Twenty five years ago today I left on an epic, “trip of a lifetime, year-long trip around the world. It was a trip I’d planned and saved and budgeted for ten years. Each June I’d submit a letter to Board of Education and each late August I’d get a letter saying, sorry…we just can’t find anyone to replace you.
Then in 1998 it happened. I was sitting in an Internet café in Xela, Guatemala when I saw it. An email from NCCS. I just about leapt out of my seat for joy! This was the year. A certified school librarian had been found.
I took a month or organize. Many people were happy for me. Most people just didn’t get it. That’s ok.
“Why don’t you do it later,” was a common response. But I’d taught Langston Hughes’ “A Dream Deferred” too often to know that dreams can shrivel up to nothing, like “a raisin in the sun.” No. Then was the time.
In those days, around the world air ticket jobbers could be found in San Francisco and New York City. Select an itinerary, pay one price, then head out. The only fixed aspect about it was the departure date which could not be changed, or the routing. Everything was changeable. NYC-Amsterdam-Warsaw. Athens—Nepal. New Delhi-Bangkok-Denpasar-Brisbane-Fiji-LA-NYC.
Every date was changed. I was supposed to spend the summer in Australia, but chose to spend December-March in SE Asia instead. I traveled alone. Some people still don’t get that. I actually like traveling alone and only solitary travelers really understand that.
Someone before I left told me…”You will come home changed. You don’t know how, but you’ll come home changed.”
I left. It was hard at the beginning, but a rhythm set in.
Some images will stay with me forever. A full moon over the Taj Majhal, Everest and Orion on the Tibetan Plateau. A beautiful white Christmas on a Thai island, then ringing in the New Year a week later with my dear friend, Glenda, who’d come all that way for her Christmas break. She brought herself and a piece of home, and I will never forget how good that felt.
That night, as midnight closed in on us, an elephant was paraded down the street where we were staying.
Other images: a lazy afternoon riding an inner tube on a gently flowing river in Laos. I will never forget the awe when I floated past a herd of water buffalo sharing the river with me. Sunrise over the Thar desert on a camel safari in India, and a blue moon on my birthday at Ayers Rock in Australia.
Seared, too, into memory is Auschwitz and, months later, the killing fields of Cambodia, where skeletal remains still cut through the earth.
So many things have changed since then. I took the trip just on the cusp of widespread international travel. Today, everybody and his brother is traveling everywhere. That was not the case then. Siem Reap in Cambodia, where Ankor Watt is located, was still a backwater town with dirt streets. Today an international airport brings in 2,000,000 tourists a year. Progress, I guess.
In the end I did come home changed. For ten months I had only myself to rely on. Shit happened. I had to find a way out of multiple situations. I got sick. A lot. I had an accident and needed emergency surgery. Sometimes I got lonely. Sometimes the road got to be too much. Sometimes I just had to stop and stay put for a while.
In all that time, though, I was never afraid. I was invited to weddings and funerals, parties and dinners. I was invited into people’s home, fed and allowed to stay there a few days.
This was before Airbnb, cell phones. I kept in touch via email, so at least that had an immediacy to it. I simply kept myself open to possibility, and the possibilities proved endless.
By the time the trip ended, not much bothered me. And it still doesn’t. There were so many things out of my control that I just learned to flow with them. This is very much who I am today. “All will be well,” said the mystic Julian of Norwich, and she is right.
I’d already known that the world is far kinder than the news would make us think. I was invited into people’s home, fed, housed, cared for. I met countless people, but all relationships were transient. I learned to live in the moment of people and learned to say goodbye when they left. It was ok. We were all on the move. It was like a series of one night stands. Enjoy someone’s company, part ways. Some people, though, I still keep in touch with.
I don’t think I could this kind of trip today. I hate to say I’m too old, but it’s true. It wore me out physically. It was too much. I was always on the go. Today, if I did a trip like that, I’d do it over a period of two or three years. I much prefer to spend longer in one place, than see a whole lot in a short period of time.
A trip like this is not for everyone. It’s certainly not part of the American cultural experience, whereas in the UK and Australia it’s almost a rite of passage.
I will forever be grateful to Steve for allowing me to do this. It had been a dream for years.
That year influences me still. I’m open and unafraid, still adventurous. The world doesn’t frighten me. Cruises are nice, but after every one I take a trip alone just to prove to myself I can still do it. Oman was that way a year ago.
You'd think this might have cured my wanderlust, but it didn't. There is not cure for that. It just made me more curious. Travel, for me, is not about the destination, but about the journey. I'm a travel addict and that's not going to change. There are few places in the world where I don't feel comfortable.
Happy 25th. I’ll probably mentally relive many parts of it as the year progresses. I may even dig out some old photos and post them.
