There and Back Again

Growing up on missions trips, there was a certain level of expectation surrounding the sort of impact international travel could have if you were willing to follow the call. There apparently was nothing worldwide that could not be improved by the presence of American teens, and American Jesus seemed anxious to get the planet back on the wagon by flooding its highways and hedges with ineffectual dorks. No matter where we went, none of us spoke the language, and roughly twelve grand in total money raised resulted in me pretending to like some local soup in Bratislava and nail-gunning two of my own fingers together in Juarez. As it turns out, stigmata is just a tetanus shot in drag.

One thing I’m grateful for, though, is the eventual awareness of how travel changes you rather than the places you go. On its face, it’s easy to be ashamed of ever thinking otherwise when I was younger but I think Ram Dass was right that anything can be a vehicle by which you get free, even if it ends up being a Southwest flight in high school to El Paso. The world can be a dark, often unfixable place and if there were a God stuffing people into camper vans and hitting the road it was so we could get a better sense of our bright blue home’s startling depth and intensity. And to gift us with a helpful pocket ontology for itself that if God is ever behaving like us, it’s because we’re making them up.

Anyway, this was meant to be a quick rickshaw ride through a travel writing idea I’ve had for a long time and it has characteristically wandered off course. Here’s the pitch: I’d love a physical book series where different writers and thinkers are given a route to travel however they choose (other than by plane) and a journal to fill with their thoughts, experiences, and intersecting narratives as they go. The beginning and ending points need to be none-obvious and long enough to take several weeks, like Brescia to Aalborg, and they can hand their results off to an editor afterwards or decide to leave it exactly as it is. It could be a Quarterly or something less often but still scheduled, so the rest of us could be reading their stories on a regular basis and letting their adventures push us into our own. However it shakes out, the important part is that it’s longform and attached to accessible but less predictable places, and takes long enough for something human to happen. Maybe this specific thing has already been done, or is being done currently and I’m not aware of it, so please let me know if so. I’ll never get tired of listening to stories from people in new places and the things they learn about themselves along the way, or forget Gandalf’s honesty with Bilbo in The Hobbit that if Bilbo does come back from his journey, he won’t come back the same. Which is why I think the real joy of travel is the willingness to change.