Traveling Alone
One of the things I’m pondering while looking back at my notes and writing Lunatic is the idea of traveling alone, of escaping into the furthest corners of the world, which has always felt good to me. Part of it is just adventure; it’s exciting to plunge along a muddy road in the Peruvian Amazon or jump aboard a ferry with no idea of where I’m going. It makes me feel nervous, scared a little, and that makes me feel intensely alive and focused. And I’ve always felt like it’s a great thing to escape from the mundane tasks of daily life, from bills that need paying to the drumbeat of bad economic news to grocery shopping. Or that’s what I’ve always told myself.
But my marriage, on shaky ground for a bit, collapsed entirely on this journey, and that’s made me think more deeply about travel and human connection and escape. I always pride myself on the connections I make while traveling, from the nutty Swiss guy in Mombassa to Fardus in Bangladesh to Moolchand the ear cleaner in New Delhi. But all those interactions were fleeting, shallow – I can’t kid myself otherwise. Which made me wonder if travel always felt so good to me not because I was making new connections, but because I was escaping the ones I had, pushing them away.
Traveling on the Lunatic Express made me, in places like India and Indonesia where people almost always travel together and I was a freak alone, start to understand the value of those deeper connections, and writing about it now only more so. Only connect, wrote E.M. Forster in one of those famous literary lines that’s now cliché, and as humans that’s what we all crave perhaps more than anything else. To be known, to let your guard down, is scary; how ironic that so many of us flee instead; that we don’t allow ourselves the very thing we want in our deepest souls. The lure of foreign countries and cultures has always been escape, but also transformation, redemption, discovery. People who feel like they don’t fit in have long sought escape in the exotic, but maybe that’s because in those foreign lands they don’t have an excuse – they can never be really known in the first place, never have to take that risk of opening up and trusting. My father never remarried after divorcing 35 years ago. Today he’s living in Thailand with a woman whose command of the English language is shaky, at best, and it’s his longest relationship in years. Do they get along because they connect so deeply, or because they barely connect at all and she can’t ask him any of those pesky emotional questions?
In the end, I did find some things on the world’s worst conveyances – that you have to be fearless and risk makes room for rewards, that you have to trust yourself and others, and most importantly, that escape is less the answer than its opposite; that being the lone Western face in a crowd of attentive exotics is no substitute for having someone you can talk to for hours on end without ever getting bored, for love and its sometimes cloying and scary bonds. It IS scary, though: you look at that train rumbling into the station and you think, how in the world can I throw myself on that scarred, battered thing? But sometimes you just have to close your eyes and board, to travel to things and not just away from them.
You have to travel alone sometimes in order to discover things. But the next time I leave, I think, I’m going to invite someone along.
Carl, Your comment is reaching. We’ve known each other since dirt. My father traveled the world broadly, found new and stimulating connections, often in war zones. His grandfather James Ricalton walked from Capetown to Cairo three times, across Russia, about 300,000 miles journeying all told, from about 1880-1912. Both men returned insights and learning to society. Both helped change the world, increasing knowledge if not making it a better place. Ricalton’s son died of typhoid outside Nairobi in 1912, ending his journeys. His wife never spoke with him again. The thrill of the new, risk taking is considerable. But I suggest that the satisfaction of building and maintaining durable foundations is also great; it may even require more work and greater courage. I look forward to your ongoing expression and balancing. It’s good stuff.
I am saddened by this news, but hopeful for you as well.
Twenty-two years ago I found myself laid off from my job and dumped by my girlfriend. So I did the only sensible thing and moved from the Pacific Northwest to exotic far-off Washington DC – a mysterious land known to me only through legend. I was a stranger to everyone East of the Rocky Mountains.
In those first few months I spent quite a lot of time alone. It was just me and my pet turtle. I wandered as a solitary figure through the Smithsonian museums, the zoos, and many historic places. And I realized two things: First, it is quite possible to feel painfully alone in the middle of a crowd. Second, experiences seem vaguely inauthentic unless shared.
Yet this period of wandering lost was good for me. For when new opportunities, both professional and personal, came along I was ready to fully appreciate them. So I am optimistic that increasingly good things shall come to you as well.
And of course, there are many of us waiting to share your experiences in your book.
Cheers and Best Wishes.
Jim, RD, thank you. Yes, Jim, I think what you say is true, that building and maintaining those durable human foundations, connections, requires more work and more courage, and that’s easy to forget, and sometimes we must learn the hard way. RD, in some ways traveling alone isn’t quite totally unshared for me, since I’m trying to bring experiences back for readers, friends, family. But, still…I know what you mean, and I’m going to try and change that, some, in the future. Carl
Great story Carl!