About this time four years ago--on this same night, the Friday after Election Day in America--I was sitting in the Greyhound station in Chicago, waiting to get on the overnight bus to Memphis. I was nervous and tired and a little scared. The tired part was because I hadn't slept much the night before. I had stayed up late (and then couldn't sleep afterwards) looking up horror stories on the Internet about riding Greyhound buses around North America. See, I was planning on doing this for the next month. I had a 30-day pass for Greyhound, and this day, the Friday after Election Day, was day 1.
There were a few grisly stories out there about going Greyhound. But the truth is, there are grisly stories out there about pretty much anything. Most of the Greyhound horror stories just involved things like late buses, long rides next to undesirable seat neighbors, and engine breakdowns. They weren't anything different from what it'd been like riding the el and city buses in Chicago every day for the past few years. But as of Halloween that year, 2008, riding the CTA every day had become a thing of the past. My last day of work had been October 31st. I'd moved out of my apartment in the city only about a week before that. Now I was waiting in a long line to get on a bus heading south. My only explanation for all this was that I'd been through some trauma earlier in the year, and now I just wanted to get away from Chicago for awhile. A long while. You know how it goes...drastic times call for drastic measures and such. So that's how one day of trauma led to 30 days of traveling.
Only it wasn't only 30 days. After that month of traveling through Illinois, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California--before coming back through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, and Iowa--I'd come back home in time for Christmas and then take off to
Australia a couple weeks after the new year. Going to
Australia--going anywhere after the Greyhound trip--hadn't been part of my plan originally. But I found I still needed to put distance between myself and Chicago--so I went to the complete other side of the world for a couple months. And I thought of something I had done while I had been working at that cubicle job for years. I worked in publishing, and I spent many days working on articles about countries all over the world. Some were places I hadn't known much about before working on the articles. As I learned the names and saw pictures of places all over the world, I began making a list of the countries and places I wanted to go to. I write the list on a yellow post-it, and kept it pinned to the wall of my cubicle--right in the spot I looked at directly whenever I lifted up my head from reading. I'd think about that list when I traveled, but more so whenever I came back from traveling. (I still have many names to cross off on that list--and I add places all the time.)
After coming back from
Australia, I planned on settling in again, finding a new job, a new place to live in the city. Instead, I took off again within a few months, deciding I wanted to attempt a pilgrimage
climb up a mountain in western Ireland on the big day of the year when everyone makes the climb, spend some time with old friends in the west, and then go on to
France for a month, to see more of the country beyond
Paris and to make another pilgrimage to the shrine at
Lourdes in the south.
Coming back home in the fall, I made the decision to try and make travel my life, and in February the following year I headed to
Mexico for a couple weeks to earn a certification as a tour manager--the first step in setting up a
women-only tour business that I had in mind back when I still had an office job. A few months later, after spending some time setting up my business, I was off again, for 2 too-short weeks in
Bolivia. Why Bolivia? Why not, man.
Bolivia had been one of the places I had on my post-it note list back at the publishing job. I remember working on a bunch of short articles about places like
Uyuni and Tupiza, and looking up pictures online to fact-check the articles. I remember being stunned by the pictures I saw, captivated by how much I didn't know about this extraordinary looking country. Now was as good a time to go as ever. All I regret is not being there longer.
From Bolivia, it was off to the strange and twisty-turny world of
small business start-up--a place you could say I'm still trying to navigate. And then, in 2011, I found myself making short trips to
New York City (for the first time, believe it or not), to
Austin and
San Antonio, Texas, to nearby, little
Galena, Illinois, and then a very long trip to
Ireland and Spain, for a very long walk starting in the south of France and ending on the northwestern coast of Celtic Spain, Galicia, in the holy city of Santiago de Compostela that marks the end of the 500-mile pilgrimage walk known as the
Camino de Santiago, the Way of St. James.
Would you believe that on that day 4 years ago today, when I boarded the bus to Memphis, I had no idea whatsoever about the
Camino de Santiago. I had no inkling I'd take a month-long walk across Spain, only about 3 years after taking a month-long ride across my own country. Santiago de Compostela had definitely not be on my post-it note list pinned to the cubicle wall. But somewhere in the interim I'd picked up word of it--I think while planning my
pilgrimage up Croagh Patrick in Ireland and to Lourdes in France--and then ended up doing it. And of course, all I regret is not being to do it all over again this year, to walk one of the other routes of the Camino in Spain, to take a long walk through beautiful countryside every year, at least once a year, for the rest of my life.
Now this year, leading up to this 4th anniversary tonight, has been much more quiet. I went to
Iowa for a family reunion. Later I went to
Michigan with my sisters. I enjoyed the trips--even wrote about 'em--but I can't honestly say I don't mind that I didn't get to a few more exotic or far-away locales as well these past months. I hope next year will be different, will have some more adventures. I truly miss them and live for them.
I only got to thinking about the fact that 4 years had passed since the Greyhound adventure, since I left my old life behind, with the election coming up. The last presidential election, in 2008, had been a historic one of course, and I heard the echoes and felt the reverberations of it in the weeks I was traveling around America, and even while visiting Australia and Ireland and France the following year...and while walking the Camino just last autumn. In the weeks leading up to this election of 2012, many people began tossing around the question of whether you, we, America, was better off now than 4 years ago. Some folks think you should vote on the basis of how you answer that question.
It's a good question. It's not necessarily the question I ask when I vote, but I think it's a valid one for voters to ask and think about. When I thought about it, I immediately remembered not so much where I had been the night Barack Obama was elected (no, I wasn't in downtown Chicago in Grant Park like my sisters and a lot of other friends of mine--I was at home with my mom watching Jon Stewart, while my dad and eldest brother had yet to come back from the polls where they were working as election judges). Instead what I remembered was where I was going to--that I was gearing up for a long cross-country trip...first stop, Memphis, Tennessee, the city where a man who went a long way in making it possible for Barack Obama to become president, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been killed. I visited the site where King was murdered in Memphis, a motel that has been transformed into the National Civil Rights Museum. As I walked through the museum and studied the exhibits, I couldn't stop thinking about what had just happened back in my hometown a few days before--the first African American president of the U.S. had just been elected. It was both hopeful and poignant to be walking through the Civil Rights Museum, a monument to black people's long struggle to be recognized as fully human, fully free, fully American, and fully important to the fabric of American society, in the days right after a black man had been chosen by Americans to lead their country. It made me proud that we had come so far, and sad that it had taken so long.
Four years later, I'm glad Obama has been given another four years to lead us. I think we still have a long way to go in this country--for black Americans, for women, for gay people, for poor people, for Hispanic and Latino Americans, and for so many others--and I think Obama is the one most likely to get us a little closer to a better, fairer, and stronger country, one that better represents people like me, a female American, and many of the people I met while traveling across America and around the world.
Economically am I better of now than I was 4 years ago? Yeah. I am. I don't have a steady paycheck, and I'm still not sure if my business is going to break even someday much less be successful. That's all part of the gamble I took 4 years ago. But do you have any idea how much richer I feel for all the places I've seen and the people I've met? Do you have any idea how it feels to travel abroad and have folks in those countries actually speak favorably of your president, maybe even of your own country and culture? Do you have any idea how valuable the contact with all these people and places of the last 4 years of my life has been to me--regardless of what they think or know about where I come from in the world? There's no number large enough I could put on it in dollars or any other currency. I think I'm so wealthy in memories of adventure, so lucky in my experiences.
Here's the thing. In the four years I've been traveling, I've met enough people to
convince me it's a small world after all, small enough to give you the
sense that you can never really escape who or what you're running from,
no matter how far you go. And I've met enough people to convince me it's
truly a great, wide world, impossible to summarize or categorize. It's as if even the
strangest people and places in the world have something familiar about
them, yet even the most familiar are ultimately unknowable. I was scared that first night I stepped onto a Greyhound bus--real scared. And I stayed scared through most of the trip--and through most of my travels anywhere. Traveling didn't take away my fears about the world. It made me come to terms with them.
Traveling is scary--especially for a woman on her own. Traveling is an adventure--because it's often scary and impossible to fully plan out or control. But fear is something you'll find in all parts of the globe, and in everybody's heart, no matter who they are, where they come, or where they're going to. Everyone is afraid. The point is to accept your fears...and keep on despite them. Accept and expect fear--but don't let it rule you. It's just one feeling you'll have--whether you're traveling or sitting at home. But if you can feel it, and all your other emotions, while visiting some really beautiful places, meeting interesting people, tasting different foods, hearing new kinds of music, standing under a sky with the same moon as back home but different constellations--if you can feel afraid doing all that, well why not just go ahead and do anything, go anywhere. When it comes to being human, a distant place is no different than a near one. You're gonna be who you are, suffer your limitations and worries and hopes and messy, complicated feelings, wherever you are. So might as well change up the scenery once in awhile if you can't change yourself.
I started traveling--and want to continue traveling--because it makes me feel free and closer to my full potential. Based on what I've seen and learned while traveling, it makes me feel calm. It makes me feel safe. I feel more at home in many places than just one spot. To me diversity is truth, and so traveling is truth. If the next four years go anything like the last four years, I think I'll be pretty happy and satisfied. I think I'll consider myself a pretty lucky person.
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| Me in Bisbee, Arizona, 2008, Greyhound trip, eyes wide shut |
