Imaginary Travel

I wanted to go to Samarkand with its blue tile, its scent of rose water and camel dung. I would have settled for Istanbul but I didn’t get there either. Budapest was as far as I got. It had a whiff of the East despite the paprikash and strudel left behind by the emperor in Vienna. I remember thinking that the vast, echoey Hungarian train station already hinted at a background flavor from the other hemisphere. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew there was something else going on. In those days, I was always sniffing after Levantine, Arabian nights-tinted dreams. They colored my earlier life. I loved the vermillion and peacock blue enamels and the illuminated manuscripts with their curlicue cursive. I knew it was very far away, but I imagined that I would get there some day on some magic carpet and stroll in the souk among stalls of spices and bangles. I didn’t know that this was the enemy culture. It never occurred to me that some combination of my aging and the collapse, the implosion of options for travel would one day send those dreams permanently beyond reach. In this way, even though they say the universe is expanding and the digital possibilities are infinite, my world for all practical purposes has become much smaller. I live at the flat northern edge of the Americas where the air is crisp and the sky stretches wide over the fields in all directions. 

Photo by Halima Bouchouicha on Unsplash

There was a honeyed sweetness to the eastern promises fairy tale I told myself when I was young. This was before I knew anything about Edward Said and his warning about orientalism, how we exoticize the East out of contempt for it and a desire to subdue it. It was before I knew about the West as a state of mind propped up by the dollar and the pound. Now it seems that the “known world,” like the world depicted on maps before the age of exploration, has shrunk to the dimensions of North America and Europe from the Thames to the Danube and even then there are incursions, neighborhoods you don’t belong in. You feel this acutely in Paris where American tourists and Europeans occupy the Gene Kelly center of the city encircled by North Africans on all sides.  See if you can conceive of a world that doesn’t feel bifurcated in that way, a world without borders, where the limits on your travel are measured only by your own time, energy, and resources, where crossing the Hindu Kush mountains in Central Asia is at least an option if you trained for it for years. What are borders anyway?

Americans are so fixated on the southern border that we have forgotten that these fences are inventions of the human imagination. Think of the possibilities in some long forgotten time of putting your toothbrush and a change of underwear in a sack and setting out on the road. I would hop on a tramp steamer to cross the Atlantic, sleeping on deck as I did in my 20s on the boat from Nice to Corsica. I would wander like a pilgrim through the villages and vineyards of France, settling down when I got to Rome to visit again the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere where Frank and I once rested for a spell digesting a perfect lunch of shrimp and salad greens we had eaten in the piazza. I would abstain from any experiences that did not carbonate my senses…..food, drink, architecture, landscape, flowers, strangers. I would follow a star from the East like the magi, always searching for the most elaborate filigree, the sweetest blood oranges.

Indulge my fantasy, please. I am just for this breath putting inequity and tyranny and climate catastrophe aside to take the full measure of the beauty of the wide world and I’m doing it from my perch in my bedroom in Minnesota without enlarging my carbon footprint. This is a storybook road trip I’m taking, a diversionary tactic to get out from under the weight of this election season where the rhetoric is increasingly suffocating and fear-filled. I did some phone banking last night, but no one was home at six in the evening. My outreach will have to be from my imaginary tramp steamer, from the moving compartment where I will look out the window and watch people in saris and jalabas lined up at the side of the road waving at the passing train.

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