Never there until you get there

Back from Europe and managed to scoot through a window. Planes, trains, security alerts, volcanic ash, mix with two quarts Perrier and you have it, a royal travel mess. Ah, international travel, how I've missed you so.

I started reflecting (while serpentining my way in a [in]security line) how things have changed since I started my traveling career. In the beginning it was simple, buy a ticket, get on a plane, land somewhere, travel around taking pictures and scribbling your impressions of the place, come back and do a story. Now it's wake up, pop the computer on, check seismic reports, read financial forecasts, survey the upper atmospheric wind patterns, check latest State Dept terrorist reports, load the iPhone with key destination apps, gather the dozen different chargers to keep my digital existence powered up, THEN, think about hitting the road and going to work.

But then I started thinking, hasn't that's always been the challenge for gypsies, staying fleet-a-foot and one step ahead of the obstacles. Just after the first of the year the word proprioception entered my weekly vocabulary. Up until now it was uttered as I gasped for air and dripped with sweat between sets of one exercise or another dished out by my fitness coach Phil. That proprioception directly connected to my spine and lower back, and their general inability to communicate with the rest of me. Proprioception popped up today as I juggled BBC volcanic ash reports, flight schedules and substituting TGV reservations for a hire car; in this case my brain communicating with the flexibility of my travel intentions.

'Travel proprioception' is something I got very good at long ago, but it came in other names and descriptions: A cameraman friend from LA use to describe it like this - our ability to eat most anything and not get sick, get toss around in a helicopter and not turn green and sleep not just anywhere, but everywhere. Another person put it "leaving your baggage behind." For the most part that's baggage filled with preconceived notions of what a people, place or thing should be - even what traveling there should be like. And as a wise, and oh so salty woman once said to me, "Want to be a good writer in this place [Africa], follow your nose, but keep your nose pointed down, out of the way."

Phil, loves to say, "sometimes ya gotta go slow to go fast" - I think it applies to travel proprioception as well. I have a bit of the Energizer bunny hopping about inside me - and it's taken 50 years to learn how to slow the little hopper down - and I still can't always catch the little hare. I once arrived in the mountains of Papua New Guinea and was still flying around in some artificially sped up world of my own; my metronome pulsing to beat of a world consumed by devices--computers, cell phones, deadlines, downloads, 24-hour news--and an elder I was suppose to meet with was not available; I was going nut. Two days later he said we could meet now, when I found him in his garden, leaning on his handmade hoe, mande tene wig slightly askew, but happily adorned with bright saffron-colored everlasting daisies, he said, "you are finally in time." I had no idea I wasn't until that moment. From that trip onwards I always took two days off before coming to the village - that's about what it took to reset my clock.

I use to have a saying when travel was my only way of life, "You're never there until you get there." People would ask me are you excited about going to this place or that, my reply, "after I get there, then I'll think about getting excited." Because the flip side of excited is total downer. It becomes a yo-yo ride that can spin out of control. On the other hand, if you are truly a journey-person not a destination-person then "there" may turn out to be a whole different place, and the place you really were destined to be. Not always an easy reality to wrap your mind, body and soul collectively around.

The one thing I have gotten smarter at is creating fertile fields for the "there" of which I had no reckoning. Heading for Belgium and France I was excited, mainly because my travel proprioception feels totally turned on, lit from within. When I first began traveling I intentionally cast my plans away from Europe, towards lands untamed, maps that still claimed "Here be dragons", places that struggled to be pronounced (like Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano - I mean, c'mon, that's a scrabble goldmine!). Europe is now a journey - I'm am excited - because I have no idea where it will eventually lead.

Places of the Mind

Geography - endlessly flat, dwarfing, towering beyond sight, wave washed, beautiful from a distance--blistering from a footstep, emerald, terracotta, alabaster, sage, azure, granite;

Senses - ebbed and flowed, the push of soft air leading the deluge of monsoon, scent of grass basket fields, sting of spice markets, icy wind from the bow, sweet humid humus, the look in a whale's eye;

and Light - warm in it, awash in it, coloured by it, persuaded and seduced by it.

...why I travel.

Travel, like travel writing, is a self-indulgent-immersion. I have four books that have companioned my indulgent perambulations over the years, in some cases inspiring others: Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen, Arctic Dreams, by Barry Lopez, Song of the Dodo, by David Quammen, Crystal Desert, by David Campbell. But one of the most eccentric of its practitioners, cum addicts was Robert Byron who set out in 1933 on a journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Teheran to Oxiana - the country of the Oxus, the ancient name for the river Amu Darya which forms part of the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. His arrival at his destination, was the legendary tower of Qabus. He chronicled this indulgence in The Road to Oxiana. Travel writer Bruce Chatwin has described the book as "a sacred text, beyond criticism," and carried his copy "spineless and floodstained" on four journeys through Central Asia.

The map of this journey is from what is called the 'inter-war years' - those are words that describe much more than a reference of years, they define, they demarcate, they turn the page on a world that will never again be - and like all times there are better and worse. Places like Persia, Ottoman Empire, Indo-china, Oxiana and others, lingering vestiges of colony - India, East Africa, German-Belgian Congo. After WWII the dusty roads were hastily paved, there was fear in foreign, urgency without understanding, the world shrank as quickly as double-right clicking Google Earth.

My first map was a paper sheet, not a digitally disconnected earth, (amazingly wonderful as GE is), one I could have crawled beneath and slept, and did in my mind. Folded and unfolded beyond its intent, its creases and worn edges clung to dreams, adventures and escapes. I clung to it as if it were a guide to my imagiNation. Even then I was traveling into self-indulgent-immersion.

In the mid 1990's I had just returned from what would be my last trip to Rwanda photographing mountain gorillas, a genocide had just been released on the people like a plague beyond our imagination and what Christiane Amanpour could report. For me Rwanda was multiple visits, it had become a place of my mind, not a mille colline landscape squeezed within the inky squiggles determined by the Belgians/UN in 1960, it was, as Byron penned, a place that "henceforth it exists on the map of our [my] intelligence as well as our atlases." It was the Rukashaza family teaching me about local pili pili, dark chocolate bars melting in equatorial sun, eucalyptus wood fires cooking rice, one cent avocados, four hour journeys into the Virungas, sweaty day-long gorilla treks, and night-time gauntlet runs to the buffalo guarded outhouse. Geogrpahy, senses, light, places of my mind. In the wake of our evening's conversation Barb shared with me Byron's words from First Russia, Then Tibet.

"Tibet, for us now, is no longer the land of mystery; a piece of dark brown on physical maps, gripped by an unholy hierarchy, and possessing no amenities of life beyond devil-dances and butter statues; but a physical, aesthetic and human definition as implied by the words France or Germany. Henceforth it exists on the map of our intelligence as well as of our atlases. If, say the newspapers, this or that is happening in Tibet, this or that means something. In Tierra del Fuego it does not. This or that moreover is invested with a particular romance. We see again the parched distances, the damson hills and gilded rocks, the encroaching snows, the yaks plowing the pale dusty earth of valleys, the threshers singing on the outskirts of the four square farmhouses, the laugh of the passer-by, the burning turquoise sky, and the pop-eyed clouds. We have a part in the country. We wish it well."

Yes, Henceforth it exists on the map of our intelligence as well as of our atlases. In my journals and field notebooks I make maps, places small and large, flower markets and labyrinth waterways, like personal address note taking, with contour lines of pondering, persuading future steps to the left or to the right. I might add those atlases Byron speaks of are not digital, but paper, rich with creases and tattered corners, faded from stare. They are ragged-eared reminders, sticky-notes to self-indulgence-immersion.

I've written that my recent travels in India were the first, after four initial encounters. It took a while, I don't know why; the mind wasn't full of places. India has now become a place of the mind. Daily it lives in people, thoughts, news, emails, food, book titles, cricket scores, writings, reviewed photographs. It connects to other places of the mind, an elaborate mental metro where journeys come and go. Two Kashmerie brothers met on floor in a Guwahati apartment have become a journey, my Tibet to know.

I envy Edward Abbey, Thoreau, Bryson for finding travel within their own domain. I have searched and the roads deadend. Even when I lived oversea perpetually for a many years the fascination remained in the foreign, only for a fleeting few days in the latter half of October did I glance skyward and wish to see Vs and voices passing southward, a reminder of home other than the road under foot.

I ran away when I was six, not because, but because. There was a road, it led, to a journey, some imagiNation, so I took off, in much the way I have traveled since, with curiosity and senses tilted forward - much to my mother's horror, although all journeys since have been to her horror as well - to this day I recall vividly those Places of the Mind collected up that sunny Saturday morning.


Photo above - a place for the senses: Kolkata flower market

Reacquainting with the road

Thirty plus hours each way, two weeks on the ground, fish market on bicycles, Kashmiris brothers selling shawls, one successful assignment, fifteen minutes with one of the rarest cats on earth and close with a TV talk show – it’s been a very long time since my life looked like that. I’ll admit, it took me no time to be mainlining it again. I'm a travel junkie. It was a fix long in coming. It was good to get reacquainted with the road.

Still just settling back into Portland so this is short – many more details and images to come over the following weeks – I missed something this past decade that I had become very skilled in hiding away. This unexpected, hastily planned trip to India, for friend Shyamal’s wedding, and a collection of wanderings before and after the wedding vividly shined a light on the magic that only travel is. It threw me back into photography, filming and writing and thinking about the three in a way I couldn’t have imagined, and in reality could not have eased into as I had planned. A bit over a month ago a bought all new gear, forced my brain, eyes and fingers to reacquaint themselves in this dance of creativity that seemed so intimate not so many years ago. But the reality is the "reacquaintance" could only take place on the road, where I have always been most at home.

I’ve only walked in the door and am hungry return to the road; wash a load of clothes, review 1,500 odd images, a couple hours of film, sort through my field notes and then get back out there. I’m completely set to again live at tiger speed. What I am completely convinced of is I never ever again want to live at Blackberry speed. While passing through SFO airport earlier on the return, I happily stood far right on the moving sidewalk and let everyone stream by – most staring at some digital device. I don’t want it, don’t need it.

When I began this journey over a quarter century ago I did so with the hunger to have each day be a clear punctuation mark in a long time line of living fully, for the past decade days have merged and gotten lost in seamless monotony. The road reminded me everyday had a value, a memory retained, experience worth living. This is the most alive I have been in years.

Now, off to plow through a sea of bits and bytes that now assemble my perception of the world via the 7D’s shutter button.

Photo (c) J. Loren