Why We Travel Now (A Parental Ode)

Leaving Prague was bittersweet, a fact that I blame on my parents.

Years ago, they implanted the travel bug within me. I am not of the belief that we are born with knowledge or habits or things of that nature. Or nature as it is commonly referred. I believe that you can override whatever basic tendencies may have developed through natural selection, environments and myriad other factors that form who we are.

Of course, genetics says we can be pre-disposed to things (e.g. alcoholism). As far as I know, travel is not one of them. Which means my wanderlust must come from somewhere or in this case two someones. Between summer long baseball tournaments and traveling sports (and to be fair, sometimes because of that), my parents dragged my sister and I on camping trips through the South and Midwest.

We did so, though, not on our own. If you know our family, you know that our branch of the tree is completely incapable of things like "roughing it" or "putting up a tent." No, we traveled with The Gang, a group of people who my parents square danced. Many of the group were older, maybe a decade or so, than my parents. Consequently, they had done things like fought in wars where knowledge of living on the land was a requirement.

Which isn’t entirely what this is piece about. And it’s everything that this is about. Let me explain.

I grew up unafraid of new places. I saw my parents and their friends tackle new challenges in a series of logical steps that allowed us to say camp on the Ohio River during torrential downpours that flooded the river banks and threatened the surrounding area. And we did this without packing up and leaving early.

That trip is lore now, at least in our household.

But you can see how it might remove a certain fear of…I’m not even sure there is a word for the nebulous fear grips us as we prepare to leave the comforts of our homes and jet off to new lands, particularly those lands where they don’t speak the language we speak. There is a a primal survival sense, one of those things we are pre-disposed (IMHO) to have, that can cripple you.

Unless you have the tools to override that born, genetic code that tells you dying is a really, really bad idea at the hands of the unknown. (I think that there is a different sense of death that comes with getting older that it less violent and more peaceful, but having not done that yet I can’t say that I know for sure. Please don’t quote me).

This is one of the great failings of the American educational institution, although to be fair it is also land-prohibited in a way that isn’t so in Europe. If you grow up in Iowa, it’s a 9-hour flight just to get to Germany and another 5-hours on a train to get to Prague. If you live in Berlin, the immediacy of culture is much easier to attain.

The ability to develop those tools, then, can be a function of location, location, location.

Which brings me to my parents. Who at several critical times in my life did things for me, most likely without any real foresight and knowledge that what they were doing would "work out okay." They dragged me into the woods with their friends and made me — and I mean Made. Me. — camp with their friends. They made me experience the otherness of not being at home. Of not cooking on a stove. Of not using a bathroom. Of not showering in the tub. The things that make us, as it turns out, very extremely American middle-class.

The kind of very extremely American middle-class that believes our culture is the pinnacle of human existence (IMHO, we are not); that our country has the solutions that the rest of the globe hasn’t gotten around to implementing (IMHO, we have not); that believes that much of what can be found to bring happiness exists in the malls, the soccer fields, the parks, the libraries, ect ect of our towns and villages which makes up the cities which make up the states.

They inadvertently did what a good, solid liberal arts education is supposed to do, which is help remove some of the preconceptions about myself relative to my location. In human speech, they have given me both the unafraidness to leave my comfort zone and the openmindedness to experience these other places not as comparisons but as simply experiences.

David Foster Wallace, whose essays have traveled with me on this journey, referred to this is the ability to think about how we think about what happens around us in his commencement speech at Kenyon College. The essence of his argument: at every moment in our lives, we have the ability to control how we take the input around us. We can experience the same event either as positive or negative.

This is not particularly new or interesting or thought-provoking except in the cases where it actually is. Like when you are pulling out of a train station in Prague at 1130 am (Prague) on a Thursday, destined for Budapest (615 pm, Budapest) and you’re main frame of reference for such a trip is that the Czech Republic and Slovak look very much like Iowa. Then you begin to realize that many of the things that you carry about as "normal" or "right" or "obvious" or indeed simply constructs of the very extremely American middle-class for which you are part.

Which isn’t bad. It simply is something that is easy to forget in the middle-classedness of soccer games and grill outs. And those thoughts that roll through my head like the plains of the Midwest makes me slightly wistful for home. And for Prague.

Which may not be all that different. At least that’s what I was taught.