Not-so-secret secret here: I can be a bit of a control freak in my own way. It doesn’t manifest in the stereotypical ways… I don’t try to micromanage the people I work with or freak out if there’s snow instead of sun. I know that an honest sense of productive happiness depends on one’s attitude, so I have come up with dozens of strategies to manage my attitude, and I enforce them upon myself with robotic rigor. The use of different colors at different times of year, or the distribution of meditative walks, or the codified shorthand of my to-do lists… these are just a few of these strategies. Sometimes they actually do work. Occasionally they are more burdensome than they are worth. Symbology, personal and cultural, is key… so you can imagine that as I’m approaching my fortieth birthday this year, I’m itching to find some meaning in the event.
I’m hoping to write a series of blog posts – extemporaneous, unscripted, mostly unedited – to reflect on turning 40. I’m doing it mostly for myself, but I’ll post them here in case they are of interest to others. Maybe I’ll finish them, or maybe not. There’s a lot going on.
And this is the second.
I’ve always been interested in traveling. Inasmuch as grasping a totality of human experience is impossible, it has still seemed obvious that the best way to learn about other people and to understand them is to go to different places and see how different people live. To discover common ground and varying perspectives.
When I was a kid, I focused on time travel and space travel, but around the time I became a teenager, it started to seem like ordinary terrestrial travel would be much easier and probably just as rewarding.
Ballpark 2000 (so when I was 22), I started keeping lists of all of the places I wanted to live before I died. I set a few convenient parameters: to “live” in a place, I needed to stay there for at least three months, and I tried to build my list to take in the tremendous variety of the world. That first list included a number of neighborhoods in both my native Flint and my then-home of Chicago. It also took in Paris and Bucharest, Kolkata and Dhaka, the McMurdo Station and the South Pole.
I remember I shared this list with a drama class toward the end of college and someone observed that it was “poignant” because there was no way I could visit all of these places before I died. She was correct. My list was already so long that it was unlikely I could visit each of the several hundred entries, even for a day, much less for three months apiece. More importantly, even if I could somehow pull it off, it would still probably require setting aside all of the other parts of living — marriage, a family, a stable career — and I’m a conventional enough person that these were all things I dearly craved. So the list was a sort of automatic temptation: it represented an unfulfilled and unfulfillable potential.
Still, I continued developing my list, revising it each year or two until it had finally accumulated some 500 entries, at which point it was too unwieldy.
By 2012, not only was my list of places to visit longer than it had ever been but it was also less compatible than ever with my personal life. I had married and had a daughter. I had moved back to Michigan and bought a house in my hometown of Flint which, if charming and solid, was unlikely to appreciate in value any time soon. My wife and I had found careers that plopped us somewhere in the Middle-Class, but we were largely a one-income family (her income, to be clear) and any big trips we took would require careful planning and saving and sacrifice.
Still, my lists tugged at me. I wanted to travel, in my imagination at the very least, all over the world, and maybe to learn something from each place.
I did the only sensible thing: I ruthlessly slashed the list to 100 destinations (you can see them here), then I took a character from one of my novels and sent her off on foot to wander the world. Her name is Crystal and I call her explorations “Crystal Peregrinations,” and as she travels, I read about where she is traveling. She has now been on the road for six-and-a-half-years. She has wandered extensively throughout the western two-thirds of the U.S. and Canada, down through Mexico, and she recently entered Belize. In the months to come she will continue through Central America and on into South America.
I don’t think many people are following her wanderings, though I post about them online from time to time, and I have long-since disabused myself of the illusion that they can be in any substitute for real travel (to say nothing of the illusion that what we call “travel” is an approximation of other peoples’ lived experiences!)… but it makes the world feel both larger and smaller, to track her progress, to see how long it takes her to go even a small distance, and to see that she nonetheless gets where she is going. It has been a background sort-of observation and, I think, a worthwhile one.
Meanwhile, in my own life, I have had chances to do what I have wanted — to travel the world and experience new things — though not always in the dramatic fashion I imagined when I was younger.
Each Fathers’ Day weekend, my older daughter and I go on a camping trip, and each year the camping trip has gotten a bit bigger. This year we went up to the Straits of Mackinac, just three hours north of Flint. We camped on a rustic site at Wilderness State Park, overlooking fens and dunes that swept on down to the northern margins of Lake Michigan. We visited the Ojibwa Museum built in the 17th century mission of Father Jacques Marquette on the northern shore, the 18th century French and British stockade fortress of Colonial Michilimackinac on the southern shore, and the 19th century British and American fortress at Mackinac Island. I’d been here before, as a child, but rediscovering the depth and, especially, the age and drama of these outposts not far from where I grew up was breathtaking and illuminating. The spray of water, the wind in the pine branches, the sheer cliffs and French place names, and cannons, and deep waters. There was a lot to learn, right here, almost in my backyard. The world is strange, even when it is familiar, and maybe we can learn as much just by looking closely as we can learn by journeying far.
So I’ll keep my eye on Crystal as she walks about the globe, but I’ll also keep my own eyes on the streets and paths and town squares and parks around here.
I don’t expect to get bored with it any time soon.
*Technically my birthday is in twenty-four days. I meant to write this post yesterday, but I was too tired (a symptom of my old age, perhaps) after getting back from visiting family in Ohio. This trip too, which took me into the bright tiny avenues of Brilliant, Ohio was another journey that opened up new horizons, but one I’ll have to write about another time. In the meantime, I want to keep the symmetry of regular intervals for the moment, so I’ve decided to lie in the post title.