I lost it because I didn’t know where it was. I didn’t know where I wanted to be so I left.
I went to the mountains to not ride my bike there, same as at home. Drove to San Francisco, ran out of gas on their bridge, then got gas and left without visiting the city. I pitched a tent on a ridge overlooking the desert and sat there uncomfortable, questioning if I deserved to be there without any goals except to finish the book “Travels with Charley.” I backed into a redwood tree in the vw camper that I didn’t earn and then sold it for less than a month’s worth of rent. I ended up bumming around Albuquerque for six months. It wasn’t the low point but I was again stuck in one place.
This is a glimpse at my western conquest of ‘94 and how it truly played out 90% of the time. But I did have 10% to consider.
Consider the idea that John Steinbeck never left home with Charley in his search for America and was only clued in on the changing times by what he read from his own writing. Suppose he pretended to travel while using his imagination introducing us to people he already knew. Consider I never left and read his entire book at home instead of reading it on the road. I would have been worse off doing both or doing neither considering the outcome of traveling alone with only other people’s thoughts to peruse.
I had travel experience in Europe at an even younger age that found me reading and writing about those experiences. By then I had already started reading the classics and occasionally writing in a short stream of consciousness.
Steinbeck was seeking the America he had already written about but didn’t find it the same as he had presented. I was looking for America myself but at myself as an American abroad. After crossing the ocean I liked what I saw.
I wasn’t going to be better off trying to understand myself back in America, quite contrary actually. I began to think there was a problem that needed solving after I had seen too much of a good thing while traveling and experimenting. In America the constables were situated in a different style of fortress.
I did not make it inside any castles in Europe but I did cruise small town America in a Volkswagen camper bus, my palace on wheels. From that early excessive swagger, I was hoping for reciprocation in discovering America inside of me instead of me inside America. The fact that I left small town America to get a brand new perspective indicated I had the spirit to explore America inside me already.
Maybe I was wrong in leaving at that time but I landed 10% good experiences while overcoming 90% negative thinking and fear of the unknown. If I could acknowledge the 10% good every time I did something adventurous and introspective, the 90% negativity and fear would dwindle into more positivity and bravery.
My mother said before I left for the west that 90% of the people you meet are indifferent to your existence and may not even like you but 10% actually enjoyed the encounter and will think back fondly of you. I say bring on the 10%.
Almost thirty years later, looking back on my ’94 travels with fondness, I am grateful for the lessons I learned and the experiences I had, however challenging. Now I know I don’t need to leave again to find my own spirit. I have found it within myself while traveling to distant places, here and now, in my imagination.
Guys like John Steinbeck may not read their own writing to find themselves within it. They probably write to find the reader and to explain the human condition, that is how they became famous. I do read my own writing in order to write and I do that to find the writer. I find that in order to feel the passion of artistry the reader needs to think of the person who is presenting the art and not the one who brought it into existence. Interpretation is not up to me but the writer is being represented better over time.
Adventure and introspection takes a lot of courage showing people what you have been hiding in plain sight while still on the go.
Francis Erich McElroy 