I had never traveled alone before and I discovered that I liked it. No one in the world knew where I was, no one had the ability to reach me. It was like being dead, my escape allowing me to taste that tremendous power my mother possessed forever.
- “Year’s End”, a story from “Unaccustomed Earth” by Jhumpa Lahiri
First, I absolutely have to make the book recommendation without reservation and without hesitation. On my list, Jhumpa Lahiri just usurped from Alice Munro her position as the undisputed queen of short stories. Excerpts don’t come across very well in demonstrating her masterful storytelling and tone-painting, so you all owe it to yourselves to pick this one up.
I’m cheating a bit with today’s post. In my writing, I’m still knee-deep in the confines of high school and Salinas. I intend on traveling chronologically, but recent conversations and contemplations of my solo travels have conjured an insufferable itch to spend some time in the less distant memories.
Despite growing up in two separate continents, I never really lived the life of a traveler. Until second grade, my family and I split our time—our life—between Korea and the States, bouncing back and forth every few years when my father’s position in the military demanded it. I took for granted the rebooting of culture and the novelty of discovery and rediscovery every boarding of the plane brought with it: the unexpected joy of finding a toy in a Happy Meal, the hearty, acrid scent of chestnuts roasting over a paint can full of glowing charcoal, and the population flipping between homogeneous and heterogeneous with every alternation of the country we considered home. Once my parents decided we were to immigrate to the States for good, I found a certain comfort in the insular community of Monterey Bay and an unanticipated tragedy urged me to remain grounded in California.
My wanderlust was born when a college friend and our mutual friend, who also happened to be a classmate from high school, invited me on a road trip across the States. Having just graduated from Berkeley with highest honors and been granted admission into the nation’s top ranked doctoral program in clinical psychology, I should have been ecstatic and immediately agreed to the trip as a nice reward and vacation prior to beginning a grueling graduate program. Instead, I was going mad with the thought I had ruined my relationship with the one—the only—woman I could love and my entire life until then was lived in and driven by guilt, rather than genuine interest or passion. The days leading up to that invitation were spent huddled on the floor of my bedroom and in constant struggle with thoughts I may be descending into a very real madness—maybe the beginning stages of schizophrenia (I was at just the right age for men).
Instead of immediately accepting the offer to travel, I refused without a real or valid excuse. The days and the weeks became more maddening and less tolerable. On one occasion, I awakened my parents at three in the morning, startled them out of their sleep by asking them to pray for me. Though I had long given up on faith and the power of prayer, I was seriously concerned my final, tenuous grip on sanity was slipping away from me. The next morning, I knew I had to get out of the house, out of Salinas, and far away from the madness and memories. I called Ray and told him I would be joining him and Ben in their adventure.
We packed the full-sized van in preparation with a three-room tent, an electronic cooler, a portable butane stove, and several duffel bags containing our clothes, toiletries, and miscellaneous necessities for our anticipated life on the road. We had no long-term plans or destinations. Ray and Ben had family and friends scattered about the country and made loose plans on visiting a few of them; I knew a few people out of state, but I wanted to leave everything behind, become lost in a perfect darkness, and maybe even escape the doubts and uncertainties squeezing, encroaching me of my sanity.
We had a road atlas, first looked in our immediate surroundings for points of interest, then extended our search outwards if we found nothing noteworthy. I have only the fondest, most awe-inspiring memories of the trip: the impossibly blue, clear summer surface of Lake Tahoe; Yellowstone National Park and its spectacular display of geysers, mud pots, and hot springs; Ray’s cousins and grandparents in Chicago; Ben’s mother, sister, and her ridiculously flamboyant Taekwondo instructor in Kentucky; the Big Apple and its staggering diversity and energy; the Preservation Hall Jazz Band playing “When the Saints go Marching In” in the barely-lit, packed,sweat-drenched room in the French Quarter; the grandeur, the spectacle, the sheer impossibility of the Grand Canyon.
Near the end of our month-long stint on the road came the Grand Canyon. I will never forget the first night we camped on the South Rim. Ben had decided to remain behind with his mother in Kentucky and Ray had already retired for the night. Under the brilliant brightness of the moon, breathing in the thin air of the tolerably chill night, I lay on a smooth, flat rock large enough to be a bed, folded my arms behind my head, and looked up into the night sky. The stars burned, flickered, and danced. They dared me to try the impossible: to count them, to name them, to know every one of them. They pierced deep into my retinas, promised to haunt me for as long as I live, and promised me the beauties of tomorrow with the indisputable proof of the beauty present in the now.
I thought of the girl I’d been obsessed with in college, wanted to share with her the absolute divinity and beauty of that moment. I thought of my family, friends, and Ray, just a thin layer of nylon separating him from the spectacular display, and wanted them to take possession of my eyes for a moment, to see what I saw, to know what I knew. I needed to know it was okay—it was natural— to be wiping the tears welling, distorting that dazzling canvas every few seconds. I needed to know that such beauty did indeed exist, that it wasn’t a product of my madness.
A month after departure, I returned home to the dreadful promise of a grief-driven career. Everything had changed and nothing had changed within the month. The month would exist in its own bubble, a world of its own, a time of its own, inhabiting a self existing entirely separate from the self I slipped back into upon my return.
The shared trip with my friends did not cure me entirely of my doubts or the threat of an impending madness, but in that month, I did forget about them and at times, even confront them equipped with the greater beauties surrounding me. I began graduate studies full of doubt, filled with recent memories and possibilities of a life without guilt, a life not devoted to placating restless spirits: all essential ingredients to brewing the courage to take ownership of my destiny, to later spend three months on the road again (but alone), and to really begin living.
