The Way of Wanderlust (2 page)

As a boy, traveling between California and England, I'd come to think, in my simplistic way, that the cultures of the Old World were the cultures of “No” (or, at best, “Maybe”), and those of the New World the ones of “Yes.” That's much too reductive, of course, but if you meet Don on the page or in the flesh, you quickly see that he's always tilted toward the sun, as a perpetual singer of yes to life, to fun, to innocence, to vulnerability, and to surrender. All his writing, and much of his being, seems to be about rendering oneself open, daring to listen, and putting forward one's best and most hopeful side, in the conviction that it will be answered in kind.

This is in any context a kind of balm, but never more so than in the realm of travel, which is one of life's most charged leaps of faith (writing, of course, is another). Every time you set out from home and throw yourself into somewhere as alien as Tokyo or the Peloponnese, you're trusting in the universe, you're counting on the capacity of friendliness to inspire friendliness in return, and you're assuming you don't have all the answers and don't even need them.

There are many travelers, from Old World and New—Paul Bowles, V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux—who revel in the shadows, and in unsettledness and dislocation; all of them give us wonders with their readiness to look unflinchingly at the dark. Don gives us something else, healthy and cheerful and forward-looking, that tells us that, if you leave yourself at home and are eager to let the world remake you as it sees fit, you can be at home almost everywhere you go. Home is the condition, the state of unencumbered ease, you export to everyone you visit.

—Nara, Japan

October 2014

I TOOK MY FIRST SERENDIPITOUS STEP
on the path to becoming a travel writer the summer after I graduated from Princeton. While all my friends were preparing for graduate school, law school, business school, or medical school, or starting jobs with banks, I arranged to go to Europe for a year, first to spend the summer in Paris on a Summer Work Abroad internship and then to teach in Greece on an Athens College Teaching Fellowship.

When I set off for Europe, I was thinking that year would be a brief interlude between undergraduate and graduate schools, but then, one sun-dappled June morning in Paris, the course of my life changed. As I had every morning for the previous two weeks, I took the rickety old filigreed elevator from my apartment—right on the rue de Rivoli, looking onto the Tuileries—and stepped into the street: into a sea of French. Everyone around me was speaking French, wearing French, looking French, acting French. Shrugging their shoulders and twirling their scarves and drinking their
cafés crèmes
, calling out “
Bonjour, monsieur-dame
,” and paying for
Le Monde
or
Le Nouvel Observateur
with francs and stepping importantly around me and staring straight into my eyes and subtly smiling in a way that only the French do.

Until that time I had spent most of my life in classrooms, and I was planning after that European detour to spend most of the rest of my life in classrooms. Suddenly it struck me: This was the classroom. Not the musty, shadowed, ivy-draped buildings in which I had spent the previous four years. This world of wide boulevards and centuries-old buildings and six-table sawdust restaurants and glasses of
vin ordinaire
and fire-eaters on street corners and poetry readings in cramped second-floor bookshops and mysterious women who smiled at me so that my heart leaped and I walked for hours restless under the plane trees by the Seine. This was the classroom.

Hungry in a way I'd never been before, I gorged on Paris. I marveled at Molière at the Comédie Française and the Ballet Béjart in the park; I idled among the secondhand shelves at Shakespeare and Company, eavesdropping on poets and
poseurs;
I immersed myself in Manet and Monet in the Musée d'Orsay; got lost in the ancient alleys of Montmartre and the Marais; savored the open-air theater from a sidewalk seat on the Champs-Élysées; and conjured Hemingway on rue Descartes and in Les Deux Magots café.

At the end of that summer, I rode the Orient Express to Greece and settled on the campus of Athens College. As it turned out, my fellowship duties were to teach five hours of literature and writing classes a week, write occasional speeches for the college president, and write and edit articles for the school's quarterly alumni magazine. This left me uncharted expanses of free time, which I exuberantly filled reading Plato by the Parthenon, sipping ouzo on bouzouki-bright nights in the Plaka, communing with muses among the red poppies and white columns of Corinth, and exploring the beaches of Rhodes and the ruins of Crete. Winter and spring vacations afforded the time to venture even farther, and I wandered footloose through Italy, Turkey, and Egypt, intoxicated with the newness and possibility of this unfurling world.

My wanderlust bloomed. Every moment seemed unbearably precious, every outing an exhilarating lesson in a new culture, place, and people—full of thrilling sights and smells, tastes and textures, creations and traditions, encounters and connections: a whole new world!

That year changed my life. And as the end of the school year approached and the question of what to do with my life loomed again, I found the courage to relinquish the student's hand-me-down desire to become a tweedy professor and choose instead the uncharted path of becoming a writer. I had no idea where that path would lead; I just knew that I wanted to walk it, wild and wide-eyed, daring to dream.

I entered an intensive one-year Master's program in creative writing at a small school in Virginia called Hollins College. I lived in a log cabin on a lake and wrote a collection of poems, a few desultory chapters of a novel, and a description of an impromptu expedition I and a traveling companion had made up Mount Kilimanjaro the summer after my stay in Greece. I learned much about the rigors and rewards of being a professional writer that year, but no clear career path emerged. And so, as winter thawed into spring and the question-filled future arose once more, I followed my wanderlust and applied for a two-year Princeton-in-Asia Fellowship. Miraculously, I won and was awarded a position teaching at International Christian University in Tokyo.

Before leaving for Japan, through some polite and persistent letter-writing, I was able to meet with a few magazine editors in New York, and I brought my Kilimanjaro story with me as a writing sample. To my astonishment, when I arrived in Tokyo in September, a telegram was waiting for me from one of these, the Travel Editor at
Mademoiselle
magazine. It read: “A hole opened up in our November issue and we put your Kilimanjaro story in it. Hope you don't mind.”

That was my first published travel article.

Over the ensuing two years, I continued to write poetry, but I also began keeping copious journals, writing long letters, and absorbing as much travel information and experience as I could. I wrote two articles for the Japan Airlines inflight magazine and a couple more for other Asia-based publications, and then I was given an assignment by
Travel & Leisure
. At the same time, I ventured throughout Japan and on to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. And perhaps most important, I began to explore and frame the world with a travel writer's mind.

When that fellowship ended and the future stretched directionless once more, I felt drawn by the enlightened, cosmopolitan atmosphere of San Francisco, and moved there without home or plan. A few months later, through an extraordinary series of serendipities, I was hired as a Travel Writer by the
San Francisco Examiner
to replace the Travel Editor while she took a one-year leave of absence.

That was my first real job, and travel writing has been my profession ever since. Through the decades I've broadened from newspaper to online and book publishing, and I've incorporated editing, teaching, speaking, consulting, tour leading, and being a spokesperson into my professional portfolio, but travel writing has always remained at the core of what I do and who I am.

In the thirty-eight years since that first Kilimanjaro piece was published, I have written more than 700 articles for some two dozen print and online publications. I've also edited ten anthologies of literary travel writing, and written a guide to becoming a travel writer. But I've never published a collection of my own travel pieces.

So I was thrilled and honored when the wonderful folks at Travelers' Tales approached me about compiling a selection of my writing. At first the task seemed daunting, but as I read through those hundreds of articles, a few stood out as having a particularly powerful sense of personal engagement, and of focusing on the inner as well as the outer journey.

Aided by the editorial acumen and invigorating energy of Candace Rose Rardon, the talented writer and artist who created the enchanting cover illustrations, maps, and icons that grace this book, I winnowed these finalists down to the stories that compose the final collection.

These pieces cover a broad spectrum. Chronologically, they range from that first story about Kilimanjaro, which was published in 1977, to an article that appeared in 2015. Geographically, they roam from my childhood home in Connecticut, through my temporary homelands in France, Greece, and Japan, to my current home in California, stopping in twenty countries on six continents en route. The world of publishing is widely represented as well, with fourteen print and online outlets included.

Once we'd selected these stories, we still had to decide how to organize them. After contemplating a number of methods—by decade, publication, publishing medium, geographical setting, narrative message—we realized that the pieces seemed to fall organically into three themed sections: Pilgrimages, Encounters, and Illuminations. (To our astonishment and delight, these were the same three words I had chosen to highlight on the cover of my website a year earlier.) As we grouped the stories into these categories, we found that eleven pieces seemed to fit snugly within each. We decided to present the stories within each section chronologically, according to their date of publication, so that readers could follow the evolution of my writing. We also decided that to enhance the continuity of the reading experience, it would be helpful to include a short introductory note before each story, to set the context and background for the piece and to trace a skeletal biographical outline throughout the book.

On further reflection, we decided to add two more stories. One seemed to summarize the prevailing themes of all the pieces, and we made that the Prologue. And one addressed the larger art and heart of travel writing, and seemed the perfect Epilogue to the entire collection.

And that's the book you hold in your hands.

In the process of reading these tales afresh, I realized that they were all the fruits of the wanderlust that had been seeded in Paris four decades before. And so “The Way of Wanderlust” seemed the perfect title for the book. The phrase has a fluid movement, an internal flow. It suggests both a journey (the path followed, the map traced/filled in) and a philosophy/life practice (as in “the way of tea”). And it captures both the adventurer/explorer and the philosopher/evangelist sides of my life and work; it has a bit of the map-maker and a bit of the pilgrim. Finally, it has a pleasing cadence and alliteration, adding a little touch of the poet who has been a part of me from the beginning.

Now, with the finished text before me, I feel humbled, exhilarated, and blessed beyond measure. It is a dream come true for me to have this collection in print. It gives a substance, a weight, a palpability to my career as a writer that those 700 articles dispersed across the vast plains of publishing never had.

I also feel suffused with wonder and gratitude at two mind-spinning, soul-plucking truths this collection has crystallized: The first is that somehow I have been able to make a living pursuing and practicing the two things I love most, traveling and writing, for my entire professional life; the second is that this journey would simply not have been possible without the many extraordinary people—family, friends, fellow writers and editors, mentors, students, readers—who have guided, supported, and inspired me in innumerable small and large, life-changing ways. I cannot adequately express my thankfulness for these riches.

At some point during the course of my journey, I came to think of myself as a travel evangelist, and compiling this collection has reinforced that notion. I was profoundly influenced by a Protestant pastor who eloquently preached the gospel of love when I was a youth, and by the precepts and practices of Buddhism that I first encountered when I lived in Japan, but in many ways, travel is my religion.

As I have learned over and over, travel teaches us about the vast and varied differences that enrich the global mosaic, in landscape, creation, custom, and belief, and about the importance of each and every piece in that mosaic. Travel teaches us to embrace our vulnerability and to have faith that whatever energy we put into the world will come back to us a hundredfold. Travel teaches us to approach unfamiliar cultures and peoples with curiosity and respect, and to realize that the great majority of people around the world, whatever their differences in background and belief, care for their fellow human beings. And in all these ways, travel paves the pathway to global understanding, evolution, and peace.

Ultimately, I have come to think, travel teaches us about love. It teaches us that the very best we can do with our lives is to embrace the peoples, places, and cultures we meet with all our mind, heart, and soul, to live as fully as possible in every moment, every day. And it teaches us that this embrace is simultaneously a way of becoming whole and letting go.

That's the way of my wanderlust. And now, with the same mixture of apprehension and exhilaration that I feel at the beginning of every journey, I let go of these tales and send them out into the world, on their own adventures. Thank you for taking them into your hands, heart, and home. I hope you find pieces that connect with your own life's puzzle, and that confer meaning and inspiration on your wanderlust way.