Travel Far

A transitional essay from REFUGE

A climber must travel, voyaging internally, of course, but also exploring the external.

I undertook my craft at distant sites of power - magnificent, sweeping faces where potential was limited only by imagination. Sometimes the lines that drew me had already been climbed, often not and the latter made me dream.

I left the comfort of the known and traveled to the Alps, the Canadian Rockies, Alaska, and the Himalaya. I flew and drove, I took trains and hitched rides, ultimately I walked. Every take-off and departure whistle signaled a new adventure. The crest of every hill unveiled the way ahead and sometimes my destination. Every alpine hairpin changed my point of view by 180 degrees.

Travel has been integral to growth and it didn’t stop when I quit climbing. Military and movie jobs took me places I would not have otherwise visited. Destinations, the act of getting there, and who I met on those journeys grew new ideas and challenged my perspective.

The view from Sofia differed from Tel Aviv and Newfoundland. In the claustrophobia of consistent Vancouver rain I wrote similarly heavy words. Under bright, brittle New Mexican sun my prose and images shown with joy I hadn’t felt or expressed - maybe ever. I saw beauty in Rome at night that was too burned out by the day. The voice of the simple English countryside sang as clearly as Icelandic fjords, while cycling on sinuous French roads could not have felt further from riding suburban single-track near Detroit.

When I travel I grow. Who departed is not who returns, and as perspective shifts the map of both experience and opportunity expands.

Travel itself is a map of emotion. It is marked with the longing to be elsewhere and the tension and joy of departure. Its shores stretch from the ache of missing home to the relief of returning there, from the pleasure of immersion in what I know is changing me to the apprehension and fear of being changed. At its edges are question marks, the arrows pointing in the direction of growth, toward the unknown in the margins where I sometimes penciled who I wished to become.

Where I traveled to do so.