From
the first time I read Robert Frost’s iconic poem, The Road Not Taken, when I was still a young boy, I was captivated
by both its imagery and its message. From a very young age, though powerfully
attracted to my own town and its surroundings, I yearned to travel. It was
almost as if I had strong memories of being a wanderer in some former life, so
fascinated was I by the idea of striking out in any direction and seeing what
was over the next rise or around the next curve.
I did a
lot of that already while I was growing up. First on my bicycle on which I
explored every inch of Wapakoneta, my home town in Ohio, and then the
surrounding countryside, from Fort Amanda to Owl Creek and from Glynwood to Grand
Lake Saint Marys. And later, once I bought my own car at age sixteen, I began
clocking more and more miles each month, not only in my job as a relief drummer
for any jazz band that needed one, but also just for the heck of it, driving in
my down-time between gigs and school to visit any Ohio town whose name struck
my fancy: towns like Lebanon, Russia and Cairo, Washington Court House, North
Star and Columbus Grove, ones with names eccentric enough to pique my interest,
eventually racking up some two thousand to three thousand miles a month between
work and recreational trips.
I was, as well, from my early childhood, an
unrepentant non-conformist, one of those weird kids who have no interest in
doing “what everybody else does” or in being “like everybody else is” or in
echoing the interests, thoughts and trends of my own generation unless they
just happened to coincide with my own. So the words and deeper meaning of that
poem of Frost’s really resonated with me:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And
sorry I could not travel both
And be
one traveler, long I stood
And
looked down one as far as I could
To
where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then
took the other, as just as fair,
And
having perhaps the better claim,
Because
it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though
as for that the passing there
Had
worn them really about the same,
And
both that morning equally lay
In
leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I
kept the first for another day!
Yet
knowing how way leads on to way,
I
doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall
be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere
ages and ages hence:
Two
roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took
the one less traveled by,
And
that has made all the difference.
Nevertheless,
there was a time, decades ago, when I used to feel there was something wrong with me as a traveler. I mean, I
felt perhaps it had something to do with my rather natural tendency to
procrastinate (another trait that, way back then, I took as a quirk, a malady,
a bad habit, but which I now accept as “part of a process”). I wasn’t at all
sure why I did it, but there seemed always to be something drawing me to
dawdle, to get distracted along the road, to keep the “final destination” at
bay, as if preferring the magic of setting forth and the surprises I
encountered along the way to the reality of “arrival”.
The dream of a natural born traveler: a car of one's own. |
I
recall once a return drive from Wapakoneta to Miami to take a plane back to my
home, at the time, in Buenos Aires. I’d spent close to a month with my family,
and as usual, my younger brother Jim and I had renewed our close bond as we
usually did, having a jog or a walk together each day, drinking coffee and engaging
in long talks at the kitchen table, or spending beery late afternoons and
evenings bellied up to local bars bending our elbows and each other’s ears. So
when I got into my rented car in the driveway of our parents’ house in Ohio,
after we’d given each other a hug, and I was about to head south for another
year or two before I’d get back that way, he leaned down at the driver’s side
window and said, “Hey, buddy, give me a call when you get wherever you stop
tonight, okay?”
“Sure,”
I said, and made a mental note to keep that promise.
A
little over eight hours later, I called Jim from my hotel just south of Atlanta
off of Interstate 75. I’d made the decision after seeing a roadside ad for a bar
and steakhouse that looked inviting at this early evening hour and the
directions at the bottom of the sign suggested that the place was located next
to a major hotel. That cinched it—a bar and grill next door to a hotel with an
indoor pool. I flicked on my turn signal and took the exit.
“So
where ya at, bud?” my brother asked when I got him on the line. “I mean, you’re
still on the road, right?”
“Just
south of Atlanta, and, no, I’m not still on the road. I’m sitting on the bed in
my hotel room in my swim trunks about to go have a dip before I go to supper.”
“Atlanta?” he cried. “Are you freakin’
kidding me?”
“What
do you mean?” I asked, bewildered.
“I
mean, is that all the further you got,
you wimp? Last time I drove from Ohio
to Florida, I drove from Lima to Ocala straight through in under thirteen
hours! And you’re still in freakin’ Atlanta?”
“What’s
the hurry?” I asked. “I have almost three days before my flight out of Miami.”
“I
don’t know,” he said, “I mean, you could’ve stayed here a day longer, for
instance. But even Dad drives to
North Florida in a day!”
“Yes,
and I wouldn’t want to meet up with him on the road after the first seven hours
or so,” I said. “Look, let’s just compare for a second. I imagine to do a
marathon drive like that you end up drinking gallons of coffee and fighting to
stay awake...”
“Red
Bull, actually...and it works!”
“...eating
junk food on the road and feeling like crap, and then when you get there,
wherever there is, you’re zonked out
for the whole next day because you’re so exhausted from the drive, right?”
“Pretty
much, but at least I get there fast!”
“I, on
the other hand, have had a plenty long enough trip as it is for one day. But
not long enough to wear me out. Now I’m going to do a few laps in the hotel
pool. Then I’m going to dress in fresh clothes and walk across the parking lot
to the bar and grill next door. I’m going to sit at the bar, order a beer and a
nice steak, and strike up a conversation with the bartender and whoever else
feels like telling me their story. And when I’m done drinking beer and
chatting, I’m going to go back to my room, get a good night’s sleep, have
another dip in the pool and a good breakfast in the morning and get back on the
road at a reasonable hour. What part of that sounds worse than driving like a
maniac through the night guzzling coffee and Red Bull to keep my eyes open?”
On the lam in Europe in the early '70s |
Jim was
silent for a couple of beats and then he said, “Know what, Big Bro? As usual,
you’re right.”
That
night I did exactly what I told him I was going to do and, in the process of
eating a fine sirloin strip and wetting my whistle, met a part-time bartender
who was working on a master’s in history and explained to me the intricacies of
the vicarious Civil War that the South continued to contend with the North, and
to a woman who was an environmental engineer and gave me a fascinating lesson
on Florida’s natural aquifers and their vulnerability to human encroachment.
Virginia on the road in Patagonia in the 1980s |
And
“stops along the way” continue to be some of the most memorable stories in my
repertoire. Like a lunch my wife, Virginia, and I shared as young newlyweds
living in Europe, an impromptu picnic of wonderfully overcooked rotisserie
chicken, floury shepherd’s loaf bread, ultra-dark espumante wine and deep red sangria oranges that we enjoyed while
sitting on a park bench in a steep-trailed park overlooking the ancient city of
Genoa, on a day that seemed to us like a piece of heaven. Or a few days when I
played hooky from work on a trip to Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship and
we took a bus from Santiago down to Viña del Mar and strolled on the beach and
stayed a couple of nights in an old family hotel, lodged in a room overlooking
the patio, where they brought us French bread, butter, jam and coffee for
breakfast in bed and where dinner was served by the owner in a small dining
room downstairs—a quiet corner where we could briefly forget the horror that
was taking place in that country and across the Andes in dictatorial Argentina.
A daunting tunnel carved and blasted in the limestone |
Then
there was the time Virginia and I were driving south through the Patagonian
desert between the Welsh-founded cities of Trelew and Puerto Madryn and saw a
broad, well-graded gravel road stretching off toward the horizon on our left
near the tiny settlement of Las Plumas. On a whim, Virginia said, “Let’s see
where that goes.”
“Well,
certainly not to Madryn,” I protested. “Madryn’s that way,” I said, pointing straight ahead.
“So
what?” she insisted. “If we don’t like what we see, we can always turn around
and come back.”
Villa Ameghino |
And so
we took that road less traveled and began the twisting turning descent along an
ever narrowing ribbon of gravel that eventually took us through a daunting
one-lane tunnel carved and blasted out of sheer limestone that, on the other
side, rewarded us for our daring with a view of a veritable Patagonian oasis, a
shimmering green valley hollowed out by the marble green Chubut River where it
flows swift and deep beneath the Dique Ameghino hydroelectric dam. From above,
on the high desert where the road began, this was an invisible world. And down
here, that coarse dry world above was just as invisible. From where we stood
now, you would have thought you were in a mountain landscape, so high were the
steep cliffs on all sides. But instead, it was a deep gorge sculpted by the
river, with the clear china-blue sky arching high overhead, the water lined
with willows and alamo poplars and with hundreds of flamingoes and black and
white-necked swans riding the milky green, lime-laden surface as it rushed
toward the sea a hundred and fifty kilometers further downstream.
A place of peace and beauty |
There
on the banks rose a small village, Villa Ameghino, where many of the couple
hundred residents still had Welsh names—Reynolds, Jones, Williams or Davies—but
where the lingua franca had long
since become Spanish. Friendly people who were quick to chat and to welcome us
to camp on the stony shore, people whose existence depended on jobs with the
National Highway Department, or on exploitation of the kaolinite mines from
nearby caves for use in the ceramics industry, or on the tiny shops and bakery
that sold us our provisions while we were there.
Such
was the peace and beauty of this place that for a few days, we forgot all about
our “final destination” and camped there by the river to bask in the fantasy of
a hidden paradise.
And
like these experiences, there are countless others I could tell in which I’ve
turned an unexpected layover, a chance encounter, or a stop to admire the
scenery into a surprising and fulfilling event. The trick is never giving in to
the human tendency to ask, “Are we there yet?” when the question that can give
birth to a wealth of experiences is, “What sort of surprises and adventures will
this journey hold?”
When I
manage to push the pause button on the busy pace of an everyday working existence,
I realize that life itself, in the final analysis, is one long—or not so long—journey.
But there’s no verifiable way to know for sure why it starts where it starts or
ends where it ends, where we came from or where we’re going. And nobody issues
us with a roadmap when we start out. So it apparently isn’t about that. Life
isn’t about “getting there”—which is, in the end, an ostensibly
counterproductive option—but about all of the side-trips we make, all of the
places and things we see, all of the observations we collect, all of the fellow
travelers we meet and all of the stories we hear, tell and enact in between.
Life is
about going or staying, and about the experiences that we absorb along our path.
It’s almost surely more about choice than about destiny, no matter how conditioned
we may be not to think so. But it is definitely about the main roads and the
side-roads that we decide to take or not to take, and about how we deal with
those choices once we’ve made them.
2 comments:
OMG, what a choice! Life!
Exactly! Many thanks for reading it, Fabio.
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