This is not a travel story

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Over the past six months, I’ve been a busy traveler. At least, relatively so. Once upon a time, six months of travel would have seen me flitting across the globe, landing on three continents and wandering far from the usual, popular destinations, where Google Maps and my ability to communicate begin to fail. These days, however, my ambitions are curtailed: In April, we took a family road trip through the near Midwest, to Chicago; in July, Jean and I went hiking in Vermont; in late August, I embarked on a solo (!) road trip around New England; and in the past couple of weeks I’ve flown to Miami for a conference and spent a long weekend (with Jean) in Western Massachusetts. None of this was adventurous per se, but it satisfied, if only for a moment, the deep restlessness I’ve felt my entire life.

And after each of these trips, I’ve sat down here at the keyboard to attempt to write about them for Trying! Surely, I thought, I should be able to capture the drama of each excursion and wring some meaning from the moments. This was, after all, what I used to do professionally, for the New York Times and elsewhere. It was the job. Go, do, write — and make the end result satisfying in a way that was at once practical (offer useful advice), structural (tell a damn story), and emotional (connect with the reader). Once upon a time, I was pretty good at doing that on deadline.

But over the last six months, I failed again and again. My drafts folder is littered with ponderous, half-finished essays that blather on — less entertainingly than my usual blather — about details no one cares about, least of all me: parking in Chicago, summer sausages in Stowe.

This was especially frustrating after the New England road trip, which was one of the freest, most exhilarating vacations I’ve ever taken. Over eight days, I drove through Connecticut to Rhode Island to Cape Cod, then back to Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, up to New Hampshire, down to central Connecticut, over to Amherst, and finally to Westchester County, all to visit a motley assortment of friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in years. (I also visited my parents and my uncle.) With Jean and one daughter in Taipei, and the other daughter working at an art camp back in Brooklyn, I had absolute freedom to go where I wanted, when I wanted, and do whatever came to mind.

Yet I couldn’t get the words down. My travel was, I finally decided, not actually a travel story. None of these trips was. The more I considered why they weren’t, the more I began to see a chasm between the travel story — in its traditional published form — and how regular human beings actually travel, and how we derive meaning from the experience.

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My New England adventure is not a travel story because, first and foremost, it is too big. I visited too many places and people, for too many different reasons. In a typical Times travel story of, say, 1,600 words, I would have limited myself to two or, very rarely, three destinations, all closely linked, so I could spend sufficient time writing about each of them in enough depth to render them truly and vividly. All those words take up space, both on the page and in your brain, and there are hard limits to how much you can squeeze in before the details blur and the descriptions run thin. When I was out on the road doing one of these research trips, I’d try to experience as much as possible, knowing I’d have to cut out whole chunks to make it fit³.

And yeah, I could try that with the New England trip. I could start in media res, driving over the bridges and isthmuses of Rhode Island to the town of Bristol, where I hung out — for the first time since late 2014 — with Victor, a Predator aficionado who used to work for me at Boston.com and who happens to own more barbecue gear even than I do. We drank whiskey and ate chorizo-and-clam stew and talked about our kids and our jobs and watched a variety of Schwarzenegger movies and played some video games — you know, the kind of stuff that guys in their 50s do, and that they did in their 40s, their 30s, their 20s, and their teens. It’s juvenile, but it’s also comforting, and still also surprising to find that someone who, in truth, I barely know happens to be someone I feel like I know very well, and who knows me in turn.

Where do you go from there, though? Are we flashing back to the New Haven wedding that was the catalyst for the trip? To the chilaquiles lunch with Leslie and Mike in Stamford? Or do we fly ahead to the hills of southern New Hampshire, where Yotam and Anna and their kids and their exchange student shared with me their lives of art and music, horses and ponds, Land Rovers and general stores? There’s no way I can see to pack this all in, to move from one episode to another with a coherent thematic momentum.

Or maybe it’s the little moments I need to home in on. An easy afternoon swim in Dublin Pond, gliding above the muck and weeds, or a strenuous morning swim on Long Pond in Harwich, unsure of my abilities and therefore reining myself in. Driving a narrow “ancient way” arched with trees. Eating a homemade scallop ceviche, or a luscious sandwich of thin-sliced lamb. Hiding from the wind atop Mount Monadnock, Boston’s skyscrapers spindly on the clear horizon. Gazing one evening at the creek that ran behind my childhood home in Amherst and wondering, as I’ve wondered for more than 40 years now, where it began and whether, on some map I’ve never seen, it might even have a name.

This is the impressionist version of the travel story, a montage that may or may not make sense. It’s not what I like to write. It feels like cheating. I want to give you real scenes, concrete details, credible characters, all of which connect to one another and lead you to a conclusion that, while you could not have predicted it, feels inevitable once it arrives. I want to be Émile Zola. As my friend Tom Bissell wrote a couple of decades ago, “travel writing is, of any genre of nonfiction save memoir, the most similar to fiction”:

But because I didn’t set out on any of these trips with a story in mind, I can’t rearrange the events this way. And I don’t want to rearrange the events this way. I’m not a travel writer anymore. I want to let the experiences remain the raw, messy adventures they were, free of climaxes and dénouements, dull and disappointing and weird and wondrous, important only to me and my family and my friends, with nothing to teach anyone about where or how or why to travel. I can’t bear to twist and squeeze them into the “travel writing” form that I just about perfected, because while that might make them palatable to a wider audience — including you, {{ first_name }} — it renders them unrecognizable to me¹. In using the techniques of fiction to produce polished nonfiction, I would make my own reality unreal.

Instead, in embracing a disjointed and unsatisfying but more authentic² approach, I feel like I’m writing poetry. Perhaps that’s for the best, because poetry, unlike travel writing, needs no hook. A poem does not need to justify its existence, or the reporting labors of its poet; it simply exists, and is either good or, uh, less good. A poem does not require a news hook, such as recovery from a natural disaster or the opening of an airport. A poem does not have to make the reader say with admiration, “Who knew?” A poem does not have to fulfill a childhood obsession or dovetail with an Internet trend. A poem can do nothing but encapsulate a moment or series of moments, or, if it tells a story, then no reader expects novelistic breadth and context, just an anecdote that hints at a bigger story beyond. A poem just is. My travels just were. Appreciate them or don’t.

This is the point in the essay where I wonder whether to reveal imagistic details of the other trips. But is it worth anyone’s while at this point for me to recall discussing with my daughters the phenomenon of “prairie madness” — a real thing in the nineteenth century! — as we sped across the Illinois flats? Does it matter that I ran into the celebrated chef Kwame Onwuachi at Las’ Lap, his excellent new Afro-Caribbean lounge in Miami? (Dude, those escovitch crab claws!) Will you relate to the afternoon Jean and I spent plucking blackberries from the bushes behind a motel in Manchester, Vermont, our fingers getting stained even as mosquitoes plucked at our wrists and ankles? If I continue to layer detail on detail on detail, does it become, somehow, a satisfying tale, or is this just me playing on your own desire to travel, knowing that each colorfully encapsulated scene pokes pleasantly at your sensory cortex?

Obviously, I want it both ways! I want to give you what you want from me — what I have available to give — and I also want to withhold it. I want you to reconsider why you want these things from a travel story, and what the conversion of travel into a story costs the traveler, whether the traveler in question is me or you.

This is sort of an unusual position for me to take. Usually, I find myself advocating for the processing of organic experience into highly considered, highly constructed forms. The food, books, art, movies, music I love most all fall into that category. Yet here I am, resisting that impulse and arguing that the fulfillment we demand and derive from travel narratives is often the worst kind of lie.

And I think that’s because unfulfillment is at the heart of travel. It’s what propels us — or at least me, I don’t know about you — out the door and into the world, and keeps us journeying for as long as we possibly can, unconcerned with whether our own personal stories have proper dramatic arcs, tidy service elements, fresh news hooks, and well-honed nut grafs. We travel — I travel — because we are always unfulfilled, always hungry for new encounters, always struggling to keep our stories going, no matter how repetitive or silly or inane they become, because they matter to us and us alone. We can render them into sentences and paragraphs, shape them into narratives, and derive some satisfaction from the results. But it’s only temporary. Travel writing isn’t travel. The hunger persists.

Over the past six months, I’ve been a busy traveler. I’ve explored New England, the Midwest, and Florida, and now, as this story ends, I’m back in Brooklyn, writing from my filthy-orange IKEA armchair. But as you know now, this story isn’t over. In all the ways that matter, I haven’t come home at all. 🪨🪨🪨

Okay, fine, you guys get one recommendation here: If you’re ever in Northampton, Massachusetts, grab a drink at The Green Room, where the cocktails are both playful and precise, like the Chips and Guac, which evokes its namesake with tortilla-infused mezcal and avocado foam. Great (and cheap!) pizza, too.