Tag: travel

Traveling on wafting fingers of smell

The wafting fingers of smell will connect me instantly to places in the past via the invisible subway of time, coursing through memories that otherwise would be lost. Or maybe they were never there. For the strangest reason, chopping an onion invariably takes me to the corner of two streets whose names I can no longer remember — Rio Grande and 13th? — near the University of Texas in Austin. I’m immediately standing in front of a small convenience store on that corner. Not inside the store, just standing outside looking at it. Why I travel to that spot when I cut an onion I have no idea, but I absolutely can verify I never cut an onion standing on that corner 55 years ago.

The smell of French perfume, which is unique compared to American scents, takes me to the New Hebrides, where we’re anchored stern-to in our sailboat in front of a colonizer’s grand home. Across the early morning still waters is a small island where women are cooking yams and the staples of the day over their cookfires. I can hear the cry of babies drifting across the still waters. I was pregnant at the time with my second child, and the smell of that perfume reminds me of the morning sickness I suffered.

The smell of marshland transports me to a childhood playing freely along the creeks of Maryland, while the smell of booze and cigarettes leaves me hiding in the darkness of night. On the rich sap smell of a pine forest, I travel to hot afternoons arriving at unnamed mountain campsites. The sweet smell of a salty ocean and creosoted wharf pilings carry me quickly to Cape Cod for the summer, while the whiff of fresh horse apples transports me on horseback to the foothills of Santa Barbara.

Why should I buy a plane ticket to travel when so many smells carry me away for free?

By car, by train, by boat

Ah, to travel. And for what purpose? To experience places beyond my front yard, of course. By car, the other place might include a grocery store or the local used bookstore, or the post office; it might include the experience of visiting a friend and catching up. And, of course, there are the greater adventures by car, traveling to our great national parks, Yellowstone to Mesa Verde, and places in between, camping under the stars.

But to experience far-away places, my most favored way to travel is by sailboat. All that I need is on board: my sleeping quarters, food, water, clothing, and books to read. Once the sails are set, the sea pulls me into her arms where I’m rocked to sleep or tossed in its more exuberant moments of tempest and storms. The longer I’m at sea, the more peaceful and joyful I feel. My ego lies down, and I find myself to be little more than a piece of dust in the immensity of the universe floating on this blue globe in an endless black space. Though a sailboat can, and must arrive, in larger ports in order to clear customs – those malignant cities on the edges of land masses big or small – a sailboat can move away from those noisy, dirty places and slip into the untouched bays and coves, less touched by “civilization.”

I no longer have a sailboat, and it’s been many years since I’ve sailed. Sailing is slow, as travel should be, traveling 100 to 200 miles a day, so much different than I would travel now. To visit another country, I zoom to an airport to hop on a plane to take me to the other side of the world, flying over great expanses of land, missing all the sights to be seen had I been down on the ground. But when I arrive in that foreign land, I stay in cheap hostels, and I always opt for public transportation — the local “chicken” buses or trains, however it is the local people travel — so that I can experience the place to which I’ve traveled and not the mirror image reflected in hotels or promoted through the travel brochures back home.

Old Journals – Old Memories

I found an old journal from 1996 that I haven’t looked at probably since I stowed it away. Old memories. One of the first entries reads: “No one can play the strings of your song. I realize that now. I realize what I keep playing is your laughter. What I keep playing is your love. It’s you I play, not me.” Though I allowed it to be a painful time, I’m glad I recorded its journey where I had allowed myself to “fall in love” with the most unavailable — and truly the most gorgeous — man on the planet.

How did I deal with my pain? Exactly as I always have: I jumped on a plane and flew away, this time to Florida, by myself. These are the thoughts that I recorded in a brand-new journal.

Wind on the mountain
Freedom pushing
Strength resisting
Isolation
Solitude of the eagle,
Of the hawk.
Everything trying to merge and
Everything trying to separate
Wholeness held in one hand
Loneliness wrapped in love
Love not knowing its own face
Love not seeing, remaining
Undiscovered and unseen.

(I only write poetry when wounded by love.)

A mockingbird sings, looking for love to touch its soul too. I wait for the sunset in Key West. Still thinking of that man. Can’t get into him. Never will. Can’t get away from him. …But I will. The broad arm of a mahogany leans across the second story patio of Mallory Square, giving shade, but my skin is fried by too much sun.  I can’t feel its cool brush. There’s a gentle clatter of ceiling fans in an effort to move air that’s too tired to move.

At the Italian Fisherman, another day, I sit on a patio at the water’s edge. I watch garfish and cat fish being circled by one small barracuda while shadows of pelicans pass over. At the table next to me are two fat women who are bitching about work in Minnesota: that they’re not allowed to wear perfume. The light breeze brings to me a strong odor of overpoured perfume clinging to their clothes as if telling their boss, “Fuck you. Smell me now.”

Later, traveling across the Everglades, heading to Clearwater, I notice a man following me in a gold Subaru. When the highway becomes four-lane, he hovers next to me, turning constantly to stare at me. It creeps me out. My imagination runs wild, as I imagine him taking down my license plate, and though it’s a rental, somehow he will find out who rented it, telling the agency some story to get them to give them my address. Damn my imagination. I slow way down, visibly taking out a pencil and paper while I drive, letting him know to beware that I am now taking down HIS license. He finally drives on ahead.

There are Native Americans in the Everglades that still live in — or at least build — thatched huts of bundled cattails — like the one I built for myself in New Zealand — but they put tar paper across the peak. A canal that borders Highway 41 is dotted with fishermen. The shacks might be their fishing shacks. In the distance a charcoal cloud, heavy with rain, hangs above the swamp that extends to the horizon. I learned later that a jet crashed into the Everglades — not within my vision or point in time — but 109 people died. The nose of the plane, the plane itself, was buried 30 feet deep in the muck. If anyone had survived the crash, the alligators were waiting. Salvage was not discussed.

Farther west, I met the green fabric of fields woven into the blue fabric of sky from which (for whatever reason), I weave in a quote by Annie Proulx: “We face up to the awful things because we can’t go around them.” That man — that man that I came to Florida to escape — is with me again, like a needle stuck in an old record. I must face why I am attracted to the emotionally unavailable. I already know why I get on planes and fly away when my heart is hurt.

I’m airport watching now on my way back to the Northwest, leaving behind plastic-fantastic. Key West is a fascinating amusement, but overall I dislike Florida. Sitting at Delta Gate 54A, a 25-year-old, hidden behind sunglasses, tells me: “…I was 17 then. A long time ago. I was a day late. Didn’t matter if I was a dollar short or a day late, my parents would take care of it.” He takes off his glasses to clean them on his shirt and puts them back on. “But now,” he says, “it’s the real world.” Yes, it is, I think.

I glance away and see an old man, with trembling hands, eating a nacho with jalapenos. He drinks water,  it shaking in his hand, but suddenly he stands up and moves away from a young woman who’s drinking a beer, changing tables. Then he changes tables again. He’s moving yet again when a long-haired man with a beeper, looking at each beep, distracts me.

Another man, older, without a chin, is standing nearby. He keeps pulling up his overly baggy pants in a way that accentuates his penis and balls. He looks like a child molester. Two indiscreet Native Americans walk by, carrying ceremonial drums. For some reason, the man I’m trying to erase from my heart and mind re-enters, a constant thrump, like the river flowing over rocks and boulders on its way to the sea. Conversations distract me. “Where’s she going to stay?” a man asks. “In the States,” she answers, jutting out her jaw. I didn’t hear the rest as the conversation blurred into a man talking about back surgery to the stranger next to him.

Yes, there are windows opening constantly in the pulse of time. I take it in, like a grouper’s mouth sucking in the unsuspecting dinner. I notice an elegantly dressed woman in colors that accentuate her aged tan and silvered hair. She sits alone, watching also, her hand lazily drooped over the arm of the chair, while mine is scribbling in my journal.

And then she rises, as do I, when boarding is announced.