All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft

by Geraldine DeRuiter

“Life is too short to spend behind a desk,” says every damn job-quitting travel writer, ever. But I’d argue that, statistically speaking, life gets a hell of a lot shorter without health insurance or a steady income.

sometimes it’s best not to know what you are up against; if you are acutely aware of the challenges involved, you’d never do a damn thing.

That’s what’s incredible about love. It’s nothing like the movies. It happens to mere mortals, manifesting while they’re standing in line for groceries or getting a dental check-up or renewing their license at the DMV.

But the real manner in which love works is much subtler. It does fix things. Or maybe, more accurately, it makes you fix things. You start to realize that if someone else loves you that much, maybe you should try to love yourself a bit more.

The problem is, most love stories don’t focus on slow-simmering, shaky romance that takes its time to come to a rolling boil, even though that’s what most of us experience (and that’s if we’re lucky). It’s just not all that interesting. If Jane Austen were alive today, she’d be forced to have Mr. Darcy and Lizzie get together in the first twenty-five pages (also, Darcy would be into sadomasochism). They would never fight about finances or take things the wrong way or get cold feet.

That’s the thing about favorite people and favorite places—at one point in your life, they are all uncharted territory. There’s no alchemy that transforms them into the loves of your life. Usually, you just need time to figure it out. They earn your love. And if you are very, very lucky, you might earn theirs.

I realized that this was my favorite place in the world. It didn’t hit me the first time I saw Ashland. Or the second. It happened slowly, until one day I found myself staring at the last traces of sunlight on the surrounding hills and realized there was literally no place else I’d rather be. Funny how people and places can creep up on you like that, until suddenly you can’t live without them. This is not to say that Ashland is perfect. If love comes from knowing something really, really well, then it comes from knowing all its shortcomings, too.

Most people I know are bewildered by their parents, and I suspect that’s the whole point. They raise us, they feed us, and they do illogical and strange things that confuse us, so that when we go out into the world and encounter illogical and strange things, we aren’t scared. If anything, we feel right at home.

The point is, sometimes you have no idea in what direction you’re headed, but you keep going anyway. Sometimes, miraculously, you end up in the right place. Sometimes it takes you fifteen years to get there, but you make it. And if you don’t? You hop in a cab. If you are lucky, you return with a good story.

He taught me that a good relationship requires balance. A certain give-and-take between two people who find that the world makes more sense when they are together than when they’re apart. When I perform autopsies on my failed love affairs, it becomes apparent that balance was missing. A lot of other things were missing, too. Empathy. Patience. A shared understanding of what the word “monogamy” means.

Not everyone will see our greatness. We might not even see it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

The truth is, roads move only in one direction, no matter how hard you try or how desperately you scream at traffic. You take a deep breath, and you accept that you are going somewhere new. You will get used to this new place, to your new reflection, to the dent in your head. If you are very, very lucky, you will find a familiar face when you get there.

Sometimes in order to understand where someone is coming from, you need to literally see where that person came from.