Good Traveler, Bad Traveler
from the notebooks
Dear Wanderers,
We learn things about ourselves when we travel, but we learn more when we stay put. When we travel we can be the best versions of ourselves: more curious, more energetic, more open to trying that unidentifiable street food we would not permit to pass our lips on an ordinary day: the shark fin soup in Beijing in the 90s, before I even knew it was cruel, the snake slit open by a rusty blade on the sidewalk in Xian, the stew at the top of a mountain in Slovenia, where I'd been driven by an angry girl who wore a razor blade on a chain around her neck.
If I wrote an ode to all the unidentifiable meats of my youth, my current self, motherish and safety-conscious, would stop mid-sentence to deliver a sermon to my son entitled, "Don't eat it if you don't know what animal it is, and whatever you do, make sure the blade is clean." But when I travel, I let the safety commissioner slide. When I travel, I eat the street food, because it is all an adventure.
When we travel we look out of foreign windows at foreign landscapes and feel cosmopolitan and foreign: we have come to this place, we have ridden the train or the plane or the boat, we have hiked the hill, we have ridden the donkey down the steep incline, we have rented the car, we have motored ourselves in one way or another into this unfamiliar landscape, into this unfamiliar home, and by setting our toothbrush by the sink, our shoes beside the door, our underwear in the underwear drawer, we have claimed it, temporarily, as our domain.
We are in motion and we are fearless, or as fearless as we will ever be, because getting out of one's geographical comfort zone makes one more willing to be uncomfortable. Those wiggling spots on the sheet are unnerving but as we look at them, mildly disgusted, fearful of lesions and parasites, we think, "One day I'll put it in a book, that whole business with the black things on the sheet. I do not like it now, but at least it is an adventure."
I travel with an open mind and always have done. Caution to the wind and all that. The same way I used to sleep with boys I fancied, because why-not-and-whatever, and you only live once. Travel lets me pretend I've got my mojo back—and lest you think I am complaining, I should explain: mojo isn't always all that. There's a reason we dim our bravado a bit as we enter middle age. We've got fewer years to lose, but more of everything else. The kids are precious and it's not their fault they're ours, they deserve to have us around. Let them make their own mistakes, but we must temper ours. Rule number one of parenting: Don't do anything stupid that will get you killed. It's your job to stick around if you can.
Travel makes me temporarily fearless and robust. It's the day-to-day of the settled life in which I fail to be industrious. We came to Paris. We hooked up the cable. We wandered down some hidden alleys, we saw some art, we drank wine on a boat pulsing down the Seine.
But mostly, we just continue to be ourselves. In Sicily, Portugal, Belfast, Tallinn, Helsinki, London, and elsewhere, I have been that good and exploratory version of myself. In Paris, though, I haven't eaten the snails; I have become one.
I eat the cheese and drink the wine but don't bother making sauces. I breathe in the tear gas, choke, cough, and when I try to air the tear gas out of the apartment I just breathe in more cigarette smoke, because the office-workers in the office complex directly across the street—more Silicon Valley than Midnight in Paris—are anxiously chain-smoking en masse, as they do every day at lunchtime on their miniature Silicon-Valleyish lawn, in the bright metal chairs, and you have to hand it to them for trying to modernize, but... can I say it?... they're smoking and their coffees are tiny and they all go home at 7:00 and take six weeks of vacation in summer, two weeks in December, two weeks in February, and so little gets done while so much tobacco gets smoked and so little coffee gets drunk.
I fritter away my time in my apartment, on my computer, teaching my writing classes because the work soothes me, the striving of my students encourages me, and because there, in that protected space, talking books and words and stories, I feel calm and competent. I can fully speak the language. I can answer their questions. In my classes, I am not a stranger in a strange land, forever mumbling, “Désolé, je ne comprends pas.”
I settle into the sofa in front of the television, late on a Saturday night, watching Lost in Space with my husband—because those people in well-fitted leather jackets, despite their burning confidence, their fearlessness in the face of the very end of humanity—are more lost than we will ever be. It's space! They're scouting out unfamiliar planets, battling robots in search of firmer ground, potable water, breathable air and safe landings.
They have no firm coordinates. All the ships have scattered.