traveling

Not everyone is a traveler. Travelers are a special breed. They look like normal people from the outside, but when you get real close, there is a gleam in the eye, a want. Travelers are always wanting. More.

When you go into a bookstore, or read in the newspaper, or see in a movie a place so spectacular and different and alive that you think, TAKE ME THERE, you know you have the bug. It is only a matter of time before you switch your schedule and your life to make time for a this new adventure. Secretly you do research on this new destination, buying guide books, watching PBS, brushing up on your high-school Spanish. You become your new country, memorizing facts and lists and customs and dangers. You make a decision, quite suddenly. Jobs may be quit, apartments may be rent out, relationships may be put on hold. Traveling items are bought, very small and not too heavy. Money is counted carefully.

The first day is always, See this! Taste this! Smell this!, as if your life thus far has been incomplete without such stimulation. Everything is new and exciting. Everything shines. Everything sings. Everything must be touched. You tire yourself out, that first day, trying to cram a whole country into your mouth in one go. Tomorrow you will do it again, only slower, and with bargaining.

Eventually you get into the routine. Wake, dress, eat, do, eat, write, sleep. There is always something different to discover. There is the museum that houses the only collection it its entirety of something, the next city over with older buildings, the mountain out there with higher peaks. You cross off the pages in the guide books as you go along, as if this country is your to-do list. You invent new pages for the book, forge on through unexplored territory. You record your thoughts and feelings and tastes and textures, try to capture the days on paper and in email. You make jokes about things you don't understand. Your body adjusts to the constant movement.

There are fabrics, there are spices, there are markets, there are alleys. There are hats, and scarves, and fruits, and bugs, and animals walking around, not penned up in zoos. There are the locals, and then there are the children, and they wave or they stare or they offer you things to buy. Sometimes they ignore you because they aren't travelers, they don't care for new sensations. You keep going, keep eating and looking and taking pictures and memorizing scenes.

And when you meet other trekkers, the only language you share is travel. "Where are you going? Where have you been? What have you seen?" The conversation turns to timelines and prices, chief concerns of the wandering. You exchange advice, trade anecdotes, and wish each other good luck. Sometimes, if you have more than just your pack in common, you will share parts of your life -- "I'm a teacher, too!" "I also live in Minnesota!" "We just came from there as well - what did you think?" It feels good to have something in common in a place so far from home.

But even these new people will go on their own ways, and eventually, become another story from your trip, a memory like the city plaza, or the way locals say hello. You can't really collect friends when you are moving. People carry too much weight. Travelers need to pack light.

You're always ready to go home by the end. It's inevitable -- you pace yourself as you go along so that nothing feels too quick or too drawn out. By the end, you long to have a bed to sleep in for more than one night, a car to steer around familiar roads, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwhich you prepare by yourself and eat sloooooowly sitting on the couch, watching TV. You are tired of being excited, tired of using a foreign language, tired of planning.

At the end of the trip, you marvel at your plasticity, your ability to adapt and accept this new lifestyle. For weeks, you've survived on strange foods, you've slept on scratchy sheets, you've ridden in swervy racecar taxis. You've gotten places through sheer energy and will. While this pride makes its way through your veins, your whole body simply desires to breathe in familiar air. At the end of the trip, you want to don non-traveler clothes and sit like a lump. You are done as a boiled egg.

But despite this mental exhaustion, you are already thinking about your next destination. Where can you go that is farther, cheaper, bigger? What countries can offer brighter colors, faster music, softer beaches? The world is so large, and you already have a backpack. You think about how you would fill it differently next time. Which clothes you will leave behind, what knowledge you will fold up tight and squeeze into your money belt.

That's what travelers do, they dream. Life is a big map, and they hope the future brings them more adventures. They dream of this past trip, of the next trip, potential great things.

As the plane takes off, if they are lucky, they will wake long enough to wave goodbye.