OPEN AND CLOSED
All my life I’ve needed to travel abroad every two years. Sometimes I have gone as long as five years between trips, but more often I’ve gone two years in a row or even, sometimes, every year.
The photograph above is me returning from hitchhiking for the summer of 1959 after graduating from Wooster College, once around the United States from Ithaca, New York, where my parents lived, across the country to San Francisco and then up to Seattle and back along the northern border to New Hampshire and then back to Ithaca. It was a leap into the unknown. I had the addresses of a few of my parents elderly relatives that I might spend a night with and a friend, Ray Smith, who was building a house outside of San Francisco whom I wanted to help build for a month. But otherwise I was clueless. The first night I left the thruway, walked into a woods in a light rain, and tried to sleep with a tarp over me, woken again and again by some animal walking around and sniffing.
The thing that was most stimulating about the trip was getting rides with people who had a story to tell. My second ride was with a couple, just married, who were returning from their honeymoon at Niagara Falls. In Oregon I was picked up by a guy from Canada whose wife couldn’t make their planned trip to Las Vegas. He went by himself, gambled away all his money in one night, and was driving straight home to Mama, dead tired. He wanted me to drive while he slept. Near Los Angeles I was picked up by a guy and two girls sitting in the front seat who changed their blouses in front of me while claiming they were on their way to an orgy while throwing apples out the window onto the eight lane highway. In upstate Michigan we were stopped by a state trooper with his rifle in his hand who asked the driver, “Seen any hitchhikers?” The driver said “no” and on we went. There were long waits, once a whole day, when no one would pick me up, the fancier the car the less chance, but the rides I did get were all interesting.
That trip was five years after I returned from India and was something I was blindly drawn to do.
Immediately after that trip I spent two years in the Army in Germany where I met my wife, Kathe. She and I spent a year in India during graduate study with our two children and had a marvelous time. And then from then on until I retired I would take students every other year to Sri Lanka and India for two months or four months at a time. Every trip was stimulating and after every return I felt numb and immobilized by having to fit back into American cultural patterns.
After retiring I and my daughter Susie, and sometimes Todd her husband, and one time with Kathe and her best German friend, would travel to India every other year with stopovers in Europe. And then when Kathe died almost four years ago I began to travel for a month at a time four times a year all over.
So the question is why did I need to do this, why at 87, getting weaker and achier, am I still doing it.
It isn’t physically hard to do, it isn’t dangerous, it isn’t expensive, it isn’t risky, anyone can easily do it, but none of my friends my age are doing it. Why am I doing it? Why have I always had to do it? Why are my friends so happy to stay here?
In wondering about this it seems to me that there are two sides of human nature, the side that wants to fit into cultural conventions which give us identity and meaning as well as the security and support of a community. And then there is the other side of human nature in which we want to open up and explore and to experience or to imagine intense possibilities.
People who are only comfortable fitting in and being supported by what makes them feel most alive have no desire to uproot themselves except for brief blow out vacations. They also are the ones most threatened if their traditional cultural conventions seem to be undermined. But others of us feel suffocated or immobilized by having to fit into routine cultural conventions and want to break out and open up to new possibilities. Travel, in which you spend time opening up to a new culture, is a great way to do this.
Of course, in my way of understanding, we have both sides of human nature within us. We like to fit in and we like to open up and break out. It is just a question of degree.
Not everyone wants to launch out across the country hitch-hiking, open to whatever happens. Not everyone is so itchy with being kept fixed in place that they yearn to escape, it doesn’t matter where. But I do, and I can’t help it.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 