Leave a light footprint.

I wonder how it is I became obsessed with travel? I guess my travels started in the forest around my house, near the Wapiti River, in Northern Alberta, Canada, with my father.

He had particular rules for traveling.  Never, ever, leave garbage on the trail.  If you see garbage, pick it up.  It doesn’t matter how long you have to carry it; the path behind you must be clean.

Every now and then, stop, and really listen.  Stop in your tracks, and fully take in your surroundings.  Listen so carefully, you can hear the wings of a bird, or a branch crackle.  An ant crawl.. well maybe not, but try..  Sniff the wind, feel the freshness of the air near the water’s edge.  Notice the pattern of sound in the leaves of the tree as they rustle.

Actually, my dad implied we were listening for bears, or mountain lions, and this scared me out of my wits, but nonetheless I was grateful to have instilled in me a strong desire to observe my surroundings carefully, and a good sense of self-protection, to boot. But most of time we realize, the fear of what’s “out there” is really just in our head.

 

I took that kind of awareness out into the world, and became a traveler.  I didn’t get my first passport until I was twenty-one, when i was preparing to finish my BA.  My travels began in Africa, then to Asia, and a bit of the Middle East and Europe.  When does it stop?  When I die.  I’ve relinquished the need to live in the future constantly, but my window to the world, though I nurture my ambitions, is in the present.  My experience of this world is through me, but I often think of the people I have met in the steps along the way.  If I am to begin telling my stories, I have to revere all the people I met along the way.  I don’t suppose to represent them, but I can give my version.

Let’s get serious for a moment.  In our course, we looked at four contingencies for successful travel writing, according to David Spurr:

1) The question of language.

2) The conditions of observation.

3) The consciousness of interest.

4) Other voices.

On the question of language, lets consider how flag words like “terrorism” are repeated and distorted in our media, until the meaning is “displaced simultaneously onto so many different contexts that it loses its authority as the name for a specific phenomenon and is instead revealed as an instrument of rhetorical and political strategy”(190). A reversal, by an official of Iranian hierarchy: “You westerners… why do you always talk about us as having power struggles while you yourselves merely have politics?”(190).  Language is twisted to favor the mothership.

On the conditions of observation, he states “the hiatus of perception is literally a matter of interest; one sees what it profits one to see, what one has a share or stake in, a claim upon”(192). He quotes George Orwell from “Marrakech”: “In a tropical landscape one’s eye takes in everything except the human beings.. it always misses the peasant hoeing his patch”(191/192).

On the consciousness of interest, he uses the words of Edward Said: “there is never interpretation, understanding, and then knowledge where there is no interest“(192).

On other voices, he hints that the barriers of providing other voices lies in problems of translation.  My favorite quote (which I think encompasses all four above principles concisely) is here when Spurr shares the words of T.D. Allman, reporting on El Salvador forHarper‘s:

“It is good that journalists come to El Salvador,” one of the men with machetes said, “but you should not just visit our country.  You should live here.” I agreed that journalists wrote much better stories when they lived in the countries about which they wrote, but that had not been what he meant. “If you lived in El Salvador,” he explained, “you could hide Christian people in your house and the Guardias could not find them, and you could bring us food and medicine and guns in your car.”

So what do I want to do as a storyteller? I wish to share, to entertain, to impart, to be respectful, to see not the other but see me in the other.

The plain fact is that the world does not need more successful people, but it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.                                                                              

David Orr