Why I Travel: Connecting the World, One Journey at a Time
When my wanderlust blossomed one recent weekend, I ensconced myself with a pile of old journals and photo albums on my living room carpet, and spent an afternoon reliving adventures past. The strongest lesson that emerged from this virtual odyssey was the enduring power of the human connections that travel serendipitously provides. If your wanderlust is blooming too, join me on a little magic carpet ride.
Our first stop is Paris, where I lived the summer between my junior and senior years in college. I remember wandering enrapt past the literary landmarks in the Latin Quarter and staring in bliss at the Impressionist masterpieces housed then in the Jeu de Paume, but what I remember most warmly of all are moments spent with the family with whom I had arranged to stay.
I recall the Baillets’ forlornly elegant apartment on rue Pergolese, all tarnished gilt portraits and fraying carpets, and the elaborate dinners they proudly served — redolent stews and bountiful salads and platters of six or seven cheeses every day — despite what I suspect were limited funds. I remember the graciousness with which they struggled to understand my stumbling dinner-table descriptions of the day’s activities and the kindness with which they tried to guide me through the magnificent maze of Parisian life.
And I recall weekend getaways with their son, Didier, and his fiancee Marie-Claire at her family’s airy, rambling country house in Chantilly: passionate afternoons on the beach arguing politics and poetry, and slow Sunday mornings over bright bowls of strawberries in heavy cream, sunlight streaming through the curtains and classical music completing the scene.
The years slide away and suddenly I’m sitting at dusk on the terrace of a leafy Athenian taverna with a trio of fellow teachers, listening to bouzouki music and staring at the impossibly elegant, aging and ageless Acropolis. Three of us are fresh-out-of-college Americans who were teaching on one-year fellowships at Athens College; the fourth, Nikos, is a gentle, sixty-something teacher with a deep and ready laugh and bright eyes, who over the months has become our mentor.
It is the spring of a long and seasoning year of travel and learning — the mysterious riches of Crete; the cool, time-suspending ruins of Delos — and the ouzo and retsina are flowing. Nikos has taken care of the ordering before we arrived, and a sumptuous succession of plates is placed before us — dolmathes, moussaka, taramasalata, tzatziki, octopus, lamb and on.
The air vibrates with calm and celebration, the stars seem suspended like time was among the ruins of Delos, the people at the tables around us are laughing. Suddenly Nikos breaks into a song that rises and falls like the hills of Attica, soars and then slips back to earth like the Aegean Sea; it is a song of welcome and farewell, of earth and grape and rock and family, and when he finishes tears swell in our eyes and stream down our cheeks.
Now I’m in the Australian Outback, astonished by the sight of kangaroos bounding and koalas munching in the wild — childhood fantasies come true. But most astonishing of all is staring at an Aboriginal rock painting while listening to legends from the Dreamtime. That’s when the chills sweep up and down my spine and stay, and some contact with a power, a permanence and an intelligence so much deeper and longer than my own is fleetingly flung, like a spider’s web, through space and time.
Next I’m in the magical mountainous region of Pakistan called the Hunza. I’m walking down a dusty road toward the center of town when I see a man in his back yard crafting a beautiful wooden door. He’s working slowly and carefully, and seems so entirely absorbed that there is no separation between him and the wood he is shaping.
Suddenly he notices me admiring his work and beckons me to join him. I slide down a small hill to his home. He grins. I grin. I gesture that the door is very beautiful. He calls out something, and presently a gorgeous young girl shyly walks up to me bearing a plate of apricots.
The apricots are sweet and delicious and I try to say so. Then I pull out some postcards of San Francisco and try to communicate that this is where I came from. Finally I pull out some pictures of my family and ask if I can take a picture of his family to bring home to show to my family.
His eyes light up, and he calls out something, and presently his family appears — wife, teen-age daughter, one baby, second baby, mother-in-law — peering out from inside the house.
We enter the living room, which has a carpet and window at one end, a door leading into what I take to be a bedroom in another wall, a fireplace in the wall opposite the carpet and a hole in the ceiling above the fireplace, the perimeter of which has been blackened by smoke. Curtains of some rough cloth frame the window, but otherwise there is almost no ornamentation, nothing on the walls and no furniture save for one low chair.
I take a photo inside, then ask if I might take their picture outside as well. They pose patiently and sweetly — the babies taking turns crying, drooling and cooing — and when we finish, the carpenter says something, and after a few minutes his elder daughter brings a plastic bag bulging with dried apricots and kernels.
These are for your family, he says, pointing to my pictures. I thank him as profusely as I can and hand him two of the San Francisco postcards I have brought. Please hang these on your wall, I say. He says thank you, then asks to have one of the pictures of my family as well. I hesitate momentarily — I don’t know what situations may arise during the remainder of this trip when I’ll need those precious pictures — but he is so kind and friendly, I hold out the photos and give him his choice.
He chooses a Christmas picture of us standing in front of a brightly decorated tree and tells me that he will hang it proudly on his wall between the two postcards of San Francisco. He then clasps my hand warmly and says two words that I later learn mean ’’family’’ and ‘’brothers.’’
I think of all these memories, a transcendent trail of images winding around me, and I wonder: Where do they come together? What do they mean?
One answer, of course, is that these images, these connections, are their own meaning — nothing more and nothing less — the accumulation, the substance of a traveler’s life.
But they are more as well. Other images ramble into mind — a warm, sunny, rice paddy-green day in my wife’s home village on the Japanese island of Shikoku. I see my then 16-month-old son pointing from his stroller at a butterfly and squealing in innocent, abandoned delight. To exult in a butterfly like that — is this not the perfect metaphor for the traveler’s joy of connection, of the world pieced together and made new over and over again?
I remember other squeals — my daughter’s first view of a koala bear at the Sydney Zoo, my son’s first plunge into the Pacific Ocean at Waikiki. I think of a hike on the happy island of Vanua Levu in Fiji, when a village girl ran to us and took my daughter’s hand as naturally as a palm waving in the wind.
What it all comes down to, I think, is the spirit in which, with which, you travel. If you travel with respect and care and love for the people and the places you encounter, you not only do the world a good turn, you also deepen, enhance, each and every encounter.
Two years after I taught in Athens, I won another fellowship to teach at a university in Tokyo. Near the end of a life-changing stay there, I gave a lecture on the theme of love in Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha.” At the end of that lecture — this was in 1979, a more innocent age — I asked all the students in the auditorium to link hands and listen to the lyrics of the Beatles song, “All You Need Is Love.” Suddenly 200 Japanese students were on their feet, swaying hand in hand, singing those wistful words, tears streaming down their cheeks. This seems preposterous to me now, but it also seems like a wonderfully improbable metaphor for what happens when we travel: Linkages occur; a rare, beautiful, singular and serendipitous string of hands clasps one to another.
At its heart, travel is an unspoken declaration of love, a love offered with no conditions, no requisites, no sense of binding commitments or fulfillments. It is a love sent out — tentatively perhaps, but always bravely — with no strings attached, except that most wondrous string of all, the humanity that clasps the lover to the loved one, that roots the traveler in the world.
