Over the Atlantic - LTA

4/21/10

Over the Atlantic on British Airways flight #0178 from New York (JFK) to London (Heathrow).  It was touch-and-go whether or not this flight would actually fly.  The Icelandic volcanic eruption about a week ago threw grit high into the atmosphere.  Winds have carried that grit and debris to southern England and northern Europe, and airports there have been closed for nearly a week.  British Airways was particularly hard hit, and they only just started running flights into and out of London last night.

I’ve been staying the past couple of nights in New York with a long-time friend, Arlene.  The New York stay was partly a staging visit for the European trip, but  I also wanted to spend time with a good friend I haven’t seen for more than two years.  It’s always such a pleasure to sit over a leisurely meal or coffee and just converse with her.  Even though we’ve been friends for nearly half a century, we always have plenty to talk about, and the topics seem endlessly new and interesting. It's a chance to share experiences and understanding in person, and I always feel as if I learn something when we get together.  She, Dinah, Art, and Constance are the four friends with whom I’ve always been able to have non-trivial conversations. And now Constance is dead.

That first evening in New York, Arlene and I went to the “Vagina Monologues” (a partly Spanish version) at a little cafe on the lower East Side of Manhattan.  It was partly funny and partly serious and partly embarrassing.  It expressed an overworked anger and pride about the condition of being woman, particularly its sexual aspects.  I might have enjoyed it more if I were younger, but I was glad to have seen it, finally.  It came to Spoleto (Piccolo?) in Charleston several years ago, and I didn’t go then, although a couple friends urged me to go.

During the day, I unpacked and reorganized my suitcases, partly looking for some things I was afraid I had left behind (camera battery charger, for example).  I found what I was looking for and was relieved, although I am going to have trouble with the large suitcase (a rolling duffle) because the upper strap on it broke.  I tried sewing it back, but it broke again when the doorman tried to lift it into the trunk of the taxi for JFK airport.

I see this as the “last big trip of my life” – at least my last big trip abroad.  I, who have traveled almost obsessively since that first joy of discovering of independent travel. That was when I used money I had earned as a car-hop at the Dixie Spot the summer I was fifteen to take a three day boat trip to Niagara Falls from Detroit with a friend, Carol Schmidt (“Schmidty”), who was then 16.  We had an absolutely marvelous time, running around together on the ship, seeing The Falls, riding under them on the Maid-of-the-Mist, buying souvenirs with our own money, savoring our amazement at things we had never seen before.  The freedom!  Several older couples “adopted” us when they discovered we were on our own, so we were not without protection.  We probably had more eyes on us (and on what we were doing) than if we had been there with our own parents.  Still, it was a delicious feeling of freedom and possibility that I remember vividly to this day.

Travel has almost always rejuvenated my soul, as during the Sweetbriar “Junior Year in France” (1956 – ’57), when I left home carrying a heavy torch for D.M. that oppressed my spirit and returned feeling renewed, happy and believing that anything was possible.  Since then, I’ve lived abroad for five years, in four different countries, and have taken many trips to other countries, both during those stays abroad and directly from the U.S.  I really need to compile all these trips and the countries I’ve visited.  People ask me, occasionally, how many countries I’ve been to, and I can’t tell them.

Travel-Lust

Moving into the “new” house has forced me to sift through a lifetime of accumulated things: furniture, dishes, books, records, photos, mementos, and travel supplies…ah yes, travel supplies and travel books and travel mementos and travel writing.

I have traveled as often as possible, and for as long as was reasonable, since age ten when my father took me to the big city of Chicago from the one-stoplight town of Waterford, Michigan, and my eyes were opened to the wonders of the wider world – indeed the wider universe - through the museums and planetarium that dotted Chicago’s south shore in the late 1940s.  They’re there still, although I have not been in that part of the country since my brother moved away from Chicago in the late 1990s.

But I have traveled to many other parts of the country and the world since then.  My first "independent" travel was on a boat (could it have been called a ship?) to Niagara Falls from Detroit when only fifteen years of age.  A friend, aged sixteen, and I decided that we wanted to go to Niagara Falls, and our parents gave permission; indeed, my folks drove us to the boat docks in Detroit.   We each paid for our trip with money we had saved from summer jobs car-hopping at the Dixie Spot near Clarkston, Michigan. I sacrificed new fall school clothes for that trip. After discovering that we had no parents with us, several kindly couples took us under their wings, but we were basically free to go and come as we pleased.  I loved the trip.  I loved the magnificent grandeur of the falls. I loved the sense of freedom and the thrill of unfettered exploration I experienced then. 

But it has not been just the sights of awesome places, the scenes I might try to capture on film, that so stirred my travel-lust. It was also sounds, smells, the feel of the air on my skin, the slant and hue of sunlight., the aura of a place as it penetrated my inner being.   Years later, I taught Anatomy for a semester at the University of Buffalo, and almost every week-end, I went to see The Falls.  They’re still awe-inspiring and stunningly beautiful; I never tired of experiencing the rush of water, the dreadful, thrilling sound like droning thunder as water plummeted and crashed onto boulders below, the mist glistening on rocks and tree limbs and cooling my lungs with each deep breath.  These were mystical experiences, like being in love; I always felt transformed as I left.

In 1956-57, I spent a year studying in Paris, long before it was fashionable for American college students to go abroad as part of a well rounded education.  I studied history and language in French; I spent mornings sketching and painting at the Atelier Julien. I wandered the streets of Paris, taking a new route each afternoon from the Left Bank across the Seine to my room with a family in the 19^th arrondissement near Gare St. Lazare.  I stopped at coffee shops along the zig-zag meanderings of those afternoons.  I visited the Louvre frequently.  I crossed bridges and walked through cemeteries and sat in small parks beneath trees under statues of unknown Frenchmen.  When it was about an hour before dinner time, I would find a Metro station and travel underground to Gare St. Lazare. 

I can still see and smell and feel the streets of Paris in some deep recess of my memory.  Someday I’d like to live there again for a month or two.  But that probably won’t happen.  It’s like home or love; you can’t go back.  And I have also traveled to - and lived in - many other places with sights and smells and auras that were loved and left, but not quite lost.

Perhaps the value of a person, place or thing might be measured by the pain we feel as we leave it or lose it.