On Travel

You can travel near. You can travel far. But still be no further from where you started.

I’ve been lucky. I’ve been able to tramp around the world and experience so many sweet things. Incredible strangers that in memory seem like my closest of friends. Scenery and culture that has changed me. My life has not just been one through time, year after year but one across space, there and here.

But it wasn’t always going to be so. I grew up far from anywhere, in the north of Canada and most who lived there, lived out their days right there. Travel was a trip into town or later perhaps to the next larger city a few times a year. In grade 8 we went on a trip to “the big city” and all us kids halted before an escalator - afraid it would eat us up if we ventured onto it.

And that was how it was in my part of the world, where I grew up. Yet, even though I didn’t know it then, I’d already traveled the whole wide world.

As a young kid, I read one thing voraciously. I credit it with not just adding miles to my mind but also my sound vocabulary and sensitivity to words. National Geographic.

My grandfather, a stern Brit who drove an ambulance in Normandy during WW1 is to be credited. He died when I was very young and I don’t have much of a memory of him but he did leave us 100s upon 100s of National Geographic magazines. Somehow my father had got them up to our homestead, lost in time and space, northern Canada.

I read and traveled to exotic places. Lost with my flashlight each evening, I experienced the jungles of Indonesia and the deserts of Asia. I climbed high mountains and talked with mountain gorillas. I raced over hills with the spear-carrying locals in the highlands of Papua and I sailed the seas with fearless adventurers.

Truly, our mind is a wonderful thing. It can take you places no plane, train or automobile can reach. It can bring you closer to everything quicker than many lifetimes would give you. It is why it is so precious and why we need in this day of AI to protect it, ensure it continues to travel and enrich us all.

During my time in education, I’ve advocated strongly for all students being required to travel as part of their education. It’s the best education we can provide our youth. No number of classes can ever amount to what traveling to another country, experiencing other ways of life can provide as learning.

That said, the easiest way to get our students traveling is by supporting literature, the imagination, READING in our schools. It’s essential. And it’s not as simple as putting on the nature channel. You need a “cold” medium to paraphrase McLuhan, a form of media like print where you can enter, change, imagine for yourself and travel on your own thoughts.

I remember as a 12 year old, getting ahold of a copy of Kapucinsky’s The Soccer War. I’ve never traveled so well! His essays took me all over the world through this book and his subsequent books (see my mention in Books In My Life).

Let’s all remember traveling doesn’t require a ticket. A suitcase. A visa and passport. It can be as simple as a lazy afternoon allowing yourself to read and be somewhere else.

The Usual Channels

Wherever I travel
I take my time and
I make no plans.

Travel is the art of balancing
chance and necessity.

I rest ‘til evening and
then head out to where
the local drunks gather;
a dark park
an underpass
sometimes like today
a dirty river path.

I smile and ask what they are drinking.
I’m always quickly offered some.
It doesn’t matter I don’t speak their language.
We understand each other.
In the margins, you are free
to be a citizen of the world.

We laugh. We feel the world
in our bones, here and now
together.

We spit loudly and warm ourselves
with drink and brotherhood.
Cigarettes get passed around.

Eventually it is my turn and
I pull out a large bill and
someone runs nimbly to the store.

It goes like that the whole night.
Drinks, stories, loud banter, a jig or two, then
I’ll stumble home to my
dark, lonely, windowless hotel room
ready to survive another round
of all the foolery, public murder, lies
officialdom and officialdee
can offer
on the usual channels.

• Drinking outside Hsinchu Train Station, Taiwan, October 6th, 2023.