Notes on Departure
I was 24 years old when I graduated college and first left the country - 2 events that would indelibly change the course of my life, and endlessly annoy my father over which to hold responsible for my indecipherable politics. I landed first in London, a city I had completely dismissed as America’s stuffy elder with an accent, and left enchanted. The gardens, the tunnel, the beautiful shops and pubs all accessed on foot, the pristine maintenance of history and ceremony that seemed long forgotten in the States… I didn’t see at all what I expected, and I was delighted.
More important as I toured Europe over that month, was the transformation starting within me - setting aside my assumptions before entering new cultures and personal interactions, allowing myself to develop confidence as I navigated new streets and transit systems, learning to feel a place as much as I might consume it with my other senses. I also realized during that trip how American geography and history must be similarly rich, but was mostly unknown to me, and returned wanting to know more about my homeland.
A few years later I took a job that would have me traveling across the U.S. almost every week for the next 5 years. I’m a window-seat person (there are many benefits beyond a great view - privacy, an easy place to rest, more room) - business travelers are campy about their positions. For many years, every time the plane took off, I would be overcome by a sense of awe watching the runway peel away, then the buildings, and the homes, then the city, passing over State lines. When I first took the job I was getting out of a terribly toxic relationship and I could genuinely feel my heartache lessen as I moved farther away from him and the home we had shared. I was also comforted by this universal sense of compassion, realizing every person in each building below, multiplying as the webbing of roads and cities passed, had lives of equal importance with similar or greater struggles than mine. For years I sat by the window and zoomed out of my own myopic world view, then zoomed back in upon landing as we all must do.
My favorite trips are this kind - those that provide insight, but also longing for return. I remember the first time I went to Marfa, like a kid in a candy store, I explored every artful corner on bicycle and returned home thinking I’d never wear anything but diaphanous embroidered gowns and vintage tapestries thenceforth. I went back a few years later (my wardrobe mildly evolved) and realized there was a lot more going on [culturally] than I saw the first time around, and I had changed a lot, too.
This trip is a little different, as I’ve left my home in Austin for an indefinite period of time, for a destination that I’m not particularly jazzed about. Nonetheless, if travel (or Covid) have taught us anything, it’s that the best laid plans… And sometimes that’s the most delightfully imperfect point.
“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
-John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
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