Traveling: Roots and Branches

“Sometimes travel is merely an opportunity taken when you can.”—Ian Frazier

My beloved niece Jeny has just returned from Ecuador, head and heart full of volcanoes, the Spanish language, village festivals, a long list of life birds seen for the first time in the boglands and misty forests, saints, and thoughts of her traveling partner, who stays on. This morning, reading her first post from home, I’m tasting my relatively pure water differently and hearing my home language spoken all around me as though I were the one returning.

While she’s been gone, I’ve been reading, slowly, Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia. He’s among my favorite writers. He takes his reader along just as Jeny has, and the quality of the writing of both of them is on an equal par. (And that’s not just a proud aunt speaking. Remember, I’ve been an editor for more than fifty years!) I’ve traveled with both of them before, in blog and book.

Jeny has taken me to Ghana with her students to visit sister city, sister school, and on a U.S. cross-country trip, a saga in which I am briefly a character. You can find her blog at Cricketeer: http://cricketeer2010.blogspot.com/  

And in his book Great Plains, Frazier has retraced my solo Dodge-van journey many years ago through prairie and town and the arid beauty of the center of America. I’ve read most of his other books, too, and this journey through Siberia is, so far, his masterwork.

When I travel with Frazier, I take all the side roads, even when they are mud ruts that are barely visible. I read, second hand, massive works on the history of the land, so beautifully wound into the movement of our journey that landscape and the human stories written on it are seamless. One experience emerges, and Siberia becomes a part of me just as it claims my guide.

Most of my travel experience comes that way, through book or blog, slide show, lecture, film, or the telling of it over tea. Years of choosing Utah and the Southwest over the rest of the world taught me how to get inside place so intimately, even in immensity, that I’ve been satisfied to learn the world’s stories beyond the Great American Desert and the redrock country through the accounts of others.

One of my strongest memories of my own first journey “abroad”-–a camping honeymoon in Canada—is caught in the call of the loon heard for the first time across the waters of the Georgian Bay. Reason enough to go to a foreign land, though I’ve heard that sound—my favorite in nature, along with the coyote and the great horned owl—many times since.

My personal land journeys at their farthest reaches have taken me into Mexico, where I saw, on my first trip, the bones of Father Kino in his glass-topped coffin. I went again with my Tucson “family”—the poet Richard Shelton, my professor, mentor, friend, and his wife Lois, who directed the University of Arizona Poetry Center for more than twenty-five years. We made a circle that took us into the Sierra Madre, with stops at all the missions. At one village, a bustling nun invited us into the cathedral on the plaza to share in a wedding celebration.

A few brief border crossings into two countries other than my own—without even one stamp on a passport, and never another continent… But I know how still a blue lizard stands in the heat that pulses from the red rock, and the neon green of tamarisk, that lacey Arabian intruder, in red canyons with a trickle of a stream. I’ve heard my heart beat as the only sound for hours on the “back” of Capitol Reef, where the great cliffs, topped with the swirling domes of stone that give the park its name. slant down into blue dust hills at the foot of the Henry Mountains, last to be discovered in the United States (by Powell on his river run of exploration down the Colorado). I know the seductive white light of heat prostration and a below-zero winter of trading off to saw town-dump-rescued logs and boxes to keep the fire going in the drafty cabin we had rented. A touch of the Kalihari in a Utah summer. A touch of the islands between Russia and Alaska in the Utah cold.

Loving one landscape in all its variations is an act of translation. If the landscape is rich enough, or stark enough, it unlocks the depths of any other. Although I have read  this planet only in translation, I have traveled the world.

Photograph by Luna Zeffer