This conceit of Internet-inspired omniscience has produced the arrogant delusion that the physical effort of travel is superfluous. In the course of my wandering life, travel has changed, not only in speed and efficiency, but because of the altered circumstances of the world - much of it connected and known. At their best, they are examples of what is most human in travel. Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,īut most are anecdotal, amusing, instructional, farcical, boastful, mock-heroic, occasionally hair-raising, warnings to the curious, or else they ring bells like mad and seem familiar. Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word I think of the travel writer as idealized in the lines of the ghost of Hamlet's father at the beginning of the play: The storyteller's intention is always to hold the listener with a glittering eye and riveting tale. Daniel Defoe based Robinson Crusoeon the actual experience of the castaway Alexander Selkirk, though he enlarged the story, turning Selkirk's four and a half years on a remote Pacific Island into twenty-eight years on a Caribbean island, adding Friday, the cannibals, and tropical exotica. It's how the first novel in English got written. And it is the origin of narrative fiction too, the traveler enlivening a dozing group with invented details, embroidering on experience. "They're just like us!" or "They're not like us at all!" The traveler's tale is always in the nature of a report. "This is what I saw" - news from the wider world the odd, the strange, the shocking, tales of beasts or of other people. The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a journey. I have felt renewed inspiration in the thought of little Donn making it safely down the high mountain. The book taught me lessons in wilderness survival, including the basic one: "Always follow a river or a creek in the direction the water is flowing." I have read many travel books since, and I have made journeys on every continent except Antarctica, which I have recounted in eight books and hundreds of essays. Donn suffered, but he made it out of the Maine woods. One of the first books my father read to me at bedtime when I was small was Donn Fendler: Lost on a Mountain in Maine.This 1930s as-told-to account described how a twelve-year-old boy survived eight days on Mount Katahdin.
The literature of travel shows the effects of solitude, sometimes mournful, more often enriching, now and then unexpectedly spiritual.Īll my traveling life I have been asked the maddening and oversimplifying question "What is your favorite travel book?" How to answer it? I have been on the road for almost fifty years and writing about my travels for more than forty years. Chekhov said, "If you're afraid of loneliness, don't marry." I would say, if you're afraid of loneliness, don't travel. The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown, to bear witness to the consequences, tragic or comic, of people possessed by the narcissism of minor differences. Eventually I saw that the most passionate travelers have always also been passionate readers and writers. And then, when I was old enough to go, the roads I traveled became the obsessive subject in my own books. Too young to go, I read about elsewheres, fantasizing about my freedom.
The importance of elsewhere was something I took on faith.
I wanted to find a new self in a distant place, and new things to care about. The word "travel" did not occur to me, nor did the word "transformation," which was my unspoken but enduring wish. The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the RoadĪS A CHILD, yearning to leave home and go far away, the image in my mind was of flight - my little self hurrying off alone.