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Another Don Quixote


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This post was inspired by the Motorcycle Diaries, a film that reminded my of this short essay I wrote as a submission for a contest last year. I've felt inspired similarly only by one other movie. I think I cried for 45 minutes after Life as a House.





Windows down, and the radio playing softly, the needle points to full. Nobody in the passenger seat, and nothing in mind but the hum of spinning wheels, I pulled on to the frontage road, and mouthed the words of a familiar song which fluttered almost too faint to hear above the flapping shoulder strap. The wind started pealing away the leaves and pollen which had accumulated on the roof and hood of my car over of the previous stagnant two weeks, as sped down the entrance ramp onto the state highway. Ah, now I was getting somewhere. My restless mind simmered at about three thousand revolutions per minute, and I began to see where I was headed.

For most of my adolescent life I have fought this itch to move somewhere, anywhere really. I would scratch the itch a little, only to find that it became more and more irritated. And when I could not put it out of mind, I would leave wherever I was for a small walk or a short drive, arriving, a short while later, at the place which I had started, honestly feeling much better. But the feeling, as I said, would not last long, and my feet would get to tapping again after a few weeks lunch and dinner at the same restaurants. Every time I left the place which contained my life, my problems, my ex-girlfriends, my church, my bed; I felt that possibility which every person longs for, a new start.

As writers, part of our commission, our calling, is to create a sense of movement or travel for the reader. To take someone on a journey that they otherwise might not be able to take on their own is a marvelous accomplishment, a gift, when received, that is not repayable. Most readers find great joy in seeing, if in their minds eye, what they have never seen before, and so we make our living as storytellers, journalists, researchers, news writers, and the like, taking them to the places they cannot get to on their own.


* * * * * *

An interesting experiment, performed by Dr. John Bowlby, was noted by Bruce Chatwin in his travel log entitled The Songlines. When Bowlby constructed a machine, which imitated the motion that a child might experience in the arms of a walking mother, he found that an upset child would cease screaming if the rocking motion of the device was to be accelerated to fifty cycles per minute. When the machine was set at lower speeds, had little effect on the child. It appeared that the simple sensation of movement pacified the cries of most normal children. This experiment alone was enough to convince Chatwin that man is primarily a migratory species. While in the same travel log, I came across this Old Latin aphorism: solvitur ambulando, meaning 'it is solved by walking'.

* * * * * *

As long as I'm standing in the same spot, I will remain in this off-balance state, dodging punches thrown at my already dizzied soul. I must move. Like a bicycle which gains stability as its velocity increases, I was finding my feet were more confident with each step in the same direction: out of town. More often, this movement becomes a remedy, a solution, which brings the traveler eventually to the place where he or she started; the only difference is, direction, velocity, and momentum have value. As travelers, we are no longer standing at a particular location, but moving through it, both figuratively and literally. It's not the movement that we ultimately crave, but the sense of purpose that it brings. The trip we take, whether it is around the block, around the globe, a few minutes, or an entire chapter of life, allows all of those tangled and echoing voices to grow fainter and fainter, swallowed by the volume of roaring wind in our ears. And we hear instead the voice of our heart, many times bringing us full circle to see we were at home all along. It's the travel itself that does the simplifying. The seams in the road, the steady broken lines, the pulse of ground underfoot, and the passing of day into night, all conspire to fill the sojourner with an understanding that they are closer to their goal (wherever they are headed) than they were just a few hours ago. A new place signifies a new day. When traveling, it is hard to misunderstand that we are not where we were yesterday, that we are progressing toward something, often the place where we began. And yet, we arrive there anew.

* * * * * *

It may be only to create the illusion that we are informed of our purpose, but however we can, we love this notion that we are moving forward. We, being the descendents of a nation which wished to fix its old problems by conquering unknown territory remain obsessed with calculable progress into the darkest regions of human understanding. There are thousands of accounts of some American traveler who wished to leave his home and find his home at the same time. America learned from its experience, forging itself a new constitution, heeding the call for a new breed of poet, and constructing a horizon which cut and gouged the sky. America was less interested in educating its inhabitants of their past. Instead it wished to show them how to leave it behind, to pierce the edges of their own boundaries.

America from the start it seems was an event of great disappointment. Winthrop and company left for this new world, zealous to show the rest of humanity a bright and shining city on a hill. Instead, they found themselves performing one of the greatest failed experiments ever attempted in the history of the globe. So many colonists and explorers left their homes to be set on this global stage. They arrived rather disappointed to find the lights turned out and curtain closing quickly.

So then the question, "What does it mean to be an American?" becomes uniquely American in itself. Culturally, don't the French know what it means to be a Frenchmen? Would and Italian find difficulty if asked what it meant to live in Italy? They know exactly what it means. But to be an American means precisely that we are on a journey, passing through our narrow alley of experience, learning piece by piece, just who we are. As travel essayist William Least Heat-Moon suggests, "Maybe America should make the national bird a Kentucky Fried Leghorn and put Ronald McDonald on the dollar bill." We are a nation without tradition, built on the broken fragments of each other's heritage.

A traveler's success is due solely to his ability to see the strangeness of a new place around him and perceive it as potentially familiar all at once. A desert or an open grassland prairie is indiscernible at first glance, but if I inquire into its purposes, its plants, and lives that make it a home, I find myself a spokesperson for the hope that is embedded there. Hey, look here, there's something that makes sense about this desert. Absolute hostility, such as the desert projects, serves simultaneously as a deterrent and as an invitation. Within the desert there is a fascinating web of interdependent creatures, an ecosystem of mutual giving and receiving that largely ignores the human race.

Meanwhile, getaway vacation homes, and fast food chains chomp across the land, blighting many of the attempts to understand the desert and its independent existence. In the wake of these bulldozers and contractors lie the remains of purposes undiscovered. Lesser purposes defeating greater purposes pose questions that morality must answer. Like the protective coloring of an insect or fish, the desert preserves itself from destruction by projecting such a howling wilderness onto the minds of its outsiders, and those not willing to humble themselves before entering will not learn of its secrets.

I, for one, have become more and more disgusted with our latest abstractions of these kinds of discovery. I went, this summer, to a theme park in Florida where they had assembled a ride famously termed, 'Rhino Rally'. The ride consisted of a Discovery Land Rover equipped with special locking bars and guide. The underutilized vehicle was to proceed along a track of steel rails constructed in a slightly discombobulated figure eight. I thought to myself, "Has the American adventure been reduced to this?" And as I left the ride confused, I considered shouting to the hundreds of adults waiting, corralled inside a maze of ropes, each sweating out their two and half hours: TURN BACK NOW, IT'S NOT TOO LATE. It's likely they would have found more novelty driving their four-door mid-size sedans around the block.

Wonder and discovery go hand in hand with our traveling itches. And yet the power of curiosities to lure our hearts into some deep crevice of interest will almost always pull our roots down with it into the people and places we decide to love. These individuals we find along the way which we love are the ones we owe the most to. They soothe the itch, they share a peace with us, and they give us an immediate and acute feeling that we are here because they are here. These tangible, contiguous connections we make with a specific and almost measurable progress are the kinds of relationships or purposes which we find easiest to believe in. Purposes which cannot be seen, those which are much grander than our limited first person view, are more difficult to embrace, and even more difficult, those purposes which we serve without ever knowing.

Everything and everyone that exists is discernible by the certain patterns and rhythm which give those things and persons purpose. They interact with other persons or objects in a certain way, and this relationship is purpose itself. Valence electrons race around a nucleus at the rim of a molecule, waiting for an opportunity to meet and interact with other molecules. Planets trace their orbits around the sun, ours at precisely three-hundred and sixty-five days per round trip. And there is always a tension between the patterns which tend to stay the same and those which are always wishing to break the rules. This tension is a delicate balance, and some will find their purposes at odds, but without this movement, without this change, wouldn't we find ourselves lost in a dissonant pool of stagnant disarray? Perhaps we would not find ourselves at all.

Still, what is this obsession with finding ourselves in the other's shoes? Why must we always sleep in a different bed, or better yet, abandon our beds altogether? It is because when we move, we find that we are left in the hands of God. For some, this may be the easiest way to the deal with the question of what to do with oneself. The choice which we recoiled from is no longer ours to make. When we place ourselves on the path of destiny by moving in the line of a single direction, we will inevitably arrive where the road takes us.

I too have begun to think that I simply need to edge past the boundaries of my own familiar ground. I want to leave, not because I have an appointment somewhere else, but to let the fingerprint of a trip take me where it pleases. So, I packed a bag and headed to the gas station, where I filled my tank completely. This is a rare occurrence, mostly because I don't use much gas to get around the small town I live in, but also for fear that I might need the money to buy something else (writer's income). Still, I felt the joy of a completely filled new tank of gas. I knew by the time it was spent, I would be somewhere else.


1 Responses to “Another Don Quixote”

  1. Blogger tito 

    Hey, Remember Cervantes the Plane and the Pilot, Ezekiel?

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