To Travel

Recently

There are so many different ways of describing a body moving from one place to another.  We usually talk about “going.”  We go places.  Go to bed, go to work, go to our friend’s house, go to an all-inclusive resort.  “Go,” as a verb, cedes the spotlight.  We talk about going so we can talk about where we’re going and maybe why.  Sometimes, though, “go” won’t do.  We want to focus on how we’re going.  We walk, skip, bike, run, drive.  Or we catch the bus, take a boat, fly.  The way our body is getting from where we are to somewhere else is, we guess, sometimes meaningful.  We want folks to know about how our body is when it’s neither here nor there.  It matters that Thelma & Louise drive.  Driving is as important as where they drive and what happens when they stop.  Bodies going and their mode of going is sometimes a full part of the story even if it’s neither a character nor a setting exactly.  Sometimes we want to elide both the body going and its mode of going, so we use some special words.  We commute, say.  This means we are going to work.  No one commutes to brunch.  Even if your workplace and your brunch place are one and the same and require the same steps - walk here, wait there, take metro, etc. - the commute feels and arguably is different.  The destination often affects the experience of getting there.  Commuting is somehow its own thing.  Likewise, the broadest and also most particular way a body sometimes moves from one place to another: TRAVEL.  

Traveling is its own capacious thing.  It seemingly includes every possible way that a body can move from one place to another.  Traveling is a host of movement nested (e.g. You travel to Beijing, so you can go to the Dongcheng District, walk around Wangfujing Street, and catch a cab elsewhere when exhausted.)  Traveling can include almost anything and everything.  It might be for work or pleasure (or hopefully both! hahahaha, customs agent, please don’t imprison us).  It can be self-willed or imposed, contingent or necessary.  Traveling, as a verb, is the opposite of going.  It seizes the spotlight.  It glories in it.  Folks talk about wanting - upon retiring (lol) or winning the lottery (a lesser lol) - to travel.  It’s not absurd to hear people talk about taking a year off from school so they can travel.  They don’t talk about wanting to take many flights or various boats.  They often don’t even talk about where they want to travel.  They just want to TRAVEL.  Where and how are almost beside the matter.  Why is self-evident.  It is good to travel.  But what does it mean to travel?  To travel, it seems, means going places that are not home and likely never will be home and, in some ways, renders home something a little different.  To say you like or hate traveling is to say something about how you feel at and maybe also about home.  

We traveled to Toronto earlier this week.

Traveling, for us, always starts the day before it starts.  No matter where we’re headed, the day leading up to the journey is deranged.  In this case, especially so.  We’d be taking a five-hour train from one city in Canada to another.  Same currency, similar culture, etc. etc. etc.  A mere 336 or so miles separates Montreal and Toronto.  These cities are so comparable, barely distinct, BUT all the same it gets into our head that a profound, radical difference exists over there.  Do they have running water?  Do marauders roam unpaved streets wielding spiked bats?  Will our phone work there?  How many snacks ought we pack in case they do not have a reliable food supply?  These questions attend every threat of travel.  We cannot avoid them even if, as we pose them to ourselves, we know they are inane or, better, insane.

So, we get very uptight about HAVING EVERYTHING WE NEED.  For instance, we got very fixated on travel-sized toothpaste as if a) trains held the same anti-paste prejudice as planes (they don’t) and b) the city of Toronto had no stores that would sell us toothpaste.  Somehow the notion of travel forces us to assume the attitude of a frontier adventurer (who, let it be known, knows themselves to be wary of frontiers and low-key uncomfortable with adventure as such).  We must acquire essentials, secure provisions.  We go full gatherer.  And, of course, we do this only every twelve hours before leaving because our mind’s not right or capable of doing anything in advance.  So, we spent the day before running stressedly around in the rain purchasing things there was little or no need to purchase at all let alone in advance while fully aware that we didn’t need to do any of this.  At the pharmacy, we came to recognize that we were essentially purchasing emotional support deodorant.  It would serve as a token or totem to protect us from everything unknown on the other end of that train.

This same bizarre anxiety determines how we pack.  There is little rhyme or reason to how we select clothes.  We sometimes get strangely obsessed with choosing the right socks or worrying about whether there will be, like, A SUDDEN AND SURPRIZING NEED FOR FORMAL ATTIRE.  There is no telling what scenarios our poor mind will conjure when an open suitcase sits on the bed.  Anything and everything is possible and nothing we currently have is quite correct.  At the back of our mind is always the lurking possibility that we will not be able to come home for some reason, that packing for this trip (whatever it is) is packing forever.  [We frequently and genuinely think of that time when a volcano erupted in Iceland many years ago and grounded planes as if erupting volcanoes were just a quotidian event and likely to affect us any damn time.]  Believing, then, that every trip is possibly terminal we choose, say, the sweater that we like best, that we can see ourselves wearing happily for many years to come as we meet new people and try to build up a whole new life in our forced new home.  Whatever else might happen, we’ll at least have that t-shirt that fits nicely.  Since we’re selecting all our future outfits, there’s tremendous pressure to choose everything carefully which is time consuming and exhausting and we eventually reach a place where we can’t continue to care and, invariably, end up packing too few of one thing and too many of something else.  It wouldn’t be surprising to end up somewhere with one shirt and all the underwear we own.  

Accompanying the unpleasant parts of preparing to travel, there’s also - thankfully - a delusionally pleasant part.  The day before we travel, we imagine that traveling takes an infinite amount of time wherein we will be so full of energy and curiosity that we will need endless possible activities.  Five-hour train ride?  Well, this is clearly an opportunity to a) read three books and four magazines, b) watch six movies, c) write that long thing we’ve been meaning to write, d) listen to the whole season of that podcast people’ve been telling us about, and e) take pictures out the window documenting our journey for you.  As with the essentials and the clothes, we are very focused on selecting things well.  Which book is the right travel book?  Which… YOU GET IT.  

[SIDENOTE: When we were much younger than we are, we very dramatically used to consider which book would be best to have with us if the plane crashed.  For real.  We not only considered what we might want to have at-hand if we survived the crash and were forced to live in the wilderness or on a raft in the middle of the ocean or whatever, but what book of ours we would most like people to discover among the wreckage of our flight.  It’s unclear why we thought this was important.  Like, some poor EMT or airline worker would be clearing up charred bodies and bent steel and then happen across our backpack and dog-eared copy of Ecce Homo and they’d… what?  Consider our scattered bones differently?  Tell everyone that we died as we lived, reading and not entirely understanding Nietzsche?  It takes a certain kind of vanity to worry about what people will think of your reading habits posthumously.  Disclosing this actually true fact feels like disclosing an upsetting and telling feature of our psychology, but nevermind.]

Part, of course, of selecting “things to do” while traveling has to do with the sudden narrowing of possibility while away from home.  Before travel, we encounter and have to acknowledge a period of scarcity.  While home, we have many things.  We have far too many things even.  There are options.  We can be guided mostly by whim.  We also have a decent and relatively stable internet connection.  This leads to even more options.  We can summon anything, cast it off, summon something else.  Our wants can be satisfied immediately and mistaken wants lead to nearly no consequences.  At home, there is nothing but choice.  Traveling?  Choices must be made in advance and poor choices have consequences.  We will be stuck with our choices for the duration, we imagine.  The train, in this case, does not have many things for us or reliable internet or even dependable cell service, so - like someone from the past - we are forced to rely on the things we carry.  

While packing everything up, it absolutely never occurs to us that our body will be the thing that carts all this shit from one place to another.  We seem to forget that lifting a bag briefly to check its weight is not a good metric by which to judge what it will feel like to carry that bag onto escalators, through narrow aisles, etc. etc.  Just as travel time opens up infinitely the day before we leave, our physical ability to lug heavy shit increases impossibly.  

It’s only occurring to us now that many people probably spend the day before traveling somewhere thinking about the somewhere they’re traveling.  Not us.  It really doesn’t enter our head.  The place we’re traveling doesn’t really feature until we’re there.  The place is, as best as we can figure in advance, just not-home.  There’s an opacity to this other place that rebuffs consideration.  All we think about is how much we don’t really know about what we’re headed towards.  We won’t know which streets lead to which streets, won’t know where the non-gross/scary public bathrooms are, or where exactly we can buy cigarettes if we absolutely need to.  OF COURSE, we could look all of this up on the internet and study and plan and consider and map and get a full mental picture of this distant place before arriving there.  We don’t, but we could.

We’re tempted to say that there’s something romantic (Keats not Hallmark, although…) attending our refusal to plan things in advance.  It would be nice to say we’re leaving ourselves open to spontaneity and surprise.  This is probably partially true.  We like not really knowing what we’re getting into.  We enjoy getting turned around and lost.  We typically appreciate things more if we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to prejudge them.  There’s something, also, about leaving a wide field of play for our feelings or the weather (the two greatest determiners of our days) to guide us in whatever way they want.  The other parts of our non-planning are less about free-spirited exploration and more about guarding against disappointment or staving off the anxiety of expectations.  Regardless of reasons, the only thing we usually know before we travel is when and how we’re traveling and where we’ll be sleeping when there.  Everything that is not getting there and sleeping is up for grabs.

[SIDENOTE: This refusal to plan  - you’ll be surprised to learn - hasn’t always turned out well.  On various occasions, it has turned out what you’d call “badly.”  Like, say, the time we ended up in downtown Tulsa after dark (don’t ask) and discovered that there were neither restaurants nor convenience stores open or extant anywhere nearby, so our dinner came from a mostly broken vending machine in the hotel lobby that sold two-packs of Pop-Tarts for $5 a piece.  We remember vividly rueing our avoidance of plans as we sat on the hotel bed staring out the window at generic glass-faced buildings reflecting other generic glass-faced buildings eating those cold Pop-Tarts.  We let the chalky, tasteless Pop-Tart crumbs fall wherever they would as if by making our bed crumby we’d, like some medieval devotee in a hair shirt, learn a lesson through suffering.  You’ll be unsurprised to learn that we have in no way changed our habit of not planning anything since then, BUT will never eat a Pop-Tart anywhere near a bed ever again.  Holy God, it was all crumbs.]

Packed up and ignorant by bedtime the night before, then, leaves only fitful sleep.  Our body, the day before travel, believes that sleeping in one hour segments is best.  We sleep, do not dream, wake, check the time, go back to sleep.  As we incrementally approach the actual time we need to wake up, this is when our body decides to enter the deepest sleep possible so that when the first of our two alarms rings it is as if the world is ending and our psyche shatters and our body feels as if it had been risen unwillingly from the grave.  It is harrowing, but we huck ourselves out from under the covers and try to become human over time because we must be human to travel.

The morning we leave, home already feels a little distant.  It feels more simply like a place we happen to be staying rather than anything mystical or more substantial.  It isn’t where the heart is, but where the heart has grown comfortable or even maybe a little complacent.  We’ve had the privilege of having many homes and of having visiting the homes of others that have felt in their own way like home.  It’s where we temporarily find ourselves or, alternately, where we only infrequently and with some effort lose ourselves.  

At home, hours before we travel we drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and obsessively check our email to see if there are any changes to our itinerary.  This last part becomes problematic quite quickly.  Time takes another strange turn here.  We start to doubt that it passes in a regular way.  We need to leave in an hour, so we check to see if that hour has passed every several minutes.  Our time troubles sometimes get more expansive.  We come even to doubt the date.  Did we fuck it up?  Were we meant to leave tomorrow?  Yesterday?  Is today in fact today?  We Google the date like a demented postmodern Scrooge on Christmas.  Yes, the date on our phone is factual.  We check the time.  Yes, there are still sixty seconds in every minute.  This sounds stressful, but it isn’t.  Just as we are getting ready to occupy and explore a new space, so too does time take on a new and weird quality.  This makes sense to us somehow.  (Physicists, back us up here?)  In the hours leading up to travel, we’re getting accustomed to doing things, feeling things, experiencing things differently than we do typically.  We’re letting slightly go of regular, predictable things.  Our novel focus and orientation towards time prefigures venturing off to a novel place.  It isn’t anxiety, but an anticipatory revision of our basic phenomenological inclination towards factical matters.  Or, rather, it absolutely is anxiety and it makes us dead certain that we’ll miss our train and have to talk to automated phone voices for hours as we reschedule things and both money and time will be lost to corporate bureaucratic procedure.  Either/or, really.

Eventually the waiting to leave overwhelms and we leave much earlier than we need to while feeling like we’re always-already late.  We almost immediately feel the weight of our baggage and slowly start to wonder about our destination and what it might do to us or what we might become in response to it.  Just as our destination was opaque the day before, now our origin starts to lose definition.  Home isn’t an orienting place right now.  We start to feel something like excitement and curiosity.  We start to think of the small experiences we’ll accrue and also the possibility of larger ones, then we wonder if our train will be delayed or our phone will die or if it’s about to rain.  But nothing much stays in mind for long, we’re traveling now.  We’re neither here nor there, for now, and this interstitial, transitory moment will fade from view quickly when it’s over so we try to appreciate the time and space between home and not-home or - taking a deep breath - appreciating the outstanding opportunity we have to live in a quiet country so stable and safe (for us) that movement from one place to the next, from home to some other place nearly as safe, is possible for us and many others around us and that the trains will likely stay on rails and food and shelter will be accessible damn near anywhere we might end up and our worries need really only be localized to what snack we might enjoy or film we might distractedly watch and try not to feel too badly about this unearned safety and comfort but also try not to keep our mind closed to the inordinate precarity, vulnerability, and difficulty being suffered by others elsewhere who merely and simply would like to be at home in their homes or travel somewhere safe to make a new home but cannot because… because our world is built, it seems, on unnecessarily uneven and unjust and unshared circumstance even if, truly, we are all simply fucking temporary travelers on this rock. And we think of other special words beyond commute or travel like forced migration and exile and displacement and evacuation and expulsion and reckon for a second about how the word ‘refugee’ typically indicates someone without refuge, someone seeking refuge, rather than someone who has finally, thankfully, mercifully, ultimately found it and how these words too contain in them entire ways of being in the world, entire ways of being forced out of a world, entire ways of moving away or being moved away from homes or places one calls home. But there is only so long that one’s thoughts - our thoughts - can stay landed on others near or far when we’re in the midst of going somewhere ourselves, so we adjust our bag’s strap on our shoulder and shift the weight of the things we carry and light another cigarette and keep going, in our own way, further and further from home and towards something else.

Kathryn McNaughton, “Diverge,” acrylic on canvas, 86 3/5 × 63 in, 2023.