Equivocality

Why is it that the rest of the world seems more real to me than my home? Why is it that I am passionate about hiking the hills of Afghanistan but I constantly need to be reminded of the existience of Joshua Tree National Park, which I could visit any weekend? Why do I want to see the Great Wall of China and Victoria falls but I’ve never thought seriously about making it to the Grand Canyon?

“These far away places,” I tried one night, “they’re amazing. They’re utterly alien.”

“Joshua Tree is also alien,” my companion replied.

I have no answer to that. We both live in California. She wants to explore California. I want to explore the whole world. I’m restless. I’m not at home unless I can’t understand anything. I don’t feel right except when I’m in some complex situation just on the edge of my comprehension. There’s nothing as real to me as the surreal.

And I could tell the stories, and they’re good stories, but just the stories any traveller tells. I’ve sampled the finest tea on the rusting boat home of family who made their living running cement up and down the Red River through Hanoi. I’ve been invited into a little wooden shack and gotten pissed with a pair of goat herds in the mountains on the Chinese border. I’ve ridden motorcycles on mud roads without helmets and seen the sun set on a dozen tropical islands which turn to be just as alluring as the postcard suggests. I’ve stumbled into local weddings, funerals, celebrations of all kinds and even had a brief affair with a street-side omelet vendor who spoke almost no English. I’ve behaved badly, behaved well, and often acted like the privileged tourist that I am. In the end I can always walk away with my passport and credit card.

There’s a certain pointlessnes to the exercise. There’s a certain arrogance in crafting grand stories of my life for my own amusement. Still I have learned things I cannot quite articulate, there outside the castle walls. This makes me feel stupid, and I am thankful for that.

Now, more and more I feel I need to do it all again. I need to get lost in the world. I need to go to the places no one else goes, the places where merely getting there is an adventure. I need to be alone for months. I need to go to Papau New Gineua, Antartica, the depths of the Amazon Basin, the lost cites of the deserts of Jordan, I need to spend the night at 20,000 feet in the Himalayas and gamble with the Sherpas while they laugh at my altitude sickness.

I don’t know why. I cannot say. All I know is I found something out there.

There are many words for what I am, and it has all been done before.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 19th, 2005 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.