The Hallways of Memory

After all our travels it is undeniably nice to sit around and do nothing. I cleaned the gutters today. Yesterday I cut the grass. For the last two weeks prior I sat on the couch early in the morning and watched the Tour de France. Sienna runs three days a week with the high school cross-country team in their summer training series. She rides her bike to the climbing gym and boulders for an hour each afternoon. She is far more driven than I. Teagan went to a basketball camp last week. Ava, like I said, is working her way onto a swim team. Wendy is back to work and I am attempting to write a book about our travels. Wendy has another idea for a series of kid’s books. I go to the library occasionally on my bike and work.

I have rediscovered the joy of one of my favorite authors, Paul Theroux. I discovered his epic travel books back when I was traveling myself and I believe we are kindred spirits. He grew up in Massachusetts, loves solo travel, enjoys nothing more than some solitude and a good book. He craves the arrival “at the edge of another country, a new frontier”. He dreams about stories and future trips and enjoys helping and speaking to the marginalized peoples of the world.

In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star he says this about those of us with wanderlust, “You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time…Of course, it’s much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things, but where’s the book in that?”

During our year long epic, perhaps the greatest joy we had was in setting up a new camp in a new location: Devils Tower, Acadia, Hunting Island, the Everglades, Mobile Bay, White Sands, Joshua Tree, Bonneville Salt Flats, Bear Lake in Idaho. There were so many. It was the singular joy of our adventure to get somewhere new, set up camp (we became so efficient at this that the act, in itself, was a pleasure) and sit in our camp chairs to do nothing so much as watch the clouds in the sky or the wind play upon the water or the trees sway in rhythm to a gentle breeze. We took elaborate measures to sit around and do nothing. Theroux had it right. He goes on, “And sometimes you just have to clear out. Trespassing is a pleasure for some of us. As for idleness, ‘An aimless joy is a pure joy’.”

I experienced much of what he calls a “strangeness and disconnection”. He says that while he is traveling he feels “insubstantial, like a puff of smoke, merely a ghost”. In our lives on the road we were alone amongst the world which was scary, yet we were together so we were safe. Out on the edge, interlopers and temporary observers of other people’s lives before we slipped out the back door into obscurity once again.

Attempting to write my book may be nothing more than just a reflexive, instinctual way of reliving the trip. I can disappear into my writing and I am back on the road. What happens when I finish writing? Well, then I start rewriting and relive the trip again.

I don’t miss it yet. In fact, it feels really, really nice to be stationary, even sedentary. But there are times. I occasionally have to visit the RV in storage to fix things and clean it up in order to get it ready to sell (sniffle, sniffle). Truth is, sometimes I just want an excuse to go see it. When I step inside and smell that smell and see that space in which we spent so much time together it gives me chills. I sit at the dinette and just look around and try to wrap my head around all that we did and all that we saw, and all that we did to make it happen. Now that it’s over we all have moments where it seems like a dream. How is it a year could be so momentous, so captivating, so full and yet also become so quickly like an elusive phantom? It’s weird and difficult to contemplate the fact that our year away could fade like so many other years into the dim, murky hallways of memory.

Kids are good at moving on. They are better at being goldfish. I’m not sure that is a good thing. I relish the memories and I want my kids to remember, but I also don’t want them to dwell in the past. I’ll put up some pictures soon, maybe throw a slideshow up on the TV from Chewonki or Crescent City. Maybe I’ll get them talking about that homeless guy we tried to give money to but we missed his hand and Wendy threw the bill at him but it blew away and he had to go running after it; or that abandoned dog at the Smoky Mountains that laid a litter of puppies near the campground and everyone was trying to catch it; or when that guy showed us his gun from the back window of his truck, or the butterfly that Ava tenderly cared for in its last moments and then laid to rest in a beautiful grave on Cumberland Island, or…sorry, I’m doing it again.