Road Fever: Why I Travel

When you travel all the time  — and I mean with unending consistency, moving every month or week or day for months and even years on end – your head spins.

It spins the most when you wake up in the middle of the night or too early in the morning, when you’re in the dark for an endless moment, the duration of which – the expanse of which – you don’t know where you are. You wake up thinking that you’re in your bed in Granada, but it turns out that Granada had been months earlier, so you thumb through time’s Rolodex and suddenly you are in Puerto Escondido, but you still haven’t remembered that you recently changed apartments. In the dark with none of life’s familiar moorings, you have no orientation. For a moment, a long moment, the compass spins your head with it and you don’t know where you are or sometimes even who you are. You are nobody. You are nowhere. You never were. And then it all comes back.

Here, in Puerto Escondido, it’s the roosters that remind me where I am. Or the sound of fighting dogs. Or the surf.

In Granada, it is the soothing clatter of the cathedral bells or the Arab markets two stories below. Or the door buzzer from somebody trying to get into the building to leave a stack of pizza coupons.

In Paris, it is more bells, more of its own sort of clatter. Parisian clatter. It has a kind of foggy, romantic peal to it.

In Barcelona, it is traffic and carousing drunk people heading home after staying out all night.

In New Orleans, it is Mr. Okra’s bullhorn and the ever-present trill of cicadas. Then bloody marys and chicken and waffles. Then usually back to bed.

In Seattle, it’s work. The noise of it floods by your window on foot or by car or streetcar or Uber or Lyft or taxi or wheelchair or bicycle or unicycle or skateboard or lightrail or horseback or helicopter or firetruck or rickshaw or, worst of all, by Segway.

The coming year with bring new places to wake up, lost, spinning in the darkness. I will learn the morning sounds of Belgrade, of Rome and Naples and Florence, of Dublin and Casablanca and Nairobi, of Hanoi and Saigon, and who knows where else. Places with exotic names.

I will learn these sounds – will collect them – because I will continue to travel. Which perhaps prompts a valid question:

Why Do I Travel?

Because to stay in one place makes your head spin in a different way. To stay in one place means to tend to the fort. It means filing papers away for the future. It means the cycle of bills and relentless turning of the Hallmark seasons and the making sure it’s in the mail and the maintenance of the this and the that and threatening correspondences from shadowy financial entities and the nagging fear that everything you built could be fragile, could in fact go away at any moment. Then where would you be?

When I’m traveling, I know exactly where I am. I am nowhere. I am nobody. I never was, maybe never will be. It’s exhilarating.

Travel does come with its daytime cyclones along with the aforementioned nighttime spins. There is the buying and the managing of the tickets and the timetables. There are missed flights and poisonous meals and boring aisle-mates. There are lost reservations and corrupt police. There is carrying everything you own with the intention of somehow keeping it secure through the inhospitable, unknown wilds of Wherever. Lost debit cards. Jealous lovers. Trying to score weed. Bad wifi, and always right when you must have it for work. There is work, crammed in between flights and buses and trains and museums and walks and benders and romances and naps and meals spanning the orgasmic to the diarrheic. There is boredom, so much waiting, for ticket agents and trains and traffic-jams and reopening after siesta and lazy cops and even lazier landlords and Tinder dates and grocery clerks and lost bags and drunk Australians. Just choose a fucking t-shirt Brad.

This is the kind of spin I prefer.

For me, the in-one-place cycle becomes a whirlpool, sucks me down, plants my feet too firmly in the mucky floor at the bottom of the sea. Cement boots, no oxygen. Not the kind I have gills for, anyways.

The tornado on-the-go, however, dismantles and scatters me across the land and through the air like dandelion seeds exploded in a million fecund directions. It’s the emptiness of the Buddha and the Vedas, of Santa Claus and James Dean, of Waldo and his stripy couture.

Who the fuck is Waldo anyways? We don’t care who he is, just where he is. He is a vessel for our enjoyment of the chaos in which he finds himself.

That’s why I travel. Because I am comfortable in the chaos. At home in uncertainty. Sanctuaried by searching.

It is where I find myself.

It is where I find quiet among the racket.

It is where I find the center of the spin.