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June 27, 2006
"How Has One Place You've Traveled..."
"...Changed Your Life?"
The question was placed seemingly haphazardly on the Yahoo email login page earlier today, mixed in with ads and other clickables. I don't even know why it was there. The question vanished just after I read it, replaced with another advert of some sort.
I had all afternoon to ponder this thought, while I was contorting myself into small corners of my wet basement with rags, trying in vain to dry what might become a mildewy, moldy mess without further intervention (Enter the huge fan lent to me from the guys who have now realized that, if they don't help me fix this problem, they might receive a big bill in the mail.). I have made progress, though, and all is not a lost cause at this point. But now I have digressed.
After such pondering, I came to the conclusion that I think the very point of travel specifically, and adventuring in general, is to incite life change. Such incited life change may be small and insignificant: my immediate family and I have all spent varying lengths of time in East Africa where Swahili is spoken; resultingly, our family uses the Swahili word for "Bless you" when someone sneezes. On the other hand, resulting life change may be more grandiose: I spent two collegiate summers in this area of Wyoming and Montana and I loved my time here; I credit those experiences with my strong desire and successful effort to return to this area to work now. Additionally, I think that such life change occurs both consciously and unconsciously.
I could make this blog entry exceedingly boring to everyone but myself if I were to list ways in which I have changed as a result of each place I've traveled. I won't torment you all. Instead, I will pick the summer after I graduated from college when my friend and I spent three months traveling in Alaska.
A few weeks after graduation, I climbed in my Dodge Neon somewhere in the cheese country of the Midwest, drove it across the United States, picked up my friend M in Seattle, and began driving north. Our intentions were quite simple: we had pooled together our earthly savings of $2100; with that, we would drive to Alaska, live out of my Dodge Neon (she didn't have a car), play until three quarters of our money was depleted, then drive back home.
Our first night together, we sat at a picnic table in a campground in the middle of British Columbia. The June evening was long, and we swatted mosquitoes while drinking cheap wine, and the daylight refused to completely wane. I can still feel the electric charge of anticipation that night. The world was at our fingertips, with seemingly no constraints of time, money, or other responsibility to limit us.
We had a great summer. We backpacked and hiked all over Alaska. We layed for hours in blueberry patches, gorging ourselves like bears and staining our fingers and lips blue. We ran on trails passing through scenery so gorgeous it could make you cry. We sat for hours upon days inside our tent, waiting for the rain and snow to wane. We got drunk in funny little bars where you could count on the ratio of men to women being all of them to the two of us and the likelihood of us ever having to buy our own beers very small. We saw more bears than I will probably ever see in the collective rest of my life. We had a car accident (The Dodge Neon survived. It was retired a few years ago, after a long, fruitful, and adventurous life of its own.). We felt the pressure of the end-of-the-summer and the jobs we both were starting in September. We talked quiety and sadly on the long journey southward back to the continental United States. In the end, I'm quite sure that we decided we had done everything, and more, that we had dreamed of doing.
In that traveling experience, I felt that world-at-my-fingertips feeling that spurs us all to dream on. Not just the intangible feeling that I should do that, sometime, somewhere, someday. But I felt it in that fingernails-dirty, dig-down-deep tangible feeling of doing what I dream of, right now, right here. And now, it's hard to imagine life without that feeling. If life is not at our fingertips, if new opportunities do not await us around each little corner of our lives, if we do not have the ability to tangibly fulfill our dreams, then who are we, really?
I pose the same question to all of you then, how has one place you've traveled changed your life?
Posted by Meghan at June 27, 2006 6:54 PM
Comments
Meghan, Asante sana. Playing with local children and their self-made incredibly intricate and beautiful metal-wire cars on the dusty streets on the outskirts of Lusaka, Zambia, 30 years ago, is a recurring thought. A summer hike in Austria with one of my best friends from school, testing the limits of adolescent-human endurance going from haus to haus, living on overly diluted powdered soups, never changing our clothes. Learning to scuba dive in the Maldives with a girlfriend when we had both already decided to break up before the trip. One of the traditional christmas day runs with my dad up the Parc de Mont Royal in Montreal at -30 degrees celsius with an extra -15 wind chill factor. Just me and him. Going with my wife to hospital to have our first child. Oh man, that was so life-changing... Going again for our second child. Just when you think you are on top of things, time to start all over again. And it is not the same at all. When I walked and walked around my neighborhood and finally found a for-rent sign for an apartment for my mother so she could live close by when her contract expired... Only used to think big travel would change my life. As it turns out, it is not a matter of scale but of how we experience things. And they all contribute to change to some extent... Could go on but as you say would be extremely boring. rgds, corrado
Posted by: corrado giambalvo at June 28, 2006 2:48 AM
It is always a treat to hear about Alaska from someone who doesn't live here. Sometimes I take it for granted. Sometimes I curse the long cold winters because they aren't running friendly. Thanks for sharing the memory, it was lovely.
Posted by: Amanda at June 28, 2006 3:06 PM
Hey Megan. Good question! I spent some time thinking about it and I still don't know the answer as to what affected me the MOST. What I realized is that I have gone to a few different places and learned a lot-but it didn't really affect me as much as it probably should have. I sort of categorize the experience away. I can think of a few really touching places where I've done that. I don't think that's particularly good. So thanks for the reminder to reflect a bit more.
Posted by: Audrey at June 28, 2006 6:28 PM