MY WAY

Every once in a while I see the things people post on Instagram or Facebook while they travel.

Almost always they’re selfies, with the traveler (usu. female) in a fetching frock, sunhat, and groovy tote. Strolling along a sunlit tropical beach. Eating bouillibaisse in a striped sailor’s jersey in Marseille. Chatting gaily with colorful local characters in Greece, Australia, Thailand. Packing smartly, effortlessly hailing cabs, whisked to whatever airport in air-conditioned limos.

My own travel is an entirely different affair. I look upon travel as sacred obligation, pilgrimage, and mosty penance. Taking a picture of myself is the absolute last thing I want to do or post, and when anyone asks to take a photo with me I have to restrain myself from snarling and make a grim, heroic effort to smile and comply. Not that I hate the way I look. Nor is it that especially whilst traveling I am far from my best. It’s just….why?

No, everything has been pared down over the years. Nowadays I barely even take pictures of the landscape. And when people start larking on with the names of “fabulous” restaurants in the area where I’m going, I hardly know what to say. I couldn’t care less. I will look up the nearest local Catholic church, the gardens, and the museums.

I’ll go to Mass. I’ll look at the flowers and trees. And I’ll walk.

The pilgrimage starts the moment the gate to my house is locked behind me. Over the years I’ve developed a weird aversion to, or refusal to purchase, or a habit of simply not buying food at an airport. I saw a bag of pistachios for 17 bucks at the Norfolk VA airport the other day!

It’s kind of a game: pack a bag of snacks the night before and then, like someone whose plane has crashed in the Andes, that’s all I allow myself (with the addition of pretzels or Trader Joe’s-like Speculoos cookies, and a Diet Coke or apple juice on American) till I land and can find a market.

This most recent trip, I bought a bag of dried apricots, half a large bar of dark chocolate with candied ginger, a bunch of shelled pistachios, and two pieces of olive bread toast with butter wrapped in aluminum foil, the latter of which, trust me, tastes pretty darn good when unwrapped at Dallas-Fort Worth around 9 am Central when you have been up since 3:45 Pacific and completed the first leg of your journey.

I landed in Dulles that day around 4:30, took an hour-long train into the city, checked into my hotel and set out around 6 pm for my daily walk and a (largely fruitless, as I may have mentioned) search for provisions. By the end of the week, I had added to my horde a bag of olive oil crostini and a hunk of Dubliner cheese, half of which I ended up ferrying back to Tucson.

In between I ate blueberries, yogurt, a pear salad, an apricot croissant, a delicious salmon dinner, and a bunch of Panera food at the catered Retreat for Artists in which I participated over the weekend.

And walked about 100 miles mulling, pondering, inwardly arguing, despairing, exulting and praying.

So as not to make my hostess rise at 4 am to give me a ride, I’d booked a 3:45 pm return flight from Norfolk to Tucson through Dallas, knowing the whole trip such a move was dicey as the later in the day the higher the chance of delays.

Sure enough, the Dallas to Tucson leg was five hours late–I rebooked and left at 11:30 pm instead of 7 (a mere 4 1/2 hours late). I almost folded during that time and bought an $11 sushi which I knew would be tasteless, hard and dry (as is true of all airport food, or all the airport food I’ve ever had), but made do with a Starbucks dark roast and nibbled away at my remaining cheese, crostini, pistachios, and apricots. I had one square of chocolate left–again, like those people who are stranded on Everest or shipwrecked! It tasted delicIous and I was quite proud of myself, and grateful.

Meanwhile I had already walked a few miles that morning and walked more through DFW which is now like an old friend. One of my favorite spots is way at the end of C terminal, like Gate 40 or so. There’s a place you can sit with floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides and look out over a freeway and a bunch of airport utility vehicles and watch the workpeople in their orange safety vests yukking it up and getting shit done.

From there if you feel like strolling, you can walk all the way to Gate C1, which has got to be a third of a mile, and then there’s a long walkway between C and D terminals which is usually pretty deserted, has windows on both sides, and again has a friendly view of freeways. If you wanted to you could just sit by the window, charge your phone from an outlet, and contemplate the state of the world and your soul.

If not, you can walk to Terminal D, and if you feel like it, bang an immediate right, which will take you to the chapel AND to a large bank of seats (no outlets, though) that are also almost always deserted, and that look out over a bunch of airplanes. I love these melancholy views and semi-deserted spots in the midst of so much humanity, and the people-watching is stellar. It’s simply unbelievable who walks by: large families with the women in saris; people who look on the verge of suicide; a barefoot young man with a lapdog sprinting to…?

All the while I was toting around a probably unconscionable weight of carry-on luggage as I will not check a bag unless under duress and would have been fine except I’d had books shipped to sell at a talk I gave which I’d been assured would go like hotcakes but of course hadn’t so rather than put someone to the trouble of shipping them back had shoehorned them into my luggage.

I mean, really, what am I going to take a selfie of myself eating four-day-old Dubliner cheese and bowed down like a beast of burden at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport as I look forward to a 12-hour plus trip home? My introvert self having been around people nonstop for a week and thus depleted to within an inch of its/my life?

Praying, however, the Rosary!

The truth is this is what travel is like for practically everyone so why don’t we just tell the truth and make a joke of it? As The Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” says: “It ain’t no pleasure in life.” Granted, the guy’s just shot a family dead, but the underlying thought is sound.

No but seriously, in fact there’s something about airports, even being stuck in them sometimes, that I totally like. The airport becomes your world so that every little detail, event, smile or mean word assumes a huge significance. Then again, no-one can get at you or to you at an airport. You’re suspended in place and time, and you have to descend into a kind of larval state simply not to lose your mind. I always tell myself I’ll read but there’s constant noise and you’re in constant angst as to when and whether your plane’s going to leave and all the stuff you have to do (and that you pray will go right) once you land.

Still, I did get a bunch of reading done during my trip and especially at the airport, including the first third of Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown (Scott descended into alcoholism and nervous breakdown-land with the strain of writing The Raj Quartet and I have just ordered a biography of him) and most of Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand and Stars, and months of back issues of the Times Literary Supplement, to which I just re-subscribed.

I arrived home around 1 a.m, thanks be to God, rose at 5 and by 7:15 am was at Larry H. Miller Fiat/Dodge dealership, where I spent another 3 1/2 hours waiting while they fixed my passenger side window, which was stuck down ($587 to replace a something or other, not the window but the mechanism). This was of the absolute essence, as it’s over 100 degrees practically every day here in Tucson and also I’m driving through the desert to St. Andrew’s Abbey above LA a week from Sunday, and these days you never know what will be wrong, whether they’ll have the part or have to order it, etc. So getting that fixed was another huge relief.

Now all I have to do is spend a couple of days raking, sweeping, watering, filling birdfeeders and writing my column and I’ll be almost caught up!

Underneath all the surface activity (or inactivity)…my heart is kind of bleeding for our country, its people, its government, its spirit. One thing about leaving home is that you are exposed to points of view and ways of thinking and life that are not shocking, exactly, but deeply depressing. One thing about airports and car dealerships is that you are forced to see if not listen to an endless stream of incomprehensibly demoralizing crap from television screens (in fact, unable to bear the TV voices any longer, after a while I went outside the dealership yesterday and sat in the broiling sun).

Why would anyone want to watch a wrestling match or cheesy home improvement show when they could be schlepping miles through an airport, starving to death, in existential torment/loneliness, quivering with excitement at the prospect of making it through a whole day on cheese, crackers and dried fruit, and weirdly, triumphantly joyful because it is all, all, all an offering; a laying down of body, blood, effort, heart for the citizens who are barricaded in their homes with their arsenals of weapons, for the suburbanites whose lives are so circumscribed they look upon a person who takes a simple walk around the neighborhood as a dangerous oddball and a threat, for the drug-addled ranting on the streets of Washington, DC (“God is delivering us from Babylon–WHITE PEOPLE!“).

For the many friends and strangers who hosted me, took me out to eat, listened to my talks, fed me, accompanied me to Mass, guided, helped and welcomed me.

Thank you, thank you, and thank you again.

The thing about travel, or this mode of travel) is that it appeals to my attraction for extremes. Extreme (if mostly self-imposed) discomfort (under the best of circumstances); extreme gratitude and relief upon returning home.

I don’t know WHY everyone doesn’t do things MY WAY!!