Going back

I'm not quite sure where the time went, but the first leg of my journey is over. Well over, in fact. It's been nearly two weeks since I hugged my seventh and final American host goodbye, got on a train that crawled through the Adirondacks, crossed another border and arrived in Montreal tired, excited, and alone. The part of my trip that consisted in large part of me staying with friends in a country I had visited before, during which I had some knowledge of what to expect, and where English was everyone's first language, is behind me.

Here's what I did in America. I traipsed through the big city and did nothing in the deep countryside. I explored towns I didn't know and revisited ones I did. I rode in cars, trucks, trains, buses and boats; slept in dormitories and cabins, on sofas and on airbeds. I had conversations with strangers; made new friends and caught up with old ones; met their families, pets, partners and roommates. I swam in the sea, ate al fresco, saw fireworks; I chopped wood, picked blueberries, learned to arrange flowers, and developed an obsessive fear of ticks. I played board games, went to a drive-in, ate my own weight in pancakes, rode a segway, saw live music, went swing dancing, failed at zumba; I read things, wrote things, thought about things, talked about things, listened to things, and learned things. 

Birthday breakfast

Wilder Hill Gardens, Conway, MA: my home for a week

One of many country walks

And yet I was plagued, from time to time, by a nagging feeling that I was somehow cheating by staying with people I knew in places I had already been - that however fulfilling and challenging the trip, I wasn't really travelling at all. A recent purchase - Paul Theroux's anthology of travel writing, The Tao of Travel - would seem to confirm this. Theroux's kind of travel is valuable precisely in that it forces you away from the comforts of the familiar and into the position of an outsider. It is, he writes, 'a leap in the dark. If the destination were familiar and friendly, what would be the point of going there?'

But I happen to think a lot of familiar, friendly destinations. Going onwards is important, of course, but going back is important too. What, after all, is the point of falling in love with a place if you never return to it, or of making happy memories with people if you never get the chance to make any more? My trip to America was about finding a series of temporary stopping places rather than, as Theroux writes, 'being always on the move towards an uncertain destination'. It was less about forging fleeting connections with people and places than about revitalising connections that had been dulled by work, responsibility, and distance. I was not a traveller à la Theroux: always peripheral, always a stranger, in a perpetual state of passing through. Instead, I became a temporary member of successive households and communities. I returned. I retraced my steps. I remembered why I wanted to return at all, why these people and these places mattered to me to begin with.

Now the adventure continues, into the unknown.