Travel Fictions

Empty Road in Vermont

There is something calming about driving a car, especially in Vermont. The roads are often empty and surrounded by Mountains. Seeing the road stretching out before you and moving steadily along it becomes hypnotic. The distance and the movement clear your head and allow for reflection. So, while the events that shape this story took place off the road it was while traveling from one place to another that I was able to make sense of them.

“I have to get out of here. There is no way I can bear staying here all summer.”

“I understand, but don’t you think you should consider your options before you just take off to Vermont?”

“No”

“You could work here and you will be with friends.”

“I’m going. It will be fine.”

That was how I decided to pick up and move to Vermont for the summer. Usually I am one of those people who have to make pro and con lists before a decision can even begin to be made. However, in that situation I made up my mind in a day and nothing could have reversed it which is how I ended up making a thirteen hour drive to Vermont.

When you spend that much time alone watching trees, pavement, and cars wiz by, you start to remember a lot of things. I once read somewhere that, “love can lead [to] a woman being lost, and in that lost world perhaps the only thing to do is leave to build a new world.”* And that is exactly what I did. Some part of me had to have known, yet it did not really hit me until I was driving that I was running away. The only reason I was going to Vermont was to escape from my past.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. The whole truck seemed to lift into the air and violently come crashing down as it passed over each freeway extension. Bang. Bang. Bang. Ignoring the pleas of the 22-year-old suspension to slow down, the man in the driver’s seat remained dead still. His stone-like face, at this point in the journey dirty and unshaven, let loose no hint of emotion, and his ice blue eyes continued to follow the darting white lines as they had for the past 500 miles. Only someone who truly knew this man would have been able to catch a glimpse of happiness, to see brief respite that this particularly rough stretch of Interstate 64 had brought him. But alas, there was nobody, and there had never been anybody for that matter, who truly knew this man.

*****

In reality, the cross-country journey of this bedraggled, blue-eyed man began back when he was not yet bedraggled or a man, but rather a boy still very much full of life and very blue-eyed. More specifically, it was a warm April morning, the likes of which are pretty rare in the small western Massachusetts town that the boy called home.

That morning was a Saturday, the one day of the week that his father did not have to work. His father ran a car rental service out of an old garage in Boston, and the long hours and grueling commute left him with little time or energy to devote towards his children. So, as the oldest child of six, the boy, at the time only sixteen and in his second year at the local high school, was in charge of looking after his brothers and sisters, all of whom had become extremely close after their mother had left in the middle of the night for Hawaii with her doctor only a couple of years before.

4.12.07
Looking out the window of the turbo prop we chartered from Rome to the small airport outside of Siena, we can see the red tile roofs of little Tuscan towns fly by. The wineries and red soil that make the area so famous stand out against the deep spring green of the Cyprus trees and hills of the Val de Chiana, the noise of the engines slowing as we approach the airport and land.
Terrafirma, terranova, new earth. We are here, starting something new. We walk down the few steps of the plane’s door. This is our first time here together, together to consummate what should be a long partnership, leaving the lavish ceremony in Manhattan far behind.
The car drives us down the winding roads, you looking out at the villages we pass, red roofs, red earth, desire. The towns have funny names: Poggibonsi, you say reminds you of a fat cat, Rosia, more red, Chuisdino, of closing. We arrive in Sovicille. Our lodging, Borgo Pretale, stands high on one of these rolling hills, a cluster of buildings constructed in the eleventh century as an outpost for traders of fur. No other human establishment is in sight, only these rough, stone buildings, the hills, the earth, you and me.
We check in, noticing several bows placed outside the reception-building door, set out for the archery range down bellow. The maître d'hôtel welcomes us and shows us up to our villa, situated highest on the complex, saying that our baggage would arrive shortly. He takes our passports for safekeeping.
Getting settled in, we admire the view from our terrace, nothingness spread out in front of us, all to be explored. A knock comes and I find our luggage placed there, a ragged looking man briskly walking away in some tweed blazer not of the hotel.
“That’s odd,” I say turning to you, “the bellman didn’t even wait for a tip.”

“France?” She exclaimed, her eyes so wide they made her look a little dumb, “Why would you want to go there?”

“Dunno” I shrugged, picking up a sugar cube and dipping it into my coffee mindlessly. “Why not?” The sugar was slowly disintegrating until I had to drop it in or get my fingers wet. “I mean, anywhere’s better than staying here. Right?”

She looked at me incredulously. Man, I hated being American. Everywhere else people didn’t mind strangers. Here it was like being strangled, slowly. Nobody cared about the rest of the world. I mean here they wouldn’t even listen to music in different languages! Man, I hated America.

Her hand brushed mine away from the sugar bowl. It bothered her when I wasted sugar, something about calories. She could be so obnoxious at times.

“You know, going somewhere else isn’t going to solve anything. You can’t run from who you are. Remember Cohn?” There was the Hemmingway again. The only thing she knew about travel she had read in books. That’s another thing about being American, we read books about other places and believed them immediately. Why couldn’t I have been Italian or French? They aren’t nearly as ignorant.

“Yeah, Cohn was an idiot- Look, I’m going to France. It’s no use arguing with me, I already have a ticket. When I come back early because I’m still depressed, then you can look at me and tell ‘I told you so’. Can we talk about something else?”

She drank her coffee with a spoon, slurping loudly with every sip. After a few minutes, she got up and brought both of our cups to the sink.

“Lilly, are you at least going to talk to him before you leave?”

“Talk to who?”

lovely, huh?....
It’s dinnertime in India. Oh joy. Let the guessing game begin. The waiters throw down the plates: Spices. Heavy spices. Burn-your-taste-buds-until-your-tongue-falls-off spices. And curry. Multicolored, thick and goopy curries. And then there’s that stuff. Goat stomach? Sheep’s tongue? I don’t even know. I can’t, nor do I want to, identify this heap of tissue on my dish. I am from America, I am American, I am the daughter of a system of nutritional facts. There are labels even on water. I miss my USDA. I want my FDA guarantee. There is no guarantee here. Nothing is guaranteed in India.

I get up to wash my hands. They are dirty from the naan and sauce mishmash. It was like finger-paints. My hands are simultaneously dripping and cakey. India’s culture has spoiled them. Thanks a lot tradition. I bow down to you, ancestors of old. Yea right. Sure, I’ll sacrifice my shorts, a few hours to jetlag, even my cellular addiction, but not my fork, knife, and even napkin in order to “respect” the customs of this place. I hate this mess. I feel like a barbarian. This isn’t my idea of a family vacation. Why did we have to come here? Only to get our hands dirty?

Past and Present Band NerdsI was born in Lexington, South Carolina, and have lived there for the past eighteen years of my life. I grew up in a small town where the place to be on the Fourth of July was the Peach Festival and students in camouflage overalls drove to school in pickup trucks (the color of the vehicle indiscernible through the multiple layers of caked-on mud). In Lexington, you read the bible like your Momma and supported the Republicans like your Daddy. You went to Wildcat Hollow on Friday nights to watch high school football (or play their fight song like I did), to Williams-Brice Stadium on Saturday to cheer on the Gamecocks, and sat at home on Sunday to watch professional football on Direct TV Sunday Ticket (after going to church, of course.)

In Lexington, everybody knew everybody else, and they were all content to keep it that way, therefore, I was never encouraged to leave the town I grew up in. Aside from a marching band trip to Hawaii in my junior year (which in spite of its tropical locale was still undeniably American), the furthest west I had been was Nashville, Tennessee, and I had never left the country. After falling in love with New York City during a trip with my eighth grade history class, I knew that was where I was meant to be. I began to feel stifled by my hometown, and worked hard throughout high school with the sole purpose of leaving it.

Like little sand castles

Mia stepped off an absurdly small plane and onto the boiling tarmac with all the eagerness of a young person on the brink of “real life.” She had been waiting for this moment for years, ages, eons—to step out of her old, confined, all-American life and into a new, worldly, adventurous one. She had been aching to shake off the house that still stood in Yuma, weathered and ordinary and now slightly less crowded with her absence. She had been counting down the days until she could leave her too-noisy, too-numbered family in the dust of a North African-bound Boeing 767—and now, standing wide-eyed beneath a sky that had looked bluer in the air, the erratic movement of her heart assured her that the moment had finally arrived.

The instant her Keds touched the oil-spill of pavement that served as the runway, Mia decided that she liked this place infinitely more than she had ever or would ever like Yuma. It wasn’t exactly a difficult decision; she hated it there. She hated the yucca plants, the unnatural amount of palm trees, the stagnant air and the slow people. She hated that house, stuffed so full of children she thought it would burst. She hated how her father was so condescending towards everyone and everything; nothing was good enough for him. The elderly were lazy, as were the youth; there was too much out-sourcing and incompetence in the work place; people bought too much and earned too little. There was always something to complain about. Even worse than the bitterness of her father was the passivity of her mother. She loathed how her mother quietly accepted her father’s criticisms, and how she allowed Mia’s five younger siblings to run rampant through the house and the neighborhood. It was all too oppressive and embarrassing to bear, and so she found a way out.

Good timesIt takes three hours to travel the 1421 miles from Houston, Texas to New York City. A short trip, really, unless it's the first time you've left home by yourself, in which case it's three hours that you will inevitably spend dwelling on all of your hometown memories and all of the memories you hope to make in your new town, New York. Your New York town. The amount of anxiety I had about moving that hung in the air during my plane trip to New York in August (not a round-trip ticket, I noticed while waiting to board) was so palpable and suffocating, in fact, that just as the fire burst from the jets and the plane tilted back mid-air, I couldn't breathe. Stuffed in coach in between two complete strangers, struggling to swallow and inhaling as slowly and with as much control as possible, I thought I would die. Suddenly I felt a tap on the shoulder and opened my eyes to see the flight attendant. My dad got frequent flyer benefits and I could upgrade to first class if I wanted, she said - first class, where a big bottle of cold water and a warm face towel waited patiently for me and my panic attack. An angel? An epiphany? Maybe not, but it definitely put things in perspective. The difficult part of the journey is only as bad as you allow it to be, and almost never as bad as you fear. Someone mentioned in their blog post at the beginning of the year that coming to college was, in itself, a travel fiction for them because the environment of the city is so drastically different from the environment they had grown up in for the past eighteen years. This is true for me too, and reflecting on certain experiences I've had in the city, experiences that I'm sure I never would have been able to have at home, I know that my "pilgrimage" was not in vain.

A taste of beauty Prologue: Before writing the final, I read through all of my blog posts from this semester to refresh my memory. I decided to essentially rewrite my first post, but instead of framing it simply as a memory, I reworked it to display the travel epiphanies I experienced and incorporate some of the books we’ve read. It is a personal essay, and hopefully reflects how much I’ve grown over the past semester. Enjoy!

       I used to think “epiphanies” were cliché. Silly comments made to make someone feel special. After all, life is all about learning, and learning is a process, not a “sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something,” as defined on dictionary.com. How is it possible that in a single moment, everything can become clear?

   That was before I spent a month on a kibbutz in Beit Shean, Israel. Suddenly, I found myself speaking like all of those people that frustrated me so much, and I finally understood where they were coming from. I was introduced to a new lifestyle, and I didn’t want to leave it.

Cairo“Yom assal, yom basal”
“Some days are honey, some days are onion.”
-Arabic Proverb

Feras was young, but not too young. He had just come into manhood and was very proud of that fact. There were now plenty of opportunities available to an energetic young Bedouin such as himself. He could now begin his search for a wife; he could start a business as a merchant since he did, after all, know everything there was to know about the desert. He knew the quickest ways to water, he knew where all the oases were, he knew how to hunt desert game; he had all the skills for success.

That was why he was out in the middle of the desert. He had left his family to go to Cairo and start his business and his life. His trusty camel Laila moseyed along next to him looking thoroughly bored with the entire enterprise. Feras, on the other hand, was very excited, this was his first time traveling on his own without the noise and irritation of his family. He knew the path well and judged that he would be in Cairo in about more three days. He could barely contain himself and couldn’t wait until he got there. His father had taken his family there many times before but the children were all made to wait outside the city with the women. The men would go into the city and sell what ever they had to sell. This was the way it was with every city the family approached, and Feras had always felt very annoyed with the fact that his father never allowed to see the inside of the city walls.