The Sorrows of Travel
Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 06:22AM 
Slumping into a chair in my new home away from home, I lift my jet-lagged eyes up to the adjacent bookshelves. A yellow, dog-eared copy of The Best of Edward Abbey calls out to me like an old friend from the top shelf. I reach up and pull it down. It practically falls open to “The Sorrows of Travel,” an essay from 1979’s Abbey’s Road.
“Cactus Ed” and I go way back. His cantankerous spirit has kept me company on many travels and flights of fancy. So it is fitting that we should meet, on the road, once again. I have yet to apologize for being on his despised Glen Canyon Dam the day of his death, March 14, 1989. Don’t worry, he got his revenge on me the next day at a filling station in Clayton, New Mexico. But that’s another story.
Unlike the brash, wizened antiheroes from The Monkey Wrench Gang, George Washington Hayduke and Seldom Seen Smith, wreaking havoc across the American Southwest, I arrive on the Old Continent with a languorous whimper. My arrival is more cartoonish, akin to Snoopy insolently kicking Charlie Brown’s door with the food bowl in his mouth: Please feed me and give me water while I retire to my doghouse to blog. “It was a dark and stormy night in Italy…” A flash of bravado, I suppose, but in the end we are both supplicants.
Luckily, my ultimate fate is yet to be decided. For the time being Ed Abbey and I have a minute or two to savor a cup of strong Italian coffee and have a good laugh about old times. I look up from the worn page to stare out the window at my neighbor’s roof. A thin layer of moss drapes itself over the pronounced humps of the terra cotta as if they were wearing little green fur coats. I wonder how roofers aligned all of those tiles into neat rows.
It has been raining here for weeks. Flying in from Germany, we crossed over the Austrian Alps and then swooped down over Verona, in a long descent toward Bologna. The countryside spread out before the plane window like a verdant quilt, a patchwork of fields stitched together by brimming creeks and irrigation ditches. It is a rich contrast to the subtle shades of brown surrounding Denver International Airport.
A scooter buzzes by like an angry bee from two floors below, snapping me out of my fatigue-induced reverie. Townsfolk funnel down narrow side streets to the Saturday market. Stefania and I have pressing matters to attend to: a European power cord for the computer, contacting an internet service provider, buying fresh bread at the bakery and going to the grocery store. Tonight it’s pizza with Alessandro, Roberta, Tommaso and Silvia. Italy does have certain advantages after all.
I close the book thinking about why travel can be so sorrowful.
Edward Abbey equates the sorrows of travel to landscapes and women. “When I think of travel I think of certain women I have known. So many of my own journeys have been made in pursuit of love. In pursuit of pain and in flight from both.”
For me travel represents leaving what has been, marching off into the unknown with my Samsonite and bike in tow. Walking down the street and getting into the car to go to the airport was much more difficult than I had thought it would be. By the time I fell into my seat on the plane the sadness of leaving was almost overwhelming.
Fortunately, travel also connotes a new beginning, the opportunity to see things from a new perspective in spite of the daunting challenges that must be overcome. Travel also implies movement and not a final destination. I cannot say what my final stopping place will be. For now Colorado is still home, Italy a waypoint. However, on this uncertain road I must voyage alone. Not even “Cactus Ed” can help me.
So welcome to my journey! Come on along for the ride. How’s that for burying the lede?
[Your Name Here]
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