| On Travel Companions |
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On the road, is a sidekick an asset, or simply excess baggage? At a birthday party years ago, I struck up a conversation with a friendly gentleman I didn’t know personally but had seen on local newscasts. I mentioned to this fellow Phil, a high-profile law-enforcement officer in my community, that I was headed for the Himalayas, and he sighed—his lifelong dream was to see the roof of the world. “So stop dreaming and come along,” I said. My wife would tell you that I do this all the time—collect friends and strangers to haul along on my travels. 
Phil called me the next day. “I guess you were ripped last night,” he
said, his voice flat with skepticism. It took a minute to convince him
I had been sober—or at least serious.
Three months later, in an austere, freezing hotel in Gangtok, the capital of the Himalayan state of Sikkim, tremendously grouchy after 48 hours of intercontinental travel, I rendezvoused with Phil, whom I hadn’t seen since the night of the party. “So,” he said with a sparkling grin, clearly delighted to be in central Asia, “tell me how you became a writer.” “OK, look,” I growled, “I’m not here to entertain you.” I stared at his Florida State Seminoles ball cap, his garnet-and-gold windbreaker, and his family-outing videocam on the table and thought, Oh, Christ, what have I gotten myself into this time? You can imagine Phil’s constricting eyes and the resignation of his downturned mouth as he grimaced at the impossibility of it: traveling into the wild unknown with a jackass like me. A centuries-long abundance of aphorisms lifts us above my foul mood for insight: “It is better to travel alone than with a bad companion”; “He travels the fastest who travels alone”; and, from Laurence Sterne, “An English man does not travel to see English men.” Traveling alone ultimately expands the solipsism of living alone, deliberately isolated and self-absorbed, floating in a vacuum of personal responsibilities. The narrative is innately first-person singular, shorn of the complications (and pleasures) of togetherness. There are places where I prefer this: cities, museums, archaeological sites, and, after a while, war zones—all places where I relish my solitude and unnegotiated sense of pacing and impulse. Yet the myth of buddy travel remains potent in the American ethos and a vital, invigorating component of fellowship. Lewis and Clark, Tom and Huck, Kerouac and Cassady, Thelma and Louise, the road movies of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Traveling as a twosome is a time-honored, highway-tested tradition: Boy Scouts and bastards (Why didn’t you tell me you’re working for the CIA!), photographers (Can we go now?) and fops, machos (You win, pal) and angels on fire. I have left buddies detained behind rolls of concertina wire (it all worked out); paid for their meds and diagnostics (no dying allowed); admonished them for hoarding food or badgering locals; pulled them away from fisticuffs and back from many a brink (Hello, the boat is sinking!); admired their cleverness; howled at their foibles; endured their toxic farts; sailed, scaled, surfed, fished, paddled, and plummeted with them through the wonders and glories, such as we encountered them. And always, they were who they were, exemplars of grace and sin, nutrients swirling through a narrative, characters in a story told and retold in the years ahead. Which brings me back to my good friend Phil. Have you ever traveled around the world with a cop? Awesome. Through his eyes, the Himalayas were a marvelous cornucopia of latent liability suits, moving violations, and hilarious criminal intent. His home movies (teaching Buddhist monks the tomahawk chop and the FSU fight song) were spellbinding. Phil was resilient, curious, prompt, tireless, eager, uncomplaining, and blessed with the optimism and humor that makes hardship a lighter memory. I loved traveling with Phil, and of course I eventually told him more about my life than he bargained for. Some of the most enduring lessons of traveling together are inaccessible until you’re out there moving through the landscape, up the valley, down the road, out where you learn that life is despairingly cheap, justice uncommonly rare, the landscape unexpectedly divine, and people more beautiful than you ever imagined. And then those lessons become indelible upon the soul. |
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