Why We Travel

  How wonderful, after three days of cold rain, to walk along the Left Bank of the Seine under a warm, welcoming sun. The almost balmy weather, unusual for October, had brought out not only Parisians and tourists but also the riverside bouquinistes who were busy setting up the zinc-topped boxes from which they sell second-hand books. Although I was on a mission to find one of the city’s historic covered passageways—the Passage Vero-Dodat near the Palais-Royal—I was unable to resist the lure of books calling out to me from their carts. And so I stopped to browse, hoping to find if not a treasure, a gift that might be just the thing for a friend who covets old books. But instead of a second-hand book, I—a woman addicted to the pleasures of traveling alone—acquired a companion. Her name was Emily Pyke and I judged her to be at least eighty years old, probably closer to one hundred. I figured that out from the date she had written next to her name—Paris, 10 Mars 1923—on the inside of a small red guidebook titled “Baedeker’s Paris and It’s Environs.” The Baedeker’s guidebook, published in English, German and French, was an indispensable companion during the mid-1800s and early 1900s to any traveler embarking on the de rigeur Grand Tour. What reader can forget the distress of Lucy Honeychurch, the young Englishwoman in E.M. Forster’s “Room with a View,” when she “arrives in Santa Croce with no Baedeker.” As I stood paging through Emily Pyke’s guidebook, I saw that its owner had made notations throughout; reminders, one assumes, of special places and memories she wished to summon up when Paris was left behind. I imagined Emily, as I now thought of her, on a cold evening in, say, London, sitting wrapped in a cozy quilt before a crackling fire, reading from the book her notation on the church of St.-Sulpice: “The beauty of the Delacroix frescoes brought tears to my eyes.” How to explain the feelings that surged through me upon reading these few words written by a woman so many years ago? They described exactly my own response each time I visited the great frescoes at St.-Sulpice. What other responses to Paris, I wondered, did Emily and I share? Eager to find out I handed over fifteen euros to the bouquiniste and—thoughts of a visit to Passage Verot-Dodot all but forgotten—set out with my new companion to retrace some of her steps. As the two of us walked from the Luxembourg Gardens to the Pantheon and from there to the rue Jacob and the exquisite little square on rue Furstemberg where Delacroix had his studio, my curiosity grew about the woman who accompanied me. Who was she? And why, in a time when leisure travel was not such a commonplace event, did she find travel so appealing? Her little scribbles throughout the book revealed, I thought, part of the answer. She was a woman, it seemed, who sought not only to learn new things about the external world, but also to discover through traveling something fresh about her own inner geography. It was precisely this approach to travel that writer Laurence Durrell ascribed to one of the world’s legendary nomads: Freya Stark. “A great traveler (in distinction to a merely good one) is a kind of introspective; as she covers the ground outwardly, so she advances toward fresh interpretations of herself inwardly,” wrote Durrell about Stark. One of the last “great” travelers, Stark began her solo journeys in 1927 (just four years after Emily Pyke made her trip to Paris), and traveled to such remote places as Persia, Syria and Baghdad, places where women traveling alone were seldom seen. Fifty years later in 1977, at age 84, the intrepid Stark was still embarking on rafting trips down the Euphrates River. Although not in the same league with Freya Stark—or in any league of adventurous travelers, for that matter—in my own small way I have been a part-time nomad for the last fifteen years. In 1999 I became a full-time nomad, quitting my job as a newspaper reporter to travel around the world and report back a different kind of news. My goal was to travel as an informal student, taking lessons in subjects that might provide a deeper understanding about the values held dear by each culture I visited. And, like Freya Stark, as I allowed myself to observe with an open mind how other people regard the world from their place within it, a parallel understanding of my own values and inner geography grew as well. In Kyoto I learned to dance in the old Wakayagi fashion and learned how ancient tradition shapes, still, much of modern Japanese life. In Scotland I learned to train border collies on a 1000-acre sheep farm in the Highlands and found that the hardiness and fierce independence of the Scots still prevails, long after King Robert the Bruce in 1314 defeated England’s King Edward II at the Battle of Bannockburn. In Paris I learned the art of traditional French cooking, an endeavor that embraces the principle of precise rules and strict order, a concept that underlies much of the French approach to social discourse, art and philosophy. Of course, in being taught these things I also came to know people I otherwise would never have met. Ouka, for instance, my Japanese dance instructor who introduced me to her entire family, including their pet terrier. And Mark Wylie, a Scottish sheep farmer and prize-winning Border collie trainer, who patiently taught me, with limited success, how to make Peg, my canine assistant, fetch sheep down from the steep hills. And Chef Moreau, one of the best chefs in Paris, who demanded perfection from his students just as he did from himself. But travel offers more subtle lessons than those that can be taught in dancing class or cooking school. Given that it is an endeavor largely dependent on such ingredients as surprise, disappointment, expectations and luck, traveling has a way of forcing, or at least encouraging, its pilgrims to live in the present tense, instead of carelessly looking backward or forward. It is a rare opportunity we are being offered, this chance to tease out the forgotten child within, the one who…