The pleasure of exploring new places with friends and family.
Travelling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.
-ibn Battuta
Two days after getting back to Marlborough, my back went into incredibly painful spasms. We were in the midst of a heat wave, so our walking would have been limited anyway, but now it’s all I can do to walk around the property for pee and poo. Waldo takes it in stride and waits it out with me. After all, this isn’t the first time our walks have been curtailed by circumstances beyond our control. It’s going to be a while before I can see my physiatrist and get some cortisone shots, so we make do as best we can. In the interim, I try to come up with ways to play with Waldo, that don’t require much back-bending, and rest my back as much as possible.
Now that I’m home, I can’t help but ask myself if the trip was worth all the expense, angst and bother that it caused both Waldo and me. I can’t speak for Waldo, but for me, the answer is clearly yes. Even the mishaps, long delays, uncertainties about making connections, and prolonged travel times were well worth the effort they required. For me, that all just adds to the adventure and makes the narrative more interesting to tell to others. In retrospect, it now seems amusing. After all, Phyllis and I were never in any danger. And isn’t adventure the whole point of the thing anyway? It is for me. But that begs the question as to why I feel the desire, nay, the need, to travel?
Quite a few years ago, coming home from taking the kids to a Six Flags amusement park, I wondered at why parks like that exist. They serve no clear purpose, other than entertainment, that I could see. And why are the rides that cause people to empty their lungs in wide-eyed screams, their hearts to race in uncontrolled fear and, on occasion, empty their stomachs, so enjoyed? I came to the conclusion that many would say that it all made them feel alive. It’s as if we spend so much time and effort to build ourselves safe havens, that we tend to overdo it and make our lives kind of boring. Those amusement parks, like Six Flags, with their scary rides, provide people the opportunity to get scared, but in an environment they know is relatively safe. To feel fear is to be unavoidably thrust into the present moment where your life is in your face and not at all theoretical. It’s real. You pay attention.
For me, traveling is something like that. The desire to travel is multifactorial, for sure, but part of its allure is that it causes me to be placed in circumstances where I can’t react habitually, as if I were on autopilot. Those circumstances may not be frightening, like in an amusement park, but they are unusual and potentially risky, causing me to have to deal with what’s happening in the moment. I often don’t have habit patterns that will allow me to get through the day without living it more consciously and completely. The adventure is in exposing myself to unusual, not fully prepared for, but tractable, risk. It makes me feel more alive.
I’m pretty sure that Waldo feels something similar, at least on occasion. He is so much more focused and energized when we walk in places where we haven’t been before. His tail is up and wagging, he’s pulling at the leash, going this way and that, sniffing everywhere as if he doesn’t want to miss a thing. There’s no “Oh, yeah, been there, done that,” coming from him at those times.
I can only imagine how much Waldo would enjoy going for a walk along a bisse in Switzerland. Or along Hadrian’s wall in Britain. Or along the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. The problem is getting him there. It’s possible to put him in a crate that’s stowed with the luggage in a plane, but it would be traumatic for him. The luggage bays are pressurized and heated, but they’re noisy and very different from what he’s used to. He wouldn’t understand what was going on or why. He would only have to deal with it for seven or eight hours as we flew across the Atlantic and he is used to spending that much time in his crate at home with a thunderstorm noise-maker, so maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad. Once in Europe, we could go together by train. Europeans take their dogs everywhere. And the benefits…
Imagine what it would be like to World Wander While Walking With Waldo!
The pleasure of being back home with friends and family.