American Ennui, now in Technicolor.

Regarding My Far-Flung Beliefs, March 17th, 2010

This essay was written for my English class. The assignment was to write as if we were going to submit our paper to NPR’s This I Believe website.

I believe in travel.

I was about six the first time I came untethered. The air around me shook with a sound I’d never heard; rubber lifted from pavement, and we were airborne, bound for London. I have only vague recollections of the ensuing trip: my father and I looking over the bustling French landscape from the Eiffel Tower. The darkness of the Channel Tunnel. A lightly-buttered croissant for breakfast in a Parisian hotel. These memories, though faded, are what remain of my first trip across the Atlantic.

This was only the beginning.

I’ve learned what a tragedy it is that most people travel merely to see the world. This is not to say that the world isn’t filled with wonder; it surely is. Though when I think back to all the places I’ve been, my location is always a backdrop for the people I’m with. I don’t just remember the Sistine Chapel; I remember my father describing it to me, telling me about Michelangelo and the Renaissance and Catholicism, every new tourist stop becoming a history lesson. I remember my grandmother teaching me how to tie a square knot in the backseat of a rental car in the middle of Alaska, my mother taking me through shops in Vienna, San Diego, Copenhagen, Toronto. I’ve witnessed arguments, my parents’ endless bickering about airlines and maps. We’ve stayed in a motel with a leaky roof, flown standby on a hope and a prayer, rented cars in bad areas of Los Angeles, all to afford to be somewhere new.

Some memories stand out more than others: the Mona Lisa and the World Trade Center are blurry at best, but I clearly remember standing in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican among thousands of people on Ash Wednesday, looking up with everyone else at Pope John Paul II. I remember my mother and I frantically looking for my dad driving our unfamiliar rental car, the Sydney Opera House behind us. Riding the L to the Sears Tower, looking out the window at the endless streets, both my parents telling me stories about their visits to the Windy City. Standing with my mother in the middle of the Coliseum, counting all the stray cats who live in its nooks and crannies. My father teaching me to say grazie and prego, danke and bitte, merci and pas de quoi. Being amazed to learn that my dad has a motorcycle license when he rents one to drive around Key West. Weaving through traffic at breakneck speed sandwiched between my parents in the back of a beat-up taxi in Tijuana. Witnessing my father pleading with a British police officer not to give us a parking ticket—we were just getting our bags from the curb of the Ibis! We have to catch our flight back to the States! (I don’t think we ever paid that ticket.)

My family bred in me a love for travel and adventure, a thirst for foreign places. They taught me to sit comfortably in a car for hours on end, speeding down the Autobahn to the Swiss border, and further still. I learned to drive hundreds of miles with ease going back and forth between Georgia and Texas twice a year. Looking back, though, I had no idea just how much those trips made me who I am.

During my freshman year of college in Santa Fe, a group of us decided that to get home for the holidays, we’d carpool from New Mexico to North Carolina, dropping off people along the way: We planned to stop in Austin, Memphis, Atlanta, and Charlotte. Naturally, I’d driven out to Santa Fe, so I offered to drive everyone back across the continent. For me, it was never so much about the trip; it was the innate adventure.

On our third day of travel, about an hour east of Texarkana, we hit ice, which is to say, the entire Interstate hit ice and came to a halt. It was 2:00 am and below twenty outside, and we were making about five miles an hour, slowly passing overturned eighteen-wheelers surrounded by police cars, everyone just as stuck as we were. But the three of us left in the car—me, my girlfriend Kim, and her roommate Sophia—we just turned on the radio and talked about the upcoming break, about how glad we were to have stopped for food and gas at the border. We eventually made our way off of the highway and got a room for the night, re-planning the rest of the trip, trying to get as far south as possible.

When most people hear this story, I’m greeted with sympathy and frustration. “That must have been awful, to have to stop for the night!” “The weather’s a real bitch sometimes, huh?” But all I see is another trip that brought me closer to the people I care about, so I think back to our discussions in the car, stopped on I-35. I imagine we were surrounded by angry, tired drivers who were sick of traveling, and I can’t say that I blame them. But I know what was happening in our car. Sophia had drifted off to sleep in the backseat, and Kim and I were discussing our next trip. Three weeks later, we got off the A line and walked across Columbus Circle to our hotel, racing to get out of the dreadful Manhattan sleet, stopping in a Duane Reade to look at a map.

And I’m already itching to go somewhere else all over again.