| Open to the Road |
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Illustration by Ulla Puggaard
Funny, isn’t it? Not long ago, on this very page, you read a piece by Bob Shacochis on the value of traveling with buddies. And on this, as on most things, Bob is right. I’ve been happy to take more than 40 trips over the years with friends and girlfriends. One high school pal—a sort of Bertie Wooster on speed—has accompanied me to Cambodia and Ethiopia and Haiti, and taken in Cuban prisons, Turkish rat houses, and more than a few Grateful Dead concerts with me. Louis has the gifts that I most cherish in a traveler: He can single out the most attractive person in any room and befriend her within seconds; he is never shy about making a fool of himself; and he carries calamity around with him like a security blanket. On the last trip we took together, to Bolivia three years ago, our taxi drove into a mountain at high speed on New Year’s Day, and as the car rolled and rolled, 13,000 feet above sea level, I knew I would never forget the experience. But the real point of travel for me is to journey toward possibility. And you can do this only by leaving behind everything you know. As the years go on and the mind tilts away from dreaming and toward memory, it takes more effort to find new experiences. If Louis had been there, would that Cuban girl still have proposed to me within an hour of meeting? Would I have followed that Burmese trishaw driver into his hut and heard the full four-hour story of his life? Would so many people have reached out for me, and would I have had the freedom to reach back? The lone traveler is himself a point of interest, and the male traveler has the rare advantage over the female in that he can follow many openings without looking so often over his shoulder. When I travel with my sweetheart, I find that we’re simply repeating routines we know too well at home. When I travel alone, I find myself having one-on-one encounters with people and places that leave my heart shaking and my sense of direction turned around. I write this in Paris, where I just came for six days to be by myself, out of reach of the beeping phone, accountable to no one. I can—and do—sleep for hours in the afternoon and then take in midnight showings of obscure Japanese movies at a poky dive off Boulevard Saint-Michel. I make up plans each morning at breakfast and tear them up at lunch. I follow those sweetest of guides, instinct and caprice, sometimes just shadowing the light, from square to street to river, as the gold of evening makes the white-gray buildings burn one final time. Selfish, I know, but for 51 weeks of every year I am so hemmed in with obligations that I forget there’s a self inside me that needs color and experience and surprise. Three days ago, I got on a bus in Berlin and found myself next to a bright-eyed, strikingly open young woman from Uganda. I mentioned something about college, and she said, “I wouldn’t know. I never went.” When she was nine, she told me, she ran away from home, got conscripted into a guerrilla army, and was taught how to live off grubs in the jungle and how to kill. When she was 14, she went on, she gave birth, thanks to an unwanted assault. When she was in her early twenties, she became a refugee, later learning that two of her sisters had died in the Rwandan genocide and a third of AIDS. She, it seemed, was the lucky one. We came to our stop, and she said, “There’s so much more to my story, but you probably don’t have time.” I didn’t have to look around me; I didn’t need to look at my watch. “I have as much time as you do,” I said, asking her to join me at a nearby bar where we could continue the conversation. “I came on this trip—alone—to see the world.” |
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