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It’s a Dangerous Business, Walking out Your Front Door

Traveling for pleasure is the most indulgent of luxuries, requiring expendable time, money and a desire to intrude the familiarity of one’s self into the foreignness of new lands and cultures. No one wants to admit to being tourists yet Western Society has only two modes of travel. Are you in town for business, or pleasure? The efficient and the sly might combine or conflate the two, but the duality is firmly fixed in our minds. Business, or pleasure?

The entrepreneur and the consumer: the two major modes of American identity reflected in our travel. I don’t mean to say that these modes are valueless, to the contrary: as Aldous Huxley wrote “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” For those who would rather focus on the silver lining, there is Maya Angelou’s quotation on travel: “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try to understand each other, we may even become friends.” However, many of us—Americans especially—suffer from a poverty of imagination when it comes to travel. In particular, I’ve found myself thinking more and more about two forms of travel that were once common but now have become oddities, antiques: The Quest and The Pilgrimage.

Unnecessity might not be a recognized word in English, but it is also the mother of lost social institutions. Have a long lost half brother you’ve recently discovered is living in South Dakota? No need to pack the car and drive through rolling grassland toward the increasing anxiety of a strange reunion. Just friend him on Facebook. Burning to find the last existent copy of an obscure artist’s notebook to discover why your mother named you after her? Don’t buy airplane tickets. Email the library holding the copy. Maybe they can send it to you. Or, better yet, maybe they can scan it and post it online. An age of convenience has hunted The Quest onto the endangered species list. We encounter them now mostly in literature: mysteries, fantasies, but also in a lot of excellent non-fiction The Lost City of Z comes to mind. Few modern Americans need to undertake a Quest, so we fill the void by reading about them. Not a bad trick really, but one that leaves me vaguely dissatisfied.

The Pilgrimage is another endangered species, but perhaps with better chances of survival than the Quest. Here I deliberately use the broadest sense of the word, tied to no particular religion. At its core, a pilgrimage is a journey of moral or spiritual significance, a trip taken both externally and internally. Indulge me by accepting that many things, religious or secular, might be of spiritual significance: churches, poetry, libraries, cities, rivers, mountains, music. We could go on ad infinitum, but let’s stop with music because the pilgrimage most familiar to Americans will be the pilgrimage to Graceland, where Elvis Presley’s home stands. Right now you are chuckling to yourself because of the kitschy nature of such a pilgrimage or you are singing the Paul Simon song. Stop fucking singing the Paul Simon song. No one likes you when you sing that song. Seriously. Let’s go back to the kitsch. Yeah, I’m not much of a fan of Elvis either, but there is something beautiful in the idea of a pilgrimage to music. It’s an idea we shouldn’t laugh at. Of course, there are other pilgrimages we are more respectful of: a veteran’s journey to the Vietnam War Memorial, an octogenarian’s last planned trip to a small home town, etc. In my estimation, a significant slice of Americans will undertake a pilgrimage of some kind in their life. This is a good thing.

I’ve been thinking about travel so much because of two extraordinary opportunities that have come my way. As a boy, I was privileged enough to travel with my parents, mostly to Europe. Later, a cultural exchange program to Morocco, opened my eyes to a beautiful and large slice of the world which had previously been a mystery. Since then, being an inveterate broke student/novelist, I’ve had little ability to travel. But a few months ago, The Girl announced that her parents were going to send her to Peru to hike the Inca Trail for her graduation present and would I like to go? Would I? Wood eye? By some freak coincidence, I also discovered that two family members had a ‘use or lose’ timeshare in Hawaii that they could not use. And would we like to use them for free? Would we? Wood wee?

Peru was wonderful for all the reasons Peru is wonderful. Every time I have tried to blog about it, I ended up writing about being a tourist in Peru. There are volumes of turistagraphia out there on the Cusco, the Inca Trail, Puno, Lake Titikaka (Yes. I know.), etc. You can check out the particularities via our Facebook photo album here. A Hawaiian album might follow later, possibly much later.

I will pause here to say that both Inca and Polynesian cultures have fascinated me for a long time and have proven even more interesting on exploration. Disjunction (the third book in the Spellwright Trilogy) will take place mostly in the Kingdom of Ixos, which is loosely inspired by Polynesian and Balinese culture. I’ve been spending some wonderful time with books and in museums thinking about how to draw inspiration from these cultures without being a culturally appropriating WASP author dipshit.

Now that I’ve written this post, mostly, I look back at it and see it’s pretty consistent with my philosophy of being emphatically-grateful-for-what-has-been-given-to-me-yet-vaguely-dissatisfied-by-things-American-culture-ignores-or-has-lost. To wit, I’m making a personal resolution to make my next travel experience either a Quest or a Pilgrimage. But, given my medical/novelist work schedule for the next few years, and the state of my student debt, that might be a very long time from now.