It Seems to Come Down to a Simple Thing Called Respect

“Bear!”

(Actually, it’s a moose.)

“Bear!”

(No, wolverine.)

A stump is a bear and a rock is a bear, and finally Pam confesses her maxim for survival here: “In Alaska, anything big and brown’s a bear, OK?”

Hmm. Is there a lesson for our children in that? Is the survival instinct a family value?

Pam and I and our children--Ashley, 13, Emily, 10, and Robert, 7--have spent the summer touring the United States, reporting on American families. Now, as we head north on the Alaska Highway, the foliage already is blazing in a yellow and orange mottle.

Autumn leaves? Sigh. It must be time to start wrapping things up.

And one thing I promised the bosses back home is that I’d report on a term that buzzed through recent political seasons: family values.

In fact, one of the first things we learned on the road was that we weren’t alone in our quest for values this summer. Everywhere we went, we met other families, and few were simply sightseeing.

That doesn’t mean anyone could define the nebulous term. But some were ahead of others.

One morning, at Cowan’s Gap State Park in southern Pennsylvania, my family bicycled off to explore the woods. I opted to infiltrate another campsite, drawn by the scent of several dozen sausages grilling over a campfire and the sight of a young man breaking a full five dozen eggs into a stainless steel bowl.

Bryan Hammaker, a 34-year-old forklift operator, was designated cook for the morning. Twenty other Hammakers from four generations scrambled after Frisbees and Nerf balls or sat playing cards beneath an enormous blue tarp.

Twenty-five years ago, matriarch Janet Hammaker and her husband began taking their six children for weeklong vacations at this shaded campground overlooking a scenic little swimming and fishing lake. When Janet’s husband died two years ago, there was a moment when the family’s ties must have seemed as vulnerable as life itself. But Janet figured that the way to knit the fabric of her family together again was to keep its traditions strong.

So what does the Hammakers’ magic bonding ritual entail? “Not much,” Bryan said, cracking two eggs at once. “We stay up every night till 2 around the campfire.”

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Talking.”

That answer echoed what we heard from Arizona to Maine: Summer is the time to coerce family togetherness, building enough boredom into the gatherings so that aunts and cousins and siblings will sit around polishing family mythology until the good stuff sparkles like legend, and the bad disappears into black humor and cautionary tale.

It’s also a natural time to sort out the family’s values.

I asked Janet what values she tries to instill in the sprawling, wisecracking, roughhousing, embarrassed-by-such-serious-talk crew that surrounds her.

She keeps it simple: “The golden rule, do unto others. Always be kind. Be as trustworthy as possible. And if you’re going to have a family, give ‘em love. Family is the center of my life, and love is the center of my family.”

I suspect that most of the people we talked to this summer were trying to say just about the same thing. More parents than I expected summed up their values with the same word or hyphenate: “Christian” or “Judeo-Christian.” Others called out a litany of specifics they hope to instill: the work ethic, cooperation, appreciation of nature.

An elderly woman we met in Wyoming began her list with “civility.” She also lamented that today’s young women dodge their duty to serve on volunteer boards. “They don’t want to do anything that impinges on their tennis game, their bridge game,” she said.

On the Iowa State Fair’s cacophonous midway, an unemployed roofer and his scraggly extended family had other concerns. He remains the only person we met all summer who cited “honesty” as a priority for his children. “I teach them, ‘don’t steal.’ ”

Those disparate encounters reminded me that despite all the worry these days about “moral relativism,” morality is relatively easier for middle- and upper-crust folks. Which may explain why the most bedraggled parents we met also were the most adamant that their kids learn right from wrong.

*

A trip like this, by its nature, generates odd juxtapositions and unusual layers of association.

Our second day on the road, more than three months ago, we all met around a conference table with former Vice President Dan Quayle, who first kicked the term “family values” into circulation.

Quayle talked about discipline and rules and (after admitting to regrets that he’d been a bit of a slacker) the importance of education. Then he turned to Ashley and administered an impromptu lecture that sounded a lot like one we’d given the kids that morning.

“You’re going to have a hard time living up to this in the next 14 weeks,” Quayle said. “But you’ve got to respect everybody that’s around this table: mother, father, brother, sister. . . . You have to respect them for who they are. And they need to respect you too.”

A week later, in Little Rock, Ark., former Surgeon General Joceyln Elders--whom conservatives deride as a foe of family values--also cited respect as the quality that keeps her family tight.

That word, in fact, was cited more often than any other as the value American families need and too often lack.

What’s causing conniptions is the question of what “respect” means, who should teach it, and what to do about those who lack it.

One fine, blustery morning in August, my family ducked into the Blue Mountain Diner in Barre, Vt. Soon we were digging into piles of pancakes covered with real maple syrup. A few stools down, a middle-aged woman nursed a Coke. It didn’t take long to see that her mind’s grip on reality was slipping.

“They say they’ve landed on Mars,” she said to the wall. “I don’t believe that. Abraham Lincoln may have gone to Mars.”

As she mumbled she glanced at us, and after a while she spoke up. “Must be hard as hell having three kids today.”

“It’s not easy,” I said.

“It’s hard getting by just alone,” she said. “I don’t have any family here. I’ve worked as a maid, digging dirt. I don’t like being treated like dirt. That’s not good. You want to have some respect.”

I smiled. The waitress had added the woman’s Coke to her tab without recrimination, saying simply, “That’s $55 now.” The patrons gave her polite nods as they came and went. No one apologized to the tourist family for the local woman spouting gibberish.

“It looks like people here respect you,” I said.

“I think they like me,” she acknowledged.

Somewhere, that diner’s citizenry had learned respect. But it seems that respect is in increasingly short supply these days. Individual, family, community, society. How to sort out the web of responsibility?

Elders and, in Massachusetts, popular pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton were among the experts who reminded us that families need a strong community to thrive. They said that society--including government--has a responsibility to pitch in and help its most vulnerable members.

We agreed. It does take a village, and it’s disingenuous of conservative leaders to pretend otherwise.

But we also agreed with the folks at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs, Colo., and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City who pointed out that when society becomes paternalistic or maternalistic, the family’s role as primary source of values is undermined. No institution can offer the quality Janet Hammaker offers.

Don’t get too worked up about this stuff, though. As that debate continues, parents of every description--Democrats! Republicans! Libertarians! Lutherans!--go about their business, bolstering their own families by implanting good values.

We were driving through upstate New York when we began seeing cars with strange trailers. Approaching a tollbooth, we rolled down a window. “Where’s everyone going?”

“Soap Box Derby!” a woman answered.

Crossing into Ohio, we hung a left for Akron. It was a week before the big race, but the starting line already swarmed with people. As Pam and the kids strolled around admiring the sleek, home-built racers, the racers’ parents told me what they thought their time-consuming efforts were teaching their offspring. “Self-esteem . . . sportsmanship . . . persistence.”

A divorced father from Tennessee said he had raced as a boy, and his father had raced, and now, when he has custody, he travels with his son watching him race.

“It’s sort of our thing,” he said.

Another racer’s dad said he directs an alcohol treatment program and that he traces a lot of the problems he sees there to a single failing: “The parents just don’t have time. . . . They put their own lives before their kids’.”

Time, after all, is where love and respect are put to the test, right? In a parking lot in Charleston, S.C., we met the Bitlers from Pennsylvania--an attorney, his science teacher wife and their 6- and 7-year-old children. The lawyer was acutely aware that highway hours aren’t billable. But he’d made a decision “to exchange the money for the moment.”

And he said he’d met many other families in campgrounds and RV parks who had made the same decision. “It’s almost like the wagon train of the ‘90s.”

Such a comparison, of course, trivializes the genuine hardship faced by the pioneers. But there may be something to the notion that families are once again wandering, searching, ready to circle the wagons around the values they think will keep them strong.

*

I’m writing this in the back of our rented RV as Pam drives. Pam’s mom, who joined us in Seattle, sleeps at the table and the kids listen to an audiotape of Jack London’s “Call of the Wild.”

As the endless landscape darkens outside our windows, London’s story ends with a sled dog abandoning civilization and heading off into the Alaska wilderness, howling with a wolf pack.

Perhaps an hour later, we stop along a river to eat. We’re cooking macaroni and hot dogs inside the well-lighted RV when I hear something. We rush outside and cluster in the dark, listening in disbelief as an unforgettable sound rolls over the tundra:

“Ah-oooo! Eeer-ooooo!”

The caribou-skin clad people who first crossed the Bering land bridge to Alaska probably figured this out fast: When the bears growl, when the wolves howl, a family comes in handy.

Later, as we drift toward sleep, it occurs to me that family and survival are indeed still linked, and that the values that keep families strong are ignored at real risk--even if the forces stalking us now don’t all have fangs and claws.

* Thursday: The last stop.

ON THE WEB: Visit the Sipchens on the World Wide Web at https:// www.latimes.com/trip/ for maps, journals and sounds from the family’s trip.