychic benefits of work. At the White House as at law firms, 12- to 15-hour workdays are the norm, perhaps not expected but “self-generated,” as President Clinton’s Chief of Staff Thomas F. McLarty puts it. “People came here to make a difference.”

Ours is a world in which even women now seem perplexed that men would want to phone home. New York Times White House reporter Maureen Dowd laments that the boys on the bus now are wimps and don’t want to have a good time; they’re always trying to dial their children on their cellular up-links. Men don’t like to advertise this yearning, of course, but they’ll talk about it in private. In discreet phone calls or in the corner of a Rayburn Building corridor a number of important men, often older than myself, have confessed to wishing they had done what I did. “Good for you, spending time with your family when you’re still young,” said a top, hard-charging Washington bureau chief.

Where we went there was no ringing of phones, because there were no phones. There was no Express Checkout, because there was no supermarket. There was no hum of even distant traffic.

The few ribbons of asphalt go nowhere except to link cabins, a bakery, a one-room school house, trail-heads, a waterfall, a remote ranger station, and a pier that juts out into the lake, which is the town’s only connection with the world most of us would recognize. The postmaster’s wife is the superintendent of the one-room school.

It’s the kind of place where you can have a towering cascade or Yosemite-carved valley all to yourself; each pass reveals another. At night, the sky is filled with more stars than most Americans can ever hope to see, even if they drive two or three hours from their homes. When meteorites fall through the upper atmosphere, you can sometimes see the flash reflected on the trees, as if Steven Spielberg were directing. These are special effects of a forgotten world.

My daughters and I could spend seemingly limitless hours reading, making up stories, playing, talking things over. The baby began crawling, the 5-year-old began reading herself. We baked huckleberry muffins. We hiked to the top of a cinder cone created by rocks spewing from a nearby volcano. We watched a family of snakes, collected pumice rocks, chased a marmot, sat down for meals together.

Far from the swiftly replicating subdivisions and HOV lanes, we dwelt among black bears, cougars, mountain goats, wild ducks, spotted owls, bald eagles, trumpeter swans and wolverines. According to a recent census, there were at that Zip code: 36 different mammals, 13 types of amphibians and reptiles, 122 birds, and 90 people. Temporarily, we could experience a form of community life most Washingtonians can only dream about in the hubbub of our self-important city — a life of potlucks, close friendships, good turns and good conversation, not just about politics.

Such are my thoughts now as I am rushing my daughter to school, or staking out a member of Congress for a quote, or wondering how to advance my career with a bigger story or a bigger news organization, or listening to the rumble of a jet over my home, or just battling with a pediatrician or plumber for an appointment sometime within the millennium. My daughter thinks about it, too. “Daddy,” pleads the voice from the car seat as we’re stuck in Beltway traffic. “I wish we could see that big bear at Coon Lake right now. And then we could make up stories about him just like we did.”

To be sure, experts recognize an American “family-time famine,” especially acute in the big cities of the Northeast — and I think of it every morning when, once again, I am saying goodbye to my two children and their mother for a lengthy day in the city. Usually, I don’t see my children again until the following morning.

According to a University of Maryland study, parents spend two hours a day with their children, 40 percent less than in 1965. Today’s average dad converses with his kids for fewer than eight minutes a day — four minutes if his wife also works outside the home. He plays with his children or helps with their homework fewer than six minutes each day, while consuming nearly two hours on other things, mostly watching television. I don’t know about you, but around our house it takes six minutes just to tie our shoes and pack our schoolbags.

A recent Newsweek poll quantified what the wishful 1980s concept of “quality time” failed to conquer: The feeling of half all mothers and fathers that they just don’t spend enough time with their children. In Washington, probably more of us feel that way, and some very public fathers are finally coming out of the closet, as it were, about their fears for the potentially destructive consequences.

Howard Paster, Clinton’s top congressional lobbyist, quit to spend more time with his family. Montgomery County School Superintendent Paul L. Vance, after the arrest of his son (charges later were dropped), fretted publicly about spending too much time on the job. Then D.C. School Superintendent Franklin L. Smith considered transferring his own son to a school in Virginia. Smith often works until 9 p.m. and attends conferences on weekends. “It definitely hit home,” Smith told The Post. “I listened to what people said about Paul Vance, that he was never with his child. That’s true of me.”

When I returned to this megalopolis of 3.4 million people, where there’s a line and bumper-to-bumper traffic for just about everything, even in the middle of the night, the same issues were still swirling — NAFTA, the Brady bill, health care, overspending, Gore’s National Performance Review.

In some respects, all I missed was Vince Foster’s suicide at the White House, a budget vote, and the sensational severing — and reattachment — of an abusive husband’s penis. I can confidently report that none of it has had much impact on the ecosystem or people of the Cascades.

At first when I got back, it seemed I had returned to a planet that existed in permanent fast-forward. Though I had hiked many miles over talus slopes and scaled a peak with belays, I felt breathless keeping up with Washingtonian friends who seemed to walk too fast. I was back in the world of angry motorists, endless promises to “do” lunch someday, and never-ending policy talk, even at — especially at — Saturday night social gatherings.

Somebody mentioned Ira Magaziner at work in the White House at 4 a.m. and I found myself daydreaming about an early Wednesday afternoon near Sahale Peak when we’d struck up a conversation with members of the cabinet of a Western governor; it was sunny, and they’d just knocked off work for a day hike. I hadn’t found out what they did for a living until we’d been talking for an hour or two about other things, like wildflowers and the best way to the top (of the mountain, that is). If Ira Magaziner did that, people would think of him as a goof off; he might even see himself that way.

It wasn’t long, though, before I picked up the pace myself. At parties or on the Metro, people again are asking what I do for a living before talking about anything else; I am defined by my work again. And I’ve been eating at my desk, dreaming up ever-better projects certain to take me away from my family. The pull of Washington, “news,” getting ahead, making a difference — it’s pretty strong at the implicit Center of the Universe roughly circumscribed by Capitol Hill and the Pentagon, Dupont Circle and I-395, and the salons of Upper Northwest.

One day in the remote community where we’d been staying, a woman came into the tiny store, a look of desperation on her face, pleading with the guy behind the counter to get her a newspaper.

“Don’t have any,” he said.

“You don’t understand,” she implored. “My husband’s back at the campground and he’s undergoing withdrawal. He’s got to have a paper.”

“Well,” said the clerk, “you could ask the fellas on the boat when it comes in tomorrow. Maybe they could bring you one the next day.”

She was shaking her head, sighing, when another local sidled up to the counter.

“You wanna know what the news is?” he asked her. “I’ll tell you. Homer poked a hole in his radiator this morning, and Emma Lou’s baby just came back from down-lake.”

Once during my travels, when I happened to see a telephone, I called somebody back in Washington to tell him the story. As I finished retelling the news about Homer and Emma Lou, the Beltway insider on the other end of the line grunted. It confirmed everything he thought about the uninformed electorate.

“You mean, Israel’s bombing Lebanon and that’s all those people care about?”

Washingtonians just don’t get it.

The alienation people felt in the last election, their anger at a power structure they sense to be elitist — it’s founded on our own arrogance, our own self-absorption, our own unwillingness to look beyond this place in a way that ironically would help us do a better job.

Without trivializing the importance of national or international events, or the grave ills of our society, this much is clear: Many of us are too full of ourselves and the noisy distractions and ambitions of the day-to-day to see what people beyond the Beltway really care about. And no wonder. From here we can hardly see the mountains — or even our own children.

Keith Epstein is an investigative reporter with the Cleveland Plain Dealer.