How Did I Get Here?

When I was 14, I took a train alone to New York City and vividly remember the feeling that I was the only 14-year-old who ever stepped onto the concourse at Grand Central Station and walked the streets of Manhattan alone.

Rather than feeling lost in crowds, I’ve always felt found in them. In the presence of so many people who I’m not, there’s a strong sense of who I am.

From 2005-2007 I took several long trips across the country in a VW van—which is, I admit, my generation’s version of a religious pilgrimage.

During that trip I listened in fits and starts to Susan Orlean’s travel stories.¹ I felt I had found a friend on the razor’s edge of outer strangeness and inner familiarity—less lost than found.

There was the Bed & Breakfast in Virginia where I sat at the breakfast table alone reading about the idolater Queen Jezebel. When I walked into the kitchen to get more coffee, there was a bible lying open on the counter as if praying for my exorcism.

Nearby, was the clearing in the woods in Appomattox where Lee camped the night before surrendering to Grant. He and his troops were far more real than any of the people I’d seen that day.

There was the cheap hotel in Santee, South Carolina where I had to wait for my van to get repaired. Back then, I described it as a place where the woman were large and strong and the coffee was small and weak.

And there was the amazing BBQ in Mississippi where, while the vibe was very friendly, the black people danced distinctly separately from the white people, as if that were the natural order of things. I felt I was of some third race or culture or ethnicity.

Many writers travel for R&R and inspiration when they aren’t writing. Even notoriously place-centered writers get out of the house now and then. Emily Dickinson went to Philadelphia. Thoreau’s journeys took him way beyond Walden Pond. And while Marcel Proust spent most of his life writing in bed, he did manage to make it as far as Venice a few times and included some memories of his Italian temps perdu in his most famous work.^⁠²

Location plays a starring, or at least supporting role, in countless classics. From Caesar’s Gaul to Jack Kerouac’s America, it’s hard to imagine how there’d be any significant there there today, if there hadn’t been any there there back then.

I like the way travelers in strange lands perceive the world as much as the places themselves. The aloneness of W. Somerset Maugham’s barely fictional spy Ashenden at Lake Como during World War I, Erich Maria Remarque’s Ravic in Vichy Paris during World War II, and Robert Stone’s John Converse during the Vietnam War is palpable—even more so because, at any moment, they could be exposed as men without a clear country and, in Converse’s case, without a soul.^⁠³

For Ashenden, there was always another perilous intrigue; for Ravic—no matter how early in the morning or late in the occupation—there was always another open bar where he could get a glass of sobering Calvados or Vouvray; and for Converse (and just about every other character in the book) there was always another step into the hell of heroin smuggling.  

While my road trips didn’t have the intrigue of Ashenden’s (except for one hysterically paranoid hitchhiker who claimed he’d been shot in a Las Vegas parking garage) and I didn’t drink as late as Ravic (although there was that one time in New Orleans) and I hope I didn’t lose my soul (although I was accused of it by a Jehovah’s Witness near Easton, Pennsylvania) I did have experiences on the road that seemed so strange I felt as if I had stopped by on my way from one galaxy to another.

Strange and familiar. Doubt and certainty. Trying to make sense of it all without losing the sense of mystery. Finding yourself in the middle of a Talking Heads song⁴ and asking yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"

The analogies to writing are as visceral as they are symbolic.

1. Susan Orlean: My Kind of Place.

2. Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time (À la Recherche du Temps Perdu).

3. I know it dates me but these are still three of my favorite books:
W. Somerset Maugham: Ashenden, or the British Agent.
Erich Maria Remarque: Arch of Triumph.
Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers.
(I was fortunate enough to have Stone as a professor in college during the early ‘70s. One time I went over to his house to drop something off and there were two large obnoxiously loud-mouthed guys there. He introduced them as Ken Kesey and Ken Babbs. I hesitated, and looked at them again. They may have been counter-cultural icons but I felt somehow that their time had passed. (They were already over thirty…)

4. Talking Heads: Once in a Lifetime.