Travel Is a State of Mind
This week I moved to a town where I know almost no one and have no job. I made a game-time (read: sudden) decision about five days before moving. The plan had been to move to Yosemite National Park to volunteer in the visitor center over the winter, but at the eleventh hour I found out some cool work might exist before spring here on the Klamath — and I saw that I *liked* where I was and didn’t feel ready to leave. So I changed my mind and stayed.
I’m more of a leaver than a sticker-around, so this felt like a big deal. There was a weeping epiphany moment on top of snow-dusted Mt. Ashland, looking across the valleys at snow-socked Mt. Shasta, in which I tearfully cried, “I can’t leave—I don’t want to go!” But I’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say, I moved myself and my few plastic bins of transient belongings to Ashland, Oregon, where a very kind colleague/friend let me stay in an apartment his parents owned while I looked for a more permanent place.
“Apartment” was a generous term. It was a bedroom and a bathroom, no kitchen. That said, it was a clean and cozy space in a perfect location just a quick trudge uphill past the Shakespeare theaters downtown. Vista Street — even the sound of it was glamorous, and apt: from the yard, where my friend’s dad’s tomatoes lay in tangled late-season profusion, I could see the town, the train tracks, the interstate in the distance, and the mountains. The peaks surrounding Ashland have a kind of tawny, bald, worn-down look. They cradle the town, which at the moment was popping off with fall leaf change, a riot of red and yellow carpeting the sidewalks.
As it turned out, not having a kitchen was an unexpected blessing, much like not having internet. The room felt like a little sanctuary in which to burn a scented candle, read a book, and sleep. Otherwise, I wanted to get out of there and into the world.
So each morning I packed up my laptop and walked to a coffee shop to do some writing (and emailing, and listening to feminist self-help podcasts, like you do). I began a survey of the town’s coffee shops, comparing ambiance and barista friendliness and the price of a 16-ounce Americano. A quick favorite emerged: Rogue Valley Roasting Co, the least pretentious and most cozy.
It was weird not knowing anyone but the workish colleagues I had from Siskiyou Mountain Club. And by “weird” I mean I was in danger of feeling isolated and lonely. So I signed up for a writers’ meetup and a group hike and texted some friends saying, “Didn’t you have that one friend in Ashland? Could you put us in touch?”
Still, I spent a day or two feeling exposed, frightened, and constantly on the verge of tears. This is pretty normal for me, and maybe for all human beings, after moving to a new town. I remember feeling it even when I moved back to Austin, where I’d lived before and knew a lot of people. The this-is-my-home-now, but-it-doesn’t-feel-like-my-home-yet feeling. The first chakra hates this kind of instability. So does the nervous system.
But then I had a small epiphany. For the second day in a row, I went to a bar to have dinner by myself. When I was a bartender years ago, I remember serving a lot of men who’d show up at the bar by themselves, have a couple drinks and a good meal, and read a book or watch whatever was on tv. Totally normal.
Women don’t do this much, since we’re socialized to think that doing things alone is scary. I thought I’d conquered this fear years before, when I started backpacking into the wilderness or hopping a flight to South America alone. But no. Going to ordinary restaurants in America, especially ones I’d never seen before, and plopping myself down at the bar? To my surprise, this was terrifying. People were going to think I was weird and pathetic, I was sure of it.
But dinner from the hot bar at the co-op was simply too depressing and almost as expensive. So I sucked it up. I picked up a hardbound copy of a third edition Richard Brautigan compilation. The heavy familiar book with the word “Mayonnaise” printed on the back cover made me feel like I could handle it. If nothing else, I’d bury my head, read the beginning of In Watermelon Sugar, and feel like I was wading in something brilliant and secret and special. If nothing else, my world would be privately lit by words. With words, I could get through anything.
“You and me, Richard,” I said. “We’re going out on the town.”
So I walked down the hill and up the stairs to The Black Sheep, a British pub with plenty of Guinness on tap and a menu featuring Bangers N’ Mash and Shepherd’s Pie. Somehow this place was less intimidating. Oh, and my recent ex-boyfriend, who also lived in Ashland? I neglected to mention him? Well, I wasn’t eager to run into him, and I felt he was unlikely to swagger into this pub on a Tuesday evening on the early side. Perfect.
Immediately I was put at ease because the bartender, Taylor, was a woman. And she was super friendly. I ordered a snakebite and fish and chips and chatted with her a little about Ashland.
“Within three weeks here I was running into people I knew in the grocery store,” she said. “It’s a great town. You’re gonna love it.”
“I bet I will.”
I already loved the fish and chips—especially the fries. Some friends were texting, and I got into a rapid-fire exchange with my new buddy Beal and never ended up reading a word of Brautigan. It is one of my personal liabilities, that I always have a man on the line. It’s something I’m trying to change. Then again, in times of being alone in bars, it is fun and lovely.
But then. Oh THEN. A man went to the stage in the corner and announced that an open mic night was about to begin. Christ, I groaned inwardly, thinking of an excruciating comedy open mic I’d been trapped in several times in Austin. But he picked up his guitar and kicked things off with a Bob Dylan cover, and it was actually...pretty good, though. Several other surprisingly good acts followed, and then an older woman read some spoken word poetry. The bar had begun to fill up, and though I couldn’t see the woman, her voice had a resonance and vitality like Joan Baez giving filler talk in a live recording. It was kind of—golden.
And speaking of golden. The MC introduced the next act, “The legendary Sweet Talk!” Two short, rather round older ladies with dark hair and glasses each took a mic. They looked like twins, wearing the same shirt in different colors.
“They’re a mother-daughter duo,” Taylor said.
The women began to sing, doing covers of classics like “Bye Bye Love” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” and they were amazing! They had crystalline voices and super-tight harmonies and they appeared to be having the time of their lives. After each song, the crowd erupted in applause. I noticed I was wearing a huge, shit-eating grin.
“This is amazing!” I said to Taylor.
“Right?”
“Dude, there’s this incredible open mic happening,” I texted my friend Sam. “A mother-daughter duo is singing, and there are people wearing berets and weird vests, and there’s an actual Irishman here with a brogue and a kilt. This town is full of delightful dorks!”
Sam wrote back instantly.
“Yeah, and it just got one more.”
True that.
Overhearing a conversation about GS levels and the District Ranger, I turned around and said, “Do y’all work for the Forest Service?” Indeed, the people standing behind me were three Forest Service botanists from Washington State and Eugene, and we got into a fun talk about public lands and the ineptitude of government and how many good, passionate people are still trying to make a difference within a broken system. By the time I left the bar, I was pleasantly cider-tipsy. I waved goodbye to the botanists, then to the bartender.
“Bye Kelly!” Taylor called. “Hope to see you soon.”
The Black Sheep’s slogan, incidentally, is “Where You Belong!”
Yes, it was just a new bartender friend and a quick chat with some out-of-towners. But I had a feeling. Like a really good feeling. As I walked through the frigid night to Safeway for a treat (oh my god they have a thing there called a “brookie,” a brownie with a cookie baked on top, which is just as disgusting-amazing as you’d think), I realized that the feeling reminded me of something.
When I travel, and especially when I travel to somewhere really far away or dissociated from my personal history, a beautiful mental shift occurs. For one thing, one enters “travel time,” where the days and hours expand almost to infinity. Without a job or a schedule or a bunch of friends and family to check in with, the day is open to unplanned meandering. You can work on something for as long as you want and stop when you’re finished. You can eat when you’re hungry and sleep when you’re tired. You can walk around just for the sake of exploring, discover new places, and talk to whomever you meet. Friendships spring up in an instant. Quotes in a store window take on new resonance. Everything feels like...well, magic.
I find that in such situations, I grow giddy with the thrill of discovery and, equally, with the freedom my anonymity affords. “I don’t know anyone here, so I can do whatever I want. I can be whoever I want.” How spectacularly liberating. I think of this feeling as “travel brain.”
One can occasionally achieve travel brain in domesticated daily life—say, on that Saturday where I rode my bike all over Austin without a specific destination and discovered new neighborhoods I’d never seen and stood in front of an abandoned lot staring at a large tree wondering and what species is that. Usually, however, this feeling is difficult to achieve stateside.
As the Safeway checkout guy placed my purchases (toilet paper, bananas, brookies) in a paper bag, the guy behind me in line set his backpack down in the bagging area and joked,
“You can just put all that in here, ok?”
“Hey!” I laughed. “I mean, you can have all this if I can take your lasagna.”
“No deal!”
I strolled home through the chilly night blaring music on my headphones, smiling. Oh, I thought. This is travel-self. I’m in travel brain. Pretty cool, though. What if I could stay like this?
Here in Ashland, a place where I lived and planned to settle, I was still a foreigner, an outsider. Not a traveler, yet I basked in the warm glow of those travel-feelings: freedom, timelessness, spontaneity, openness to strangers, and fearlessness. What a feeling.
And now, knowing what the feeling was and that it existed independent of standing atop a volcano in Guatemala, I could choose it again. On purpose. Anywhere. Instead of thinking, What do I have to do today, ugh ugh ugh, I could think: Ok, if I were a visitor here, what would I do? If time were wide open, where would I go?
I see that there’s a “protest songs” open mic happening at that dive bar my friend mentioned. Why not go? Maybe it’ll be a dud, but you never know. Maybe I’ll meet some cool people. And maybe that Japanese tea house / hot tub place is worth checking out soon. Whether to go in the modest daytime hours or for the “clothing optional” evening soak, that is the question. What a question.
Yes, my feelings will likely shift as I settle here, make friends, maybe get a job. Surely it’s easier to achieve a blissful mindset without a 9 to 5. But I hold to the theory that travel brain is a choice, that “travel” is a state of mind and approach to life, one we naturally adopt in unfamiliar places but can adopt on purpose anywhere and anytime we want. Travel is simply our ability to stand in awe before the beautiful mystery of the unfamiliar. That ability exists not in any given locale; it exists, like a muscle, inside the human heart.
So me, I’m tackling my personal challenge du jour and staying put for a while. I’m learning that commitment—to a place, a community, a career, and eventually a partner, I hope—isn’t such a terrifying thing. I’m becoming a stayer (though obviously one who will keep a home base and still go on wild trips). But in my heart of hearts, in my brain of brains, this new daily life is a trip that might never end. I’m “traveling,” and I’m not coming back.
