Why We Travel

And… back. I’ve spent the last nine days on vacation, and while it wasn’t exactly relaxing, it did give me the space and distance needed to explore some things from a new perspective. I spent some time reading, of course: Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle and John Grisham’s The Associate. (Both were funny -- and frightening -- for very different reasons.)

But neither book really preoccupied my mind: instead, I kept thinking about why people travel. One of my favorite fiction passages is from Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler. Here, the narrator is describing Rally McWilliams, a travel writer living in New York. (As a caveat, I am cutting off the passage shamelessly for my purposes.)

“Rally was obsessed with what made people wonderful. It was usually what she least expected, but she knew the truth when she found it. In Dublin she’d hoped to meet blue-eyed men, raconteurs who would buy her pints and tell her stories. Instead, it was the Irishwomen who fascinated Rally, the young ones with babies, or the ones with pale skin and cigarettes. In Montana, Rally had talked to countless cowboys – men with blue jeans and money – hoping to sniff out the spirit of the West for a piece she was writing. But it was in Glacier National Park, listening to a park ranger named Russ, a little barrel of a fellow with a lisp, that Rally felt the stubborn inconsequence of men in the wild. What startled Rally, and kept her traveling, was this: when the wonder of an individual human being struck her.”

It’s not why I travel – that’s a whole other post, eventually – but I thought it was a beautiful meditation on why people travel.